Graham Earnshaw

Graham Earnshaw is a publisher and media businessman who has spent most of his career in the China world. But throughout, he has been writing songs, while also recording them and playing them live to anyone who will listen. The topics addressed in his song lyrics range from drinking tea to life and death, and raising a smile is clearly a priority with many of them. There are more than 100 lyrics collected here, plus two extended humorous poem sagas. Recordings of most of these songs are available on the main global music streaming platforms.

The Chinese written language is today the only language in the world which is non-phonetic, using pictures to convey meaning. The history of the characters goes back over 3,000 years, and their impact extends over most of East Asia. This book celebrates the breadth and depth of the thousands of characters that make up the script, starting with the most simple and commonly-used, presenting one word per page from a variety of different perspectives. It looks at the many different ways in which characters are pronounced, including in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, as well as Chinese languages and dialects, but also shows the breadth of meaning and the many different ways in which they can be written. The characters are capsules of history and culture, and this book provides a hint of the richness that attaches to each one.

The Golden Chersonese is a travel book written by Isabella Bird, the greatest travel writer of the 19th century. It recounts her travels in 1883 through southern China and into the interior of the Malay Peninsula—which in the age of Ancient Greece and Rome was known as the Golden Chersonese. It was ground-breaking reportage at the time because many of the places she visited were totally cut off from the outside world.

San Francisco is a crested jewel of the California Coast, a city which has been home to convicts and charlatans, millionaires and movie stars. The last stop on the journey West across America, or the first stop from Asia, San Francisco managed to remain Wild long after the rest of the United States was tamed. Tales of Old San Francisco bathes the reader in the rich mysteries of the city, from the Chinatown to Haight-Ashbury, from the gold rush to earthquakes, from crooks to rock stars, beatniks to Hippies, and the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz. The city's history brims with colorful characters and extraordinary events, and this book gives all the highlights.

The Taoist canon, the Daodejing, has been translated many times, but the version by the great translator James Legge is one of the best, but also one of the least known. This edition includes the full text of Legge's translation of the Lao-Tzu classic, along with the full Chinese text of the original.

Isabella Bird was the greatest travel writer of the late nineteenth century and she undertook her journey into western Tibet in the early summer of 1889, when she was already in her late fifties. But she was not the slightest bit fazed at the prospect of discomfort and possible death. And nearly die she did, at least once, before the trip was over. Isabella travelled over several months through some of the remotest places on the planet and her descriptions of the journey, the sights she saw and the people she met, transcend the times and continue to entertain and inform.

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there. He made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, a publishing sensation in London in 1704. Even the Bishop of London swallowed Psalmanazar's story and invited him to teach his (fake) Formosan language at Oxford University. The Formosa fantasy world he created, including elephants and camels, gold mines and outlandish religious sacrificial ceremonies, almost rivals Tolkein's Middle Earth, with the crucial difference that many people believed it to be real. This is the story of one of the great frauds in literary history.

Herbert Giles was one of the most prominent Sinologists of the late 19th century and early 20th century and China and the Chinese was in its era one of the best-selling and most authoritative books on the topic. Originally published in 1902, Giles' commentary on all thing Chinese, based on six lectures delivered at Columbia University in New York, still has a remarkable value for anyone trying to figure out the conundrum that is China. With a new foreword by long-time Chinese resident and observer, Graham Earnshaw.

The old Shanghai was a rich and cosmopolitan mixture of East and West and this engaging book offers a glimpse into that world through an assortment of photographs, newspaper clippings, cartoons,, stamps, and other collectibles.

How long would it take to walk across the world's most populous country? The Great Walk of China is a journey into China's heartland, away from its surging coastal cities, where the ripples of prosperity are only just beginning to be felt and many find themselves left behind. Through his conversations with the people he meets along the way, the Chinese-speaking Earnshaw paints a portrait of a nation struggling to come to terms with its newfound identity and its place in the world. Our wandering guide never backs away from sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable topics, and captures the essential kindness and generosity of the Chinese people with brilliant clarity.

This wonderful book is written as the diary of a one-year-old baby in an American expat household in Shanghai in the early 1920s. The world of old Shanghai, the life of expats in Asia - it is all reflected here through the eyes of the baby. Elsie McCormick, an American resident of Shanghai, nails the feel of the times with humor and insight.

Isabella Bird was one of the greatest travelers and travel writers of all time, and this is her last major book, a sympathetic look at inland China and beyond into Tibet at the end of the 19th century. In describing the journey, Isabella provides a rich mix of observations and describes two occasions when she is almost killed by anti-foreign mobs. It many ways, Isabella created the model for travel writing today, and this one of her greatest works.

This book, first published in 1909, in the autobiography of a man who witnessed and played a key role in 19th century China. Remarkably, the book was written in English – Yung Wing, born in 1828, was the first Chinese person ever to graduate from a major US college. He then returned to his own world, seeing it now with outsiders’ eyes. He brokered the purchase of China’s first arms factory from the US, and proposed widespread financial and social changes, which were the inspiration for the changes China went through in the 20th century. This is a unique and highly readable book.

For two years, Princess Der Ling was the favorite lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager Cixi in the imperial palace in Beijing. This book provides a unique and surprisingly intimate portrait of the Dragon Lady, who ruled China for 47 years, and brought the country to the brink of destruction. Der Ling refers to the larger political context on many occasions. But the best parts of the book are the small details. What emerges is an intimate portrait of the life and personality of the Empress Dowager, and a sense of the inner workings of the highly secretive world of the imperial palace.