14 Books BOOKS 2024


China Yuan Ming Yuan:


Art and Culture of an Imperial Garden-Palace Edited by Yang Xu, Hong Kong Palace Museum, ISBN 9789887043607, HK$360


Te book presents the latest research and interpretations by scholars from around the world, expanding our understanding of Yuanmingyuan from the perspectives of architectural design, residential garden life, artistic creation, and visual heritage. Using 60 objects as illustratiosn, it offers new discoveries and interpretations, many for the first time, including paintings, calligraphy, porcelain, and architectural models and elements.


From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane by Peter Jackson, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300251128, £30


By the mid-14th century, the world empire founded by Genghis Khan was in crisis. Te Mongol Ilkhanate had ended in Iran and Iraq, China’s Mongol rulers were threatened by the native Ming, and the Golden Horde and the Central Asian Mongols were prey to internal discord. Into this void moved the warlord Tamerlane, the last major conqueror to emerge from Inner Asia. Peter Jackson traces Tamerlane’s rise to power against the backdrop of the decline of Mongol rule. Jackson argues that Tamerlane, a keen exponent of Mongol custom and tradition, operated in Genghis Khan’s shadow and took care to draw parallels between himself and his great precursor. But, as a Muslim, Tamerlane drew on Islamic traditions, and his waging of wars in the name of jihad, whether sincere or not, had a more powerful impact than those of any Muslim Mongol ruler before him.


Rebel Island:


The Incredible History of Taiwan by Jonathan Clements, Scribe, ISBN 9781915590275, £26


Once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as nothing but a ‘ball of mud’, Taiwan now has a modern GDP larger than that of Sweden, in a land area smaller than Indiana. It is the last surviving enclave of the Republic of China, a lost colony of


Japan, and claimed by Beijing as a rogue province – merely the latest chapters in its long history as a refuge for pirates, rebels, settlers, and outcasts. Jonathan Clements offers a concise and vivid telling of Taiwan’s complex island story, beginning with the unique conditions of its archaeology before examining its indigenous history and its days as a Dutch and Spanish trading post. He looks at the periods as an independent kingdom, Chinese province, and short-lived republic, along with transformations wrought by 50 years as part of the Japanese Empire. In 1949, the island became a lifeboat for two million refugees from the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the White Terror began. Later chapters explain the recent conflicts that have emerged after the suspension of four decades of martial law, as the Taiwanese debate issues of self- determination, independence, and home rule – all under the watchful gaze of President Xi Jinping, and politicians around the world.


The Struggle for Taiwan: A History by Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Allen Lane, ISBN 9780241674857, £25


In the overwhelming chaos across Asia at the end of the Second World War, one relatively minor issue was the future of the Japanese colony of Taiwan, a large island some one hundred miles off the coast of Fujian. Handed to the Kuomintang- ruled Republic of China, in 1949 it suddenly became the focus of global attention as a random cross-section of defeated Nationalists, including President Chiang Kai-shek, fled there from Mao’s triumphant Communist forces. Te book is the account of the sequence of events that has left Taiwan for generations as a political anomaly, with issues around its status and future continuing to threaten war. With deepening democratisation, Taiwan further goads Beijing, remaining functionally independent from China even as Xi Jinping clamours for unification.


Chinese Fans: The Untold Story by Hahn Eura Eunkyung and HaYoung Joo, Scala, ISBN 9781785515255, £7


In China, fans have traditionally


Emperor of the Seas by Jack Weatherford, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781399417730, £25


Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer


China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life. Kublai Khan is one of history’s most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world’s largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward-looking sea faring empire. By the end of his reign, the Chinese were building and supplying remarkable ships to transport men, grain, and weapons over vast distances, of a size and dexterity that would be inconceivable in Europe for hundreds of years.


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been both a practical object and an artistic work that expresses the owner’s learning or personality. Te high-end craftsmanship of Chinese fans, encompassing poetry, calligraphy and painting, has long captivated the West. Tis catalogue, newly translated from the original Korean, showcases 71 examples dating from between the late 18th and 20th centuries. Te pieces are drawn from the Eurus Collection in South Korea.


The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire by Henrietta Harrison, Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691225463, £17.99


Te 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney’s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fuelled by the East’s lack of interest in the West. Te author presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney’s two interpreters at that meeting – Li Zibiao and George Tomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars. Harrison demonstrates that the


Qing court’s ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li’s influence as Macartney’s interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to


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flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices,


the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain.


From Rome to Beijing


by Daniel M Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara, Brill, ISBN 9789004693364, £123


Tis book explores the relationship between Jesuit enterprise and Ming-Qing China in the 17th and 18th centuries. Te Jesuit order’s global corporation grew increasingly influential within the Chinese court after 1582, in no small part due to the two institutions shared interests in artistic and scientific matters. Te paintings, astronomical instruments, spiritual texts and sacred buildings engendered through this encounter tell stories of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. Tis book approaches early modern East-West exchange as a site of cultural (rather than commercial) negotiations, where two sets of traditions and values intersected and diverged.


The Mongol World edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope, Routledge, ISBN 9781032244839, £44.99


Drawing upon research carried out


in several different languages and across a variety of disciplines, Te book documents how Mongol rule shaped the trajectory of Eurasian history from Central Europe to the Korean Peninsula, from the 13th century to the 15th century. Contributing authors consider how intercontinental environmental, economic, and intellectual trends affected the Empire as a whole and, where appropriate, situate regional political, social, and religious shifts within the context of the broader Mongol Empire. Issues pertaining to the Mongols and their role within the societies that they conquered therefore take precedence over the historical narrative of those societies.


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Alongside the formation, conquests, administration, and political structure of the Mongol Empire, the second section examines archaeology and art history, family and royal households, science and exploration, and religion, which provides greater insight into the social history of the Empire – an aspect often neglected by traditional dynastic and political histories.


The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300267082, £30


Tis history chronicles how an impoverished and terrorised China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Tese changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world. Te authors construct a panorama of catastrophe and progress in China. Tey chronicle China’s gradual opening to the world – the interplay of power in an era of aged and ailing leadership, the people’s rebellion against the earlier government system, and the roles of unlikely characters: overseas Chinese capitalists, American engineers, Japanese professors, and German designers. Tis is a story of revolutionary change that neither foreigners nor the Chinese themselves could have predicted.


Japan & Korea


Salon Culture in Japan edited by Akiko Yano, British Museum, ISBN 997801714124964, £30


In early modern Japan, cultural salons were creative spaces for people of all ages and social levels to pursue painting, poetry and other artistic endeavours, as serious but amateur practitioners. Tey all used a pen or art name. Individuals were therefore able to socialise and interact broadly through these artistic activities, regardless of official social status as regulated by the shogunal government. Te idea of communal and collaborative creativity seems to have been especially ingrained in the areas of Kyoto and Osaka. Each of the two cities had a distinct character: Kyoto was the national capital, where the emperor and aristocrats resided, and Osaka was the centre of commerce. Only a fraction of these technically sophisticated artworks has previously been published in colour. With five essays that explore this cultural phenomenon from different angles, and eight shorter insights that delve into specific historical aspects and the personal connections and legacies of cultural figures, this book offers a new perspective on Japanese art and society in the late 18th and 19th centuries.


The Splendour of Modernity: Japanese Arts of the Meiji Era By Rosina Buckland, Reaktion Books, ISBN 9781789148558, £30


Presenting a comprehensive overview of Japanese art from 1865


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