From Bond Maid to Pioneering Chinese Businesswoman
Raised as a servant girl, Lai Ngan grew up to become a cigar maker, own a boarding house, and run grocery stores in the American Southwest.
The I Ching in America
Europeans translated the Chinese Book of Changes in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
Mao Zedong: Reader, Librarian, Revolutionary?
Before becoming leader of communist China, Mao was an ardent library patron and then worked as a library assistant.
China’s Historic Preservation Challenges
Beijing’s hutongs are disappearing quickly. Is there a way create safe housing, preserve historic buildings, and meet the city's financial needs?
Lost in Translation: Ezra Pound’s Imagism and the Angel Island Poets
As Pound was making a splash with “translations” of Chinese poetry, immigrants from China were etching poems of despair into the walls of a detention facility.
Jade Snow Wong’s Cold War World Tour
In 1953, the US Department of State sent ceramicist and author Constance Wong—known professionally as Jade Snow Wong—on a four-month goodwill tour of Asia.
Opium’s History in China
Opium has been used as a medicinal and recreational substance in China for centuries, its shifting meanings tied to class and national identity.
The Allure of Chinese Medicine
Capitalizing on stereotypes earned Chinese-American practitioners patients, but it also helped keep them confined to the margins of American society.
Keeping Time with Incense Clocks
As chronicled by Chinese poet Yu Jianwu, the use of fire and smoke for time measurement dates back to at least the sixth century CE.
Yaks in Tibet
As China tried to expand into Tibet in the late 1930s, it looked to the yak as a way to "modernize" Tibetan culture.