They kept up their intrigues and opium smuggling while helping to rescue 18,000 Jews from Hitler's Europe, and though they soon faced the tsunami that was communism, their legacy remains today.

    But behind the wall’s intimidating exterior—and the myths that have built up around it—is a complex history that has both defined and undermined China. Author Julia Lovell has written a new and important history of the Great Wall that guides the reader through the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire, from the second millennium BC to the present day.In recent years, the Wall has become an ever more potent symbol of Chinese nationalism, of a determination to resist foreign domination. But how successful was the Wall in reality, and what was its real purpose? Was it a precursor, albeit on a huge scale, of the Berlin Wall—a barrier designed to keep its population in as much as undesirables out? Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese state and the frontier policy that defined it, through the lives of the millions of individuals who supported, criticized, built, and attacked it.

    The Two Koreas places the tensions between North and South within a historical context, with a special emphasis on the involvement of outside powers.

    A foreign worker is decapitated in an HDB building site accident. A Singaporean wife must negotiate Beijing as her British husband awaits a heart transplant. And in different corners of the world, Singaporeans and exiles mark National Day in their own ways.Jeremy Tiang’s debut collection weaves together the lives of its characters across the world—from Switzerland, Norway, Germany, China, Canada, Thailand, New York City and back to Singapore. These wry, unsettling stories ask how we decide where we belong, and what happens to those who don’t.

    His objective: to conquer Korea, then China, and then the whole of Asia. The resulting seven years of fighting, known in Korea as imjin waeran, the “Imjin invasion,” after the year of the water dragon in which it began, dwarfed contemporary conflicts in Europe and was one of the most devastating wars to grip East Asia in the past thousand years.The Imjin War is the most comprehensive account ever published in English of this cataclysmic event, so little known in the West. It begins with the political and cultural background of Korea, Japan and China, explores the diplomatic impasse that led to the war, describes every major incident and battle from 1592 to 1598 and introduces a fascinating cast of characters along the way. There is Hideyoshi, hosting garden parties as his armies march toward Beijing; Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin, emerging from a prison cell to take on the Japanese navy with just thirteen ships; Chinese commander Zhao Chengxun, suffering defeat after promising to “scatter the Japanese to the four winds”; the courtesan Chu Non-gae, luring a samurai into her arms and then jumping into the Nam River with him locked in her embrace.One nation fighting to expand, another to survive. Shockwaves extending across China and beyond. The Imjin War is an epic tale of grand perspective and intimate detail of an upheaval that would shape East Asia for centuries to come.

    Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta. Over the centuries, numerous kingdoms, dynasties, and states have ruled over -- and fought for -- what is now Vietnam. The bloody Cold War-era conflict between Ho Chi Minh's communist-backed Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the American-backed Republic of Vietnam was only the most recent instance when war divided and transformed Vietnam.A major achievement, Vietnam offers the grand narrative of the country's complex past and the creation of the modern state of Vietnam. It is the definitive single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand Vietnam today.

    The texts were written between the ninth and the seventeenth centuries and convey each author's underlying sense of the world and what is to be valued in it. Four Huts presents original translations by Burton Watson—one of the most respected translators of Chinese and Japanese literature. The qualities that emerge from these writings are an awareness of impermanence, love of nature, fondness for poetry and music, and an appreciation of the quiet life. Four Huts features eleven brush paintings by artist Stephen Addiss.

    The Dalai Lama may be the only religious leader who can inspire the devotion of agnostics. Patrick French has been fascinated by Tibet since he was a teenager. He has read its history, agitated for its freedom, and risked arrest to travel through its remote interior. His love and knowledge inform every page of this learned, literate, and impassioned book.Talking with nomads and Buddhist nuns, exiles and collaborators, French portrays a nation demoralized by a half-century of Chinese occupation and forced to depend on the patronage of Western dilettantes. He demolishes many of the myths accruing to Tibet–including those centering around the radiant figure of the Dalai Lama. Combining the best of history, travel writing, and memoir, Tibet, Tibet is a work of extraordinary power and insight.

