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The Ends of Kinship

Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York

By Sienna R. Craig

For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped...

Further Adventures on the Journey to the West

By Master of Silent Whistle Studio. Translated by Qiancheng Li and Robert E. Hegel . Introduction by Qiancheng Li

As the audacious Monkey King battles his way through a landscape of inexplicable places and unfamiliar passions, Further Adventures on the Journey to the West offers a wry, revisionist critique of the late-Ming fascination with...

The Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan Reader

Selections from China’s Earliest Narrative History

By Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, David Schaberg

Zuo Tradition, China’s first great work of history, was completed by about 300 BCE and recounts events during a period of disunity from 722 to 468 BCE. The text, which plays a foundational role in...

One Left

A Novel

By Kim Soom. Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Foreword by Bonnie Oh

During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in horrific conditions in “comfort stations” across Japanese-occupied territories. Barely 10 percent survived to return to...

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian

The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

By James Staples. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu...

Bringing Whales Ashore

Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan

By Jakobina K. Arch. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japan today defends its controversial whaling expeditions by invoking tradition—but what was the historical reality? In examining the techniques and impacts of whaling during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Jakobina Arch shows that the organized, shore-based...

The Edge of Knowing

Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature

By Roy Bing Chan

Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The...

Rural Origins, City Lives

Class and Place in Contemporary China

By Roberta Zavoretti

Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than...

Kings in Love: Lilit Phra Lo and Twelve Months

Two classic Thai poems

By Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit

Kings in Love: Lilit Phra Lo and Twelve Months (Thawathotsamat) are among the earliest works of Thai literature. These translations by an award-winning team aim to convey not only the meaning of the Thai originals...

The Story of King Lo

Lilit Phra Lo

By Robert J. Bickner

Highly regarded as an important part of the poetic heritage of Thailand, The Story of King Law received royal acclaim in 1914 and is included in official school curricula. All students of Thai literature memorize...

Textiles in Burman Culture

By Sylvia Fraser-Lu

This pioneering work traces the history and evolution of the textiles of Myanmar (Burma) made and used by the Burman (Bama) ethnic majority. Written accessibly, it covers the importance of textiles in many contexts as...

South Asian Filmscapes

Transregional Encounters

By Elora Halim Chowdhury, Esha Niyogi De

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947...

Greening East Asia

The Rise of the Eco-developmental State

By Ashley Esarey, Mary Alice Haddad, Joanna I. Lewis, Stevan Harrell

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of...

Seeds of Control

Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

By David Fedman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government...

Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

What the Emperor Built

Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming

By Aurelia Campbell

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor...

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

By Ian M. Miller. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed...

A Fashionable Century

Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing

By Rachel Silberstein

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women’s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women’s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an...

Korean Skilled Workers

Toward a Labor Aristocracy

By Hyung-A Kim

South Korea’s triumphant development has catapulted the country’s economy to the eleventh largest in the world. Large family-owned conglomerates, or chaebŏls, such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, have become globally preeminent manufacturing brands. Yet Korea’s...

Citizens of Beauty

Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China

By Louise Edwards

In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew...