mrg

Reclaiming Confucius from Autocracy The largest statue of Confucius in the world, in stolid brass, looms 236 feet above the neighboring sprawl of the Nishan Center for World Confucian Studies just outside of Qufu, Shandong Province. …

The Useless Tree is back!

At least for now. I just posted a long piece on my experience last year at the Tenth Nishan Forum on World Civilizations. Come for the politics of Confucian revival, stay for some jabs at Jeffrey Sachs. Good times!

uselesstree.blog/2025/11/22/r...

piccola lezione

la giacca che indossa Liu Jinsong non è quella alla Mao

nota come "abito Zhongshan"

segue per chi fosse interessato
la spiegazione dettagliata del significato della
"giacca alla Mao"

le quattro tasche del vero "abito Zhongshan" simboleggiano le quattro dimensioni del paese 👇

Edging Toward Japan: What does being literate in Japanese really mean? - The Mainichi By Damian Flanagan The other day I had the pleasure of attending a very interesting presentation about antique books by an expert in Edo period litera

As one who has spent much time these last few months glaring at texts I can partially decipher but cannot read, I am qualified to recommend this essay.

Edging Toward Japan: What does being literate in Japanese really mean? - The Mainichi share.google/Gw4gLrPrnPyI...

Can we go back to the days when politicians said that they really wanted to help people but it’s very hard and takes time, rather than saying that they want to hurt people and can do it quickly?

Excited to say that my article on horse names in China's ancient postal system has been published with Early China! 🐎✉️🌿 Meet Skittish Fish, Calm at the Carriage, and, my personal fave, Cinnamon Stick, at the link below:
#animalhistory

Finally someone that engages with what it actually means to learn from a Leninist one-party system.

A circular circuit board with various icons and a text in latin along the circumference and multicoloured squares in the centre.

OPHANIM אוֹפַנִּים (Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager) is a 3800 megapixel camera used in the AEgIS αἰγίς high-energy physics project at CERN. In this blog post The Owlet of Minerva tries to pick apart the scientific, biblical Hebrew, medieval European and Buddhist iconography of the instrument.

Back when I studied Chinese I had a French roommate for a while and when I got to a ’le’ or a ’de’ in either language there was a 1 in 10 chance I’d switch over to the other without noticing.

Economists are like medieval scholastics, they produce truth using sophisticated formal methods but completely unrealistic axioms which leads to them to invent epicycle upon epicycle to explain the conjunctions.

A Book: Neon Is Not Dead: The Future of a Hong Kong Icon It's about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Hong Kong’s living light

Very proud to have contributed a few chapters to this book on the past, present, and future of neon in HK. The process showed me how it’s so much more than just sappy sentimentality to mourn HK’s lost lights — and that despite everything… neon’s not dead.

Consider backing our Kickstarter campaign ⬇️

”En ekonom är en person som vet priset på allt men värdet av inget.”

(Mina djupaste ursäkter till Oscar Wilde)

Whenever anyone gives me a ‘head’s up’ my natural inclination is to keep my head down.

Chronology of early China: A radiocarbon databank for Chinese archaeology - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Chronology of early China: A radiocarbon databank for Chinese archaeology

Super useful tool -- "Chronology of Early China: A Radiocarbon Databank for Chinese Archaeology” out here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Our new manuscript estimating shares of late Qing degree holders who had kin other than direct patrilineal ancestors who held degrees, and within kin network correlations in degree attainment, based on a new dataset constructed from 同年齿录 and related records. 1/2 osf.io/preprints/so...

This is my non-Roman Empire

The Man Awakened from Dreams | Stanford University Press In this beautifully crafted study of one emblematic life, Harrison addresses large themes in Chinese history while conveying with great immediacy the textures and rhythms of everyday life in the count...

…och lite hiragana till på köpet.

(Att ta hand om papper med tecken på var tydligen något som gav hög status i lokalsamhället till den ofrivilligt obsolete konfucianska ämbetsmannen i Henrietta Harrisons väldigt intressanta ”The Man Awakened from Dreams”)

www.sup.org/books/asian-...

Monarchy spiralling downward with sense of inevitability. President Stephen Fry looking increasingly plausible.

Well, they called it 辭海 because of the feeling of just barely being able to keep your head above water.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cihai

A woman works in a warehouse (?).

A little girl looks into the camera, foliage in the background.

Ceramic urns are drying in the sun.

Two toddlers sitting by a wall.

Contact prints from photos by Frederick J. Foley 傅良圃. These photos were taken in Taiwan; we're guessing in the 1960s. The Ricci Institute has around 85,000 of Foley's photographic negatives that await digitization. They were given to us in 1985.

Not really a lit review but I've had the papers from a symposium on Scott's Against the Grain published in Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 2019; Vol 29(4) in my Zotero library forever, I haven't read them but maybe there is some historiography in there?

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Why does so much of the literature on early agricultural states write as if these sequences of developments are already established and widely agreed upon narratives? Even a Graeber writes as if "as everyone knows." I just need one good "well these bozos over here think X bc Y" lit review.

I added a section to our Frog in a Well Primary Source guide to Korean History with some links to open access copies of volumes with Japanese statistics from colonial Korea - froginawell.net/frog/sources...

Yu Hua: Fictional Cities | China Books Review The bestselling Chinese novelist foregrounds individual suffering in the chaos of modern Chinese history. In his latest novel in translation, gratuitous violence shows the limits of fiction.

@chinabooksreview.com just published my review of Yu Hua's 余华 *City of Fiction*《文城》(2021, tr. 2025).

"Along with other contemporary Chinese works with such graphic violence, Yu’s novel does political work by purging the traumas of China’s bloody 20th century."
chinabooksreview.com/2025/10/30/f...

But there might an interesting essay in there somewhere on how the authors of articles like that are just rhapsodising set phrases until they hit their word limit instead of doing any real analysis.

Oh, come now, he is also 'lion-hearted', 'god-like' and 'the pelead'.

(The actual subject of the thread (CLB, CDM) makes me so depressed I just had to go along with the tangent...)

FYI: Print copies of my book Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke is now on sale for 50% at the Duke University Press website if you use the code: FALL25

My favorite use of 嗨：
自嗨 or 自high (“self-high”) 😅

This term started out as an internet slang around 2010 and is now widely used colloquially with a range of meanings—to get excited or hyper by oneself; to amuse or have fun by oneself; being self-indulgent or narcissistic

川普自嗨 Trump “self-high”

Thanks for posting this.

I'm revealing my ignorance here but I'd been vaguely aware about Jin and Liu and some of their works but not really connected the dots until I read the short bio at the top of the linked article.

A sign mostly in Chinese but with English translation in small letters. Police remind: Do not fight If you lose you will be hospitalized If you win you have to go to jail

This may be my new favorite sign. (Seen today while walking around Hechuan.)

A wonderful personal meditation on East Asian literature and how politics seeps into life.