Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

In 1995, the People's Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a...

Between 1949 and 1997, Hong Kong transformed from a struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial capital. Made in Hong Kong delivers a new narrative of this metamorphosis, revealing Hong Kong both as a critical engine in the expansion and remaking of postwar global capitalism and as the linchpin of Sino-U.S. trade since the 1970s. Peter E. Hamilton explores...

The second volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, this volume tells the story of the Great Leap Forward—Mao's utopian attempt to propel China economically and socially into the twenty-first century by mobilising his nation's greatest asset: its disciplined manpower. The effort produced economic disaster and...

The Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet in 1959 after its occupation by China and established a government in exile in India. There, Tibetan leaders aimed to bring together displaced people from varied religious traditions and local loyalties under the banner of unity. To contest Chinese colonisation and stand up for self-determination, Tibetan refugees were asked to shed regional allegiances and...

When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernisation profoundly destabilised cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era. Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature...

In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination...

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the "loud" (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the...