    But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia’s revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia.       Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, From The Ruins Of Empire is as necessary as it is timely—a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

    Looking at the reality behind these images, this Very Short Introduction illuminates the historical background against which the silk road flourished, shedding light on the importance of old-world cultural exchange to Eurasian and world history.On the one hand, historian James A. Millward treats the silk road broadly, to stand in for the cross-cultural communication between peoples across the Eurasian continent since at least the Neolithic era. On the other, he highlights specific examples of goods and ideas exchanged between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and China, along with the significance of these exchanges. While including silks, spices, and travelers' tales of colorful locales, the book explains the dynamics of Central Eurasian history that promoted Silk Road interactions--especially the role of nomad empires--highlighting the importance of the biological, technological, artistic, intellectual, and religious interchanges across the continent. Millward shows that these exchanges had a profound effect on the old world that was akin to, if not on the scale of, modern globalization. He also disputes the idea that the silk road declined after the collapse of the Mongol empire or the opening of direct sea routes from Europe to Asia, showing how silk road phenomena continued through the early modern and modern expansion of the Russian and Chinese states across Central Asia.Millward concludes that the idea of the silk road has remained powerful, not only as a popular name for boutiques and restaurants, but also in modern politics and diplomacy, such as U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's Silk Road Initiative for India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

    A simple beverage, served either hot or iced, tea has fascinated and driven us, calmed and awoken us, for well over two thousand years.The most extensive and well presented tea history available, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World tells of the rich legends and history surrounding the spread of tea throughout Asia and the West, as well as its rise to the status of necessity in kitchens around the world. From the tea houses of China's Tang Dynasty (618-907), to fourteenth century tea ceremonies in Korea's Buddhist temples' to the tea plantations in Sri Lanka today, this book explores and illuminates tea and its intricate, compelling history.Topics in Tea: The Drink that Changed the World include:From Shrub to Cup: and Overview.History and Legend of tea.Tea in Ancient China and Korea.Tea in Ancient Japan.The Japanese Tea Ceremony.Tea in the Ming Dynasty.Tea Spreads Throughout the World.The British in India, China and Ceylon.Tea in England and the United States.Tea Today and Tomorrow.Whether you prefer green tea, back tea, white tea, oolong tea, chai, Japanese tea, Chinese tea, Sri Lankan tea, American tea or British tea, you will certainly enjoy reading this history of tea and expanding your knowledge of the world's most celebrated beverage.

    The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the saviour of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people. The Libyan army officer who authored a new work of political philosophy, The Green Book, and lived in a tent with a harem of female soldiers, running his country like a mafia family business.And behind these almost incredible stories of fantastic violence and excess lie the dark secrets of Western greed and complicity, the insatiable taste for chocolate, oil, diamonds and gold that has encouraged dictators to rule with an iron hand, siphoning off their share of the action into mansions in Paris and banks in Zurich and keeping their people in dire poverty.

    The mystical aspects of Jesus' teachings are compared to those of teachers from three other world religions.

    Lilley spent much of his childhood in China and after a Yale professor took him aside and suggested a career in intelligence, it became clear that he would spend his adult life returning to China again and again. Lilley served for twenty-five years in the CIA in Laos, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before moving to the State Department in the early 1980s to begin a distinguished career as the U.S.'s top-ranking diplomat in Taiwan, ambassador to South Korea, and finally, ambassador to China. From helping Laotian insurgent forces assist the American efforts in Vietnam to his posting in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he was in a remarkable number of crucial places during challenging times as he spent his life tending to America's interests in Asia. In China Hands, he includes three generations of stories from an American family in the Far East, all of them absorbing, some of them exciting, and one, the loss of Lilley's much loved and admired brother, Frank, unremittingly tragic.China Hands is a fascinating memoir of America in Asia, Asia itself, and one especially capable American's personal history.

    Written in workbook style, complete with exercises, questionnaires, journal-keeping techniques, and affirmations, The Tao of Inner Peace translates the ancient Eastern philosophy into a plan for contemporary Western living. Diane Dreher, Ph.D., shows the way to: * Bring greater joy, fulfillment, and creativity to daily life * Heal the body and spirit * Build self-acceptance and self-esteem * Resolve conflict * Reverse negative cycles of emotion * Understand life as a process of changes and challengesWith its lively, demystifying approach, The Tao of Inner Peace shows how the Tao can be a powerful source of growth, inspiration, and peace.