A fascinating reflection on family, identity, and belonging.As someone who has studied history for much of my life, I have found the past fascinating. But it has always been some grand and even intimidating universe that I wanted to unpick and explain to myself.Wang Gungwu is one of Asia’s most important public intellectuals. He is best known for his explorations of Chinese history in the long view and for his writings on the Chinese diaspora. With...

Does home have to be a country or a city?... Or is home this house or that? We have been fortunate.... We seemed always to have been home.Wang Gungwu’s account of his university education in Singapore and the UK, and the early years of his career as an academic in Malaysia captures the excitement, the ambition, and the choices of a generation that saw it their responsibility to build the new nations of Southeast Asia.The exploration of the emotional and intellectua...

The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. China's global outlook is shaped by its regional experience, first as a pre-modern Asian center, then displaced by Western-oriented modernization, and now returning as a central producer and market in a globalized region. Developments since 2008 have been so rapid that future directions are uncertain, but China's presence, population, and production g...

This book is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Wang Gungwu. Professor Wang is not only a great historian on Chinese history in general and the Chinese overseas in particular, but has much wider influence through remarkable domain crossing, namely spatial crossing characterised by geographical straddling between inside and outside of China, temporal crossing from the ancient past to the contemporary, inter-disciplinary crossing from history to the social sciences, and intellectu...

The name Wang Gungwu is iconic. He is one of the most eminent scholars and historians in Asia today and is renowned for his scholarship on the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and the history and civilisation of China and Southeast Asia.A well-known scholar aside, Wang Gungwu has been an inspiring educator since he embarked on an academic career first at the University of Malaya and subsequently at the Australian National University before making his mark as vice chancell...

What can you remember of your childhood? This was the question put to a number of ‘seniors’ asked to start from as far back as they could get, and go as far as the onset of adolescence. Their answers are in this unusual book.Topics naturally include their physical self; their parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, playmates, teachers, classmates, pets; their manners, training, rewards and punishments; food; play, toys; likes, dislikes; schools, kindergarten, elementary; outings, ...

Chinese merchants have traded with Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning and sometimes settling, during their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, over mountains and across deserts, linking China with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace. Chinese Circulations provides an unprecedented overview of this trade, its scope, diversity, and complexity. This collection of twenty groundbreaking essays foregrounds the commodities that ha...

No Borders: Journeys Across Islands and Continents is the autobiography of eminent historian Professor Wang Gungwu. Respected the world over for his interpretation of the Sinic civilisation, he delves into his own annals to tell his story. From vantage points in Malaya, London, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, he has witnessed the trials and tribulations of China over the last 80 years — even as he devoted himself to studying its past. This he accomplished alongside a career defined by ...

Professor Wang Gungwu is the Institute of Policy Studies' 12th S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore. This book is an edited collection of his four IPS-Nathan Lectures, delivered from November 2022 to March 2023, and includes highlights of his question-and-answer segments with our audience.The Southeast Asian region is home to a set of diverse local cultures and distinct local identities. In this lecture series, Professor Wang looks at how great civilisations came into conta...

This collection of essays by and about Wang Gungwu brings together some of Wang's most recent and representative writing about the ethnic Chinese outside China giving the reader a deeper understanding of his views on migration, identity, nationalism and culture, all key issues in modern Asia's transformation. The book collects interviews, speeches and essays that illustrate the development and direction of Wang's scholarship on ethnic and diasporic Chinese.

What is China? While many perceive it as a rising power challenging Western dominance, eminent historian Professor Gungwu Wang posits that the country has no ambitions on that front. In this illuminating book comprised of edited transcripts of selected lectures, it offers his interpretation of the answer. He traces China's roots as an ancient, borderless Sinic civilisation with a distinctive past that has been a source of strength. Following the establishment of the concept of a nation-sta...

Humans have been on the move for millennia. They have done so slowly as well as quickly, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes transported by force, often relocated at great cost in lives, but they have always moved. Over the centuries, improved transportation has eased the movement, even in the face of man-made or natural obstacles. But in modern times, migration has accelerated and its reach has become truly global.Whether it is Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany, Japanese Nisei in Seattle, Fi...