This small book – a Penguin Special weighing in at a hundred pages – packs a punch, and though no more than an afternoon’s easy reading, it may well alter the way you think about the history of China and globalization. The “Silver Way” in the title refers to [...]
Late at night and deep into research – i.e. drinking heavily while trawling the Internet – I was becoming increasingly convinced that my idea for a book was a brilliant one. Yes, I would retrace Peter Fleming’s journey from Peking to Kashmir described in his 1936 travel classic News From [...]
“Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?” We are all—even the best of us—quick to judge. The unfamiliar confuses, upsets, and undermines our conventions, forcing us to put aside what we’re accustomed to, including the distinct, learned ways in which we’ve [...]
Published in 1947 in the wake of a war that consumed the Pacific, American Agent is the uninspiring title of a remarkable true story. American involvement in the local Chinese resistance to the Japanese was little known at the time, even more rarely reported on, and barely acknowledged by the powers in Washington [...]
In the Land of Pagodas: A Classic Account of Travel in Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou by Alfred Raquez (Edited and translated by William L. Gibson and Paul Bruthiaux) Long out of print in the original French, this travel account of China at the end of the [...]
This is a tremendously enjoyable book; reading it feels like going for a stroll through Old Peking with a companion who is a cross between Peter Hopkirk and Mark Twain. On the very first page of the book, Aldrich lays out his stall with an explanation of the use of [...]
Englishman Tim Symonds is the author of five Sherlock Holmes novels, most recently the highly enjoyable Sherlock Holmes and the Nine-Dragon Sigil, which takes Holmes and Watson to the Forbidden City in Peking during the last days of the Qing dynasty. * * * What does the "Nine-Dragon Sigil" in the book [...]
In India in the Chinese Imagination, an excellent collection of essays published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, eleven scholars examine the way that Indian ideas have influenced the mythology, religion, and thought of China. The book is divided into three sections: Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination, India in [...]
Ever visited places on your overseas travels and felt that you were ten or twenty years too late? I have, often, but not with China. I first went there in 1995 and it was bad enough; a decade or two earlier would have meant even dirtier toilets, even worse transportation, [...]
Late at night and easing your way through a bottle, have you ever been blessed by a flash of literary genius? Perhaps an idea for a novel, let’s say, a Sherlock Holmes story set in Asia? Alas, you’re hardly halfway through the celebratory follow-up bottle when a few cursory internet [...]