A Blog Post Upon Roast Pig
I was reading a discussion of progressive economics at Progressive Historians and was stopped dead in my tracks by a quote from Henry George There is a delusion...
Category: Classics
Lies, Damn Lies, and Chinese “Lies That Bind”
Do Chinese lie? The Western media have jumped on recent revelations about doctoring the Olympic opening ceremonies and allegations about false ages of their gym...
Summer is here
Today is the first day of summer here in Pennsylvania, which must mean it is time for a reading from 呂氏春秋 Lüshi Chunqiu LSCQ is best described as a philosophica...
Perennial Question: Martial Arts in Chinese Militaries?
I got a query from a reader which echoes a question I’ve gotten in class (( Actually, the question is usually much less carefully phrased, and I hear it a...
Why Study?
Jeremiah from Granite Studio has post about the debate in American universities about the relationship between education and training. Anthony Kronman claims t...
National sudies fever
China’s intellectual world needs to bundle up better, and wear its galoshes, since it tends to catch a lot of “fevers.” The current one is for...
Has anyone seen the scissors?
Tang-dynasty scissors, via wikipedia Perhaps they are not as interesting as pigs, but I had a question about scissors. I was reading the 海王 chapter of Gu...
Naughty or Nice?
As it is time to think about the good or bad behavior of children, I have been wondering why so many Chinese sage-kings had rotten kids. Lewis points out that o...
Six Dynasties blogging
One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968...
Hightower Obituary
If you’re an H-Asia reader, you already saw this, but if you’re not, it’s an interesting look at the 20th century history of Asian literary st...
Lumpy Chinese History
There are a few places to go for archived syllabi — H-Net, ExEAS, I had a printed collection at one point, as well, then there’s the GMU Syllabus Fi...