The time is 1944. The setting is East Asia in flames. The characters are: Philip Baldwin, a New England major with his first command -- a tough and surly American demolition unit isolated in the great retreat of that turbulent year; Su-piao, a strong and beautiful Chinese woman educated in America; and Kwan, a frosty Chinese colonel who loves his country but must help ravish it. The story of their adventures in one violent week marks Theodore H. White's emergence as a major novelist.

The Mountain Road

Theodore H. White

EastBridge, a nonprofit corporation

The report of the Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia was published in Moscow by the main sponsor and organizer of the expedition, P.P. Riabushinskii. Traveling throughout northern and western Mongolia in the summer of 1910, the expedition gathered a wealth of information on trade routes, trading centers, the perceived threat to Russian trade posed by Chinese mercantile competition, and the daily lives of the Mongols, themselves. This document ranks among the best travel accounts of Mongolia written by foreigners from the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. It gives the reader a minutely detailed account of Mongolia in its final years before autonomy (1911-1919) and revolution (1921) reordered the entire social, political, and economic landscape. The seventy-three Moscow merchants who jointly underwrote the expedition s costs were in search of new export markets for Russian textiles and other manufactured products as well as scouting Mongolia as a source for unprocessed raw materials woolens, hides, and the like.

Pages From the Past: The 1910 Moscow Trade Expedition to Mongolia

Elizabeth Endicott (translator)

This is the biography of an American woman in China. It is the life story of Pearl Buck's mother. Everything in it is true except the names of the people are changed. Much of it the author learned from her mother's lips and diaries; the rest from her own observation. Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker's (Carie's in the book) childhood was passed happily in the hills of West Virginia, from which she went, the bride of a missionary, to spend a rigorous life in the interior of China. There, with warmth and vigor and understanding, she taught and served a strange people, spending her strength upon them. Of the seven children she bore, only three would grow up; only one, the author, was born in America, in the stately house which, to the exiled mother, was forever home. But even in a far country, the dauntless woman made an American home with an American garden and held always before herself and her children the bright remembrance that they were American and in the face of all danger and grief and bewilderment kept to the end a flaming spirit and a stout heart.

The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother

PEARL S. BUCK

This is the biography of an American missionary in China. It is the life story of Pearl Buck's father. Only the names of the people are changed. Absalom Sydenstricker (1852-1931) (renamed Andrew in the book) was the eighth of nine children born to a Presbyterian farming family in what would become West Virginia. At 22, Sydenstricker left home to complete high school. He went on to graduate from Washington and Lee College and Union Theological Seminary in Richmond. His resulting honors degrees were in classical languages. In 1879, just prior to seminary graduation, he was accepted by the Southern Presbyterian Mission Board to be sent out to China. A marriage was arranged, he was wed just after graduation, and a month later the couple was on their way to China.  Sydenstricker would serve in twenty missions spread all over China during his career. His background in languages and his exposure to many regional forms of spoken Mandarin molded his approach to mission work and, indeed, led him to insist that the bible, hymnals, and tracts be translated into popular Mandarin instead of the scholarly classical Chinese used by Western missionaries for more than a half-century in order to reach the common people with the gospel. Sydenstricker was unique among bible translators due to his command of Greek and Hebrew as well as his insistence on readability for the average Chinese Christian. He had a running feud with the official translators whom he blamed for the poor state of Christianity in China. While spectacularly unsuccessful against those official translators, his work heavily influenced the bible in use in China today. Modern scholarship has shifted away from studying individuals to focus on broad movements within the missionary community such as liberalism, anti-opium activities, or women missionaries. While these inquiries can be important and helpful, a look into personalities like Sydenstricker reminds us that there were missionaries of immense influence within their often gigantic mission fields who are not so easily classified. Sydenstricker was a contradictory and irascible man, isolated from the rest of the missionary community, but he was also a man of stern convictions and complex personality sufficient reason to look again into the lives of individuals in order to gain understanding of today's Chinese church. ...freely adapted from Jost O. Zetzsche in The Missionary Kaleidoscope

