A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
I purchased this children’s educational card game in Penang, Malaysia in 2023. Its name is 汉字组字扑克, which roughly translates to “Chinese character combination poker.” This box set did not come with any instructions, but its name and design suggests it’s a kind of “扑克…
Continue readingHistorical artifact: 汉字组字扑克 (Chinese character combination poker)
Many moons ago, Krish Raghav raised some serious concerns about a Radiolab episode on the emergence of the rock music scene in China. “Framing China’s musical lineage as ‘Revolutionary operas to John Denver’ is such a frustrating half-truth,” he said, “[and] positing ‘western’…
Continue readingCorrecting the record (and oriental gaze) on Radiolab’s China Mixtape episode
88 Bar began life as a blog for one of the Institute for the Future’s research programs. This was back in 2006, and our blog was called Virtual China. With it, Lyn and I set out to document our “exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.” Many of our posts had an excited “look…
Tom Mullaney (professor of Chinese history + technology at Stanford) is running a Kickstarter campaign around exhibiting and preserving the fascinating history of the Chinese typewriter. One highlight of his exhibition will be centered around how Chinese engineers cracked the puzzle on creating a typewriter…
Continue readingThe History of Chinese Typewriters Needs Your $upport
In A Borrowed Life, esteemed Taiwanese writer-director Wu Nien-jen pays tribute to his working-class father by telling the latter’s life story. His story was made into an award-winning movie way back in 1994 (also called A Borrowed Life), and now it has been retold in comic form. The graphic novel has a grand, sweeping, filmic quality…
Continue readingA Borrowed Life: a superb comic memoir of a flawed Taiwanese patriarch
The third volume of “Understanding China through Comics” continues Liu’s epic quest to chronicle all of ancient Chinese history in comic form. As with the first two volumes, the book zips through Chinese history, in this case 907 to 1368 AD, with text and illustrations.
Liu spends more of the third volume explaining Chinese cultural ideology and geopolitical context than…
Above: An excerpt from a six-page comic about Cheng I Sao.
Below: Excerpts from a CNN mental floss article about her:
The most successful pirate of all time controlled a fleet of more than 1,500 ships and upwards of 80,000 sailors — and she did it all without the help of facial hair.…
Continue readingCheng I Sao: the biggest pirate in history was Chinese and female!
This is a follow up of our review of Volume 1.
Understanding China through Comics, Volume 2 picks up where its predecessor left of – on a hyperspeed journey through Chinese history starting with the Three Kingdoms era. As before, Liu employs illustrations and diagrams to explain events and lighten the…
Continue readingBook review: Understanding China through Comics (Vol 2)
Lei Feng. He’s like a 20th century, Chinese Cincinnatus (minus the part about being an emperor), a humble servant of the people. An early member of the Communist youth corps, Lei joined the People’s Liberation Army and died in…
Continue readingLearn from Lei Feng — The Meme
“Understanding China through Comics” is part one of a three-book series about the ancient history of China. This volume covers the years 2697 BC – 220 AD, starting from the Yellow Emperor through the end of the Han Dynasty. Its focus is on contextualizing China for an outsider and its comic format makes it a smooth and…
Continue readingBook review: Understanding China through Comics