For the want of a Monsoon
According to Yahoo Asia Nature will be publishing an article tomorrow that claims that climate change was the cause of the fall of the Tang dynasty. A team of G...
Category: China
Democracy Quote of the Day
“We Communists always oppose a one-party dictatorship, and don’t approve of the Nationalists having a one-party dictatorship. The CCP certainly does...
The Wall Is Great!
One of these days we’re all going to get tired of Great Wall metaphors for China…. I hope. For now, it’s being over-visited by tourists and st...
Naughty or Nice?
As it is time to think about the good or bad behavior of children, I have been wondering why so many Chinese sage-kings had rotten kids. Lewis points out that o...
Announcement: East Asian Libraries and Archives Wiki
The Frog in a Well project is expanding. While we hope our three bilingual collaborative weblogs dedicated to the study of East Asian history will continue to d...
Source: The China Provincial Atlas and Geography
This posting is the first of what I hope will become a more frequent kind of offering here at Frog in a Well. I’m not sure how it will go yet but I hope t...
Chairman Mao’s teacher
A nice article in Modern China on Mao’s teacher Yang Changji. The article draws on Yeh Wen-Hsin’s work on the provincial background of many of the second group ...
Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty
As regular readers know, I am interested in the question of how people are defined as Chinese. One nice bit of data comes from Hans Kuhner. He is looking at a p...
Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went to Scotland and kissed a fellow
Via Cliopatria, a website with Scottish broadsides from 1810-1830. One is obviously satirical, announcing the arrival of a Chinese doctor Dr. Puff Stuff Sham Qu...
Monthly Miscellany
The carnivals roll on: Nathanael Robinson hosted the last AHC, and did a very nice job. The next edition will be hosted by our very own Owen Miller in a week or...
The History of Sino-Japanese Relations as seen in Japan's Most Popular Travel Guide
The Globe-trotter Travel Guidebook, which is the official English name for 地球の歩き方 (Lit: The way to wander the world) is the most popular Japanese travel guide s...
Ancient Chinese sex advice
One scholar who has had a lot of influence on my teaching on Early China is Mark Edward Lewis. I sometimes assign Sanctioned Violence in Early China, and if I h...
No need for Clever Speech
It is recorded in the Han chronicles that when Emperor Wen visited his pleasure park he went to the area called Tiger Garden. There he questioned the official i...
Military history MIA? WIA? KIA?
There has been a good deal of discussion on Cliopatria and elsewhere on the topic of military history. This discussion was sparked off by a piece in the Nationa...