British travel writer David Leffman has written numerous guide books, including ones for Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Iceland. He is also the author of The Mercenary Mandarin: How a British adventurer became a general in Qing-dynasty China, which tells the amazing story of Jersey-born William Mesny. Mesny ran off to [...]
Endo’s Silence: the Grim Japanese Novel behind Martin Scorsese’s New Film Reviewed by Eric Mader The first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in 1549. By 1583, an estimated 200,000 Japanese, from both the upper classes and the peasantry, had converted to the new faith, convincing the Catholic Jesuits who had [...]
T.C. Locke (aka T.C. Lin) is the author of Barbarian at the Gate: From the American Suburbs to the Taiwanese Army. The book describes how the author - soon after gaining Taiwanese citizenship - found himself called up for two years of compulsory military service in the ROC (Republic of China) army. Why [...]
An interview with Jonathan Adams, author of Welcome Home, Master: Covering East Asia in the Twilight of Old Media. American journalist Jonathan Adams reported on East Asia for a decade. Welcome Home, Master is his honest, funny, and revealing behind-the-scenes look at foreign reporting, and the reality of making a [...]
This is the kind of book that makes you want to kidnap the world’s leading scientists and force them to build you a time machine. When I first came across Weirather’s account of American cowboy Fred Barton and his adventures in the Far East between 1911 and 1937, I was [...]
Heaven Lake is part coming-of-age tale, part travelogue – a thoughtful and thought-provoking story about faith, loneliness, and love. It takes its time with some old-fashioned pacing but rewards the patient reader. It is, I think, the best Taiwan expat novel. Regardless of how you define that category, it’s a [...]
The false certainty of hindsight makes it seem inevitable that the Japanese colony of Taiwan would, after the Second World War, come under Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) control; and it was surely logical that Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT would flee to the island in the dying days of the [...]
I vividly remember the day my father announced that we were going to move. I was six, and we were sitting round the dinner table in our house in Dublin. As we finished our food he calmly told us that we would be leaving Ireland, destined for Hong Kong. I [...]
In 2009 the “Ghost City” of Ordos was discovered by the global media. Here, in a lonely desert expanse, a massive new city, said to be built for a million people, lay eerily quiet and empty. There were brand-new apartment blocks, whole suburbs of upmarket homes, and a massive public [...]
The epic adventure The Rose of Tibet is a stunning work from a largely forgotten writer. Lionel Davidson would make any shortlist for the best thriller writer of the last sixty years whom you’ve never heard of, let alone read. Of his eight novels, three won the prestigious Gold Dagger [...]