Wow a conference that gives speakers 20 minutes to present…so rare these days

I’m a little shocked and disappointed at how many “Middle Period” China scholars are still stuck in the Sinocentric mind frame. The entire discussion is “China this, China that”. Nobody, even those who claim to do comparative history, talks about the Global Middle Ages or the Chinggisid Exchange

Got interviewed by Kazakh TV

Hands down the fanciest conference I’ve attended

Air Astana’s inflight safety video features a scene of nomads (Mongols? Kazakhs?) planning a city siege 😳😂

Visiting Kazakhstan was not on the cards this year but I’m excited to be here!

NYT can’t even do a basic Wikipedia search….13th century smh

RIP Stephen Owen. A testament to what a fine chap, and an ordinary guy, is able to achieve, with just a little social and academic support. As Asian Studies are being decimated, let's strive for a better, more democratic world where every generation 10,000 Stephen Owens are able to flourish. 🍻

I hate dealing with incompetent travel agents…dudes booked me a 1.5hr layover in Seoul ON TWO SEPARATE TICKETS and expect me to to through customs in Korea and check in again for the next flight

Currently tracing maps for use in my monograph. Look at how much HK’s coastline has changed since the Yuan.

New Sui-Tang exhibit at the Hong Kong Museum of History! Over 100 pieces of some of the best stuff from various museums in Shaanxi on display until the end of August. Highly recommend!

Finally got around to read Alyagon's Inked. A wonderful book that is highly relevant to my own work. But I find it kind of problematic he keeps calling it a "penal-military complex", likely in an anachronistic attempt to make the book relevant to a modern audience and to modern issues.

Mainland burger chain Wallace 華萊士 is coming to HK. First store in Kowloon City Plaza 😂

As part of my lecture on Ming Taizu, I had students write their own instructions for a college dorm based on Taizu’s Placard for the People’s Instructions 教民榜文. Very creative results! Too bad this group didn’t manage to finish 😂

Lüshun Museum is seriously underrated. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture, built by the Japanese in 1917, and has a very impressive collection of bronzes and other artifacts

Some pictures I took from my Dalian trip. Hill 203 was the site of one of the bloodiest battle during the Siege of Port Arthur (1905-1906). Nogi Marusuke lost his son here (pic 4), one of the 8000 Japanese casualties during the battle to take the hill.

Come check out our panel on Saturday morning! And since AAS decided to once again drop the name of our discussant from the program, we have Yi Wang from SUNY Binghamton!

Genius move by Biden to block TikTok in the US on a hallucinated China threat has now resulted in the app being sold to a group of investors with close relations to Trump.

Congratulations to @superoldgranny.bsky.social's whose book The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service just won the @mesa1966.bsky.social's Albert Hourani Book Award #Mesa2025

Who is Tim Kaine @kaine.senate.gov trying to gaslight? He voted for the same thing that the Republicans offered a month ago. So it was 40 days for nothing.

Tim Kaine truly is an idiot. Federal workers were only fired because the government shut down. If that's the case you might as well have kept the government open in the first place. All they got out of it was the same thing Thune offered them in the first place, a promised vote on the ACA 🙄

The Fourth Middle-Period China Humanities conference in Hong Kong, summer 2026. Hope to see many of you there!

Wow Trump sounds so jealous he wasn't invited

We founded the U of Arizona Center for East Asian Studies three years ago with a US Dept of Education grant. Last Friday marked the end of year 3 of 4. Though the grant was for four years, we have not received word about year 4 funding. Without this support, we have no choice but to close down.

Officially started at HKU today!

Somewhat of a culture shock here in HK: so many people just loiter in furniture stores, sitting on the sofas and seats playing with their phones 😂

2026 will mark the fourth consecutive year that the study of Mongol Eurasia has been presented in separate panels at @imc-leeds.bsky.social. Here is the call for papers. Spread the word and come along! #mongolsky #tengri #medievalsky www.academia.edu/143008741/Ca...

What a sad reality we live in when the AAS has to put out a travel concern notice for people traveling FROM the US

Very sad news about Andrew West, an online friend to many of us on here, who had a rare combination of expertises and was always generous with advice on 'Phags-pa script wine advertisements, fake Yuan-dynasty passports, and less-explored reaches of the higher Unicode planes.

This week in weird translations in China, how about some "grains as hard" for breakfast?

Hah, anyone want to try the tea that those damn American colonists dumped into the harbor? 😂

I think secretly the Dems DO want this bill to pass, because just like Dobbs and abortion, this will help them tremendously in the midterms

This place is a paradise for historians of China

Xi is going to show Trump how it's done: www.scmp.com/news/china/m...

What a clown

Another big AAA game beautifully set in a Chinese setting. This time after the fall of the Tang. www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6Iw...

Would you like to read some books on Buddhist philosophy or "the Buddhism"? 🤔

This is Nanshan 南山 Park in Jinzhou 錦州. It was here that the Battle of Songjin was fought between Qing and Ming forces between 1639-1641. The mountain is also called 罕王殿山.

Another Chinese toilet sign. According to this Chinese people don't flush and foreigners don't throw away their trash 😂

The mosque in my hometown. The domes have been demolished and replaced with Chinese architecture, no Arabic is allowed, and the crescent is now on display instead

I love this translation 😂

Goodbye California and USA! Ready for the next adventure in Asia and Hong Kong!

Sneak preview - before booking opens - of the rather amazing line-up of speakers for a Chinese art conference in Oxford this September. I'm hugely honoured that colleagues want to do this, it will be a memorable gathering. #arthistory #China

Well that didn't take long

Boundless idiocy.

Bibliographies of Feng Menglong's Sanyan stories and Ling Mengchu's Erpai stories are now on the Ming History English Translation Project. Hope it's of use for historians of Chinese literature! Courtesy of Dylan K. Wang (SOAS).

Wait, I thought he said it was foreign countries that paid the tariffs?

Can you imagine if the Dems narrowly won the House? They would have lost their majority simply by virtue of older members dying. What's so controversial about electing younger members?

Anyone going to be at AHA next year?

A very stable genius: #Winning