William Nelson Lovatt in Late Qing China looks at the Imperial Maritime Customs Service and the final decades of the last Chinese dynasty through the lens of a British-American who served as a Tidesurveyor at nearly a dozen treaty ports.  Rather than focusing on Inspector-General Sir Robert Hart with a top-down approach, Lovatt's perspective is from the bottom-up,…

Chinese woodblock prints were once made in their millions, but now the art is dying out. Using about 40 prints from his collection, David Leffman presents some of the different types: bright and cheerful new year prints, fierce door guardians and talismans, “paper horse” deity prints, and action-packed nineteenth-century propaganda. The talk investigates the hidden…

The title of the book is Maymyo Days, but it is really the sub title, Forgotten Lives of a Burma Hill Station which best describes what the book is really all about – I have written about some, as is the case with most of us ordinary, ‘normal’ people, who lived in the Shan Hills,…

        Coming from two people who've resided in China for more than two decades each, this easily could sound like a survival guide for  living and working in Beijing.  However, the key to why a society such as RASBJ has been able to survive -- and thrive -- in the challenging environment…