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The Top Ten

© Maria Christensen

A new year can prompt a time of reflection and looking back as well as planning for the future. While New Year’s Day on the Gregorian calendar has come and gone, Chinese New Year will be celebrated on February 12, 2002 and so I am taking this opportunity to reflect on some of the more popular articles published here in this Suite101 topic. A bit self congratulatory, yes, especially considering that there isn't necessarily a substantial body of work here, but it has also been a good gauge of what people like to read and learn about. This is also a good opportunity to thank and link to sites which have linked to some of my articles. There is a caveat though, these are the top ten most popular articles based on readership. While the statistics tell me which articles have been viewed and read the most, they do not tell me which are the most well written and have been enjoyed the most, nor which articles people have learned the most from. Please feel free to leave a post at the end of the article if you have a favorite. That said, let’s get on with it!

The Top Ten

1. The First Opium War

Learn about the biggest and most well backed drug deal in history. The Opium Wars were pivotal events in China’s history, and indeed, influenced events and decisions in other Asian countries, including Japan’s later modernization during the Meiji Era. What caused the war? And what justification did Great Britain use to continue a drug trade that was illegal from China’s point of view with all the military might of the British Empire thrown behind it? These questions and more are addressed in this article which remains the most popular article in this topic. It has been viewed well over 13,000 times in the two and a half years since it was published, and has been listed as background material for the 1999 East Asia Summer Seminar at the UCLA Center for East Asian Studies as well as in various college curricula.

2. The Meiji Era and the Modernization of Japan

For nearly 250 years, the islands comprising the nation of Japan kept a silent vigil in the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean, yet in a relatively short period of time after the country opened its borders, Japan transformed itself from a culturally strong, but technologically weak nation into a nation able to compete on all fronts with the Western powers. How did this happen? And what role did the sport of baseball play? Learn that and more in this article which owes a lot of its popularity thanks to a prominent link on an excellent website about The Meiji Period.

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