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Disappearing Soonish: Shanghai’s Dongtai Road Antique Market
I don’t venture over to the antique market on Dongtai Road all that often. I have plenty of Mao pins and propaganda posters, porcelain and jade really aren’t my style, and the stuff that I like the most—Art Deco furniture and light fixtures—is both out of my price range and a hassle to get back…
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Books, Books, and More Books: Taking the #HistoriannChallenge
Earlier this month, the New York Times interviewed retired Princeton historian of the Civil War James McPherson for the newspaper’s “By the Book” feature. The Times asked McPherson to name the best historians writing today, the books that have most influenced him, the best treatments of particular subjects, and so forth. When I and a…
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Ten Thoughts about Myanmar
I’m back in Shanghai and trying to work through an epic to-do list while the back of my mind is still mulling all the things I saw and did in Myanmar. In no particular order, here are ten thoughts that struck me during my six days in the country: 1. I was so much more…
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All Aboard the Yangon Circle Line
The Yangon Circle Line train is the exact opposite of Chinese high-speed rail. Over the course of three hours, the Circle Line traces a route only 28.5 miles long; there are points when the train moves so slowly that it seems like it would be faster to get out and walk. During the short stretches…
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Myanmar So Far, In Five Pictures
Pretty much the whole Yangon airport appears sponsored by Samsung. Quick Wednesday morning stop at one of the many tea shops lining Yangon’s streets. The tea is thick, milky, and super-sweet; it’s never going to replace black coffee in my daily routine. Spire of the Sule Pagoda, a stupa that occupies a traffic circle not…
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One Night in Kunming and Scattered Thoughts on Travel
Greetings from Yangon, Myanmar (or Rangoon, Burma, depending on your politics), where I’m spending the Chinese National Day break. To get to Yangon, I first had to fly to Kunming, a city in southwest China that serves as a sort of gateway to Southeast Asia. Due to a combination of flight schedules and my own…
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Bookshelf: Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves
As a historian and a reader, my favorite “relaxation” books are the ones that spotlight unknown or unusual personal stories that complicate what we think we know about the past. Sure, I’ll read an analysis of the origins of the Boxer Uprising or a monograph on everyday life in twentieth-century Shanghai—and both of those books…
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A Weekend in Pingyao, Part II: A Journey of Ten Thousand Steps
Pingyao’s most notable feature is its centuries-old city wall, which stands ten meters high, a fortress of sloping brick—brown in some lights, gray in others—topped with crenellations through which cannons could be shot if the city needed to defend itself. The six-kilometer-long wall would form a square, if not for its squiggly southern edge. Six…
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A Weekend in Pingyao, Part I: A Journey of a Thousand Miles
It seemed like half the people on my flight from Shanghai to Taiyuan were coughing—short, dry testimonies to the coal city’s infamy as one of the most polluted places in China. Taiyuan deserves that reputation, I saw as I rode a bus from the airport to the train station: a thick yellow haze hung in…
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LA Review of Books: Take Me Out to the Ballgame, in Taipei
Golf on Monday, baseball today … based on what I’ve been writing lately, I probably seem like more of a sports fan than I actually am. Just a coincidence, though. Well, not completely. I am a huge baseball fan and don’t get to indulge this passion when I’m here in Shanghai. That’s one of the…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 