On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor. Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s–1998 (Harvard University Press, 2022) by John D. Wong and published by Harvard University Press. Hong Kong’s growth as a hub for commercial aviation was often unplanned, often the result of compromise–and yet wildly successful. The city was able to carve a niche for itself, in both the declining British empire and the wider world, while also having to deal with colonial bureaucracy, geopolitics, fierce competition and an entirely new Communist government across the border. In this interview, John and I talk about Hong Kong’s history with aviation, from its very start with flying boats and puddlejumpers right through to the jumbo jet era. John D. Wong is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. He is also the author of Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hong Kong Takes Flight. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers That event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long March (Overlook Press, 2022), about one couple who faced a similar decision–whether to leave their child behind–and that decision’s repercussions decades later. In this interview, Michael and I talk about the Long March, what makes it a great setting for a novel, and how its story aligns with many other family stories from modern China. Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi province. His short story collection, Further News of Defeat (Autumn House Press: 2020), won the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and was a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Michael’s work has appeared in the New England Review, Greensboro Review, Day One, and Juked, among others. He is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Arkansas Tech University and lives in Russellville, Arkansas. He can be followed on Twitter at @MichaelXWang3. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Lost in the Long March. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai’s newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil’s book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today’s Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Sassoons were one of the great merchant families of the nineteenth century, alongside such names as the Jardines, the Mathesons, and the Swires. They dominated the India-China opium trade through the David Sassoon and E.D. Sassoon companies. They became Indian tycoons, English aristocracy, Hong Kong board directors, and Shanghai real estate moguls. Yet unlike the Kadoories and Swires, the Sassoon companies no longer exist today. Professor Joseph Sassoon in his latest book The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (Pantheon, 2022) helps to answer that question, from the Sassoons’ start fleeing Baghdad for Bombay, through to Victor Sassoon’s investments in the Shanghai before the Second World War. In this interview, Joseph and I talk about the Sassoon family: from David, the patriarch of the family, through to Victor Sassoon, Shanghai real estate mogul. And we also think about the Sassoons as a business: how did this great, global family trading house decline–and are there lessons for the businesses of today? Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Trustee of the Bodleian Library. His previous books include the prize-winning Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press: 2012), The Iraqi Refugees: The New Crisis in the Middle East (I. B. Taurus, 2010), and Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (Cambridge University Press: 2016). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Sassoons. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

“History has not been kind to Himalaya,” writes historian and travel writer John Keay in his latest book Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). The region, nestled between India, China and Central Asia, has long been subject to political and imperial intrigue–and at times violent invasion. But the region also provided a wealth of scientific information, like geographers puzzling over how these tall peaks were thrust upwards by plate tectonics. And, of course, it’s the home to a Tibetan culture and people that has been present for centuries That’s all from Keay’s latest book, which collects years of detail on history, geography, and culture, in one volume. John Keay has been writing about Himalaya and traveling there since the 1960s. He wrote the two-volume Explorers of the Western Himalayas (John Murray: 1977, 1979) and wrote and presented a major BBC R3 documentary series on the Himalayan kingdom; other works include India: A History (Grove Press: 2000) and China: A History (HarperCollins: 2008). In this interview, John and I talk about just a few details from his book: the Younghusband Expedition, plate tectonics, and local legends like the “Ogress of the Rocks” You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Himalaya. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard. That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press: 2022), which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s waters, from the South China Sea through the Persian Gulf. Eric weaves together historical research and on-the-ground fieldwork to show how Asia’s oceans can be a better way to understand the region than its land borders. In this interview, Eric and I talk about these Asian waters, stretching from the Middle East to East Asia, and the history and fieldwork that went into Eric’s book. Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. His many books include Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Yale University Press: 2009) and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press: 2013). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of In Asian Waters. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Stay True (Doubleday: 2022), the new memoir from Hua Hsu, is a coming-of-age story about the writer’s time in the University of California in Berkeley, where he tries to become a writer–and becomes a bit of a music snob. He builds a close friendship with another Asian-American student, Ken, very different from Hua, about which he writes in the book: "All the previous times I had met poised, content people like Ken, they were white. It’s one of those obscure parts of an already obscure identity that Japanese American kids can seem like aliens to other Asians, untroubled, largely oblivious to feeling like outsiders." But Ken is killed in a robbery gone wrong, forcing Hua to grapple with the death of his friend. In this interview, Hua and I talk about his story in Stay True, including his unbelievably non-stereotypical parents, his dive into college music, and his attempt with Ken to put together an homage for the Berry Gordy-produced martial arts film, the Last Dragon. Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of Literature at Bard College. Hua serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He is also the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific (Harvard University Press: 2016) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Stay True. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

