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Jan 21, 2025 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
China has been one of the leading sources of overseas visitors to the Maldives in recent years. Bin Yang, a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong, makes the argument in Discovered but Forgotten that this is to some extent a rerun of the situation in the 14th and 15th centuries when the Maldives were firmly on Chinese maps of places to visit.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro's photographs of Macau are certainly worth that and more. This latest collection consists of 100 photos taken during the last five years, a period which included Covid-19.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
Most people "collect" stuff, but Paul Bromberg is a "collector", the difference being that he proceeds with intent and purpose, focusing on a relatively narrow group of objects. Bromberg is now on at least his fourth collection:At the end of 1997, my wife, Siripun, and I moved from Hong Kong to Bangkok.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
Pirates and piracy seem to be about as universal as death and taxes, and Chinese and Western piracy bear much in common, from violence and hardship, to oppression from the authorities as both cause and consequence, as well as a certain amount of popular romanticism.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
bmj.com | Peter Gordon
Rapid Response:
Dear EditorIn his response to this opinion article [1] Dr Aggarwal of the ABPI accuses the authors of being 'lazy', 'unjustified' and 'provocative' [2]. He states that this 'undermines the ability to have a proper discussion': however his own defensive language only serves to polarise the debate further. The concern here is that this will only continue to impede progress in this area.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
As an award-winning novelist, Jeet Thayil may need little introduction, but given that I'll Have It Here is his first collection in a decade and a half, some readers may need some reminding that he is also an accomplished poet. The poems in this new collection sit, sometimes comfortably, sometimes precariously, between tradition and modernity, alternately looking forward and backwards, or inwards and outwards, sometimes at the same time.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
Ruth Mandujano López starts her book Steamships across the Pacific with, as seems almost de rigueur now for almost any book about Latin American-Asian relations, with the history of the Manila Galleon, but for her, this is a point of comparison and departure.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
Titles from the venerable Penguin Classics imprint are usually books one knows one should have read even if one hasn't (yet): known unknowns, as the famous saying goes. Behind the Painting by Thai author Siburapha is, even for the well-read anglophone consumer of literature, likely to qualify as an unknown unknown.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries are, one comes to realize, one of the earliest example of mass commercial art, at least purely secular art, and one that still resonates with modern sensibilities.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
asianreviewofbooks.com | Peter Gordon
uch has already been written about the Manila Galleon, the system of annual commercial sailings between Manila and Acapulco that dominated trans-Pacific trade for two and a half centuries from the latter part of the 16th-century until the early 19th, a development which is often taken to mark the beginning of "globalization". Juan José Rivas Moreno reviews much of that as background, but unlike perhaps any other book on the subject to date, he turns his gaze to what was going on in Manila itself.
