Asian History Carnival 2
The 2nd installment of the Asian History Carnival is coming next week, December 12th. The announcement is out a bit late but send your nominations to konrad [at...
Category: China
Provincialism and democracy
Everyone is talking about the protests in Hong Kong, for good reason. What I find most interesting is the official response. (All links via Simon’s World, the o...
Why didn’t Manchu women bind their feet?
It is well-known that even after the conquest of China Manchu women did not bind their feet. The Qing emperors took clothing and hair very seriously as ways of ...
Ling Long: Digital Women's Magazine Project Relaunched
I just found out that Columbia University has relaunched its project putting the Chinese women’s magazine Ling long (玲瓏, “elegant and fine”）on...
Hero and Mao
I’m a little late to the Hero bashing party, but this post (Bourdieu Boy via Notes of a former native speaker) got me to thinking. I agree that Hero was a somew...
Self introduction
Dear 井底之蛙 members My name is Motoe Sasaki-Gayle. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. Although my major is American his...
Last night I saw upon the stair a little man who was not there
Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants has a section on dragons. Specifically, why reliable, skeptical observers like Xie Zhaozhe, who published his Fivefold Misc...
Korean History Weblog Launch
Today we are launching our new collaborative Korean history weblog. You can read more about the goals of the site here. I’m going to start it out with a s...
Frog In the Well Index, Logo, and Buttons
I have uploaded a new index page for us here at Frog in a Well. It displays our new Frog in a Well logo, based on a painting by Joseph Y. Lo, who has kindly giv...
Women hold up half of heaven
I recently got a postcard asking me to assign a pamphlet “Li Fengjin: How the New Marriage Law Helped Chinese Women Stand Up” translated by Susan Glosser and pu...
Gresham’s Law
The Great Yuan—how grave and dignified, Its authority by the crafty and duplicitous monopolized. ‘Repairing’ the Yellow River dikes [1351], ‘reforming’ th...
Boundaries within Asia
Interesting article on the problem understanding Central Asia: the first problem is that nobody agrees on what or where it is. Apparently, East Asianists —...
The Chairman vanishes (but is found again!)
One of the nice things about teaching modern China is that the Communists, as a text-centered party, wrote a lot of things. A lot of them have been translated i...