How does a pilot see the cities of the world? Unlike residents, who live there full-time, or tourists, who travel once and perhaps never again, pilots are brief, but regular visitors to the hubs of the world. In Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World (Chatto & Windus / Knopf: 2022), Mark Vanhoenacker helps to give us an answer. In his book, Mark charts his flights all over the world, to cities like Hong Kong, Jeddah, Rio, Cape Town, Sapporo, Delhi, and many more. But the book also regularly returns to his home town: Pittsfield, Mass., near the state border with New York. In this interview, Mark and I talk about his travels around the world, from the (relatively) small town of Pittsfield to the snowy streets of Sapporo. Mark Vanhoenacker is a commercial airline pilot and writer. The author of the international best seller Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Knopf: 2015) and How to Land a Plane (The Experiment: 2019), he is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for the Financial Times. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked in business before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. He now flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London to cities around the world. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Imagine a City. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In the strategy game Civilization VI, where players choose world leaders to be their avatar, Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, has one goal in mind: building wonders (like the Great Wall of China). His workers can build wonders faster and more cheaply, and he hates leaders that build more wonders than he does. That largely corresponds to how people in the West think of the First Emperor: powerful, responsible for unifying China, despotic–and focused on building great works like the Great Wall and the Terracotta. Civilization VI isn’t one of the many works detailed in Anthony Barbieri’s most recent book, The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China (University of Washington Press: 2022). But it does explore the many ways the life of Qin Shihuang has been represented in books, historical works, mythology, political narratives, movies, tv shows and, yes, video games. We welcome Anthony back to the show to talk about the First Emperor, and how different writers, politicians, and producers portrayed the different aspects of his life. Anthony J. Barbieri-Low is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara. His book Artisans in Early Imperial China won top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and International Convention of Asia Scholars. He is also the author of Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021), which was also the subject of an Asian Review of Books interview last year. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Two neighbors from the same village fall in love and elope to a shelter for couples that break caste norms. A Hindu woman falls in love with a Muslim man, drawing the ire of Hindu nationalists. Two women start a lesbian relationship. These three couples are the protagonists of Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India (Atria Book, 2022). This work charts the lives of Dawinder and Neetu, Monika and Arif, Reshma and Preethi, who all break social norms in their relationships, and are forced to endure the sometimes-violent consequences—not always successfully. In this interview, Mansi and I talk about the three couples in her book—and what their struggles tell us about love, relationships and social pressure in today’s India. Mansi Choksi is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and two-time Livingston Award Finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and more. She lives in Dubai with her husband and son. The Newlyweds is her first book. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Newlyweds. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict. In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress. Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost as well as a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press: 2018). You can follow Scott on Twitter at @water_futures. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China’s Next Act. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Most Hong Kong residents nowadays only have to worry about a wandering boar or an aggressive monkey in their day-to-day lives. But for much of its history, those living in the British colony were worried about a very different form of wildlife: the South China tiger. Not that their British overlords always believed them, as John Saeki notes in his book The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats that Stalked Britain's Chinese Colony (Blacksmith Books: 2022). Police officers, civil servants and journalists often dismissed sightings as a case of mistaken identity by confused locals—until authorities saw tigers with their own eyes, in which case it became a much more serious problem. In this interview, John and I talk about the tiger, and its many sightings—rumored and confirmed—in the now-lost rural communities of Hong Kong. John Saeki runs the graphics desk in the Hong Kong office of the international newswire Agence France-Presse. He spends his working days writing, designing and editing maps, charts and information graphics on world news. He is also the author of the novel The Tiger Hunters of Tai O (Blacksmith Books: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Most people tend to mark the beginning of Indian international relations thought to Nehru, and his self-proclaimed attempt to build a true non-aligned movement and more enlightened international system. But Indian thought didn’t emerge sui generis after Indian independence, as Rahul Sagar notes in his edited anthology, To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (Juggernaut / Columbia University Press: 2022). Rahul collects writings from Indian thinkers on a variety of topics: the threat posed by Russia, the value of free trade, discrimination faced by Indians at home and overseas, showing the diversity of views present in Indian political debate long before 1945. In this interview, Rahul and I talk about these collected writings, and what they tell us about India then and, perhaps India today. Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. His other books include Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton University Press: 2013) and The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government (Oxford University Press: 2022). He can be followed on Twitter at @rahulsagar. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of To Raise A Fallen People. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

A young sake bar owner, Yusuke Shimoki, arrives on the doorstep of Hannah Kirshner’s Brooklyn apartment “with a suitcase full of Ishikawa sake,” in Hannah’s words. That visit sparked a years-long connection between Hannah and the rural Japanese community of Yamanaka, a home for artisans and artists, hunters and farmers, and other ordinary Japanese trying to live in the countryside. Those visits are the subject of Hannah’s book, Water Wood and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town, published in hardcover by Viking in 2021, and in paperback by Penguin this year. Hannah learns how to make sake, craft wooden trays, hunt ducks, farm vegetables, and several other activities common in this part of rural Japan. And, as an added bonus, readers get to see recipes garnered from Hannah’s time in Yamanaka! In this interview, Hannah and I talk about rural Japan, duck hunting, drinking sake and growing vegetables, as well as some of her favorite recipes in the book! Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Vogue, Saveur, Taste, Food 52, Atlas Obscura, and Food & Wine, among others. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kirshner grew up on a small farm outside Seattle and divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Japan. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Water, Wood and Wild Things. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

