Christopher G. Rea

Christopher Rea is Professor of Chinese and former Director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. Learn about his books and research at: https://asia.ubc.ca/profile/christopher-rea/ He is the creator of the Chinese Film Classics project, the world's largest collection of early Chinese films with English subtitles: chinesefilmclassics.org Subscribe to his YouTube channel @ModernChineseCulturalStudies BOOKS "Where Research Begins," co-authored with Thomas S. Mullaney, is a guide for the researcher starting a new project. Editions forthcoming in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. "Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949" is an essential guide to 14 Chinese cinematic masterworks of the black-and-white era. Chinese edition forthcoming. "The Book of Swindles" is a 400-year-old Chinese collection of stories about fraud, and especially the perils faced by merchants traveling in the southern reaches of empire during the late Ming dynasty. A second volume is under contract with Columbia University Press. "The Age of Irreverence" is a history of how China laughed its way into the modern age. It traces an unruly current in modern Chinese culture, following the stories of whimsical poets, vaudevillian entrepreneurs, renowned revilers, twee essayists, winking farceurs, and self-promoting jokesters--as well as the vocal opponents who tried to tame them. The Association of Asian Studies awarded "The Age of Irreverence" the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Post-1900 China) in 2017. A Taiwan edition was published by Rye Field (Maitian) in 2018; a PRC edition is forthcoming from Peking University Press. "The Business of Culture" is a study of cultural entrepreneurship that traces the rise of cultural personalities, tycoons, and collective cultural enterprises in China and Southeast Asia, from Tianjin and Shanghai to Hong Kong and Singapore. "Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts," is a translated collection of stories and essays by Qian Zhongshu, twentieth-century China's paragon of urbane wit and acerbic satire. "China's Literary Cosmopolitans" offers a comprehensive survey of the literary oeuvres of two of China's leading scholar-writers, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, and explains their contributions to the notion of literary cosmopolitanism. "Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Modern Chinese Celebrities" features fifty witty and idiosyncratic pen sketches, written in English by a Cambridge-educated author born in the Dutch East Indies, of Chinese cultural celebrities in the 1930s. "China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai" is a humor anthology that will answer the questions that have been keeping you up at night, such as: What is a father’s duty when he and his son are courting the same prostitute? And why should you never, never, never pull a hair from a horse’s tail?