We’re not in Hebei anymore, Toto
A Chinese Peasant Pearl Buck has been getting a good deal more attention in China of late. Part of it is no doubt the fact that she wrote about China and won th...
Category: China
Tibet by rail
It has been in the news of late that China has built a rail line to Tibet. It cost $3.2 billion, and the train cars have to be pressurized, but you can now get ...
Japanese War Related Survey and its Results
Sasaki Kei, one of our contributors at the Japanese history blog here at Frog in a Well pointed out some results of a survey recently released in the Japanese p...
AHC #5
Miland Brown has the latest edition of the Asian History Carnival up at his World History Blog, and it’s a very nice collection. We’re still looking...
Creating East Asia
东亚三国的近现代史 A History of Modern and Contemporary East Asia is a book that got a lot of press when it first came out, since it was written by a team of scholars fr...
Even Barbarians can become good
How does one become a good person? That is a question that crops up a lot when one reads the Confucians. In fact, for Confucians the processes of self-cultivati...
The World before Google
One of the reasons I write this blog is to preserve things, mostly for myself. I often come across something that might be useful to teach with later, and blogg...
Six Dynasties blogging
One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968...
Mao vs. Hitler
I’m not trying to make this blog all Mao all the time, but as we seem to be discussing him a lot, and Johnathan just brought up the issue of popular memory agai...
Forty Years Ago
The New York Times has a short interview with two women who played pivotal roles in the Cultural revolution NIE YUANZI was an ambitious college professor whose ...
A simple Miscellany
Ralph Luker‘s uncovering of the wonderful linguistic debunkings of 1421 by Bill Poser and friends (in two parts; note: Is Menzies just making up words in ...
Thank you for not smoking
Today is 6-3 anti-opium day in the Nanjing period and Anti-Smoking Day on Taiwan. It commemorates Lin Zexu’s destruction of the British Opium at Humen. In...
My Great Helmsman is Charlton Heston
In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920’s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument ...
How much do your students remember?
I’m looking over the Condensed History of China (Thanks, Simon) and thinking to myself “yeah, it’s brutally short, but if my students remember...