Book Talk: Edward Wong on the Edge of Empire
The New York Times journalist tells us how his father followed Mao's star in the 1950s — and how the frontiers he reported on in...
Orville Schell on China in the 1980s
The 1980s in China were an exciting, ephemeral period of opening. The Peking Hotel podcast talked to a veteran China watcher who lived, and recorded,...
Sarah Conger: Letters from the Boxer Rebellion
In 1900, the wife of an American envoy to China was caught up in the infamous siege of Beijing. The letters she wrote at the...
Perry Link on June 4 Intellectuals
Chinese intellectuals played a critical role in China’s opening during the 1980s, and the protests of 1989. In a new podcast collaboration, we talked to...
Ep. 9: Tiananmen Remembered
It has been 35 years since the violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests of 1989. We talked to an activist whose work pushes for the...
Tibet’s Cultural Revolution
The brutality of Maoist Red Guards is well documented, but lesser known in relation to Tibet, where its spiritual damage ran deep. Few records remained...
Edgar Snow: Red Star Struck
The left-wing journalist’s 1937 account of meeting Mao influenced a generation who saw China through rose-tinted glasses as late as the 1970s — until the...
Peter Goullart: Forgotten Kingdom
20 years after “Shangri-La” was coined in the Western imagination, a Russian adventurer published a memoir from the valley of Lijiang, southwest China, that is...
Ellen La Motte: An American Nurse in Peking
In 1916, an American activist and writer traveled to China from the frontlines of World War I. What she saw in the city delighted her;...
One for the History Books
How Endymion Wilkinson’s encyclopedia of Chinese history grew from 70,000 words in 1973 to 1.75 million words for its 50th anniversary edition.
Marco Polo: Travel Writer? Fraud? Sexpat?
‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ is often held up as the earliest Western account of China and Asia. What’s actually inside the covers might surprise...
Washing History
A new novel about the Chinese Civil War feels true to the author’s experience of it, but also amplifies the Party’s preferred version of the...