Reconsidering Marco Polo
“Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay….” Perry Anderson, LRB I got an email from a student who found my blog post in which...
Category: Mongols and Mongolia
China gets modern
A nice photo essay from Financial Times on railways in Inner Mongolia. Lots of nice pics, but the thing that amazed me was that the author was traveling with a...
Holiday reading: Murder, treachery and genocide
As I am half-heartedly getting ready for the Spring I am putting together some readings for my students. What survey would be complete without a chunk from the ...
China's Robinson Crusoe
I’ve been reading Wolf Totem and having a lot of fun doing so. The book, based on Jiang Rong’s time as a sent-down youth in Inner Mongolia. was a hu...
Maps and Empire
Maps have been an important part of empire in China for a long time. In the Warring States period spies were always trying to steal maps, and defeated states pr...
Bad History: Mongols good, US bad?
Jack Weatherford’s piece reprinted in the latest edition of (the increasingly inaptly named) Japan Focus argues that the US occupation of Iraq is a failur...
Tombs on Tuesday
It’s been a good week for archaeology in the news, it seems: Liao tombs in Mongolia, of course Ming-era Imperial (eunuch) tombs near Beijing