Erica Fox Brindley, “Music, Cosmology, and th...

Amy Chavez talks to Don Weiss, currently mid-way through the Shikoku Pilgrimage — Japan's 1,300 km Buddhist route that has been walked for almost as many years. Pilgrims share their journey with Kobo Daishi, patron saint of the 88-temple circuit and founder of Shingon Buddhism i ...  Show more

The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) is the first book that examines the concept of risk in non-anglophone world literature. Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than ...  Show more

Erica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (SUNY Press, 2012) offers readers a history of harmony in early Ch ...  Show more

This week Neil MacGregor is exploring the emergence of sophisticated new powers across the world 2500 years ago, from the Parthenon in Greece, to the great empire of Cyrus in Persia and the forgotten people of the Olmec in Mexico. Today he arrives in China at the time of Confuciu ...  Show more

Henrietta Harrison discusses her Cundill Prize-shortlisted book on the interpreters who took on the dangerous task of communicating between the British empire and Qing China. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, she explores the extraordinary life stories of two key translators, and reve ...  Show more

Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), ...  Show more