Washington University Press Search Results Page

Glorious Qing

Decorative Arts in China, 1644-1911

By Claudia Brown

With over 250 color illustrations, this companion volume to Claudia Brown's Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911 covers an array of superbly crafted objects of art produced during China's last dynasty. It features ceramics, metalwork,...

Taiwan Lives

A Social and Political History

By Niki J. P. Alsford

From a cradle of Austronesian expansion to the dynamic economic powerhouse and successful democracy it is today, Taiwan is layered in colonial histories. In Taiwan Lives, Niki J. P. Alsford presents a comprehensive examination of...

Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

By Yong-Chool Ha

South Korea's rapid industrialization occurred with the rise of powerful chaebǒl (family-owned business conglomerates) that controlled vast swaths of the nation's economy. Leader Park Chung Hee's sense of backwardness and urgency led him to rely...

Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

By David H. Price

During the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with CIA goals, from clandestine operations and research to liberal anticommunist programs. While investigative journalists and...

Resisting the Nuclear

Art and Activism across the Pacific

By Elyssa Faison, Alison Fields

From uranium mines on the Navajo Nation to craters caused by nuclear testing on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, the production and deployment of nuclear weapon technologies have disproportionately harmed Indigenous lands. Sustained exposure to...

Island X

Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism

By Wendy Cheng

Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s. Often depicted as compliant model minorities, many were in fact...

The Empire Looks South

Chinese Perceptions of Cambodia before and during the Kingdom of Angkor

By Peter Harris

The most famous firsthand account of the Kingdom of Angkor was left by the imperial Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan. But Zhou's was not the only portrait of Angkor and the kingdoms that came before it....

Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

By Jessica Rawson

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilization still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment;...

Vietnam

Asia's Rising Star

By Brook Taylor and Sam Korsmoe

Is Vietnam the world's next Tiger Economy? Can it grow like Taiwan and South Korea did when they were Tiger Economies in the 1980s and '90s? Brook Taylor and Sam Korsmoe bring together more than...

Who Cares?

COVID-19 Social Protection Responses in Southeast Asia

By Edited by Rosalia Sciortino

Who Cares? presents findings on the social protection response to the COVID-19 pandemic in six Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. After a regional overview, country-specific chapters narrate the pandemic's...

Regional Identities in Southeast Asia

Contemporary Challenges, Historical Fractures

By Jayeel Cornelio, Volker Grabowsky

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, is a community of multiple identities. Over time, its citizens' loyalties were formed around national and transnational frameworks involving ethnic, religious, and ideological affinities. In the post-independence...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...