Washington University Press Search Results Page

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons

A Seventeenth-Century Novel

By Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, Mark Edward Lewis, Brigitte Baptandier

The Lady of Linshui—the goddess of women, childbirth, and childhood—is still venerated in south China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Her story evolved from the life of Chen Jinggu in the eighth century and blossomed in...

Pure Land in the Making

Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South

By Allison J. Truitt

Since the 1970s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese immigrants have settled in Louisiana, Florida, and other Gulf Coast states, rebuilding lives that were upended by the wars in Indochina. For many, their faith has been...

The Objectionable Li Zhi

Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China

By Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, Haun Saussy

Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward gender, and perspectives...

Divine, Demonic, and Disordered

Women without Men in Song Dynasty China

By Hsiao-wen Cheng

A variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960–1279)—medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes—depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused...

The Social Life of Inkstones

Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China

By Dorothy Ko

An inkstone, a piece of polished stone no bigger than an outstretched hand, is an instrument for grinding ink, an object of art, a token of exchange between friends or sovereign states, and a surface...

Opening Kailasanatha

The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

By Padma Kaimal

Stone figures hardened by ascetic discipline and heroic effort face north in deep shadow. There they meet the gazes of the same gods and goddesses but with gentler bodies enacting grace, warmth, seduction, and marriage,...

Landmarks from a Bygone Era

Life and Work of Ed. Cuypers and Hulswit-Fermont, 1897-1927

By Obbe H. Norbruis

Eduard Cuypers (1859–1927) was one of the most celebrated architects in the Netherlands in the 1890s. Known for much of the development of the time throughout Indonesia, yet working from Amsterdam, Cuypers and his firm...

Architecture from the Indonesian Past

Life and Work of Fermont-Cuypers, 1927-1957

By Obbe H. Norbruis

In Architecture from the Indonesian Past, Obbe H. Norbruis tells the story of a celebrated Dutch architecture firm, its unique buildings, and their designers. Fermont-Cuypers designed many buildings significant in Indonesia’s history beginning in 1927...

Thai Cinema Uncensored

By Matthew Hunt

In this first full-length study on the topic, Matthew Hunt—with access to rare and controversial films—provides a history of film censorship in Thailand. Hunt outlines its beginnings in the country, when films were censored by...

The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance

By Bertil Lintner

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) is a nonstate armed group that administers an autonomous zone in the difficult-to-reach Wa Hills of eastern Myanmar. As China expands its geopolitical interests across Asia through the Belt...

Birds' Nests: Business and Ethnicity in Southeast Asia

An Anthropological Study of Business

By Kasem Jandam

Southeast Asia is renowned for birds’ nests and the bird’s nest trade. A bird’s nest is often referred to as “White Gold” or “the Caviar of the East.” In Birds’ Nests: Business and Ethnicity in...

Mountains of Blame

Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands

By Will Smith. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and...

Exile from the Grasslands

Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects

By Jarmila Ptáčková

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and...

The Power of the Brush

Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

By Hwisang Cho

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295747828

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an “epistolary revolution” in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men...

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...

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...

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...

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...