On June 16 2020, Indian and Chinese forces clashed high in the Himalayan mountains in Aksai Chin. Beijing and New Delhi both claim control over this remote region in a territorial dispute dating back decades. Sources differ on how many soldiers died in the skirmish, fought with fists and clubs rather than guns, with the potential dead ranging into the dozens. Looking back two years later, Galwan marked a clear turning point in relations between the two Asian countries, with India now taking a much harsher line towards China, joining the U.S., Australia and Japan in the so-called Quad Alliance, banning Chinese-affiliated apps like Alibaba and TikTok. Why has the border between China and India been disputed for so long? And what made the bloody clash at Galwan a watershed for New Delhi? Manoj Joshi in Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya (Hurst: 2022) explains where this dispute came from, how it sometimes sparked war, and the many failed attempts to find a negotiated solution. Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. He has been a journalist specializing on national and international politics and is a commentator and columnist on these issues. As a reporter, he has written extensively on issues relating to Siachen, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka and terrorism in Kashmir and Punjab. Today, Manoj and I talk about the border dispute, where it came from, and why both countries have been unable to reach a negotiated solution. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Understanding the India-China Border. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill purportedly meant to revive U.S. dominance in research and development. “We used to rank number one in the world in research and development; now we rank number nine,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “China was number eight decades ago; now they are number two.” And a recent study from Japan’s science ministry reported that China now leads the world not just in quantity of scientific research, but in quality too. The success of the U.S.--and perhaps China, into the future–is due to the “research university”, an academic institution that offers professors the freedom to study and research, and students the freedom to learn, leading to high-quality academic output. Those universities are the subject of Professor William Kirby’s Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press, 2022). In this interview, Professor Kirby and I talk about the research university: Humboldt, Harvard, Berkeley, Tsinghua, Nanjing, and the University of Hong Kong. We also discuss what it means for China, and Chinese institutions, to play a bigger role in world academia. How might that change things? William C. Kirby is Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration and T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University, as well as Chair of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. His many books include Can China Lead? Reaching the Limits of Power and Growth (Harvard Business Review Press: 2014) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empires of Ideas. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Jerusalem’s Old City is normally understood to be split into four quarters: the Jewish Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter. Those designations can be found on maps, on guidebooks, on news articles, and countless other pieces of writing about the city. But as Matthew Teller points out in his latest book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City (Profile Books / Other Press, 2022): the idea of the “four quarters” is entirely a nineteenth century creation, invented by a couple of British mapmakers. Instead, Teller explores Jerusalem and all its myriad peoples–not just the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the Africans, Syrians, and other peoples that call the holy city their home. In this interview, Matthew and I talk about how we should actually think about Jerusalem, and all the different people that make the city what it is today. Matthew Teller writes for the BBC, The Guardian, Times of London, Financial Times, and other global media. He has produced and presented documentaries for BBC Radio and has reported for the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent program from around the Middle East and beyond. He is the author of several travel guides, including the Rough Guide to Jordan (Rough Guides: 2012). He is also the author of Quite Alone: Journalism from the Middle East 2008–2019. He can be followed on Twitter at @matthewteller. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Fine Chao, a Chinese restaurant in the town of Haven, is known for its food and its boisterous owner, Big Leo Chao. Leo is loud, assertive and aggressive, sexually explicit in a way unmatched in his three sons, Dagou, Ming and James, who all take after–and despise–their father in differing ways. The Chao family are the protagonists of Lan Samantha Chang’s newest novel, appropriately titled The Family Chao (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022). What starts as a family drama turns into a crime novel, with references to the struggles and challenges faced by the Chinese-American community–and with echoes to other classic works of literature. In this interview, Samantha and I talk about The Family Chao, its focus on the Chinese-American population, and how it uses classic ideas to explore that community’s place in the United States. Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Family Chao. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Money does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press: 2022) In Madagascar, loggers, flush with cash from the rosewood trade, don’t quite know how to react to their newfound largesse, sometimes demanding less money for their wares out of confusion. Rumors abound of how loggers make their money. There’s no way that simple wood could garner so much profit, people say, so observers think they must be trading something else–like human bones. Annah’s book studies globalization, the rise of China, and global environmental politics through trade in one commodity: Madagascar rosewood, used in furniture. In this interview, Annah and I talk about this important material–the commodity, the cultural product, and the conservation target–in China and Madagascar. Annah Lake Zhu is Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, a veteran of the United Nations Environment Programme in Geneva, and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar. Her work has been published in Science, Geoforum, and Political Geography. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Rosewood. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It’s the sixteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire has just defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, conquering Damascus and Cairo, important centers of Arab learning and culture. But how did these two groups–Arabs and “Rumis”, a term used to refer to those living in Anatolia, interact? How did Arabs deal with these powerful upstarts–and how did Rumis try to work with their learned, yet defeated, subjects? Dr. Helen Pfeifer studies one venue where Arabs and Rumis in the Ottoman Empire interacted, learned from each other, and jockeyed for status: the salon. Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands (Princeton University Press: 2022) looks at how gatherings of “gentlemen” helped to build Ottoman culture. In this interview, Helen and I talk about the Ottoman Empire, the differences between the Arab and Rumi communities, and what exactly people did in the salon. Dr. Helen Pfeifer is the inaugural university lecturer in early Ottoman history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Christ’s College. She has an interest in understanding the empire within larger Islamic, European, and global contexts. Her research focuses on issues of empire, cultural exchange, and Islamic devotional practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She can be followed on Twitter at @krel7. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empire of Salons. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

