Recent debates over Taiwan’s identity as Chinese, or part of China, focus on the awkward arrangement by which governments in Taipei and Beijing both claim sovereignty over the island. In 1947, questions of national identity were also rampant in Taiwan, but the fault lines were very different.
The Buddhist monk Xuanzang covered 10,000 miles on foot and horseback, from China to India, and passed through parts of what are today Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal. When he returned home, he received a hero's welcome.
If Chinese commanders had observed the experiences of French and American forces in Vietnam, they seem to have learned few lessons.
At the end of World War II, more than 100,000 American soldiers were stationed in China, and tens of thousands still remained by 1947. One newspaper alleged that American forces were responsible for one Chinese death every day. And then there was the Shen Chong rape case, which galvanized popular opinion against the American presence.
In 1908, Qing customs officials boarded the Japanese steamship Tatsu Maru to seize weapons allegedly earmarked for revolutionaries. The ship's captain objected. The drawn-out diplomatic dispute that followed made international headlines.
An extraordinary book by an extraordinary historian.
At its height, the Ming dynasty had more than a thousand ocean-going vessels, including large "treasure ships" equipped with luxury cabins and weaponry. At the helm was Zheng He, an admiral who has fascinated historians in recent decades.
On January 15, 1935, a warlord’s palace in the remote mountains of Guizhou was the setting for a meeting that, over the course of three days, changed China’s political course for decades.
The tactics employed in the movement, which ostensibly targeted corruption among business owners, foreshadowed the Chinese Communist Party's dark excesses in the decades to come.