For most expats in China, the name “Tsingtao†conjures up images of beer, but for fans of military history it’s a name associated with the most important episode of China’s First World War: the siege and battle for the German port settlement on the Shandong Peninsula’s southern coast. The Japanese attack, made with British assistance, …Read More
Neutral up until August 1917 and far from the carnage of Europe, China had a relatively quiet First World War. Its limited involvement in the conflict consisted chiefly of two episodes: the sending of Chinese labourers to France and Russia; and the 1914 battle at the German enclave of Tsingtao (Qingdao) on the Shandong Peninsula …Read More
The original lost laowai, Marco Polo is getting the premium TV treatment with a new 10-episode Netflix original series debuting December 12th. Lorenzo Richelmy is playing the Venetian explorer, and the show will centre on his adventures in the court of Kublai Khan, during the Yuan Dynasty of 13th century China.Read More
Not long ago I went out to dinner with some friends who had just recently arrived in China. Since this was their first time in Beijing, we naturally went for the city’s signature dish at Quanjude. Just as any religious pilgrimage is accompanied by certain obligatory rituals and prayers, so too does the Beijing visitor’s …Read More
This is just all sorts of awesome. Created by the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors (bio below), the video delivers what’s on the box — the (abridged) history of China in 3 1/2 minutes.
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In October of 2010, I was invited to take a welcome break from my life on the hamster wheel that is Shanghai, and visit Jinhua’s famous Taoist temple and caves. I was very excited by this invitation, partly because of my interest in Taoism and its place in Chinese culture, and partly because I had …Read More
So the story goes that around 2000 years ago approximately 10,000 Romans, prisoners of Parthia after a failed campaign by Marcus Licinius Crassus (played in this blog post by Lord Laurence Olivier), were put to work guarding the Parthian Empire’s eastern borders in exchange for not being put into slavery or executed. Members of the …Read More
I spent several hours over the course of the last couple days compiling a retrospective look on 60 years of the People’s Republic of China, and after getting 1949 to 2003 down in a draft, I realized I didn’t want the site to go the way of the still blocked Peking Duck and Danwei, and …Read More
eChinaCities has a good rundown of what we can expect from tomorrow’s massive 60th anniversary celebration marking the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It can be watched online in English via CCTV9 starting first thing in the morning. Like most China-centric sites, you may have troubles loading the players in anything other than …Read More
I’ve been debating with myself today about putting together a post on that topic which has the brass in Beijing with their gitch in a twitch. In truth, I’m a bit muddled on where I sit with the issue. On one side we seem to have Western activists shaking their fists and demanding action, recognition, …Read More
Tweets are filling my screen with reports that Twitter.com and Flickr.com are both inaccessible in Mainland China. They join YouTube, as well as WordPress and Blogger blogs as the latest casualties in the Great Firewall of China’s war against free speech. Undoubtedly the blocks are in an effort to curb online commentary and the dissemination …Read More
I was away at college when my family first got into sushi, but I remember the story well. During one of our weekly Sunday night telephone conversations, my mother drolly recounted to me how she and my sister had been sneaking take-out from a new local restaurant into the house behind my grandmother’s back. While …Read More
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