Radio in China
I was looking around for some information on Chinese radio during the Republic and discovered that there is not much out there. There are some cites in this the...
Category: Religion
Was Hirata Atsutane Japan’s first Science Fiction writer?
Maybe. Well, sort of. It kind of depends on how you define things. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was one of the key thinkers and popularizers of Japanese Nativism...
Do you want some pictures of Chiang Ching-kuo’s funeral?
Of course you do. Assuming you are interested in either the history of Christianity in Taiwan or funeral customs or.. well… China. More here.
Why are the Chinese atheists?
Sam Crane, at Useless Tree, comments on the recent study that shows that China has a higher percentage of atheists than anyplace else in the world. Sam suggests...
Teachers as sages. Also, Tibet
Here is something wonderful from Donald Lopez’s Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West1 If you have not read it, it is a very good book on...
Very superstitious
Above is a charm carried by a Chinese soldier in 1938, re-printed in the journal Youth Front in 1938. It seems to be a Communist publication, although this bein...
Things I don’t know about Korea, part 3
One of the things that I noticed about the materials I used last time I taught Korean history1 is that the texts I chose for my course did not mention, much les...
Zhong Kui comes to Sunnydale High
Sigh… I try to keep my posts to this blog to at least a minimal level of scholarly-ness. At the very least I try to avoid doing too many posts on weird Ch...
Japan as apocalyptic fulfillment
I have to get to my AAS blogging, I know, but I have to share something I ran across reading — of all things — David Walsh’s HNN reports from ...
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
What do you really think Mr. Jiang?
Chinese museums are one of the best places to look at the changing interpretation of historical figures and events. Last weekend I went to Famen temple outside ...
Conference Blogging: ASPAC 2009 at Soka University
ASPAC was at Soka University of America this year. It’s in the hills above Laguna Beach, just down the road from Irvine, on the edge of a nature reserve. ...
Male and female lightly engaged in erotic excess
The behavior of the people, the cosmic order, and the stability of the state were all linked in traditional Chinese political theory. Disorder in one would lead...
Heartland Mandala
I was surprised to learn, about ten days ago, that PSU was going to be hosting a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks creating a sand mandala. This is a touring comp...