When it was first completed in 1578, the Bencao Gangmu (The Compendium of Materia Medica) was arguably the world’s greatest medical text. Drawing on hundreds of existing works and incorporating new scholarship, in almost two million characters it described the entire body of knowledge of Chinese medicine. Among the many [...]
Old Taiwan Hand Richard Saunders has done more to get his fellow expats exploring the island than any other person or organization. He is the founder of the group Taipei Hikers, and regularly leads day and weekend hikes around Taipei, and longer treks to Taiwan’s 3,000-meter-plus mountains. He has written hundreds [...]
Alec Ash is an English writer and journalist living in Beijing. He is the founder of a writer's colony called the Anthill, and the author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. Wish Lanterns, which follows the lives of six young Chinese, is a fascinating close-up look at China's millennials. What was the [...]
Quincy Carroll is the the author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside. The novel follows the strained relationship between two American English teachers during an academic year in the small Chinese town of Ningyuan. The lives of English teachers in China might not sound too exciting but Quincy's [...]
John Dougill grew up in Grimsby, England. Since 1988 he has lived in Kyoto, Japan, where he is professor of British Studies at Ryukoku University. He has written numerous books about Japan (on travel, religion, and history) and England. His 2012 In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians: A Story of Suppression, [...]
Taiwan-based American Greg McCann fell in love with the little-known wilderness of northeast Cambodia while doing doctoral research on the animist beliefs of the highlander tribes and how their belief in mountain spirits and traditional taboos translated into a form of environmental conservation. He wrote a book about his experiences, [...]
Liam D'Arcy-Brown is the author of three books on China: Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: Travels to China's Extremes (2003), The Emperor's River: Travels to the Heart of a Resurgent China (2010) and Chusan: The Opium Wars & the Forgotten Story of Britain's First Chinese Island. He studied Chinese at St. Anne's [...]
Troy Parfitt is the author of Notes from the Other China: Adventures in Asia (2007), Why China Will Never Rule the World: Travels in the Two Chinas (2011), and War Torn: Adventures in the Brave New Canada (2015). Originally from New Brunswick, Canada, he is currently living in Scotland. Why China Will [...]
Nicki Chen is the author of Tiger Tail Soup, a historical novel that tells the story of a Chinese woman struggling to survive during the Japanese invasion. The novel is set on Kulangsu (Gulangyu), a small island near the city of Xiamen. Why did you set Tiger Tail Soup on [...]
Shawna Yang Ryan is a former Fulbright scholar and the author of Water Ghosts (Penguin Press 2009) and mostly recently Green Island (Knopf 2016), a novel exploring the dark days of Taiwan's post-WW II White Terror period. Originally from California, Shawna Yang Ryan now lives on Oahu, where she teaches in the [...]