History

News

24 Jan 2025
From an ancient Buddhist symbol representing the wheel of law to an enduring icon of self-reliance and resistance in the early twentieth century, the charkha, a hand-driven spinning wheel, and the chakra, the flat-spoked wheel with which it is often conflated, have lived many lives in South Asia.
Great Barrier reef
15 Jan 2025
Tsuyoshi Watanabe uses corals to understand the environment of the past and what it can tell us about people living then.
02 Dec 2024
Perched on a hill overlooking the village of Thiksey in Ladakh, Thiksey Monastery is one of the most expansive Buddhist complexes in India. Notable for its vast collection of murals, sculptures and rare manuscripts, this 15th-century religious site is heavily fortified and was once an administrative centre.
04 Nov 2024
For centuries, gold and silver ornamentation was used to embellish textiles. Gota work is one such technique, which incorporates these precious metals in appliqué form. Read more about the history of this craft, which is inspired by Mughal and Islamic art, and found on bridal and ceremonial garments across northern India.
31 Oct 2024
Japanese language learning brought prosperity and persecution for women in Korea
18 Oct 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are how a chatbot prompt can send hackers your personal information, the discovery of tiny crystals first predicted almost 100 years ago, and how microbes influence our brain and our planet.
11 Oct 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are how our brain makes us love or hate spicy food, using maths to predict stock market trends, and a battery that can make electricity from the atmosphere on Mars.
08 Oct 2024
An unprecedented rapid increase in anthropogenic fingerprints around 1952 in the global strata reflects the point in time when humanity began to overwhelm the Earth system
03 Oct 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are how hungry ants push birds out of their habitat, how eroding a mountain makes it taller, and how our cells carry insights into origin of life.
The renovated Wing On Plaza at Lingnan University has a flagpole area, where the flag-raising ceremony was held for the first time on National Day.
01 Oct 2024
Lingnan University held a flag-raising ceremony today (1 October) to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The ceremony took place at 10:30 am at the University’s Wing On Plaza. It was attended by Prof Raymond Chan Hon-fu, Vice-President (Academics) cum Provost and Lam Man Tsan Chair Professor of Scientific Computing, senior management, faculty and students, who all gathered to honour the occasion.
01 Oct 2024
A luminary of modern Indian art, Jamini Roy is celebrated for his experiments with Bengali patachitra painting traditions and his brightly hued, bold and two-dimensional depictions of human, animal and mythological forms. Discover the legacy of this 20th-century artist, whose works have been declared national treasures of India under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972.
27 Sep 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are how AI helped uncover mysterious Nazca lines, a battery made from a glowing crystal, and how 1 in 3 children are nearsighted.
13 Sep 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are a computer chip inspired by our brains, the potential link between asthma and diabetes, and how Japanese eels flee their predators after being swallowed.
09 Sep 2024
A rare artefact of 19th-century tawaif culture, The Beauties of Lucknow is a fascinating photograph album from colonial South Asia. Compiled in 1874, it consists of 24 portraits of courtesans from Awadh in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Read more to know how Darogah Abbas Ali, the photographer behind it, reimagined Mughal-era muraqqa traditions and colonial portraiture to create one of the earliest works of nostalgia on the tawaifs of Lucknow.
05 Sep 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are how a live pig was operated on by a surgeon thousands of kilometers away, how an asteroid caused a massive ancient impact, and the day the sun grew dark 6,000 years ago.
26 Aug 2024
A board game made of cloth or paper and featuring a series of squares, snakes and ladders, with the latter functioning as karmic devices, gyan chaupar was not only a popular recreation in ancient India, but also an important spiritual tool. Literally translating to the ‘game of knowledge’ this game instilled lessons on attaining moksha or salvation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Read more about gyan chaupar’s many variations in medieval India and how it gradually evolved into a children’s board game at the turn of the twentieth century.
16 Aug 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are the ‘holy grail’ of insulin treatments, a new species that ate like a walrus, and keeping cool in smart, adaptive clothing.
12 Aug 2024
Since the early 1900s, Indian women artists have consistently raised sociopolitical issues with their aesthetic and thematic choices. While painters like Amrita Sher-Gil were among the privileged few to have received global recognition in their lifetime, the works of Sunayani Devi, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Bhuri Bai and others have been overlooked in favour of their more celebrated male peers. Discover the rich legacy of feminist consciousness in modern Indian art and how it has been shaped by gender justice movements and caste reform in recent decades.
09 Aug 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are a new fossil from our tiny ancient relatives, H20 in moon crystals, and a shiny new starfish found off the coasts of Japan.
