Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. One of the very unexpected features of backpacking around China in the late eighties and early nineties was how frequent I would end up booking a passage on an ocean liner. Just these words alone feel [...]
Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1989, just weeks before the Chinese government breakdown on the Democracy movement, I bought passage on a Yangtze river boat from Shanghai to Chongqing – a distance of more than a thousand miles. For the [...]
Like many other authors I’m constantly thinking of new ways to promote my book – and one thing that I haven’t tried yet is to give it away! Shanghai Gold is of course still available at Amazon (including a Kindle Edition), Barnes & Noble and your local bookstores – and I very much would like [...]
Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. I’d been trying to go to Hangzhou not too far from Shanghai for several years, but had always been deflected by inconvenient bus or train connections. In the summer of 1993 I finally managed to make [...]
This will be a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. Here’s a first installment…. In the early nineties it was still very common in China to see steam engines pulling freight trains. I vividly remember the first time I saw these huge, smoke-black trains lumbering [...]
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese [...]
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989. Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships. There were the banners, held high. [...]
15 years ago in a very different world. Millions of people in China were demonstrating for a free society, for an end to corruption and for some semblance of a democratic process. It was one of these moments in time that is hard to describe, when everything seemed possible and everybody you see seems to [...]
While re-googling some of the search words that bring visitors to this site, I noticed that many people are looking for images of Buddhist art in Asian countries. Here is a small collection of Buddhist Art Of China, which is part of the Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art. I’ve visited both the Longmen [...]
I’ve noticed that many people come to my site in search of information about Chinese History. I’ve had a small table of Chinese History as supplemental data in the China Room section of this site since 1996, and this long-term exposure to search engines is definitely driving up my site traffic. Since there seems to [...]