Camphor Press Ltd: 24 books

Vibrant, modern, and drenched in history from centuries as a gateway to China, this garden city of two million is a hidden gem. When the author, Robert Barge, arrived in Xiamen to take up an engineering position, he was expecting a typical gray Chinese city; instead, what he found left such an impression...

Recently occupied by the Nationalist Chinese regime, Taiwan in early 1947 was a powder keg. Anger at the corrupt misrule of the new government erupted into protests and riots, which quickly became an island-wide uprising. The response from the Nationalists was brutal and overwhelming – a weeks-long...

American-style democracy and capitalism come to the sleepy village of Tobiki in this uplifting comedy of cultural conflict set on Okinawa at the end of World War II. The hapless Captain Fisby, with the help of his local interpreter, Sakini, is implementing the U.S. Army’s Plan B, which includes...

Vern Sneider’s *A Pail of Oysters *is the most important English-language novel ever written about Taiwan. Yet despite critical acclaim, this exciting and controversial book has long been unavailable to readers. Unlike Sneider’s previous novel, the humorous bestseller The Teahouse of the August...

Little known today, Instructions for Chinese Women and Girls has a storied place in Chinese history as the first educational text for women and a standard reference for them from the first century AD all the way into the nineteenth. Polymath author Ban Zhao was perhaps China’s greatest female...

Bu San Bu Si—"not three not four." To the Taiwanese people, it's an idiom used to describe the punks, lowlifes, and losers of society—the ones who don't fit in, and never will. It's what they would call someone like Xiao Hei. Talented and self-destructive, young and reckless, Xiao Hei...

Everybody wants to think they're the only foreigner living in China. Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside tells the story of two American English teachers in rural China. Daniel, a young college graduate, is enjoying his seemingly idyllic life in the small town of Ningyuan when Thomas,...

Formosa Betrayed is the authoritative account of the Kuomintang takeover of Taiwan in 1945 and the 1947 "228 Incident" in which tens of thousands of Taiwanese people – an entire generation of intellectuals and leaders – were massacred by the new government. Kerr was there, knew Taiwan well, and paints a compelling picture of Taiwan's tragic past.

Peng Ming-min was imprisoned by the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan during the White Terror era for subversion. He was released from prison but still under house arrest when he evaded his minders and fled the country, first to Sweden and then to the US, where he led the fight for democracy in his homeland....

Destination Chungking is the fictionalized autobiography of best-selling writer Han Suyin. It tells the love story of a young Chinese couple during the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Childhood friends Han Suyin, a medical student, and Tang Pao, an officer in the Kuomintang Army, cross paths...

In one of history’s most audacious hoaxes, a mysterious George Psalmanazar arrived in England in 1702 claiming to be a native of the island of Formosa. His *An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, *published two years later, was a sensation, and the author became a minor celebrity,...

Until the early twentieth century, Taiwan was one of the wildest places in Asia. Its coastline was known as a mariners’ graveyard, the mountainous interior was the domain of headhunting tribes, while the lowlands were a frontier area where banditry, feuding, and revolts were a way of life. Formosan...

Cathay is a collection of classical Chinese poems by Li Bai, interpreted by the American poet Ezra Pound. Though Pound didn’t speak Chinese, he based his translations on notes by Ernest Fenollosa, in the process setting a benchmark for modernist translations. The interpretative nature of Pound’s...

Deep within the heart of China, far from the glamour of Shanghai and Beijing, lies the Chinese every-city of Huaishi. This worker’s paradise of smog and concrete is home to Party Member Yang Wei, a mediocre man in a mediocre job. His content life of bureaucratic monotony is shattered by an encounter...