Jottings from the Granite Studio

This has nothing to do with Chinese history and everything to do with Boston sports. If you don’t care about the latter, then click here to read historian Ken Pomeranz’s marvelous post on The China Beat about Han Dynasty reformer/usurper Wang Mang.
Bill Belichick cheated. Fine. He ordered a minion to videotape the opposing team’s coaching [...]

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In a fascinating interview in the Australian newspaper The Age, Beijing-based artist Ai Wei Wei gives his own take on modern Chinese history:

“It is very important to understand China that you know very soon after 1949, even before the Communists had total control, because of the severity of the problems facing China (what Mao called [...]

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From the Shanghai Daily:

CHINESE archaeologists have discovered an elaborately decorated sword, believed to be 2,500 to 2,600 years old, in an ancient tomb in the eastern province of Jiangxi. “It is reckoned the oldest ever excavated in the country,” said Xu Changqing, chief of the excavation team.
A dragon pattern was carved on both ends [...]

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In the wake of last week’s protests in Shanghai over construction of a new mag-lev train, historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom has a great piece in The Nation looking at the history of collective action in Shanghai.
It would be a mistake to ignore parallels between the current Shanghai protests and earlier events in the city’s history [...]

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