Foreign influence on China's revolution
I found this picture on Southeast Asia Visions1 It is from Siam and China by Besso, Salvatore (1914) I was a bit confused about what it was showing. Surely Marc...
Category: China
If you prick Taiwanese savages, do they not bleed?
I want to share just one more short passage from Small Sea Travel Diaries, the English translation of Yu Yonghe’s journal and essays from his trip to Taiw...
Chinese Description of Dutch Suicide Tactics
Another quick quote from Small Sea Travel Diaries, the English translation of Yu Yonghe’s journal and essays from his trip to Taiwan in the 17th century b...
A Moment of Humility
I just finished reading Small Sea Travel Diaries which is an English translation of Yu Yonghe’s journal and essays from his trip to Taiwan in the 17th cen...
Show me the money
From the Times via CDT an article about a group of Chinese intellectuals who are asking for some new people to be put on Chinese currency. This is actually a bi...
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis*
How did the modern Chinese historians create a national history? One aspect of this is the creation of protohistory, explaining what was going on in a place bef...
Breaking news
The top 10 Chinese archaeological finds for 2007 have been announced (Chinese descriptions are a bit longer).1 The winner is the Lingjing Paleolithic Site in He...
More public sphere
Lots of stuff out there on how response to the earthquake is leading to a more robust public sphere in China. People are self-organizing, money is being collect...
Comparative religion
Teaching about religions is always tricky in part because I and most of my students are heavily influenced by the Christian (especially Protestant) idea that th...
Whither Taiwan?
If you were wondering how different the new Ma government in Taiwan would be from the DPP government it is replacing you should go read Michael Turton’s a...
U.S.-China Cooperation
I have no idea where the U.S. China relationship is going, but I have usually thought that whatever rhetoric was coming from either side of the Pacific there we...
Needling Needham
The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked t...
The end of polygamy in China
As some of our American readers may know the California Supreme Court has recently ruled that men and men in California can get married. This has led a number o...
Seismic politics
There is not much I can say about the earthquake in Sichuan, although I am glad to hear that all the people I know in Sichuan are safe. One thing that is pretty...
1911 in pictures
Via BibliOdyssey an exhibition of the prints of the 1911 revolution from Princeton. The prints are great, if a little small. One thing that struck me was the di...