Food and empire
Where other cultures mark the passage of time with significant political events or military battles, Chinese historians do so with significant banquets.
Anatomy of a neighbourhood
Understanding the inner workings of a city.
Behind the Pax Sinica
China's trying to build a new international order, but it may not be what you think.
Trop picks: Bird's Nest Fern
Exploring parallels between the bird's nest fern, a vascular epiphyte, and apartment-dwelling homo sapiens.
Men, don't shake your hips
Why is gracefulness a quality only associated with women?
The salt librarian
Why not ditch your generic table salt for something locally harvested and far more healthful?
Trop picks: Kumquat
Kumquat. Kumquat. Kumquat. Kumquat.
What it feels like for a girl
What is the feminine mystique?
The baddest one of them all: Empress Dowager Cixi
How a whiffet of undistinguished antecedents plotted and schemed her way to the top is a lesson in bad galing for all the aspiring bad gals out there.
Trop picks: A picnic
Why don't you have a picnic?
Get to work
Reimagining work as torture.
Jazz
Part of a beautiful series by Mumbai-based artist Gajanan Kabade, in which he captures the city in all its lights, moods and colours.
Sail on, black ships
You know that old chestnut about how Japan is so weirdly wonderful because of its several hundred years of self-imposed isolation? Not so true after all.
Identity is an ongoing conversation.
India is no more a Hindu country than China is a porcelain print dress. Some realities are so complex, they don't lend themselves to oversimplification.
The rock 'n' roll poet of the Dior dress
The story of the dress doesn't end with Zhang Xu's stomach ache. "Crazy Zhang," as he was known, was the enfant terrible of Chinese letters.
Lost in translation
When the tables are turned.
The first comic strip?
To the snobs who don't consider comic books art, consider this: it has classical origins. An introduction to the first comic strip.
Whither the city?
When America was modernizing, its artists embraced modernity, warts and all. Now Asia is having its own modern moment, but our artists remain markedly ambivalent about modernity.
Stop complaining about your lawyers
Maybe your lawyer isn't that bad after all.
Manchu princess, Japanese spy: Yoshiko Kawashima
How different is a person allowed to be? Serious threats to established systems are either co-opted and neutralised or completely destroyed.