Jottings from the Granite Studio

I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to understand Chinese history. Confucius himself once said: “To know that you know what you know and that you don’t know what you don’t know, that is true knowledge.”
Later scholars in China’s history wrote insightful commentaries on this passage to assist future lao wai historians. Insight that could [...]

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While genetic evidence has shown that populations of Western Eurasians existed in Xinjiang, where their DNA persists in some areas to this day, National Geographic reports that a man exhumed from a 1,500 year old tomb in Taiyuan is evidence that such populations may have pushed even further east than previously believed
The man, named Yu [...]

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Two recent articles on historical preservation in China. The first is by Lindsey Hilsum of the New Statesman. Hilsum writes about Shanchang, a village near Macao and Zhuhai, where over 21 homes and buildings dating from the Ming and Qing dynasty have been torn down to make way for developers. The homes had [...]

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Via The Korea Times: You know this is the sort of thing that is going to get some attention over here. A history textbook used for SAT prep in the United States misidentifies the Silla Kingdom (57 B.C.E.-935 C.E.) as Korea’s first kingdom while ignoring the Goguryeo Kingdom (37 B.C.E.-668 C.E.).
A South Korean civic group [...]

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This is not the kind of story that makes tenured faculty wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat clutching an empty box of ramen noodles…but for Ph.D. students, it’s a fairly commonplace tale of woe that offers all the encouragement of an iron bar to the back of the head.
Back [...]

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