Introduction: Foreign Language Sources on Southern Chinese Piracy It is a dictum in the social sciences that data is never self-interpreting. Likewise historians have found that it is often impossible to judge the nature or significance of... Continue Reading →
Introduction The academic life has a sense of seasonality. In a world dedicated to the creation and multiplication of identical, homogeneous and interchangeable units of “work,” this is increasingly rare. I think that it is safe to say... Continue Reading →
Robert J. Antony. 2003. Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China. China Research Monograph 56. Berkeley, University of California: Institute of East Asian Studies. 198 pages. ... Continue Reading →
Traditional Chinese Martial Arts, the Nautical Life and Piracy In the following post I will introduce what I believe to be an account of the earliest large-scale Chinese martial arts demonstration in the United Kingdom and possibly... Continue Reading →
Introduction In the summer of 1902 a martial artist and rebel leader named Zhao San-duo (alt. Zhao Luo-zhu) was arrested in the course of a tax uprising in Guangzong County. Betrayed by a local wu juren (a... Continue Reading →
Introduction Conflict seems to inspire trophy hunting. In the west this often takes the form of fading photographs of someone’s grandfather holding a vintage Luger. A large number of katanas also made their way back to the United States... Continue Reading →
Introduction Most historical debates (both popular and academic) about the Chinese martial arts pit two opposing visions against one another. Sociologically informed theories tend to see the Chinese martial arts as a manifestation of fundamentally secular historical, economic... Continue Reading →
Introduction: Hong Kong, Regionalism and the Martial Arts It is hard to think of any state with such robust and diverse group of regional identities as China’s. Much of my research is focused on the development... Continue Reading →
***Today's post continues our discussion of economic markets and modernity in the Chinese martial arts. This essay, first posted in May of 2013, was one of my first attempts at hashing out these questions as they related to advertising... Continue Reading →
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