Camphor Press Ltd: 24 books

The year is 1624. In southwestern Taiwan the Dutch establish a trading settlement; in Nagasaki a boy is born who will become immortalized as Ming dynasty loyalist Koxinga. Lord of Formosa tells the intertwined stories of Koxinga and the Dutch colony from their beginnings to their fateful climax in...

You Don’t Know China takes a wrecking ball to misconceptions old and new. Each of the twenty-two chapters debunks a particular myth on topics ranging from history and economics to language and food. Learn the truth about feng shui and Chinese medicine. Find out whether Marco Polo really went to...

Kinmen, Matsu, Orchid Island, Green Island…The outlying islands offer an extraordinary combination of traditional culture, some of Taiwan’s finest old architecture, and beautiful natural scenery, yet most of them are still an unknown quantity to both locals and foreign visitors alike. The Islands...

A mysterious windfall upends Lena Haze’s almost-comfortable middle-class American life. Her husband Marcus has inherited some prime Hong Kong real estate, a building in Wan Chai – the bustling, gentrifying heart of the city. It comes with a catch, though: the building must not be sold. With financing...

Green recruit PFC Timothy Cole is fresh off the boat in the GI paradise of Okinawa. Looking for adventure, the “cherry boy-san” finds his first true love – a beautiful Okinawan nightclub hostess called Kimiko. It’s the spring of 1963 and the subtropical island is still under U.S. military...

Everlasting Empire (Yongwonhan chekuk) is a Korean historical novel written as a murder mystery. The narrator frames the main story with his “discovery” of a 150-year-old manuscript. Because of problems verifying the authenticity of the manuscript, the narrator offers the book not as genuine...

Are war clouds gathering in Asia? Will China make good on threats to invade Taiwan? What would this conflict mean for America and the world? Exposing internal Chinese military documents and restricted-access studies, The Chinese Invasion Threat explores the secret world of war planning and strategy,...

On May 17, 1951, Dwight Rugh — a Yale-in-China representative for twenty years and one of the last Americans remaining in China after the Communist Revolution — was taken from his home in Changsha to a mass rally where he was denounced as an imperialist spy. Twenty-three years later, his daughter...

Oil for the Lamps of China (1934) was a best-selling novel when it was first published, just a few years after Pearl Buck’s *The Good Earth *(1931). The hero of the story is a keen, young American businessman who wants to bring “light” and progress to China in the form of oil and oil lamps,...

Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Europe and America since its debut in 1904. It has also inspired a global-level debate about whether the tragic heroine of the opera, Cho-Cho-san, was based on a real-life model.  Starcrossed looks at this controversy...