History blog archive

Category: China

  • Lacquer as Art and Medicinal Material in Early Modern England

    Lacquer as Art and Medicinal Material in Early Modern England

    CHENG HE Look up the word ‘lacquer’ in an art dictionary, or on Google, and you usually find the word ‘varnish’; a sticky liquid applied to the surface of objects to form a shiny coating. The word can also refer to the objects coated with varnish themselves, which are sometimes decorated with additional materials like…

  • The British Army’s Chinese Auxiliaries in Arctic Russia

    The British Army’s Chinese Auxiliaries in Arctic Russia

    Yuexin Rachel Lin While conducting research in the Academia Sinica digital archives in 2017, I stumbled across a remarkable document: A list of Chinese workers, part of a labour company recruited by the Slavo-British Legion in the northern Russian cities of Murmansk and Archangel. The list includes every man’s name, age, hometown, and even the…