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...
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Current Events/Current/Recent Events/Hong Kong/Politics/Popular Culture/Uncategorized/visual culture
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So this is a post that already seems outdated, but I thought I would do it anyway.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 ...
A Wuhan Timeline and Bibliography
The world’s attention has, for the most part, moved on from Wuhan, the city where the the Covid-19 virus outbreak began. Now the media both within and bey...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“What I Read Over Summer Vacation” (part one?)
I’ve been on something of a tear through my to-read pile in search of… well, I’m not entirely sure some days. A lot of what’s in that st...
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. ...
The Marie Kondo thing
I’ve been avoiding getting into the debate about Marie Kondo’s konmari brand of modernist orientalism, mostly because I’m not that interested,...
On the opening vignette as pedagogy
A passage I wrote for one of my online course discussion boards: One of my pet peeves about textbook, history, and journalistic writing is the use of the “...