If there’s a country that “punches above its weight”, it’s South Korea. It’s home to some of the world’s largest and most important companies, and the source of pop culture that dominates Asia—and even planted a foothold in the West. But the country’s growth would have been astounding to those at the end of the Korean War. The Republic of Korea was poor, devastated by war, and stuck deep in Cold War politics. Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop (Hurst, 2022) by Ramon Pacheco Pardo tells the story of Korea over the past sixty years, charting the country’s path through dictatorship and democracy to the economic and cultural powerhouse it is today. In this interview, Ramon and I talk about Korea–what it was like after the war, how it became a mature democracy–and what makes the book’s title, Shrimp to Whale, especially apt. Ramon Pacheco Pardo is Professor of International Relations at King’s College London, and KF-VUB Korea Chair at the Brussels School of Governance. He is also a non-resident adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic Studies Korea Chair, and a non-resident fellow at the Sejong Institute. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Today, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively. But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Mountaineers claimed that the Himalayas could not be taller than peaks in Europe or South America, like Ecuador’s Chimborazo. Even when it was proven that the Himalayas were taller, mountaineers would praised the aesthetic quality of European and South American peaks—essentially giving the nineteenth-century equivalent of “height isn’t everything” That’s merely one of the historical details from Lachlan Fleetwood’s Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which studies the first attempts to survey this mountain range. Fleetwood’s book examines not just the expeditions themselves, but also how surveyors procured their equipment, how they handled altitude sickness, and the fossils they found (among other details), in order to analyze the connection between knowledge, the frontier, and empire. Lachlan Fleetwood is a historian of science, empire, geography and environment. He holds a PhD in history from Cambridge University, and is currently a research fellow at University College Dublin. He is currently developing a new project that examines climatic sciences and environmental determinism in imperial surveys of Central Asia and Mesopotamia in the long nineteenth century. In this interview, Lachlan and I talk about the Himalayas, how the first surveyors studied them, and why these early efforts to understand this mountain range are important to how we understand the history of science. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Science on the Roof of the World. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Kushnameh is unique, literally. Only one copy of the “Epic of Kush”exists, sitting in the British Library. Hardly anything is known about its author, Iranshah. It features a quite villainous protagonist, the tusked warrior Kush, who carves a swathe of destruction across the region. And it spans nearly half the world, with episodes in Spain, the Maghreb, India, China and even Korea. It was that last reference that encouraged academics in Korea to study the Kushnameh, and bring Kaveh Hemmat to do its first-ever English translation, published by the University of California Press this year.  Kaveh L. Hemmat is assistant professor, professional faculty in History at Benedictine University, scholar of world history and Islamicate culture, director of the NEH-funded Khataynameh Translation Project, an unusually determined cyclist, and a dabbler in sundry pursuits ranging from sourdough bread baking to drawing. He completed his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2014. His research focuses on interaction between the Islamic world and East Asia and the importance of this interaction to Islamic political thought and premodern global political history. In this interview, Kaveh and I discuss this unique document and the cultural and political context behind its writing.  You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of the Kushnameh. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months after Nixon’s history-making visit.  There was drama immediately after they landed in Shanghai. Chinese officials asked for a last-minute change to the program: Beethoven’s Sixth. After protests that the Orchestra didn’t bring scores with them, officials returned with copies haphazardly sourced from across the country, with different notations and different notes, forcing the orchestra to make do.  That’s just one of the stories recounted in Jennifer Lin’s book, Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China (Temple University Press: 2022). The book stems from the work Lin did in putting together a documentary film on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s trip; with so much left on the cutting room floor, she decided to turn it into an oral history.  Jennifer Lin is an award-winning journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. She produced and codirected the feature-length documentary, Beethoven in Beijing, which premiered on PBS’s Great Performances in 2021. For 31 years, she worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter, including posts as a foreign correspondent in China, a financial correspondent on Wall Street, and a national correspondent in Washington, DC. She is the author of Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 2017), and coauthor of Sole Sisters: Stories of Women and Running (Andrews McMeel Publishing: 2006). Her current documentary project is Beyond Yellowface about two New York City dancers trying to rid ballet of offensive Asian stereotypes. In this interview, Jennifer and I talk about the opening of China, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and how that 1973 visit still resonates today.   You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beethoven in Beijing. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon stepped off a plane in Beijing: a visit that changed the course of China, the U.S., the Cold war and the world. The stories in Gish Jen’s newest story collection, Thank You Mr. Nixon: Stories (Knopf: 2022), covers stories spanning the fifty-year relationship since then, from a Chinese woman press-ganged into translating for her Western tour group, to an English professor struggling to teach the wealthy Chinese students at his university. Gish Jen is the author of one previous book of stories, five novels, and two works of nonfiction. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University. She and her husband split their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Vermont. In this interview, Gish and I talk about why she wrote this story collection, covering fifty years of encounters and connections between Chinese, Americans, and Chinedse-Americans. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Thank You Mr. Nixon. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

King Rao–one of the protagonists from Vauhini Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton & Company: 2022)—is like many of the tech founders we idolize today. King comes from humble beginnings—born into a Dalit family in a coconut grove in India–moves to the U.S., and launches a company that ends up dominating the world. But Vauhini’s novel is also the story of King’s daughter Athena, living in the world created by her father’s company: a world of social credit, “hothouse earth” and “Shareholder Government”. The Immortal King Rao presents a techno-dystopia that may be recognizable for us today. But it’s more than just a warning about the future–Vauhini’s novel weaves together scenes from the past and the near future to tell a story about caste in India and the growth of our modern-day tech sector. Vauhini Vara has worked as an editor at the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and as a journalist for those publications and others, including the Wall Street Journal, where she began her career. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Tin House and McSweeney's and has been honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her essay about grieving her sister's death, “Ghosts”—published in The Believer and adapted by This American Life—will be anthologized in The Best American Essays 2022. She is the secretary for Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color, and a mentor for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. In this interview, Vauhini and I talk about The Immortal King Rao, how the experience of her family’s Dalit heritage motivated her to write the book, and what companies, perhaps, inspired the techno-dystopia seen in her novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Immortal King Rao. