In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence. The riots are the backdrop of Lindsay Pereira’s latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Vintage Books, 2023). The titular Rao is a retir...
Jan 11, 2024•33 min•Ep. 169
Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote: “There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich were reduced to scrounging for beans or wheat, the poor for chaff or rotting garbage. Being able to buy a few pecks of chaff or bark was ecstasy.” The Ming Dynasty collapsed two years...
Jan 04, 2024•39 min•Ep. 168
On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead. The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international support...
Dec 28, 2023•43 min•Ep. 167
In August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best. But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried to f...
Dec 21, 2023•35 min•Ep. 166
Like countless other migrants from China, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers–Wong Foon Chuck and Leung Hing–travel across the Pacific to make a life for themselves in San Francisco. Unlike many of their peers, they don’t stay, instead traveling south, to Mexico–in part to escape growing anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States. They thrive, at least initially, in Mexico, as Hugo explains in his book America's Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream (Hurst, 2023). They assimilate...
Dec 14, 2023•47 min•Ep. 165
In 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz left Paris on a train bound for China. She was on her way to her fourth wedding, and her fourth husband: An American investment banker named Chester Fritz, who’d proposed after a whirlwind meeting earlier in Shanghai. Bernardine is then forced to find herself things to do in interwar China–and her husband isn’t helping much. That’s how Susan Blumberg-Kason’s newest book, Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China (Post Hill Press: 2023), s...
Dec 07, 2023•40 min•Ep. 164
Post-independence India had a big problem–about 40% of its land wasn’t, well, India. Instead, this land was in the hands of the princely states: Rulers who had signed agreements accepting the rule of the British Empire, while getting a relatively free hand to rule their local jurisdictions. And these weren’t small states. Hyderabad–whose ruler made noises about independence, at least initially–had a larger income than Belgium, and was bigger than all but twenty UN member countries. But the power...
Nov 30, 2023•59 min•Ep. 163
Earlier this month, Toho Studios released “Godzilla Minus One”—the 37th film in the now almost seven-decade-old franchise. Godzilla has gone through many phases over the past 70 years: symbol of Japan’s nuclear fears, cuddly defender of humanity, Japanese cultural icon and, now, the centerpiece of another Hollywood cinematic universe. But it was 1954’s Godzilla that launched the whole thing, with a story written by Japanese author Shigeru Kayama. He also wrote a novelization for the movie and it...
Nov 23, 2023•39 min•Ep. 162
The northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow British colony of Burma and covering a large segment of India’s northeast. Today’s Assam is much smaller: First partition cut Assam off from the rest of India, with just a tiny “chicken neck” of land connecting the state with India proper. Then decades of tension between the Assamese and minority groups led to new states being created from within its bor...
Nov 16, 2023•50 min•Ep. 161
Silk—a luxury fabric, a valuable trade good, and a scientific marvel. This material, created by the bombyx mori silkworm, has captivated artisans for centuries—and it captivated science presenter and writer Aarathi Prasad, who was studying the scientific potential of silk for new treatments. That started Aarathi on a journey to explore the world of silk—not just the traditional silk we use today, but all its different varieties: wild silks, made from less famous moths; sea silks, made from mollu...
Nov 09, 2023•52 min•Ep. 160
It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools. But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that followed—would be a mistake, argues Toby Matthiesen. Toby, in his most recent book The Caliph and the Imam...
Nov 02, 2023•43 min•Ep. 159
For the third anniversary of the Asian Review of Books podcast, I wanted to do something a little different today—and talk about another one of my hobbies, video games. For video game players of—let’s call them the elder millennial set and older—there’s something special about the final dozen or so years of the 20th century. The Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, the Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStation: it was a period of technical advancement and creative experimentation that led to classics st...
Oct 26, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 158
In 1987, Chris Stowers ditches his dull job in the UK and embarks on a trip throughout the Asia-Pacific, following countless other adventurers traveling with just a backpack and a miniscule budget in what he calls the “golden age of travel.” In his many adventures around the region, two particular stories stand out enough for Chris to turn into a book, Bugis Nights (Earnshaw, 2023). The first is his encounter with an older German woman in the Himalayan mountains, with a penchant for flirtation a...
Oct 19, 2023•40 min•Ep. 157
Sae, former journalist turned a young mother of two in 1992 Seoul, is waiting for her husband, an engineer for a small construction company. He’s late. A neighbor rushes down with the news: a high-rise downtown has collapsed, trapping hundreds inside–the same high-rise that Sae’s husband is working. That disaster, which parallels the real-life Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995, starts the story of Hannah Michell’s novel Excavations (One World: 2023). Sae and the book’s other characters ...
Oct 12, 2023•37 min•Ep. 156
Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention. These missions to Burma flopped among the Buddhist majority, but won converts among its minorities: the Karen, the Kachin, and others. Alexandra Kaloyonides covers these missions in Baptizing Burma...
