Seeds of Fire 曾伴浮雲歸晚翠，猶陪落日泛秋聲。
世間無限丹青手，一片傷心畫不成。   悲傷 bēishāng, ‘grief’, ‘sorrow’, ‘distress’ — two Chinese characters in the calligraphic hand of Li Xianting 栗憲庭 written for Geng Xiaonan 耿蕭男 to commemorate her release from prison displayed here with Tao Jingzhou 陶景洲 in March 2026 are a silent testimony to the karmic link between Li, Geng, Tao and Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, their long-persecuted friend.… Read

The Other China   Liu Chan 劉蟾, who also goes by the pen name Dasheng 大生, is a writer, scholar and calligrapher. Born in Shaanxi, he lives in Beijing where he edits The Chinese Study 中國書房.… Read

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