Teaching Cao Cao
This semester I am teaching HIST 332 Early China, which goes from Anyang to the Tang.1 One problem with this class is where and how to break it in half. The Sha...
Category: Posts
Ignorance is Strength: Or, teaching Laozi in Utah
Utah has apparently become the first state to mandate the Ethics and Public Policy Foundation (EPPF) model legislation on General Education. This will be rolled...
Chairman Mao’s Guide to Writing History Essays
To all students! Below are some quotes from Chairman Mao Zedong, ripped shamelessly from their context, to help you in the research and writing of your essay.1 ...
Swimming in the Sea of Mao’s Works
There are lots of things to keep in mind when working with texts by Mao Zedong. Many of the works that come to us today were speeches or notes on speeches that ...
Air Policing on Taiwan
“Air policing” was a term the British seem to have come up with after the Great War. Although using the new technology to keep the natives down star...
The perfect wife
Three things to use in class Epitaph for Mme Ren, titled Lady of Virtue (shuren) The Honorable Bao Deming, the Assistant Regional Military Commander for my prov...
Obscene mystery solved! (Sort of)
At long last an issue is solved! Did an engraver creating banknotes for a Japanese puppet bank in the 1940s slip in a picture of Confucius making an obscene ges...
Shoplifting Japanese-English Dictionaries in Shanghai, 1942
I’ve been working on a website to help collect information related to documents in the (International Settlement’s) Shanghai Municipal police (SMP) ...
Teaching Late Imperial China
So, if the class makes1 I will be doing Late Imperial China in Spring. I was going to do a few weeks of basic stuff, do some Sanyan Stories, set up their resear...
Qing Taxation
Since I got a bit of flak for asking for Taisu Zhang’s The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics and Institutions for Christmas I t...
Tokugawa Japan-What’s the question?
So, again this fall I will be having students in my upper-level class (in this case Early Modern Japan) do a group research project. The end of the project wil...
Hong Kong Education in Chinese Schools 1929
Today I was browsing through US national archives microfilm reels containing state department records related to British Asia, 1910-29.1 There is always fun and...
Cleaning Up Tables from Primary Sources in ChatGPT
I’ve been following with interest the debates around the rapid emergence of powerful large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, its Bing siblin...
Confucius at Eighty: Sufficiently Decayed or Ready for a Great Xi Change?
Kong Qiu, Kongzi, or Master Kong, known in English as “Confucius,” marked the passing of the decades: At fifteen I set my heart upon learning.At thirty, I had p...