Let's Save ...

Tracing its origins back to 1822 in Whampoa, the Mariners’ Club in Hong Kong was established to meet a specific need for an Anglo-Chinese society defined by that most dubious of activities, seafaring.

In On Saving Face, Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one’s place in society as well as one’s relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, a

How did lay people in old China save their lives when dealing with acute or chronic health issues? Conventional medicine was costly and might not have been an option for many. Instead, people in villages and towns relied on remedies drawn from a woodblock-printed illustrated booklet called the Seventy-Two Therapies, first published in 1847. The goal of this book is to foster an appreciation of China’s long tradition of folk remedies. Each folk remedy is illustrated by a page from the circa 1860s woodblock edition of the Seventy-Two Therapies which the author used for translation. He also added a historical and interpretive analysis to expand on each therapy and to place it in the context of contemporary thinking, aiming at academics and readers interested in the everyday lives of common people in pre-1950 China, and in the folk medicine wisdom inherited from the past. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The 72 specific disease

Battle of the Artisans tells the story of Tangtun, a conflicted, artistic twelve-year-old in 5th-century BCE China, who sets out to save his father from a killer. He crosses wits with his macho father and a vengeful king, armed thieves, and disgruntled villagers, and in the process, discovers new powers that rock his Bronze-Age world. In the end, what matters most is not Tangtun’s artistic abilities or his father’s muscles and might but that they realize the strength of acting together.This novel portrays the making of the very real Bells of Marquis Yi, a 2500-year-old National Treasure of China. No one knows exactly why these bells were made, but Bennett provides a well-researched and persuasive solution to the mystery through her story of Tangtun and his village on the Yangtze River.Every historical novel is an imagined introduction to a topic and a time. Battle of the Artisans invites readers to explore further the world and the science of the bells of Marquis Yi, to learn more abou