Oct 05, 2023•37 min•Ep. 155
It’s one of the strange artifacts of history that Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, was once controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. In 1832, then Sultan Sayyid Saïd bin Sultan al-Busaidi made the island his capital, with the empire split in two upon his death: one based in Muscat, one based in Zanzibar. As Seema Alavi notes in her history, Sovereigns of the Sea: Omani Ambition in the Age of Empire (India Allen Lane, 2023), the Omanis extended their reach across the Indian Ocean, preserving thei...
Sep 28, 2023•54 min•Ep. 154
How do we talk about China? It’s a question every analyst, academic, policymaker, and reporter probably needs to ask themselves. Is China, as some of the hawks claim, an existential threat to the world order? Is it on the verge of aggressively taking the number one spot—or is it on the verge of collapse? Is it a dangerous military threat or is it—as some Chinese commentators claim—an entirely benevolent power? Navigating this increasingly black-and-white conversation is Kerry Brown, leading Chin...
Sep 21, 2023•40 min•Ep. 153
The Book of Esther, one of the historical books in the Torah and the Old Testament, is known as a story of community, discrimination, and human ingenuity. It’s core to the Jewish holiday of Purim, with singing, feasting, and other merriment. And it’s unique as one of the few books in the Bible that doesn’t mention God. At all. But it’s also useful as a historical document, as Lloyd Llewellyn Jones writes in his most recent book, Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther: Achaemenid Court Culture in ...
Sep 14, 2023•37 min•Ep. 152
When we think of Nepal, we think of its high Himalayan mountains, or maybe the highlands of Kathmandu. But somewhere between a quarter and a third of the country is nothing like that: marshy, forested, malaria-infested swampland, along the southern border with India. This is the Tarai, the most productive region of Nepal—and also the focal point for the once-Kingdom of Nepal’s conquest. Maximillian Mørch writes about the region’s history in his latest book Plains of Discontent: A Political Histo...
Sep 07, 2023•47 min•Ep. 151
The characters in Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience (Pantheon, 2023), his debut short story collection, are like many in India or in Indian communities in the United States: Working hard and enduring hardships to try to get a better life for themselves. They don’t always succeed—and even those that do lose something along the way. That tension between hope and reality is at the core of many of Injam’s stories, whether it’s a recently migrated Indian family panicking that a white boy ...
Aug 31, 2023•36 min•Ep. 150
For much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting–with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship–even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The region of northeast India has long posed a challenge for its leaders, both local and national. G...
Aug 24, 2023•36 min•Ep. 149
When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse. Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I ...
Aug 17, 2023•46 min•Ep. 148
The legacy of the businessmen who built Hong Kong are all over the city. Bankers work in Chater House—named after Paul Chater, the Armenian businessman behind much of the city’s land reclamation (among many other things). The Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel sits along Mody Road, named after Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, a Parsi immigrant who helped found the University of Hong Kong. And that’s not including figures like Robert Hotung, the half-British, half-Chinese magnate who found more power in his Chines...
Aug 10, 2023•53 min•Ep. 147
When meeting an expatriate friend on my first trip to Dubai, the host at the restaurant where we were meeting quickly ushered me up to the second floor. For foreigners, he said—before handing me a wine list. Dubai’s tolerance of alcohol is a more formalized version of Muslim tolerance—and clandestine drinking—of alcohol that dates back to its very inception, despite religious commands to the contrary. Professor Rudi Matthee tells that story in Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door: A History of...
Aug 03, 2023•44 min•Ep. 146
The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as e...
Jul 27, 2023•44 min•Ep. 145
It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all. 500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer. Robert Hillenbrand’s work collects all these disparate illustrations and puts them together in one book, which puts “The Gre...
Jul 20, 2023•40 min•Ep. 144
As a member of the U.S. National Security Council, Victor Cha flew over the DMZ separating North and South Korea in 2007, following negotiations with Pyongyang. He writes in Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023)—his latest book with co-author, and previous podcast guest, Ramon Pacheco Pardo—about how he was struck by the environment on both sides of the border. The north had barren fields, no cars, and windowless homes; the south, gleaming skyscrapers in the globa...
Jul 13, 2023•50 min•Ep. 143
Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, ...
Jul 06, 2023•43 min•Ep. 142
Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories (Scribner: 2023) jumps from character to character, location to location, time period to time period. Two cooks working for Madame Chiang-Kai Shek. A dancer, exiled to Shanghai’s Wukang Mansion. Three women, gathering in a French cathedral, finding strength in each other decades after the protests in Tiananmen. These six interconnected stories make up this debut novel from accomplished poet and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who joins us today, sharing on w...
Jun 29, 2023•36 min•Ep. 141
In the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make themselves available for conscription, and pushed forward by prophecies of the imminent return of Christ, over a hundred families travel in a grueling journey, eventually building a settlement and church that locals still remember fondly today. Over a century later, the author Sofia Samatar comes across this story when exploring her own Mennonite her...
Jun 22, 2023•35 min•Ep. 140
