The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empire--a millennium and a half in the making--was suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the...
The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empire--a millennium and a half in the making--was suddenly thru...
From the epicentre of Delft in the Netherlands, Timothy Brook takes the paintings of Johannes Vermeer and uses details of them as a series of entry points in the widest circles of world trade and cultural exchange in the 17th century.
From the epicentre of Delft in the Netherlands, Timothy Brook takes the paintings of Johannes Vermeer and uses details of them as a series of entry po...
In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London business lawyer, political activist, former convict, MP and the city's first Orientalist scholar. Largely ignored, it remained in the bowels of the library, until called up by an inquisitive reader. When Timothy Brook saw it in 2009, he realised that the Selden Map was 'a puzzle that had to be solved': an exceptional artefact, so unsettlingly modern-looking it could almost be a forgery. But it was genuine, and what it has to tell us is astonishing. It shows China, not...
In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London business lawyer, politica...
