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Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900

By Sumit Guha. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands...

Modified Bodies, Material Selves

Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai

By Julie E. Starr

Thin body, white skin, and big eyes. Such beauty ideals are ubiquitous across Shanghai, where salons and weight-loss clinics offering an array of products and treatment options beckon city dwellers with promises of a "better...

An Ecological History of Modern China

By Stevan Harrell

Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of An Ecological History of...

Fukushima Futures

Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape

By Satsuki Takahashi. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along...

Good Formulas

Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts

By Ruth Yun-Ju Chen

Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of...

Insect Histories of East Asia

By David A. Bello, Daniel Burton-Rose

Interactions between people and animals are attracting overdue attention in diverse fields of scholarship, yet insects still creep within the shadows of more charismatic birds, fish, and mammals. Insect Histories of East Asia centers on...

China's Hidden Century

1796-1912

By Jessica Harrison-Hall, Julia Lovell

Cultural creativity in China between 1796 and 1912 demonstrated extraordinary resilience in a time of warfare, land shortages, famine, and uprisings. Innovation can be seen in material culture (including print, painting, calligraphy, textiles, jewelry, ceramics,...

The Brush of Insight

Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court

By Yael Rice

Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mughal court painters evolved from illustrators of manuscripts and albums to active mediators of imperial visionary experience, cultivating their patrons’ earthly and spiritual authority. Featuring...

Miscellany of the South Seas

A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam

By Cai Tinglan. Translated by Kathlene Baldanza and Zhao Lu

In 1835 young Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan was caught in a typhoon while sailing across the Taiwan Strait. He and his shipmates spent a harrowing week at sea before drifting to the coast of central...

Surviving the Sanctuary City

Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York

By Tina Shrestha

Over the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary...

A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry

An Anthology

By Michelle Yeh, Zhangbin Li, Frank Stewart

This volume—a completely overhauled and updated version of Michelle Yeh’s 1992 classic Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry—brings together modern poetry from the Chinese-speaking world dating from the 1910s to the 2010s. Featuring the work of...

A Thorough Exploration in Historiography / Shitong

By Liu Zhiji. Translated and Introduced by Victor Cunrui Xiong

In the early eighth century, frustrated with the authorities but still hoping to gain immortality through his future oeuvre, the Tang court historian Liu Zhiji set out to write Shitong, in which he would rigorously...

Porcelain for the Emperor

Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China

By Kai Jun Chen

The exquisite ceramic ware produced at the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory at Jingdezhen in southern China functioned as a kind of visual propaganda for the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court. Porcelain for the Emperor charts the career...

The Ghost in the City

Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China

By Michele Matteini

In 1771 the artist Luo Ping (1733–99) left his native Yangzhou to relocate to the burgeoning hub of Beijing’s Southern City. Over two decades, he became the favored artist of a cosmopolitan community of scholars...

Spatial Dunhuang

Experiencing the Mogao Caves

By Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved...

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant

Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

By Faizah Zakaria. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? The...

Old Stacks, New Leaves

The Arts of the Book in South Asia

By Sonal Khullar

In the twenty-first century, debates on the future of books and print culture have intensified with the rise of digital technologies, and the contemporary art world has witnessed an explosion of interest in the book...

Chinese Autobiographical Writing

An Anthology of Personal Accounts

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, Ping Yao

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in...

Park Dae Sung

Ink Reimagined

By Sunglim Kim

Contemporary Korean artist Park Dae Sung (b. 1945) works in the traditional medium of ink painting while transforming familiar Korean landscapes with his modern and imaginative interpretations of the natural world. Park, who lost his...

Material Contradictions in Mao's China

By Jennifer Altehenger, Denise Y. Ho

The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to...