Donald F. Lach Books

Praised for its scope and depth, Asia in the Making of Europe is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history. Volume I: The Century of Discovery brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" (The New York Review of Books). Volume II: A Century of Wonder examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.

<i>The Chinese Bell Murders</i> describes the Judge's exploits in the tribunal of Poo-yang early in his career. He has one case left over from his predecessor—the brutal rape-murder of Pure Jade, the daughter of Butcher Hsai who lived on Half Moon Street. Her lover has been accused and is on the verge of being convicted, but Judge Dee senses that all is not right and sets out with his lieutenants to find the real murderer. "So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."—<i>New York Times</i> Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.