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More evidence the China building boom is ending
A couple months ago, I wrote about my anecdotal impression from a recent trip to Fujian province in China that the great building conversion from farmland to skyscrapers — or, if you prefer, peasant...
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The last moment in history to see the tulou
On an assignment for Le Monde d’Hermès earlier this year, I flew half-way around the world to a small Chinese village called Xiashi in rural Fujian province to look at a bridge. The river it spanned...
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Goodbye, Earthlings
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il is dead and almost no one can figure out what to say about that. He was in power 17 years, succeeding his father (and North Korea’s founder) Kim Il-sung in 1994, and...
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The China boom is over. That could be good
On 18 April last year, following a trip to Fujian province, I wrote that the great China infrastructure build out — the most important economic story of the last quarter century — was coming to an...
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Cultures of Independence, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2007
I came across this book in Phnom Penh in 2007 and couldn’t put it down. It is a scrap book, of sorts, for a Cambodia that few realize ever existed: in the 1950s and 60s, newly independent from...
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Vietnam Chante revolutionary songs, Paris, France, c1967
When I wrote recently about the book Cultures of Independence that I found in Cambodia some years ago, it was the Khmer pop record covers that intrigued me so it seemed a kind of fate that I would...
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The ‘unexpected’ China slowdown was entirely foreseeable
The headline in today’s New York Times reads “After Barreling Ahead in Recession, China Finally Slows.” It cites a warning to this effect from the World Bank and quotes Diana Choyleva, a China...
View ArticleAn ex-Googler pokes China in the eye
Slate has a fascinating interview with Andrew McLaughlin at Tumblr, the blogging platform that has become popular/trendy for its social network layer. The most interesting part of the interview...
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Hand-drawn ryokan map, Kyoto, Japan, 1990
This is the map I drew of a district in Kyoto in 1990, a pre-internet, pre-smartphone age when (absent a guidebook) the only way I could ensure I’d find the route to my ryokan was to sketch out the...
View ArticleThe Japanese village alive with dolls
Across Japan, villages are dying: the population is aging rapidly, the young move to the cities and the countryside empties. The trend lines are similar in many other countries but never in history...
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Li Xiaodong’s modest, radical architecture
For a moment, I thought the innovative library in rural China profiled in an article in the New York Times today was the very one I’d visited four years ago on an assignment for Le Monde d’Hermès but...
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Lijiang, China as it used to be
I am early, and late, to this video about Lijiang in the southwest corner of China along the Tibetan plateau. It was produced by the BBC nearly a quarter century ago and somehow I have only heard...
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Warrior-gymnasts in Tonkin, Vietnam, 1909
I bought this unusual carte postale at the marché aux puces Vernaison, just north of Paris. It dates from April 1909, stamped in Hanoi, and titled “Tirailleurs Tonkinois à l’ecole de Gymnastique.” The...
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Bali ruined, again
Monkey Forest Road in Ubud 1989-2016, photo by Sean Rocha The first time I went to Bali was in 1989, when I was twenty, and I thought it was magical. When I returned two years later, in 1991, I thought...
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On the streets of Hong Kong in 1938
I lived in Hong Kong for three years in the early- to mid-1990s and the pace of change was so rapid that we were all conscious of an Old Hong Kong that had been there once before but of which little...
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