CHAPTER TWO
Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire — The Poet Who Made Darkness Beautiful
Before the Beautiful Era
Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was a medieval city undergoing violent modernisation. Its streets were narrow,...
RODIN And His Poets
CHAPTER ONE - The Man Who Made Stone Breathe
Auguste Rodin
Paris, 1840
He was born into a Paris that still smelled of coal smoke and river mud, in a city that had...
A Miracle in Kagoshima
Satsuma Gyu: The Quiet Empire at the Edge of Japan
At the southern end of Kyushu, where the old provinces of Satsuma once looked out across the East China Sea, the...
The Scent of Greene Papaya
Vietnam Voices
“The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul.”
— Graham Greene
"Không có chuyện gì xảy ra, nhưng mọi thứ diễn ra thật...
Lo Bak Go: The Golden Cake That Crossed the Sea
Chinese Fried Radish Cake (蘿蔔糕)
Few dishes tell a story quite as quietly, or as completely, as lo bak go. To look at it on the...
The Alchemy of Steam: The Story of Xiao Long Bao (小笼包)
You never forget your first taste of the little pleated dumpling filled with soup and pork, known as xiaolongbao. This is ostensibly because it...
1961 Château Latour à Pomerol
"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
— Thomas Merton
On a perfectly quiet and very still evening on a lake, so incredibly and perfectly...
Dan Tat
“To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders.”
― Chuang Tzu
The art of eating an egg tart in Hong Kong is a ritual centred on freshness, timing, and sensory indulgence, characterised by...
