China history with footnotes and bite.
Barbarians at the Gate is a China-focused conversation show where academic curiosity meets bar-table timing. Episodes move from Chinese character pedagogy and Qing court scandals to Shanghai horse racing, travel, poetry performance, and arguments over what history can actually prove.
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Barbarians at the Gate is a conversational China podcast built around history, culture, language, books, and the odd places where all four collide. It has the rhythm of informed friends arguing across cities rather than a polished lecture series. The show can be playful. It is also unusually comfortable with footnotes, caveats, and the phrase-level work of getting a claim right. Episodes range widely: Chinese character learning in the age of keyboards, Da Shan’s return to live performance and poetry, Lee Moore’s challenges to familiar historical slogans, Edmund Backhouse’s lurid and unreliable Qing court stories, Emily Hahn’s Shanghai years, new Chinese travel and migration patterns in Thailand and Ethiopia, AI and energy competition, and the colonial racetrack as a way into old Shanghai. The common thread is not a single beat or ideology. It is a habit of slowing down when a story gets too neat. The show likes disputed sources, half-remembered myths, seductive anecdotes, and public narratives that harden into received wisdom. Then it asks what survives contact with texts, archives, language, politics, and lived experience. David Moser and Jeremiah Jenny give the conversations a lightly irreverent frame, often joking about geography, academic life, food, or the podcast’s own drums, while still giving guests room to build careful arguments. Writers and scholars bring books into the room, but the result rarely feels like a standard author interview. A discussion of Chinese pedagogy becomes a debate about whether computers saved characters from romanization. A profile of Da Shan becomes a story about pandemic interruption, poetry study, Mandarin performance, and cultural reinvention. A conversation about Thailand tourism opens into social media, scams, risk perception, and a more sophisticated Chinese traveling public. Even the most eccentric topics point back to larger questions: who gets to narrate China, what evidence counts, how foreigners perform expertise, and how cultural memory changes when it travels. The show is strongest for listeners who want texture rather than tidy answers. It is serious about China, but not solemn about itself.
Made for: For listeners interested in China beyond headlines: language learners, history readers, Asia watchers, book people, and anyone who enjoys scholarly conversation with a loose conversational edge.
What sets it apart: The show pairs China expertise with a taste for messy evidence, unreliable narrators, and cultural side doors. It can move from ancient poetry to AI infrastructure without losing its archive-minded skepticism.
A semi-serious deep dive into Chinese history and culture broadcast from Beijing and hosted by Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser.
A 'history proves' claim gets cross-examined before you let it win the argument.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused conversation on Chinese character writing, pedagogy, and how keyboards may have helped preserve the script.
David Moser and Matt Koss give Chinese pedagogy a practical stress test, weighing character memorization and dictation against the demands of speaking and listening.
A pandemic-era career reset leads Mark Roswell into Chinese poetry, Chu Ci, and the challenge of making old work live in short videos.
Mark Roswell's conversation with David Moser follows a career reset shaped by pandemic disruption and redirected toward Chinese poetry. Known as Da Shan, Roswell describes how travel and live performance fell away, leaving him in Toronto with the time to deepen an old interest:…
A careful look at what history can and cannot prove about early Taiwan contact.
Lee Moore's China Backstory episode brings a useful restraint to Barbarians at the Gate, centering on what historical evidence can actually show about China's early contact with Taiwan.
A disputed memoir becomes a useful case study in how historical truth can survive inside an unreliable story.
Barbarians at the Gate traces Edmund Backhouse through the uneasy space between performance, memory, and history. Jeremiah Jenny and Alexander Boyd, Associate Editor of the China Books Review, keep the focus on Backhouse's claimed relationship with Empress Dowager Cixi, while…
A sharp portrait of Emily Hahn, where Shanghai literary life meets wartime danger and the practical risks of protecting a publisher.
Emily Hahn's 1930s China comes through as a world where personal daring and political risk are never far apart. Jeremiah Jenny and Sarah Keemleyside follow Hahn, known as Mickey, from her arrival after imagining an opium habit might be interesting, into the literary circles…
Serious books, East Asian worlds.
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Small habit changes meet hands-on AI experiments.
Barbarians at the Gate turns into a debate about whether Chinese teaching should still center handwriting, dictation, and stroke-order practice for L2 learners.
["David Moser interviews Mark Roswell, known in China as Da Shan, about a career that moved from crosstalk and television into poetry, music, and theatre in Beijing.", "Roswell says Da Shan 2.0 covered television hosting, educational programs, consulting, the Beijing Olympics, and the Shanghai Expo, while Da Shan 3.0 was his attempt to return to comedy through tokoshou.", "He says tokoshou let him stop being 'Mr.
["Barbarians at the Gate interviews Lee Moore about China's Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn't Want You to Read, a book built around Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy, and Hong Kong.", "Jeremiah Jenny and David Moser introduce Moore as the founder of the Chinese Literature Podcast and a scholar with a Ph.D.
Jeremiah Jenny and Alexander Boyd discuss Derek Sandhaus's edition of Decadence Manchu, Sir Edmund Backhouse's memoir about late-Qing Beijing and Empress Dowager Cixi.
Barbarians at the Gate x By Their Own Compass follows Emily Hahn, or Mickey Hahn, from St.
Barbarians at the Gate examines why Chinese tourism to Thailand rose from 2.7 million visitors in 2012 to 11 million in 2019 before a two-million-visitor slump in 2025.
Barbarians at the Gate examines China’s 2026 outlook through U.S.-China educational exchange, artificial intelligence, restaurants, alcohol, and Chinese character learning.
James Carter discusses Champion’s Day, his history of Shanghai’s racetrack and the city’s relationship with China and the West.
Barbarians at the Gate examines whether Empress Dowager Cixi deserves responsibility for the Qing dynasty’s decline, beginning with her 1861 seizure of power beside Ci’an and Prince Gong.
Barbarians at the Gate and China Books Review examine Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake, a travelogue about traveling from Nanjing toward Delhi through Gansu, the Tibetan Qinghai Plateau, and Nepal.
Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom discusses his new book on the Boxer Rebellion and how it differentiates from previous works.
Hosts discuss their summer locations and David's observation of a vibrant outdoor reading culture in Seoul.
Crystal Owen Hund shares her journey from Canada to founding the Snowland Art Academy in Gansu, China.
Isabel Nepstad discusses her journey from growing up in the Amazon to founding a sustainability consulting firm bridging China and the world.