Opening vignettes on Tokugawa prostitutes
I never really responded to Jonathan’s post on opening vignettes as pedagogy, but I do like using them. In fact, I will be using a couple Monday. Sometime...
Author: Alan Baumler
Classical Chinese for Everyone
Looking for a fun book? Look no further! Bryan Van Norden’s Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners is it. This is a book for anyon...
Revolutionary China
Looking to spend some money? There are a lot of good essays in the Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China. The editing is not that good, but there are some r...
Bullets and Opium-Tiananmen thirty years later
Part of my summer reading has been Liao Yiwu‘s Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Liao got in trouble afte...
The soldier-archeologist
Among other things, the Japanese empire was an empire of science. Conquest led to (or was proceeded by) masses of geographers, anthropologists, geologists etc. ...
Ichi-F -Japanese workingman’s blues
One of my Christmas gifts was Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant As it says on the cover, it is a worker’s memoir. The...
Huainanzi and teaching Early China
I really liked using Huainanzi in my upper-division Early China class this semester. I have a habit of switching books a lot in all my classes, in part because...
Teaching with old photographs
One thing that I have started teaching with this semester is Ed Krebs and Hanchao Lu, eds., China in Family Photographs: A Peoples History of Revolution and Eve...
Pinyin is coming to get you!
Here is a CIA report on Pinyin from, I think, 1961 or so. They lay out the history of pinyin as a method of romanization (or latinization) of Chinese, and from ...
Who are the shi?
Since I am teaching Early China this semester, I am drawing from Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Period ...
Did Chinese women go to opium dens?
Since someone asked me if Qing women went to opium dens, I thought I would answer and put up some of my evidence. Short answer – I don’t think so, a...
Canadian pot and the lessons of opium
Apparently Canada has legalized pot. The New Republic is speculating that they may find it hard to get an official distribution system to replace the old illega...
Chinese Anti-Japanese films
There is a new book out, though sadly only in Japanese so far, about Chinese Anti-Japanese films. There are countless Sino-Japanese war movies and TV shows, and...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2018
So, as is our tradition, a bit about what I will be doing in my classes in the Fall. As is also tradition, I am doing this way too late to incorporate any of yo...
Is the Shanghai Textile Museum the best museum in China?
The Shanghai Textile Museum 上海纺织博物馆 150 Aomen Rd; 澳門路150号(right near the M50 art district) is not one of the most famous museums in China. Lonely Planet dismiss...