A network of seaside and hill resorts created by foreigners gradually took shape in China during the late Qing and Republican periods. Such places were both a touristic novelty in China and the focal point of a type of tourist experience that was modern in a variety of ways. This article examines tourist accounts, tourist guidance material, and other sources, in an attempt to understand the major habits, norms, perceptions, and meanings of tourism to the seaside and hill resorts as a new type of tourism in China, from its inception to the downfall of the Nationalist government in 1949. For this purpose, it explores three aspects that were central to resort tourism: its strong association with an idea of refuge, its identification as an ideal experience, and its important physical component. While the article aims at an overall analysis of this new element of tourist culture in China, it also seeks to locate it within the wider contexts of tourist culture and of the broad motivations and anxieties of this period.

The memory of the foreign involvement in the Taiping war lasted long after the fall of the Taiping capital at Nanjing in 1864. The events were commemorated by various actors, Chinese and foreign, from the end of the war until the end of the treaty-port century in 1943 when the right to extraterritoriality was abrogated. This article explores the commemorations of the foreign role through three media: the issuing of medals to foreign fighters, the building of memorials to the foreign dead, and the writing of histories of the events. Across these media, different interest groups used the foreign interventions as a proxy for continuing debates about the role of foreigners in China and about China's place in the world. More broadly, the commemorations of the role of foreign fighters in the Taiping war is a case study in the transnational politics of memory. The memories of the war were contested or commemorated not just by states, but also by individuals and groups whose views often diverged from those of their government. By tracing how memories of the war were remembered and forgotten, we can trace the insecurities of different interest groups over time and their perceived power relative to each other.

The article examines a wave of teachers’ strikes that spread across China during the autumn, winter, and spring of 2014–15. Looking at event data and social media coverage of the wave, it discusses how social media enabled protesters to carry out media-savvy campaigns that involved both online and offline tactics, draw inspiration from claimants in faraway protest sites, and emulate tactics, slogans, and symbols from other locations. The episode indicates that claimants in contemporary China are utilizing social media to break the geographic bounds of localized protests and, while falling short of nationally coordinated protest movements, are able to generate widespread, cross-regional protest waves that place greater pressure on subnational authorities to give in to protester demands. These cross-regional protest waves present a third category of ‘widespread’ protests in China that are distinct from parochial/localized protests and national protest movements.

This article will evaluate how the experience of participating in the Tabligh Jama‘at affects the formation of Chinese Muslims’ subjectivities in relation to their local, national, and global communities by using data gleaned from interviews with participants in the movement and participation in Tabligh activities in and around Xining, Qinghai Province. Intensively structured practices make the movement seem restrictive, but observing the variety permitted in individual performances and autonomy allowed by grassroots governance reveals that the movement imbues participants with a high degree of agency. A sense of belonging in a pious transnational community grants individuals the means and confidence to reshape their everyday behaviours and comportment in a way that transcends traditional sectarian structures of authority and conflicts with the predominant materialism of modern China. The movement's inward focus and apolitical stance make the movement a subtle and peaceful means of tacitly undermining both atheist state and Muslim hierarchies, reinventing oneself, and expressing membership in the global ummah.

Asia is the world's most linguistically diverse continent and its diversity largely conforms to established global patterns that correlate linguistic diversity with biodiversity, latitude, and topography. However, one Asian region stands out as an anomaly in these patterns—Tibet, which is often portrayed as linguistically homogenous. A growing body of research now suggests that Tibet is linguistically diverse. In this article, we examine this literature in an attempt to quantify Tibet's linguistic diversity. We focus on the minority languages of Tibet—languages that are neither Chinese nor Tibetan. We provide five different estimates of how many minority languages are spoken in Tibet. We also interrogate these sources for clues about language endangerment among Tibet's minority languages and propose a sociolinguistic categorization of Tibet's minority languages that enables broad patterns of language endangerment to be perceived. Appendices include lists of the languages identified in each of our five estimates, along with references to key sources on each language. Our survey found that as many as 60 minority languages may be spoken in Tibet and that the majority of these languages are endangered to some degree. We hope our contribution inspires further research into the predicament of Tibet's minority languages and helps support community efforts to maintain and revitalize these languages.

The archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian ‘houseboys’. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of ‘houseboys’ worked as a ‘visual culture’ of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony.

This article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism also contains a strand which is underpinned by nationalist biopolitics. While we find his writings deeply entrenched in racist colonial stereotypes about native Africans, they are also shaped by nationalist biopolitics that were emerging during decolonization, which led him to strongly condemn prominent groups of Indian immigrants in Africa as well. Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections on the ambiguities of decolonizing discourses provide a useful springboard for a fresh reading. This preliminary reading of Pottekkatt's African travelogues, however, complicates Chakrabarty's observations about both pedagogic and dialogic modes of decolonizing discourses. It also points to the importance of the regional, and not the national, in the possibilities of South-South dialogue—to which Pottekkatt's accounts point, if only in a cursory manner.

This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination.

This article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).

In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India, and the Gulf, this article explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur. Through attending to the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of labour migrants, the article argues that bridging the material and the imagined is critical to understanding not just patterns of migration, but also the subjective experiences of migrants themselves. Through a descriptive ethnographic account, involving journeys with woodworkers over one and a half years, the article explores the ways in which migration, its effects, and connections are shaped by the imagination, yet are also simultaneously active in shaping the imagination—a process that is self-perpetuating. Emerging from this, the article gives attention to continuity at the material, personal, and more emotive levels. This runs counter to research that situates migration as rupturing or change-driving within both the social and the subjective. These continuities play out in complex ways, providing comfort and familiarity, but also enabling the imaginations of migrants to be subverted, co-opted, influenced, and structured to meet the demands of labour markets both domestically and abroad.