Fighting Angel

Local Politics in Rural Taiwan under Dictatorship and Democracy

History

J. Bruce Jacobs

Asia

In the 1920s, three adventurous and determined British women missionaries traveled along China's old Silk Road to gossip the Gospel in the Muslim regions of northwestern China. As this ground-breaking biography of Mildred Cable and the sisters Eva and Francesca French illustrates, their dedicated service in the Gobi Desert as members of the China Inland Mission (CIM) was only one aspect of these three unconventional women's lives. 
The Trio as they became known, advocated (and personified) equality for women in mission service; they denounced the British opium trade in China through their writings; and on home leaves, they wrote and published books that, in their lifetimes, brought them wide acclaim, honors, and influence as travelers, writers, and popular public speakers. Ultimately, the collaboration between Francesca French and Mildred Cable produced over 20 books, including Mildred Cable's renowned travel classic, The Gobi Desert. They were honored by several learnéd societies, receiving the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial medal of the Royal Central Asia Society (predecessor to the Royal Society for Asian Affairs) and the Livingstone medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. 
In this detailed and carefully researched account, Linda Benson reveals three extraordinary lives while providing fresh insight into the role of European women in the China mission field, the impact of warlord politics in Gansu and Xinjiang, and the lives of Muslim women in the far Asian northwest.

Across China's Gobi: The lives of Evangeline French, Mildred Cable, and Francesca French of the China Inland Mission

Linda K. Benson

Sun and Li interviewed 21 young Chinese movie-makers on a variety of challenges facing them as cinema gradually emerges from the PRC's long-standing censorship restrictions. Assembled by theme, the reader experiences a sense of eavesdropping on an open discussion between with these notable film directors. Includes biographical sketches (with color photos) of each participating director together with their filmographies.

Lights! Camera! Kai Shi!: In Depth Interviews with China's New Generation of Movie Directors

Shaoyi Sun

Li, Xun

In the summer of 1948, Winthrop Knowlton and his friend, James C. Thomson, Jr., just graduated from prep school, set out for China. 
During the next nine months they would travel throughout revolution-torn China as Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces moved ever southward fighting Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist armies in their retreat to Formosa. Separated by the war, they rejoined in South China and continued their journey -- their revolution around the world -- by freighter to a Europe still reeling from World War II, and across the Atlantic back home. 
Knowlton's memoir tells a magnificent story of that remarkable time. The story closes with Knowlton's return to China in 1979 at the head of an American publishing delegation, a retrospective look at the events of 1948-49 giving the book still another historical and human dimension.

My First Revolution (Signature Books)

Winthrop Knowlton

Children's Books

Winner of the 2002 Daesan Foundation prize for Outstanding Literature in Translation. Everlasting Empire (Yongwonhan chekuk) is a Korean historical novel written as a mystery story. The narrator frames the main story with his "discovery" of a 150-year-old manuscript. Because of problems verifying the authenticity of the original writer, the narrator offers the book not as genuine history but as a story. 
The narrative opens on a winter morning in 1800 with the discovery that the Royal Book Examiner has died in the night while working alone on a secret project for the Korean king. His death sets in motion a series of events revealing the contours of philosophical and political conflict among the literati in the royal court. Set at a pivotal moment in Korean history, when the nation's last strong king was attempting to consolidate the authority of the monarchy against the dangerous encumbrance of bureaucratic factional infighting, and when Western ideas were beginning to infiltrate Korea, Everlasting Empire is not only an exciting and informative novel but offers genuine insight into the history and culture of late eighteenth-early nineteenth century Korea. 
The original Korean edition was published in 1993 and was a bestseller in Korea, selling more than one million copies. In was translated into French and published by Maisonneuve &amp; Larose in 2000 and was made into a film in Korean which collected six prestigious Grand Bell Awards. 
"Yi In-hwa has achieved a goal that eludes most authors of historical fiction: He has created a tale so plausible that it can almost pass for the work of a historian rather than a novelist. This novel opens a window into the turbulent world of Chosen dynasty politics, in which political disagreements often had deadly consequences. Yi In-hwa has captured the rivalries, cruelty, and treachery on Chongjo's Seoul with a vividness equaled by few historical records, or even historians' reconstructions. I recommend Everlasting Empire to anyone who wants to experience political intrigue on the Korean peninsula two centuries ago." -From the Introduction by Don Baker

Everlasting Empire

Yi, In-Hwa

Desaix Anderson was the first American charge d'affairs to Vietnam when diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1995 after a hiatus of almost twenty years. His role was to meet, analyse, report on, and influence the policy-level leaders of Vietnam as well as those officials responsible for executing those policies. His insights into the Vietnamese leadership and their thinking are a key feature of this book.

An American in Hanoi: America's Reconciliation with Vietnam (Signature Books)

Politics & Social Sciences

Desaix Anderson

Politics & Government

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