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Temples in the Cliffside

Buddhist Art in Sichuan

By Sonya S. Lee

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world’s tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO...

Misreading the Bengal Delta

Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal​ Bangladesh

By Camelia Dewan. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749624

Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet, to what extent...

New Lives in Anand

Building a Muslim Hub in Western India

By Sanderien Verstappen

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749655

In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart hundreds of towns and villages in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the...

Ordering the Myriad Things

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

By Nicholas K. Menzies. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth...

Single Mothers and the State’s Embrace

Reproductive Agency in Vietnam

By Harriet M. Phinney

In the mid-1980s, after the Indochina Wars, a shortage of men meant that many single women in Vietnam found themselves without suitable marital prospects. A number of these women chose to pursue single motherhood by...

Mumbai Taximen

Autobiographies and Automobilities in India

By Tarini Bedi

In this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for...

Garden of Eloquence / Shuoyuan說苑

By Liu Xiang. Translated and Introduced by Eric Henry

In 17 BCE the Han dynasty archivist Liu Xiang presented to the throne a collection of some seven hundred items of varying length, mostly quasi-historical anecdotes and narratives, that he deemed essential reading for wise...

Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan

Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea

By Maya K. H. Stiller

North Korea’s Kŭmgangsan is one of Asia’s most celebrated sacred mountain ranges, comparable in fame to Mount Tai in China and Mount Fuji in Japan. Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan marks a paradigm shift in the...

The City in Time

Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

By Pamela N. Corey

In The City in Time, Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last...

Artisans in Early Imperial China

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed by archaeological excavations are often viewed without...

Footprints of War

Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam

By David Andrew Biggs. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the...

Chinese Village Life Today

Building Families in an Age of Transition 

By Gonçalo Santos

China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or...

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

By Mytheli Sreenivas

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial...

Ancient Egypt and Early China

State, Society, and Culture

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548–1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers—the...

Adivasi Art and Activism

Curation in a Nationalist Age

By Alice Tilche

As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a...

Arranged Companions

Marriage and Intimacy in Qing China

By Weijing Lu

Although commonly associated with patriarchal oppression, arranged marriages have adapted over the centuries to changing cultural norms and the lived experiences of men and women. In Arranged Companions, historian Weijing Lu chronicles how marital behaviors...

Timber and Forestry in Qing China 

Sustaining the Market

By Meng Zhang

In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the...

Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand

Encounters with Buddhist Monks

By Brooke Schedneck

Temples are everywhere in Chiang Mai, filled with tourists as well as saffron-robed monks of all ages. The monks participate in daily urban life here as elsewhere in Thailand, where Buddhism is promoted, protected, and...

Healing with Poisons

Potent Medicines in Medieval China

By Yan Liu

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013

At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from...

The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China

State News and Political Authority 

By Emily Mokros

In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and...