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It can be hard to think of Everest as unknown anymore. While it’s certainly a challenge to climb the world’s tallest mountain, someone–with enough time and money–has a good chance of making it to the summit. A potential mountaineer can fly into Kathmandu, travel to a well-stocked base camp, be escorted up a well-trodden route by expert sherpas. There’s even Wifi at the peak. The relative ease of climbing Everest is born from almost a century of attempted expeditions up the mountain, to determine how high one could go, and what routes to take. Even the successful expedition of Norgay and Hillary was built on the efforts of those who came before. And the first expeditions, in 1921 and 1922, are the subject of Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain (Pegasus Books, 2022). Mick tells the story of these very first attempts to climb the mountain–including the difficulties of funding, recruitment, and travel, as well as the climb itself. In this interview, Mick and I talk about the two expeditions to Everest–including its most famous participant, George Mallory–the scientific and mountaineering controversies around it, and what makes climbing Everest different today. Mick Conefrey is an award-winning writer and documentary film maker. He created the landmark BBC series The Race for Everest to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include The Adventurer's Handbook: Life Lessons from History's Great Explorers (Smithsonian: 2006); Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent (Mountaineers Books: 2014), the winner of a Leggimontagna Award; and Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain (Oneworld Publications: 2015), which won a U.S. National Outdoor Book Award. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Everest 1922. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

On February 1st, 1936, Begum Hasrat Mohani, famed Indian writer and independence activist, sends the first of several letters to her daughter. She’s traveling on the Hajj, passing through Iran and Iraq on her way to Mecca. Along the way, she writes to her daughter, noting the sights and sounds she experiences on her pilgrimage–and give us a glimpse into a different kind of travel writing, from a different kind of travel writer. Those letters are the subject of Daniel Majchrowicz’s chapter in Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing (Ilex Foundation: 2022), edited by James Uden. The book covers travel writing by women, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as they travel through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Both James and Daniel join us today to talk about their book, and their respective chapters. In this interview, we talk about what makes these examples of travel writing so interesting, and what the genre of travel writing means today after two years of travel restrictions. James Uden is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University.researches and writes about Latin literature and the transformation of ancient ideas in later eras, especially the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has published essays on a broad range of topics, including Catullus, Virgil, love elegy, travel literature, and ancient fable. His first book, The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford University Press: 2014), offers a new interpretation of the poems of Juvenal, showing how these texts responded to changing conceptions of Roman identity and contemporary trends in Greek rhetoric and philosophy. His second book, Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740-1830 (Oxford University Press: 2020) explores the work of British and American novelists of the eighteenth century. Daniel Majchrowicz is Assistant Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture at Northwestern University. His research considers the history and culture of Muslims and Islam in South Asia with an emphasis on Urdu literature, travel writing, popular culture, and language politics. He is a translator from Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian, and currently the director of the South Asia Research Forum. Daniel is also an editor of the forthcoming Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press: 2022) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The history of India and Pakistan since Partition has been marked by countless skirmishes–and four major wars. The second conflict–the 1965 war between India and Pakistan along the long land border–featured some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War and some of the first skirmishes between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. It reshaped regional and global geopolitics, pushing India closer to the Soviet Union and Pakistan closer to China. But the war didn’t arise from nowhere, as Shiv Kunal Verma notes in his newest history 1965: A Western Sunrise (Aleph Book Company: 2021) The book notes the timeline leading up to the war, including the 1962 war with China and the skirmish in the Rann of Kutch months before Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir. Nor did it end with a great deal of finality, with months of conflict following a ceasefire—and instability that again erupted in war in 1971. Shiv Kunal Verma is a military historian and filmmaker, working with all three branches of the Indian armed forces. ces. He helped to write The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why (Rupa & Co.: 2010) and Courage & Conviction (Aleph Book Company: 2013), the autobiography of General VK Singh. His latest book, 1962: The War That Wasn’t (Aleph Book Company: 2016) has been hailed as one of the most definitive works on the Indo-China conflict. In this interview, Kunal and I talk about the 1965 India-Pakistan War–how the 1962 war with China helped to set the stage for the 1965 war, the breadth of the conflict along the India-Pakistan border, and how the ‘65 war has repercussions that can still be seen today. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of 1965: A Western Sunrise. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Myanmar—or Burma, if that’s the name you prefer—is one of a small set of countries: nations that, despite natural bounty and a vibrant population, remain underdeveloped due to conflict, economic mismanagement and international isolation. Yet Myanmar has a habit of enchanting those who have the opportunity to visit the country. One such person was Erin Murphy, author of Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar’s Opening—and Closing (Association for Asian Studies: 2022). Erin had a front-row seat to the major changes in U.S. policy towards Myanmar under the Obama Administration, in reaction to the country’s opening and democratic reform, a process halted by the 2021 coup. Erin Murphy has worked on Asia issues since 2001. She has spent her career in several public and private sector roles, including as an analyst on Asian political, foreign policy, and leadership issues at the Central Intelligence Agency, a director for Indo-Pacific with a development finance agency, leading her boutique advisory firm focused on Myanmar, and as an English teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program in Saga ken, Japan. Erin can be followed on Twitter. In this interview, Erin and I talk about Myanmar, what drove its brief reopening, how U.S. policy towards the country changed—and whether Myanmar’s experience is valuable to us today, at a time when sanctions are back in the news. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Burmese Haze. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Europeans have been writing about China for centuries–ever since The Travels of Marco Polo described it as a faraway and mystical kingdom. European thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu used China to support their own theories of political philosophy, then writers in early modernity tried to explain why China was falling behind–and then, with the rise of Maoist China, how it represented true revolutionary potential. China Through European Eyes: 800 Years Of Cultural And Intellectual Encounter (World Scientific, 2022), edited by Professor Kerry Brown and Gemma Chenger Deng collects an assortment of these observations written over several centuries, from illustrious writers like Matteo Ricci, Voltaire, Leibniz, Weber, Marx, and Beauvoir. In this interview, Kerry and I talk about how the way Europeans understood China changed and shifted over eight centuries–and the ways in which they parallel the way we talk about cHina today. Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is an Associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London, an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run by the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He is the author of almost 20 books on modern Chinese politics. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China Through European Eyes. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Hakkenden is a classic work of Japanese literature: the story of the eight warriors, born from Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa, has been adapted to manga, movies and anime. And its tropes continue to pop up in Japanese popular culture today. But there’s so much story in Hakkenden that Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One―An Ill-Considered Jest (Cornell University Press: 2021), a new translation by Glynne Walley, doesn’t even get to the eight warriors before it’s end! Glynne’s translation sets the scene for the emergence of the eight dog warriors, translating everything in the book–including the medicine ads the author included to help pay the bills. In this interview, Glynne and I talk about what makes Hakkenden so special, Glynne’s translation choices, and how its themes and tropes persist to the present day. Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon and author ofGood Dogs: Edification, Entertainment & Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2018), the first monograph-length study of Hakkenden, a landmark of premodern Japanese fiction. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hakkenden. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Tonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river. And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations. But the lake is currently stressed by climate change, overfishing, and hydropower damming. Abby Seiff’s Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) tells the stories of those who live along the lake’s shores, and how they try to keep their lives and livelihoods going. In this interview, Abby and I talk about Tonlé Sap, how it’s changed in recent years–and what the lake’s communities tell us about what it means to be a climate refugee. Abby Seiff is a journalist who was based in Southeast Asia for nearly a decade, working as an editor at the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post and writing for publications such as Time, the Economist, Al Jazeera, and Pacific Standard, among others. She is now a freelance correspondent. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Troubling the Water. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sailings, museum exhibitions, and a joint submission from Spain and Portugal to UNESCO. Two years later, the Philippines marked their own commemoration of Magellan’s voyage: the 500th anniversary of his death at the hands of local leader Lapu-Lapu. A master voyager in Spain and Portugal, a defeated imperialist in the Philippines–these are just two of the ways that Magellan’s image has evolved and changed over the past five centuries. But what was the man actually like? Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tries to get at who Magellan was in his latest book Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (University of California Press: 2022). Relying on first-hand accounts of Magellan’s voyage, Felipe portrays Magellan as a self-promoter, devious over-promiser, lover of chivalric literature, ruthless authoritarian and, at the end, a believer in his own hype. In this interview, Felipe and I talk about Magellan: the man, his voyage (and what it was actually supposed to do), and the legacy of his expedition. Felipe holds the William P. Reynolds Chair of Mission in Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor in the Departments of History and Classics and the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. His most recent books are Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It (University of California Press: 2019) and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of the World (Oxford University Press: 2021) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Straits. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Jean-Luc Guéry is a man down on his luck. Middling journalist, gambling addict, alcoholic. Yet when news of his brother’s murder in Saigon reach him in France, Guéry drops everything and travels to French Vietnam to investigate. Guéry is not the kind of main character you’d think would star in a detective novel like Bede Scott’s Too Far From Antibes (Penguin Random House, 2022)—something that many other characters in Bede’s novel remark on several occasions. Yet Scott drives Guéry through a murky plot of corruption and colonialism in a tense Saigon near the end of French colonialism. Bede Scott is Associate Professor of World Literature in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has been teaching in Singapore since 2006, when he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. Scott is the author of On Lightness in World Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2019). Today, Bede and I talk about his novel, the setting of colonial-era Vietnam—and how Bede’s character and plot try to deconstruct some of the standard tropes of the detective novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Too Far From Antibes. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

We often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing. Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia, spreading goods, cultures and ideas. And now, with no hegemon and an array of different states, governments, and economies, the world may look more like the Indian Ocean in the future. Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean (Hurst: 2021 / Oxford University Press: 2022), edited by Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, studies the countries in the Indian Ocean—nations as as different as Singapore, Pakistan, and Somalia—to look at how our understanding of the post-Cold War world order doesn’t quite align with this part of the world. Harry Verhoeven is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is the Convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network and a Senior Adviser at the European Institute of Peace. He is the author of Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan (Cambridge University Press: 2015) and Why Comrades Go To War (Oxford University Press: 2016) and the editor of Environmental Politics in the Middle East (Oxford University Press: 2018) Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC, and was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and King's College London. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as a British journalist in South Asia and the former Soviet Union, and is the author of several books on these regions including Pakistan: A Hard Country (PublicAffairs: 2012). His most recent book, Climate Change and the Nation State, appeared in paperback in 2021. In this interview, the three of us talk about the Indian Ocean—and how it challenges the way we think about international relations and the international system. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beyond Liberal Order. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Hong Kong is almost impossible to explain to those not from the city. Too often, the city has had to struggle with shorthand used by those writing about the city from afar—for audiences with little understanding of what the place is actually like. The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (Random House: 2022) by Karen Cheung is a deep dive into the things that make Hong Kong different, diverse and difficult. In this interview, Karen and I talk about Hong Kong—the home city for both of us—and what it means to grow up in such a dense, unsure and misunderstood place. Karen Cheung (karen-cheung.com) is a writer and journalist from Hong Kong. Her essays, cultural criticism, and reported features have appeared on This American Life and in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She was formerly a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press and was co–founding editor of Still / Loud, an indie magazine about culture and music in Hong Kong. Karen can be followed on Twitter at @karenklcheung. