About
East Epoch is an independent journal about Chinese civilisation — its festivals, its arguments, its craft — written for readers in English.
It exists because most English-language writing about China is either journalism about the present or scholarship about the distant past, and very little of it explains how the two connect. A calendar that has been counting since the Han is still in use on a restaurant placemat. A tea bowl designed for a gesture nobody performs any more is still in museum cases. These are not curiosities. They are the working parts of a living system, and they are badly served by being treated as decoration.
What you will find here
- Festivals — what is actually being marked, and why on that date
- Philosophy — the arguments, taken seriously as arguments
- Arts & Craft — objects, and the constraints that shaped them
- History — the paperwork: who recorded what, and for whom
Who writes it
LinDagu writes and edits East Epoch. The interest started with excavated documents — the Qin and Han slips that turn out to be laws, almanacs and shopping lists — and widened from there into the calendar, the rituals built on top of it, and the objects that outlasted both.
Every article carries this byline. There is no second writer and no editorial board to hide behind: if a piece is wrong, one person is accountable for it.
How it is written
- Sources sit at the foot of each article. Where an excavation report or a primary text exists, it is preferred to a summary of one.
- Where scholars disagree, the article reports the disagreement rather than quietly picking a winner.
- Dates, names and numbers are checked against the record before publication.
- No trackers, no advertising, no affiliate links, no newsletter pop-up.
Corrections
When something here is wrong, it gets fixed rather than deleted. Substantive corrections are noted at the foot of the article with the date they were made, and the article’s updated date moves with them.
Send corrections to [email protected] — that address reaches the person who wrote the piece.
The video work lives on YouTube.