I'm plotting a story that begins a few years before Kublai Khan invaded China. The name of the main protagonist isn't important for now, since he's not human and isn't expected to have one and will only be addressed with nicknames for a while; but I do need to at least find a name for some of the people surrounding him ( Read more... )

This question is party preemptive, as this is an item that is highly likely to arise many times over the course of this book. Recently I have been banging my head against Google trying to find a map of Qufu (Lu state, future China) in the 6th century BCE. What I need is the inside of the city: its layout, internal roads, etc., and what I am ( Read more... )

Hi!

I desperately need figures on female POWs in Japanese captivity in World War II. I've been scouring the net but not even on Wikipedia I seem to be able to find a site the lists figures for how many female POWs there were and which nationalities they were of, maybe even broken down to the individual camps (but just numbers and nationalities would ( Read more... )

I have a question about the Chinese children's song (三只老虎 or Three Tigers). I'm writing a fic for an exchange (hence the anon) which contains a character who was a peasant girl in Hebei Province, China in the 1950s-1960s. (Born 1957 and left in 1967) and want to know if she could be familiar with this song. (Or in other words, when did this song ( Read more... )

I've been able to find scads of information about how one was expected to address the Emperor himself (particularly servants), but very little information on how his children, the Empress Consort and military generals might address him in conversation (although I have assumed thus far that military generals would likely address him in much the same ( Read more... )

I have a character who's a prostitute right around the fall of the Han Dynasty, ~220 AD (just before the Three 'Kingdoms' period). The problem is, I have no idea why or what type of prostitute ( Read more... )

I'm going crazy trying to find pictures of the interiors of the diaolou of Kaiping. I'm trying to get a picture of what the space looks like ( Read more... )

Hey, I'm editing a story set in Hong Kong and I have a probably impossible question. I don't even know what to search for this one. I've tried "founding dates of consulates" and "consulates in hong kong" and "embassies in hong kong" and variations thereon, but no go ( Read more... )

An pair of questions: any help gratefully received.

Q1) Murderous Methods in a Darkroom
And by 'darkroom' I obviously mean a photographic darkroom rather than a 'shot in the dark.' The setting is Shanghai, c.1923; the necessity - bumping someone off, and since I'm no expert, I'm looking for novel lists of death in a private/home darkroom ( Read more... )