Mid Autumn Festival in The Tower of Reading

The Tower of Reading 念樓中秋   The Fifteenth Day of the Eighth Month of the lunar calendar, a day that in 2024 falls on the 17th of September, marks the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節.… Read

To Go or Not to Go — Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom on his China Conundrum

Watching China Watching   Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a historian who, among other things, is noted for his scholarship and media engagement regarding student protests, both past and present. As I noted in May Fourth at 105 — Protest, Resistance, Repression: Jeff and I got to know each other when working on The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary film about the 1989 Protest Movement in China.… Read

Observing 9 September 2024, Mao’s Deathday, with Dai Qing

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium 二十八畫先生忌日   In 2024, we mark the anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death in the company of Dai Qing (戴晴, 1941-), a renowned writer, environmental activist and China’s first post-Mao historical investigative journalist.… Read

When the Guest Departs, the Tea Goes Cold

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Chapter VII 人一走 茶就涼   In the first Chaguan column in The Economist on 13 September 2018, David Rennie featured the teahouse culture of Chengdu in Sichuan.… Read

To an Erstwhile Friend

Intersecting with Eternity  絕交 In the essay On Heritage we offered the Rationale behind China Heritage. We noted that the character 遺 yí — the leitmotif of our journal — in the hand of the Tang-dynasty artist Li Huailin 李懷琳 is taken from his grass-script 草書 version of a ‘Letter to Shan Tao’ 與山巨源絕交書, a famous epistle by Xi Kang, one of the celebrated Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 竹林七賢. … Read

Other People’s Thoughts XLVIII

Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.… Read