Taiwan for 6 months?
Don’t buy a KIA!
KIA Carnival is the worst piece of junk imaginable. We paid 32,5000 NT (some 10,000 US) for a six year old model. We did a reasonable amount of googling before making up our minds. Too bad we didn’t put in “KIA total engine failure” or “KIA ruined my life.” If we had, we would have […]
Lord Elgin’s dream
In his History of Persia and the Mongols, the 14th century Persian statesman and historian, Rashid-ed-Din, tells the story of how Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler over China, had a vision of a palace in a dream. Waking up he decided to construct its material equivalent at his summer retreat in Chengde. This was the […]
Wilting flowers
The courses this term have gone a bit better than last term. I’m learning to be more of a disciplinarian. Still, it’s not quite good enough. I gave a lecture last week where 6 out of 12 students were asleep most of the time. And they weren’t just gently closing their eyes, they looked like […]
There is no “Great Wall”
I’ve been reading The Great Wall of China by Arthur Waldron. He argues very persuasively that there is no such thing: The basic conviction that has thus emerged from my research is that the idea of a Great Wall of China, familiar to me since childhood, and with which I began my work, is a […]
The emperor’s giraffe
The latest issue of the Journal of World History has my article on giraffes. You can get it here, here or here. In the 15th century Chinese ships were traveling to Africa and as part of this trade a giraffe appeared at the court of the emperor in Beijing. A few decades later another giraffe […]
Old palaces, new conflicts
I wrote an article on the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan — the so called “summer palace” of the Chinese emperor — by Anglo-French troops in 1860. Song Nianshen, a student of mine here in London, very kindly and competently translated the article and we sent it off to Tian Ya, a Chinese cultural journal. We […]
Conquering Asia
The article I wrote about the Yuanmingyuan continues to conquer Asia — if that’s the right metaphor. A friend of mine took the independent initiative to send it on to a journal in Hong Kong, Century China, which published it last week (without footnotes and with their own subtitle). The article has had over 1500 […]
The Fury of the Europeans
I just set up a number of web pages for my new book project, The Fury of the Europeans, on the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860. The pages are here. The idea is to gather all my notes on-line, together with pictures, eyewitness accounts, maps and other primary sources. Eventually my own book chapters will […]