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Impossible City. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It can be easy to think of the recent history of India—especially for those who aren’t from there—as a straight line, from the Mughal Empire, through the British Empire, to independent India. That, of course, is hugely simplistic, missing the mess of competing polities, interests, and people that made up Indian history over the last few centuries. Manu Pillai’s False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (Juggernaut, 2021), looks at a few of these political actors: the Maharajas of India, who led the “princely states”. Not quite sovereign entities, not quite directly-ruled colonies. Pillai portrays the stories of a few of these princes and princesses through the life of famed Indian artist Ravi Varma as he travels around India in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this interview, Manu and I talk about the princely states, the Maharajas, and why Manu chose Ravi Varma to tell the stories of the Indian princes. Manu S Pillai is the author of the award-winning The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (HarperCollins India: 2015), Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (Juggernaut: 2018), and The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History (Context: 2019). He can be followed on Twitter at @UnamPillai and on Instagram at @WaatCoconut. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of False Allies. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender. Those eleven years are the subject of Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Sherzod Muminov. The book tells the story of the Japanese prisoners: how they were captured, their time in the camps, and how they tried to acclimatize to Japan after their release. Sherzod Muminov is a Lecturer in Japanese History at the University of East Anglia and winner of the inaugural Murayama Tsuneo Memorial Prize. He is a historian of transnational and international processes in East Asia and Eurasia, whose primary research deals with Japan’s makings as a modern nation from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to present day, through the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire and its remaking as a nation-state following defeat in World War II. Fellow New Books Network host Shatrunjay Mall joins us for this interview. Shatrunjay is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. The three of us talk about the experience of the Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, their life in camps, how they handled their return to Japan—and how the experience has repercussions today for Japan and its relations with Russia. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Eleven Winters of Discontent. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Tens of thousands of characters. Countless homonyms. Mutually unintelligible dialects across an entire country. This is what faced the Chinese thinkers, inventors and technicians who had to figure out how to standardize, translate, and adapt the Chinese language for a new country, and for new technologies. Professor Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022) tells the stories of those who worked to transform Chinese for the 20th century. In this interview, Jing and I talk about thinkers and technicians: those who toiled to make the Chinese language work for typewriters, telegraphs, and other important technologies. Jing Tsu is the John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. She specializes in Chinese literature, history, and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and received her doctorate in Chinese studies from Harvard. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has held fellowships and distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton institutes. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Kingdom of Characters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

On September 9th, 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites couterfactuals: was it a warning of things to come? And what might have happened in Afghanistan had the assassination failed? Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud (Haus Publishing, 2021) guides readers through the guerilla’s life—including his campaigns against the Communists, the Soviets and the Taliban—and how he became a target for Al Qaeda. The book was written by legendary journalist Sandy Gall, who traveled to Afghanistan on many occasions, meeting with Massoud several times. Carlotta Gall—who worked with her father Sandy to report and write Afghan Napoleon—joins us for this episode of the Asian Review of Books podcast. She is the Istanbul Bureau Chief for The New York Times, and a longtime reporter on Afghanistan and Pakistan. She’s also the author of The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2014). In this interview, Carlotta and I talk about Massoud–his life, his campaigns, and his work. We also talk about how Afghanistan’s story over the last two decades—including the end of the U.S. occupation—changes how we understand Massoud’s life. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Afghan Napoleon. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

London has always been a galvanizing factor for the South Asian community—whether due to the machinations of empire, the drive for higher education, or the need to make a living. South Asians make up the largest group of foreign-born individuals in London—and South Asian politicians in the U.K. cross the political divide, from Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel to Sadiq Khan. Many of India and Pakistan’s most important historical figures also passed through London: Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Bose all lived and worked in London. The head of the British Empire was the location for much of the debate and activism that drove India’s independence movement. Indians have been a part of London’s community for centuries, a point made clear in Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), by Arup K. Chatterjee. Across almost half a millennium, Chatterjee tells the stories of the South Asians that traveled to London: poor and rich, those who stayed and those who went back to change the region’s politics forever. In this interview, Arup and I talk about the four centuries worth of South Asians that traveled to London, what brought them there, and how they changed South Asia when they returned. Arup K. Chatterjee is an Associate Professor at OP Jindal Global University. He is the founding chief editor of Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures, which he has run from 2011 to 2018. He has authored The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (Bloomsbury India: 2018), and The Great Indian Railways (Bloomsbury India: 2019), as well as over seventy articles and academic papers in national and international publications. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Indians in London. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Mahabharata is one of the central works of Indian literature—its characters, lessons, and tropes are widely known and referenced in Indian popular culture, literary discussions and political debate. And like all classic works, it’s ripe for reinterpretations, deconstructions and adaptations. One such reinterpretation is Song of Draupadi (Aleph Book Company, 2021), written by Ira Mukhoty. Ira’s book puts the Mahabhrata’s female characters front and center, focusing the story around their struggles and their strengths in fighting for themselves—and the men they have to care for. Ira Mukhoty is the author of several books about India and Indian women throughout history, including Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History (Aleph Book Company: 2017), Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire (Aleph Book Company: 2018), and Akbar: The Great Mughal (Aleph Book Company: 2020). Ira can be followed on Twitter at @mukhoty, and on Instagram at @iramukhoty. We’re also joined by Mariyam Haider, researcher-writer and spoken word artist in Singapore. Today, the three of us will talk about the Mahabharata, and how Song of Draupadi reinterprets its story and central characters. