The late Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kwan Yew once typified the China-Japan relationship as one where, on one side (China's) nothing is forgotten, and on the other (Japan's) nothing is remembered. This neat summary comes towards the end of June Teufel Dreyer's comprehensive overview of the relationship - Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising
Originally published in Publishers Weekly Volume 255 Issue 27 07/07/2008 by Judith Rosen Founded a decade ago by Karen Christensen and her ex-husband, David Levinson, as a reference book packager, Berkshire Publishing Group in Great Barrington, Mass., transitioned into a trade and professional publishing house in 2004. But even before that, Christensen knew that the direction she
Update: We were not selected for the trade mission, but are grateful for all the encouragement, and for the many questions (including, "Are you out of your mind?"). It was useful to prepare the full application, which made me think about our work in China, and about the importance of showing how small businesses, based in
For me, 2017 will go down as the year I finally managed to make it through the David Hawkes and John Minford five volume translation of the Story of the Stone – （石头记) or , as it is more famously known, Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼 梦) (Penguin 1973–1986) by the Qing writer Cao Xueqin
The one thing I knew about the great Ming novel The Golden Lotus (Jinpingmei – 金瓶梅) by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng (Tuttle 2011) was that it is regarded as an infamously explicit text with passages so inflammatory that its earlier translators into English rendered the most lurid into Latin, as a form of delicate censorship. This
It is a sultry early autumn day in the central province of Hunan in China, half a century ago in 1967. In a small cluster of villages, remote from the main political centre in Beijing, life revolves around farming, tending animals, just making a basic living. But for a couple of weeks, from around the 20th
I started 2017 by ending a reading of John Minford's magnificent translation of the classical Chinese uber-text, The Book of Changes (I-Ching, or, in pinyin, Yijing): I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom (Viking 2014). This is an Amazon affiliate link for your convenience. We also encourage you
Since the first unification of China in 220 BCE under the Qin dynasty, the issue of how such a diverse, disparate entity – something more akin at times to an empire, or a continent, than a country – governs itself has been the source of perpetual fascination. This is an Amazon affiliate link for your
It was just over a year ago that William H. McNeill, our dear friend Bill, died at 98, and now we have learned that the great Asian scholar Wm. Theodore de Bary has died. It was more than a decade ago that I first attended one of his classes at Columbia, and he was still teaching
In 2006 I wrote a blog post about how much I missed England and the homesickness I felt for my London neighborhood and friends I made when I was a young working mum. It got a lot of responses; I wasn't the only one who had regrets about moving on, or a lingering desire to be at home again
