Born in Amsterdam in 1919, Carl Barkman studied Sinology at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, with Russian as a subsidiary subject. He wrote a doctoral thesis The Return of the Torghuts from Russia to China, which was published in 1955 in Hong Kong (Journal of Oriental Studies).
Read more…This is not a history book, but a novel, and a historical novel only in the sense that it is a mixture of fiction and historical reality; and partly autobiographical. After all that has been published about Mao Zedong’s China, its author attempts to give his own vision of Mao’s years of decline.
Read more…“What you have begun, you must finish, and what you’re looking for, find it!”, with these words and his best wishes my lama friend bade me farewell in Peking (Beijing) in March 1948, when I started on a trip to Inner Mongolia with my French colleague, a sinologist like me.
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