Russia Engages the World, by Cynthia Whittaker, was published in 2003 to accompany an exhibition at the New York Public Library that same year. Rereading…
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Month: November 2025
Sikhs and the Partition of India, the Raw Deal—Part 2
Two books shed some light on the questions I posed in Part 1. I had asked why the British failed to accommodate the Sikhs by…
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Britain’s War Story Revisited
Alan Allport’s two-volume history of the Second World War from the perspective of Britain—Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941…
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Invented in China
Francis Bacon said the three greatest inventions are paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. All three were invented in China by the Chinese.…
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The Jesuit in the Ming Court—Part 3
The Jesuits from 1579 to 1724 mounted a sustained mission to spread Christianity to China during the reign of the Ming Wanli emperor (1563-1620) to…
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The Jesuit in the Ming Court—Part 2
Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia is an expert on Catholicism history. He is best known for his 2010 biography A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, Matteo Ricci.…
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The Jesuit in the Ming Court—Part 1
China had 200 million people at the end of the 16th century. It was the dream of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, to convert…
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Sikhs and the Partition of India, the Raw Deal—Part 1
If you read the papers recently, you will read that Sikh pilgrims from India had to apply for visas from Pakistan to visit the birthplace…
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Tibet and Photography
Tibet in history has two schools of thought. One views Tibet as a feudalistic backwater where religion and rule by theocracy imposed by the elites…
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