Photography

Badlands of Xinjiang

Patrick Wack

A photo essay from China’s far west – Patrick Wack

In Chinese, Xinjiang means “new territory.” Chinese officials have been stationed there for millennia, and the region was ruled by the Qing dynasty since the 18th century, before becoming a province of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, but it has always held a different identity on the fringe of China, populated by Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. There’s even a special word, túntián (屯田), for the Han Chinese strategy of making Xinjiang “Chinese” by encouraging Chinese people to live there. It takes a unique person to find desert landscapes beautiful, and not to be overwhelmed by their loneliness.

Chinese Corner

Strokes of Genius

Alec Ash

When Chinese characters get complicated

There's a new noodle joint on my street, and this is the sign on the window. Biángbiáng miàn is a type of flat noodle from Shaanxi province, supposedly named after the slapping biang! sound that the uncooked noodle makes when hit against the kitchen table-top to stretch it out (or the lip-smacking sound of eating them, depending on who you ask). It’s one of my favourite street dishes in China, and I’ve had a few chance encounters in this particular Beijing eatery. But the noodle is more famous for how it is written than how it tastes

Reviews

Contemporary Dragon Ladies

Gina Anne Tam

China historian Gina Tam on Women and Power by Mary Beard

The first woman to ever have been told to “shut up,” according to Mary Beard’s sharp manifesto Women and Power, was Odysseus’s wife Penelope. Upon recognizing that her son Telemachus was entertaining a group of unwelcome visitors, she intervenes, only to be told to return to her proper place. “Mother,” he tells her, “go back up into your quarters and take up your own work… speech will be the business of men.” For Beard, this is the beginning of an uncomfortable, long history of telling women to hold their tongues and take their place outside the inner circles of power – from Telemachus to the male CEOs of today’s board rooms, from the Amazonians to Theresa May, “notions of power that exclude women,” have been strikingly durable across space and time.

Dispatches

Ghosts of the Eastern Capital

Dylan Levi King

Trawling Chinese Bookstores in Tokyo – Dylan Levi King

The accounts of the life of an overseas Chinese student in Tokyo almost universally mention bookstores. But if you go to looking for traces of these early exiles, you will be disappointed. The Ginza cafes that Tian Han and Yu Dafu met in to drink wine and talk Ibsen and Hamlet disappeared not long after the Chinese students left. The theaters and bookstores that brought the Chinese students to Kanda are gone. The blooming banks of the Sumida River that Yu Mantuo wrote about in his poetry have been poured over with concrete. Not much is left standing in Tokyo that dates to before the Showa period (1926–1989) and most of the city was turned to rubble in the Second World War and then rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. But one place worth visiting, if you’re making a pilgrimage, is the cluster of bookstores in Jinbocho in Kanda.