The Other China 打通上下古今   Teacher’s Festival 教師節, or ‘teacher’s day’, was originally celebrated in China on 6 June. Called 雙六節 — the ‘Double Sixth’ — is was gazetted by the national government of the Republic of China in 1931 in response to a proposal made by professors at the newly established National Central University in Nanking.… Read

The Other China We travelled together for a time — we weathered a storm and stood together at that ferry crossing to watch the sunset. It was our connection. It would be well nigh impossible to repeat a journey during which your teacher shielded you from the wind, lit a lamp for you to see by and offered tea to warm you.… Read

Seeds of Fire at Forty 一個幽靈在中國大地遊蕩   Mao Zedong died fifty years ago, in the early hours of 9 September 1976. With his death, the Chairman entered history and China’s mythopoetic realm although, in a sense, he had announced his apotheosis decades earlier in a poem titled Snow 沁園春 · 雪.… Read

This is the eighty-sixth 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

Seeds of Fire Celebrating Four Decades 李白陸 In ‘Take Xi Jinping at his word’, the essay by Greg Sheridan, Foreign Affairs editor of The Australian, reproduced below, Pierre Ryckmans, Kevin Rudd and I are brought together for the first time since August 2009.… Read

The Other China 夏去秋來，四時輪轉   夏去秋來，四時輪轉 — ‘Summer now gives way to autumn, the cycle of seasons in a changeful year’. Or, to quote Shakespeare: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.… Read