Jottings from the Granite Studio

We did it. We finally found a place to live. YJ and I will NOT be sharing a cardboard box in Ritan Park this winter and we’ll be in Beijing starting tomorrow. Also, for the few readers of this blog who don’t also read The Peking Duck, Richard has organized another bloggers’ dinner […]

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I guess I’ve been shirking my responsibilities as a blogger lately. This past week marks 35 years since Nixon traveled to China to shake hands with Mao in a meeting that “shook the world.” Up to now, I’ve relegated this monumental event to a series in the “Image of the Day” section of the blog […]

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Danwei has a great post on why the Ming (1368-1644) is so hot these days. (And they’re not talking about the hobbled Yao, either.) Joel Martinson asks, “Has the Qing been mined to exhaustion as a source for popular culture, or have people simply grown tired of historical teledramas featuring costumed characters wearing queues?”
One of […]

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Korean textbook writers have fired the latest salvo in the ongoing history wars between the ROK and the PRC. The textbooks have been revised to describe the Korean Bronze Age as starting 1000 years earlier than previous claims. The new textbooks date the beginning of the Bronze Age to about 2000 B.C.E. Further revisions state […]

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Davegonetochina, a frequent commenter both here and at The Peking Duck has (re)started his own blog called Mutant Palm. Dave is one of the best writers and certainly one of sharpest historical minds in the Chinese blogosphere. That said, he has a wide range of interests beyond history and is always a good […]

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One of THE BEST blogs currently in the Chinese blogosphere is China Dialogue. Its excellent collection of Chinese and English articles (with translations) on environmental topics make it the very definition of a must-read blog. In today’s edition, Jiang Gaoming, professor of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Science and vice secretary-general of the UNESCO […]

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Brilliant post on Danwei yesterday in keeping with the theme of Spring Festival. It is an annotated translation of interviews about Spring Festivals of years past collected by oral historian Sang Ye. The stories tell not only of the great hardships (floods, starvation) but also of the little joys (roasting a pig in the communal […]

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I’m still busy with Spring Festival matters so I’m taking the lazy way out and cross-posting between The Granite Studio and The Peking Duck. In a week, I’ll be back in Beijing and on a more normal schedule.————————
In the journal First Things, David Gress reviews the new book What is the West? by French philosopher, […]

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Via CDT: The blog Letters from China has a post about an article in the magazine China Review by Fudan University professor Ge Jianxiong. The CDT brief and the Letters from China post both feature the title “Tibet not always a part of China: Chinese Historian.” Taken in context, Professor Ge’s comments are not quite […]

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At the risk of slipping into what China Law Blog refers to as a “noodle” blog, I had some thoughts while wandering around Tianjin the last couple of days before the Spring Festival.
YJ’s mother is the sweetest human being on Earth. She really is. But like an evil genie, when you are in her presence […]

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