The summer issue of the Asian Affairs Journal is now available online – click here for the contents page. Some articles are free to view by all visitors (as indicated); others are only available for free to RSAA memers/JSTOR/Taylor & Francis/Academic subscribers. Highlights include “Yemen and the Huthis: Genesis of the 2015 Crisis” – an…
Seb Rumsby is the holder of an RSAA Sir Peter Holmes Memorial Award. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit Hanoi’s Thăng Long Water Puppet Theatre, located on the bank of Hoà n Kiếm Lake next to the Old Quarter. Water puppetry has become an iconic representation of nation, and is now seen as an…
Helen Crisp reports on a lecture to the RSAA last week by Dr Jenny Balfour-Paul. Jenny Balfour Paul gave a fascinating talk to the RSAA based on her new book, Deeper than Indigo, describing how she tracked the life of Thomas Machell, a mid-19th century indigo planter and traveller, after being directed to his journals…
Dr Amit Ranjan, Research Fellow at the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi, comments on the recent border accord between India and Bangladesh, and asks whether it could be a model for solving other boundary disputes between India and China, and India and Pakistan. With the forthcoming implementation of the Land Boundary Agreement…
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Asian Affairs Journal, we are giving free access to 25 historic articles published in the Journal by such luminaries as Sir Wilfrid Thesiger, BBC correspondents Frank Gardener and Mark Tully, Freya Stark, Frances Wood, and Bill Deedes. The articles are available here until the end of June.
Manuel Martorell is a Spanish journalist and one of the founders of the national daily El Mundo, where he held the posts of Editor-in-Chief and Foreign Editor. He has been covering the Kurds since 1983 and has published three books on the subject and produced a number of television documentaries. 8 February 2015. This will…
Richard Fell is a former diplomat; he was latterly British High Commissioner in New Zealand, but served in Vietnam earlier in his career. He is the Book Review Editor of Asian Affairs. Forty years ago, in April 1975, North Vietnamese forces defeated the army of the South, captured Saigon and ousted the South Vietnamese government….
Kenneth C. Walker, an academic and former diplomat who sits on the Editorial Board of the Asian Affairs Journal, takes issue with articles on Hong Kong and China in the March 2015 issue of Asian Affairs. He puts a different point of view here, and Dr Stephan Ortmann, author of the article on the Democracy…
James Willsher was until recently co-publisher of the Times of Central Asia, and has lived in Bishkek. I become an acquaintance of an Uighur student in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, a decade ago; he pronounces his ethnic nomenclature as Oi-ghur, not Wee–gerr, as news reports do at the time of Uighur riots taking place in western…
Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones MBE, RSAA Archivist, writes on the gift by Kathleen Hopkirk, widow of the author Peter Hopkirk, to the RSAA of a 19th century notebook written by George Hayward, one of the early players of the Great Game. He fell among thieves was a favourite Victorian poem by Sir Henry Newbolt, recited in drawing…
