On January 5, 1858, when British and French forces stormed Canton, the British seized a sizable quantity of archival materials belonging to the yamen of high functionaries of Kwangtung. After the documents had served their initial purpose of helping the British in the administration of Canton and in their subsequent dealings with the Chinese, they were stashed away and became mixed up with a much larger bulk of Chinese-language manuscripts in the Chinese Secretary's Office of the British Legation at Peking. For over a century, these important documents of the Opium War period remained unrecognized and were seldom exploited by scholars.
The collection as it stands today contains two thousand items of varying length ranging from a single page to multi-ts’e works, totaling nearly 10,000 folios. Although a few of the documents date back to the last quarter of the 18th century, the majority fall within the first half of the 19th. David Pong presents an extensive and carefully researched list of these documents, as well as an index, a bibliography, a concordance, and a critical introduction. With the aid of this invaluable research guide to a very important collection of archival materials, the Public Record Office has been able to reclassify its rich Chinese-language collection, and scholars will now be able to use these materials far more effectively in the future.
All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of it
Concurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-historical times. Aaron Jaffe delivers a timely corrective to post-critical modes of reading that demonstrates the dangers of forfeiting critical suspicion.
Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
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