30 Jul 2024
A historic folk tradition from Bengal, patua combines storytelling with scroll painting. Performers of this tradition travel from one village to another, reciting tales from Hindu epics like the Ramayana, and from local Santhal mythologies, bringing them to life by unravelling vivid scroll paintings illustrating these stories. Discover the ancient history, decline and revitalisation of this folk tradition, and how the government has used it to promote family planning in postcolonial India.
24 Jul 2024
Fragrant, sweet, exotic and golden-yellow, the mango is an apt metaphor for summer in South Asia. Domesticated over 4,000 years ago, it has been a symbol of wealth, desire and luxury in the subcontinent. Peel back the layers of this iconic fruit to reveal the reasons behind its enduring popularity and read more about mango’s significance through art objects and discover how artists and craftsmen have tried to capture its essence in all its glory.
05 Jul 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are small robots with human brain organoids, new findings about the ancient Denisovan culture, and how to create the perfect environment for bad bacteria.
30 Jun 2024
A 90-acre garden complex in the heart of New Delhi, Lodi Gardens is one of the city’s most-loved public parks. Surprisingly, it is actually a tomb complex — dotted with mosques and domes from the Sayyid, Lodi and Mughal eras. Explore the park’s cultural and geographical significance by tracing the garden's history from the 15th century to the present, and read about the iconic figures and architectural styles associated with the monument.
21 Jun 2024
Associated with the forest and healing herbs, the goddess Parnashavari is revered for her ability to cure illnesses, contagious diseases and epidemics. A folk deity for the Shavari or Sabara indigenous community of central and eastern India, she was later integrated into the Buddhist pantheon and continues to be venerated in the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet. Learn about her iconography and the symbolic objects and weapons she wields.
Exposing the “disaster-scape” in Kyushu. The yellow band in the soil is the “disaster layer” of compacted ash. The layer was found during the excavation of the Aihara No1 site, 150km to the north of the K-Ah epicenter (September 2020). It is about 70 cm thick and would have been about 1.5 to 2.0 meters meters when the event first happened. (Photo: Junzo Uchiyama, the first author of the paper)
17 Jun 2024
A research paper titled ‘Disaster, survival and recovery: the resettlement of Tanegashima Island following the Kikai-Akahoya ‘super-eruption’, 7.3ka cal BP’ co-written by Hokkaido University GSI’s Professor Peter Jordan has been awarded the prestigious Ben Cullen Prize 2024 for making an “outstanding contribution” to World Archaeology.
13 Jun 2024
In the same way that the number of rings in a tree can tell us its age, the characteristics of rocks such as breccia can tell us about the history of a region. The breccia around Ichinokawa Mine (located in Ehime prefecture) are of particular interest, as the mine is located south of the Median Tectonic Line. Researchers at Tohoku University uncovered how breccia can provide valuable evidence to estimate the energy of past earthquakes in the area.
30 May 2024
Renowned for its gleaming silver and gold inlay against dark metallic backgrounds, Bidriware metal work derives its name from the town of its origin — Bidar in southern India. While the earliest documented presence of Bidriware is in a 1625 Deccani miniature painting, the craft is believed to have originated in the 14th century under the patronage of the Bahmani Sultans. Bidriware's allure ensured that it was valued and patronised by royalty across the Indian subcontinent in the late medieval and early modern period. Read about this living tradition, and the processes behind the creation of Bidriware.
The 2023/24 Territory-wide Junior Secondary Chinese History and Culture Quiz is successfully concluded.
18 May 2024
The finals of the 2023/24 Territory-wide Junior Secondary Chinese History and Culture Quiz, organised by the Hong Kong Government Education Bureau (EDB) and co-organised by the Hong Kong and South China Historical Research Programme (HKSCHRP) of Lingnan University, were held on campus today (18 May). Officiating guests were Ms Teresa Chan Mo-ngan, Deputy Secretary of the EDB,and Prof Lau Chi-pang, Associate Vice-President (Academic Affairs and External Relations) and Co-ordinator of the HKSCHRP. ProfVincent Leung Sueh-han, Head and Associate Professor of the Department of History at Lingnan University, Prof Tam Ka-chai, Associate Professor of the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), Dr Fan Wing-chung, Senior Lecturer of HKBU, and Dr Law Yuen-han, Lecturer I at the Department of History at HKBU, judged the competition.
17 May 2024
Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are how negative rumors affect children, a new fiber-sorting method, and an ancient Egyptian “anomaly”.
13 May 2024
Late in the sixteenth century, a master artist from the Mughal emperor Akbar’s atelier adopted the technique of using monochromatic tones with highlights of colour or gold. Known as ‘nim qalam,’ Persian for ‘half pen,’ or ‘siyah qalam’ for ‘black pen’, this technique was eventually adopted by artists in the Deccan, and later the Rajput courts. Although its precise origins remain uncertain, nim qalam continues to be used by contemporary South Asian artists working on manuscript painting.

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Researchers

Nehaluddin Ahmad (born in 1952) is a public figure and prominent academician from India who served as a law professor at the Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Faculty of Law, Sultan Sharif Ali Islamic University (UNISSA) in Brunei Darussalam
Zheimie H. Zamri is a Bruneian Senior Research Assistant and Tutor, pursuing a Ph.D. in Law at UNISSA, with research interests in human rights and legal social issues.
I'm currently an adjunct professor at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila. I crafted a course called Art-Science Thinking based on my dissertation on Culture as Transformative Innovation: Filipino Care in the Practice of Family Medicine. Since 2017, my consultancy & studio has been collaborating with the Dept. of Science & Technology in the Philippines.
Doctoral Student 博士生, Faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum 波鴻魯爾大學東亞學系 (Germany)
Trần Thị Vân Dung was born in Vietnam in 1978. In 2006, she graduated from Hue University with a Bachelor of Pedagogy in Linguistics. In 2013, she received a Master of Vietnamese Literature from the University of Sciences, Hue University. Currently, she is undertaking a Ph.D. course in Vietnamese Literature at Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam. She has been the principal lecturer at Thua Thien Hue Pedagogical College since 2013. She sits on the reviewer board of Horizon Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences Research, a prominent scholarly peer-reviewed leading journal.
Southeast Asia Media Studies Association
University professor with 20 years of experience in Thailand's secondary and higher education sectors.
I am Grace Joy Palmes Betonio currently taking Bachelor or Secondary Education Major in Filipino. I am in my 4th year.
DOCTORAL CANDIDATE AT JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY, NEW DELHI, INDIA
Hadiyanto is a researcher at Universitas Jambi in the area of social science, particularly in education. In 2021, He was invited as a speaker AIbotic Series, European Week, and Edutech.
City University of Hong Kong (CityU)
Picture of Dr. Tsui Lik Hang
Dr.Tsui Lik Hang specializes in middle period Chinese history and culture, as well as the digital humanities. He is currently writing a book on Song dynasty epistolary culture and planning another one on digital humanities in China.
Universiti Malaysia Sabah
Dr. Connie Cassy Ompok is an early childhood education expert and a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah. She Started her career in Early Childhood Education as a preschool teacher (2004-2007), a lecturer in early childhood education at the Malaysian Institute of Teacher Education (2008-2016) before serving as a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at UMS (2016 until now).
I'm Senior Lecturer at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffiield. I research and teach about post-developmental Japan in the Asia-Pacific region.
Picture of Sachiko Kawai
My research on how medieval Japanese royal women strategized to overcome disparity is relevant in a time when COVID-19 has exposed ongoing problems tied to the vulnerability of (Japanese) women and gender stereotypes (e.g. recent remarks by Tokyo Olympics chief Mori).
Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM)
Dr Heo is currently a senior lecturer at the Department of Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.
Universiti Malaysia Sabah
Sanen Marshall is a US Fulbright Scholar (2017) and a UK Chevening Scholar who teaches at the Centre for the Promotion of Knowledge and Language Learning, Universiti Malaysia Sabah.

Giants in history

Through her iconic stories featuring fictional scenes from the history of the Philippines, language teacher and academic Genoveva Matute (3 January 1915 – 21 March 2009) helped strengthen the Filipino identity.
Hwang Hye-seong (5 July 1920 – 14 December 2006) was an expert on Korean royal court cuisine, the knowledge of which she dedicated her career to keeping alive. Formerly an assistant professor of nutritional science, Hwang met the last kitchen court lady in the Joseon Dynasty Han Hui-sun and, from her, learned about the culinary traditions of the royal court.