This article is part of a large online project — End of Empire — launched by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS). The idea is simple: To describe day by day the 100 days immediately after Hiroshima. This article, written by David Askew, is reproduced with the kind permission of NIAS. Check out End…
One week before Christmas in 1944, nearly 200 American planes raided the Chinese city of Wuhan, dropping 500 tons of incendiary bombs. Thousands of Chinese lives were lost in this incident, which has received very little attention in the intervening decades. Here is a rare account of this tragic event, by Stephen R. MacKinnon, history…
It may have cost 40,000 lives, but the US firebombing of the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 1944 is one of the least known chapters of World War 2. Here is a rare account of this tragic event, by Stephen R. MacKinnon, history professor at Arizona State University and author of the book…
Recently we carried an article on Manchukuo visas by Neil Kaplan, reproduced with his kind permission from his website Our Passports. As a follow-up, we bring a number of examples of these precious historical items, also from Neil’s great website.
This article by Neil Kaplan about visas from Manchukuo was first published on his website Our Passports. It is reproduced here with his kind permission. September 18th 1931 was a crucial date in the history of modern China. From this month onwards, starting with Asia and ending with Europe, events would spiral from a regional conflict into a world…
It comes as a bit of surprise: A tablet with a link to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, set up in front of the German Naval Memorial in the Baltic town of Laboe. It’s all the more surprising since the memorial, originally erected to commemorate German sailors killed in World War I, has seen itself as a…
The Australian War Memorial in Canberra is one of the world’s main museums documenting mankind’s most destructive activity. Naturally, the War in the Asia Pacific takes up a large part of the collections, and even though Australia and China were mostly engaged in different corners of the war with Japan, there are overlaps. Here…
This is the fifth in a series of articles introducing Chinese veterans of the Second Sino-Japanese War, some of whom are now about 100 years old. The fact that a broader public can now finally learn their stories is all thanks to the Youxin Foundation, which looks after many of the old heroes. The copyright of…
This is the fourth in a series of articles introducing Chinese veterans of the Second Sino-Japanese War, some of whom are now about 100 years old. The fact that a broader public can now finally learn their stories is all thanks to the Youxin Foundation, which looks after many of the old heroes. The copyright of…
The marine’s main base was the Special Naval Landing Force’s headquarters, a building taking up two house blocks and capable of housing thousands of troops at a time. It is testimony to foreign powers’ ability to roam at will in Shanghai in the 1930s that the building was actually located outside the area legally considered…