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Song of Draupadi. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Bangkok, as Thailand’s largest and most economically-important cities, attracts migrants from all over the country. Drawn to its economic opportunities, migrants eke a living working in informal jobs, with few protections–yet they build a community among their fellow migrants and workers. The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press: 2021), written by Claudio Sopranzetti, illustrated by Sara Fabbri and translated from its original Italian by Chiara Natalucci, tells the story of one such migrant: Nok, who lives through economic upheaval, protest movements and military crackdowns, in a story based on years of research. Claudio Sopranzetti is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Central European University. He is the author of Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press: 2017), winner of the 2019 Margaret Mead Award. Sara Fabbri is an illustrator and editorial designer, currently working as Art Director for Linus, an Italian comics magazine. Claudio and Sara join us to talk about The King of Bangkok, where they cover Nok’s story, and what it tells us about Thailand, Bangkok, and the country’s urban-rural divide. They also talk about the process of making the book itself: a graphic novel, based on a decade of anthropological research. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The King of Bangkok. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books, 2021) by Professor Marc David Baer charts the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, not just dealing with its sultans and military expansion, but also a wide range of topics like the roles played by women and minorities in Ottoman society. In this interview, Marc and I talk about the Ottoman empire’s rise and “fall”—a term that may actually mischaracterize how the Ottoman Empire transformed after its heights under Selim and Suleiman. We also talk about its legacy, both for Europe and the wider world. Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of five books, including Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press: 2011), which won the Albert Hourani Prize, and Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Indiana Univeristy Press: 2020), which won the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Ottomans. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Thirties and Forties were some of the first instances of aerial bombardment of civilian populations—and an indication of their destructive power. We often point to the Nazi bombing in Guernica, Spain in 1937—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—as the first instance of what happens when “the bomber gets through”, to paraphrase then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. But just a few months later, across a continent, the world got a glimpse of what bombardment would look like in one of the world’s most built-up and international cities of the time: Shanghai, and “Bloody Saturday”: August 14th, 1937. Paul French’s Bloody Saturday: Shanghai's Darkest Day (Penguin Australia: 2018), recently republished by Penguin’s Southeast Asia arm, is a short telling of what happened on that fateful day. In this interview, Paul and I talk about what happened in Shanghai on August 14th, and what it tells us about the nature of the city, the foreigners that lived there, and how the rest of the Sino-Japanese War developed. Paul French was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (Penguin Group USA: 2012) was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. Both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai (Picador USA: 2018) are currently being developed for television. More can be found on Paul French’s blog China Rhyming. In our interview, we also mention another one of Paul’s works: Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong University Press: 2009) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bloody Saturday. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

It’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper, 2021), which traces the path of the Amur from its origins in Mongolia to its end-point in the Pacific Ocean. We also discuss what means to be a travel writer in today’s world—which has undergone a recent and rapid expansion, and even more recent and rapid collapse, of travel. Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first books were about the Middle Eas—Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. But later he was drawn to the lands which he says his generation was brought up to fear: the Soviet Union and Communist China. In 1982 he traveled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey described in Among the Russians (Ulverscroft: 1989). From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind The Wall: A Journey Through China (Random House: 1987), The Lost Heart of Asia (Random House: 1994), In Siberia (Penguin: 2000), Shadow of the Silk Road (Chatto & Windus: 2006) and To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto & Windus: 2011). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Amur River. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In Hong Kong’s Ice House Street, in the heart of the city’s Financial District, is Club Lusitano: one of the city’s premier social clubs, nestled at the top of an office tower. But the club’s roots stretch back over 150 years, when it was originally set up to serve the colony’s burgeoning Portuguese community–including many who hopped over the Pearl River Delta from the Portuguese colony of Macau. It can be hard to remember among the glistening casino lights of modern-day Macau, but the colony used to and still does host a sizable “Macanese” community: people of Portuguese or Portuguese-Chinese heritage. As Macau turned into a sleepy, somewhat rigid community in the nineteenth century, several Macanese made the jump to look for a better life elsewhere–including in Macau’s larger, British-run cousin, Hong Kong. Catherine Chan’s The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting (Amsterdam University Press: 2021) looks at the Macanese community in Hong Kong, and how they settled into life in the British colony. More of Chan’s articles on the subject can be found in the following academic articles: ‘Diverse Cosmopolitan Visions and Intellectual Passions: Macanese Publics in British Hong Kong,’ Modern Asian Studies 56, no. 1 (2022), 350-377. ‘Macau Martyr or Portuguese Traitor? The Macanese communities of Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai and the Portuguese Nation,’ Historical Research 93, no. 262 (2020), 754-768. ‘From Macanese Opium Traders to British Aristocrats: The Trans-imperial Migration of the Pereiras,’ Journal of Migration History 6, no. 2 (2020), 236-261. Historian Catherine Chan received her PhD from the University of Bristol and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. You can find more examples of her work at https://projectmacau.wordpress.com/.  We're joined again by fellow NBN host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. The three of us will talk about Hong Kong’s Macanese: what brought them to Hong Kong, the lives they built for themselves, and the niche they filled in British-run Colonial Hong Kong. Amsterdam University Press has kindly offered listeners of the podcast a discount code! Go to the store page on the AUP website and input discount code CHAN_25 to receive a 25% discount on the book. This offer expires Feb. 28. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Macanese Diaspora. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review