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Games and Play in Chinese and Sinophone Cultures

By Li Guo, Douglas Eyman, Hongmei Sun

From ancient gameboards to Honor of Kings, games as cultural agents

Games as global and connected phenomena have been examined in the rising scholarly field of game studies, but relatively little has been published on the...

The Ghost in the City

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

By Michele Matteini

A visual and social exploration of early modern Beijing's cultural milieu

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...

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 Objectionable Li Zhi

Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China

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

Astute inquiries into the world of China’s most unconventional early modern intellectual

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...

Chinese Characters across Asia

How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese

By Zev Handel

A fascinating story of writing across cultures and time

While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over...

India's Mithila Painting

By David L. Szanton, Paula Richman

A woman's art form transforms from home to high art

Since at least the fifteenth century, Hindu women in the Mithila region of northern India have been painting images of deities, flora and fauna symbolizing fertility...