The economics of maize
Here, for your teaching pleasure, is a long quote on the value of corn (maize) in China. I often mention in class that New World crops were economically valuabl...
Author: Alan Baumler
Korean social history through yadam
I was recently sent a copy of Si Nae Park The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia U.P., 2020) It̵...
The Songs of Chu
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Gopal Suku’s new translation of Qu Yuan’s The Songs of Chu. I am not qualified to speak about it as a scholarly tran...
Syllabus blogging Fall 2020 -HIST 433 China 1300-1800 The Late Imperial Age
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. This is my upper-division class for the semester, where I want to push students i...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2020 HIST 206 History of East Asia
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. Fall semester will be a bit different. We will be doing hybrid (well, actually Ha...
Can you speak Chinese?
Friend-of-the-blog Gina Tam1 has a new book out.Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 Cambridge University Press, 2020 It is a really remarkable s...
Was Late Imperial China Early Modern?
Zou Jiajun posted on the Sinologists Facebook group asking how the term “Early Modern” got to be used in China studies. This is a an interesting question, since...
Art and status and women and mirrors and…
This is an image from the back of a Song dynasty mirror in the collection of Martin J. Powers. As he describes it One [woman], on the right, tends a child and s...
Dress and identity in the Qing
I have been reading Guojun Wang’s Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. I am not particularly a student of drama, or of costume, but in the T...
Masks in recent Chinese History
So this is a post that already seems outdated, but I thought I would do it anyway. Masks now mean something quite different than they did before, and I am sure ...
Mapping China from the air
Since I have been posting maps, I thought I would put this up. This is from Shigeru Kobayashi 小林茂, Gaihōzu : Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu 外邦図 : 帝国日本のアジア地図 (Tōk...
Spreading Revolution from Wuhan, 1911
This is an image I use in class, from Caroline Blunden and Mark Elvin. Cultural Atlas of China New York: Facts on File, 1983. p.158. This has some good images i...
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...
Princess Iron Fan and the origins of Asian animation
Like most of you (I assume) I knew that Princess Iron Fan 鐵扇公主 (1941) was China’s first full-length animated film. Also like most of you I assume that you...
Confucius hates Japan
Once upon a time I was big into Chinese currency. Not so much as a speculator, but as one of the people who bought old banknotes from people who were selling th...