Seeds of Fire The intellectual culture it most resembled, Claude said, was one built on relentless questioning, arguing with texts, treating interpretation as sacred, a contrarian streak, deep concern with ethics and law, and a tradition of thriving through knowledge rather than territorial conquest.… Read

Other People’s Thoughts This is the seventy-fourth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.… Read

Intersecting with Eternity 上善若水 In 2021, a century after Stefan Zweig wrote about the invisible republic of the spirit, we adapted the concept to our ongoing investigation into what we have long dubbed The Other China.… Read

Contra Trump ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant ‘They make a desert and call it peace’ is an oft-quoted and clichéd line from Tacitus, one that we learned in high school when studying Roman history.… Read

The Other China 裡通天朝上國 In the Xi Jinping era, the term Great Power 強國 qiáng guó, literally ‘powerful nation’, is a commonplace term for China itself. It encapsulates the quest of the People’s Republic of China in the twenty-first century to be a superpower.… Read

The Other China 張燈結綵 The Fifteenth Day of the First Month of the New Year 正月十五 marks the first full moon of the Lunisolar New Year. Generally called Yuanxiao 元宵, literally ‘First Evening’, it is also the height of the Lantern Festival 燈節,  one traditionally celebrated from the Hanging of Lanterns 上燈 on the Thirteenth Day of the First Month to the Taking Down of Lanterns 落燈 on the Eighteenth Day of the First Month.… Read