The Pearl River Delta is home to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and cities of millions – such as gritty workshops to the world Dongguan and Zhongshan – that you’ve never heard of. Despite being the powerhouse of the country’s decades-long economic boom, China’s southern cities have been largely ignored [...]
Lise Boehm was the pen name of Elise Williamina Edersheim Giles. She was born around 1859 in Scotland. Her father, Alfred Edersheim (1825–1889), was a Jewish convert to Christianity and a biblical scholar. In 1883, at the age of twenty-three she married Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), of Wade-Giles romanization system [...]
At the dawn of the seventeenth century Taiwan was an Austronesian island, inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Aborigines and largely removed from the wider currents of East Asian history. In modern Taiwan the Aboriginal peoples make up just 3 percent of the population, with most of the rest being [...]
The thriller gets off to a good start with the title. Any China–Taiwan story without “dragon” or similar Orientalist cheese in the name is a welcome reprieve from the likes of Dragon Teeth, Dragon Storm, and Operation Red Dragon. Having a dragon-free title is a minor point perhaps, but it’s [...]
A poor man’s Marco Polo, Hendrick Hamel was the first European to write a detailed account of Korea. The twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper was serving aboard the Dutch East India Company’s Sperwer (Sparrowhawk) as it set sail on July 30, 1653, from the Dutch settlement of Anping, Formosa. Laden with a cargo [...]
The value of any kind of travel narrative is meted out not in the immediate present but slowly over time, which only adds to the torture of writing them. Oftentimes both reader and writer don’t really know what they’ve really got on their hands until five, ten, or even fifteen [...]
Taiwan is a superb destination for rail fans: there’s the new bullet train, Taipei’s showcase MRT, the scenic East Coast railways, the busy main trunk western line, quaint branch lines, and the magnificent Alishan narrow-gauge forestry railway, which climbs a stunning two-thousand meters. Not that you’d know that from the [...]
Some books get under your skin, keep you awake at night long after you’ve finished reading them. This biography of a policeman in Shanghai’s International Settlement in the 1920s and 1930s is such a book. Richard Maurice Tinkler, recently demobbed from First World War service, is back in England looking [...]
It’s odd that Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) isn’t better known today. As a Nobel Prize-winning author and tireless human rights campaigner, she deserves to be an icon for modern Western progressives. And deserving aside, she simply had an extraordinary life that makes for one hell of a gripping story. With [...]
Seven Years in Tibet is travel pornography. Austrian Heinrich Harrer, fresh from the first-ever ascent of the deadly north face of the Eiger, is on a German climbing expedition to the Himalayas. The outbreak of the Second World War sees the climbers interned in a POW camp in British India. [...]
