New Books In East Asian Studies

Michael Nylan and Griet Vankeerberghen have produced a landmark volume. Chang’an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press, 2015) collects 19 essays (plus an Introduction and an Afterword) devoted to exploring the built environment and archaeology of Han Chang’an, sociopolitical transformations in the late Western Han,...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The development of higher education in Asia has been as dramatic as the region’s rapid economic rise. The landscape of this diverse and ever-changing sector is thoroughly explored in Asia: The Next Higher Education Superpower? (Institute of International Education [IIE] and the American Institute For Foreign Study Foundation, 2015). Dr....Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christians, like other religious people, have to manage the relationship between their belief in supernatural forces and an afterlife on one side, and how those beliefs impact their daily life on the other. This was especially difficult for Korean Protestant Christians (and members of an indigenous religion influenced by Christianity...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work and a boon for scholars and teachers working in the field of modern Chinese studies. Waverings is the second work in...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David A. Pietz‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to disappear anytime soon. Using a careful history of water and environmental management to inform our understanding of water-related challenges in contemporary China, Yellow River: The Problem of Water...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s not to love about Jie Li‘s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes by focusing on two physical spaces, both built in the early twentieth century by Japanese and British companies, and both located in...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When one thinks of the connection of religion and imperialism in Japan, one automatically thinks first of Shintoism and second of Buddhism. Christianity does not usually figure into that story. However, Emily Anderson, in her new book Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury, 2014), shows how...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging into the history of the bookmaking craft, the author approaches these ancient texts primarily through the lens of their artistry, while simultaneously showing...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wen Jin’s book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms (Ohio State Press, 2012), compares histories and modes of multiculturalism in China and the United States. Whereas many see few correlations between China’s ethnic policies and the multiculturalist policies of the U.S., Wen Jin brings these...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs from their first appearance in the third century to the eighth century, when printed editions of the canon took over the catalog’s role of...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to be a martyr? What does it mean to be an apostate? How should we understand people who choose one or the other? These are the questions asked by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, in which he tells the story of Japanese Catholics and foreign...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) pays careful attention to a wide range of contexts of concern with nature...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah M. Allen‘s new book looks at the literature of tales in eighth- and ninth-century China. Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) situates Tang tales in the context of social story exchange among elite men. Allen’s work not only...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Zhuang in his encounter with a skeleton who comes back to life...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Byonghyon Choi‘s new book makes a key document of Korean and world history available in English in a volume that will be tremendously useful for both scholarship and teaching. The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2014) translates an important excerpt from The Veritable...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our interview with Kenneth M. Swope about his book, The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44 (Routledge, 2014), published through Routledge, is an effort to address an oversight in how New Books in Military History has generally overlooked both early modern history and works that have an exclusively non-Eurocentric...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom. Beginning with Victor Mair’s argument that...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices