This paper compares the experiences and conclusions of two imperial investigations into diasporic Chinese communities of the Asia-Pacific in the 1880s. These were the official investigations undertaken by the specially appointed Qing Commissioners Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong, and the unofficial mission carried out by the British translator, orientalist, and diplomat Edward Harper Parker. At a crucial moment in the history of Chinese immigration, these two parties undertook almost simultaneous expeditions to investigate the conditions of the vast Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia and Oceania. Both missions engaged with some of the most contentious issues surrounding Chinese migration of the era. In particular, I focus on their documentation of the brutal exploitation of trafficked Chinese workers on the tobacco plantations of Deli, in the Dutch East Indies, as well as the rising tide of white supremacist efforts to exclude Chinese migrants from British Australia. Arguing for bold new approaches to imperial engagement with Chinese diaspora, both parties faced significant resistance to their work. Using Chinese, British, Dutch, and Australian sources, this paper traces these journeys to reveal unexpected commonalities between two very different imperial systems, demonstrating the surprisingly global reach of the late Qing state. Moreover, it uses the materials created by these missions to paint in-depth portraits of two Chinese communities and situate the period’s “Chinese Question” of migration to white settler colonies in its broader diasporic context.

Stylistic variation has been a central concern in the study of prehistoric pottery in central Europe. In this paper, we approach stylistic variation from a visual cognition perspective, focusing on the effects that stylistic attributes of vessels have on patterns of attention. A free-viewing eye-tracking experiment was conducted using pottery vessels from central Germany spanning from 5500 to 1 bce. Our results show that, among modern observers, decorative patterns and motifs primarily guide visual attention over attributes like shape or luminance. Attentional patterns were associated with variation in decorations: vessels with spiralled or punctured motifs (Early–Middle Neolithic) tended to attract more attention, whereas the undecorated (Younger Neolithic), less decorated, burnished or linear motifs (Bronze Age), or standardized and symmetrical patterns (Late Iron Age) of later styles, were less visually engaging. Considering the archaeological context of pottery stylistic changes in central Germany, a provisional explanation is that increased standardization and specialization and the general displacement of interest towards other crafts reduced the importance of pottery for visually communicating important socio-cultural cues, producing fewer captivating designs. This study does not claim equivalence between modern and past populations, but demonstrates the potential of eye-tracking techniques for investigating visual-cognitive responses to stylistic change.

This article discusses the accessibility of sensory experience in archaeological research by proposing an approach that articulates the role imagination plays in the investigation of empirical data from the distant past. Building on interdisciplinary work in sensory studies, this article argues that sensory experiences are both culturally constructed and biologically mediated, emphasizing how the dynamic interplay between perception and materiality reveals the values embedded in ancient sensory-based desires. The author concludes by applying the theoretical and methodological approaches discussed throughout to a case study on ancient Egyptian head cones, demonstrating how archaeology can uncover the complex and consequential nature of ancient sensory experience. Sensory archaeology may advance not only by developing new ways to answer questions, but by reconsidering how we ask them.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Malaya found itself entangled in complex geopolitical and ideological struggles, where local and global forces intersected and clashed. The British colonial authorities depicted Chinese student-led, left-wing activities through the lens of the Cold War, framing them as communist insurgency and their artistic expressions as propaganda tools. However, a closer examination of the artistic practices of Chinese youth during this turbulent era reveals a plurality of motivations and ideals that transcended strict ideological binaries. This article offers a cultural and historical examination of the ascent and decline of the art societies—the Yi Yan Hui, its successor the Equator Art Society (EAS), and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), as embodied by its inaugural principal Lim Hak Tai. By tracing the personal and artistic journeys of pivotal artists and scrutinizing their aesthetic approaches, the article aims to challenge the long-held binary opposition in the art world of decolonizing Singapore and to shed new light on the on-ground experiences of Chinese youth struggling against Cold War tensions. Utilizing a visual lens, it highlights the agency of left-wing youth and socially engaged artists and reconsiders how these individuals navigated the intertwined realities of Cold War geopolitics and their imagined ideals of independent Singapore and Malaya.

This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to the intersection of memory, narration, and migration as a fruitful theoretical framework to analyse Refugee Tales. These are the publications of the Refugee Tales Project, fostered by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group with the goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The tales give voice to the refugees’ experience of forced displacement, asylum claim, and detention, and most of them are collaboratively narrated by the refugee and an established writer. My contention is that the exercise of (re)telling inherent in Refugee Tales can be examined in the light of the concept of communicative remembering, considering how the refugee and the writer engage in a dialogic co-construction of the refugee’s autobiographical memories. In this context, the article aims at exploring how (re)telling and remembering go hand in hand in a selection of narratives from the latest volumes of the series: Refugee Tales IV (2021) and Refugee Tales V (2024). Both include the experience of COVID-19 as a context or as content of remembering, and so the pandemic becomes one more factor in the process of giving voice and listening to the refugees’ testimonies of indefinite and arbitrary detention in the UK.

This article examines the endurance of timbering and rafting along the upper Yellow River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a case study of Fernand Braudel’s ‘social time’ of that critical section of the waterway, marked by intensified commerce and shifting political dynamics. The Muslim consolidation of midstream Ningxia, anchored in upstream Linxia, exemplified how Hui economic dominance intertwined with territorial control. These networks, later repurposed to support China’s resistance against Japanese imperialism, were abruptly disrupted by mid–twentieth-century dam construction and socialist collectivisation. Beyond economic history, the article interrogates historiographical silences surrounding Hui economic territorialisation. While external observers, including Republican officials and Japanese strategists, acknowledged Hui commercial monopolies, state historiography under the People’s Republic of China has often downplayed them to maintain narratives of ethnic harmony. Analysing cinematic representations across different eras of the twentieth century, the article further argues that film serves as a counterpoint to official narratives, offering an alternative medium where Hui agency and economic territoriality are articulated and contested. By bridging economic history, historiography, and visual culture, this study highlights the political stakes of ethnic commerce and the ways in which Hui identity has been shaped and reshaped across different political regimes.