Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs (1903)

What we love here at wonder | wander | world is what we choose to share with our beloved readers.

This week's pick strikes at the heart of our love of Hokusai and his ingenious wave - coveted and admired through the years.

Kanagawa-oki nami ura

The Public Domain Review has featured a series of three books full of elegant wave and ripple designs originally published in 1903 and now available to download free at the Internet Archive (volume one, volume two, volume three). 

Let the practice live on - enjoy! 

wandering wayfarers

wonder |wander | world pick of the week is the article featured on YaleGlobal Online - "Identity History: Austronesian Asia?"

Western terms defining regions often stick despite the existence of more relevant, indigenous language. The label “Maritime Southeast Asia,” covering the area shared by Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, fails to take into account shared Austronesian language roots or history including the ancient Majapahit Empire, argues Philip Bowring, journalist and author of Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago. Bowring analyzes how longstanding exchanges of culture and trade with extensive maritime activity have shaped the region's ethnic groups. Trade links with India and the Middle East helped introduce Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam and influenced the region's languages. Java-based empires managed to resist subjugation to China’s various advances although European colonists eventually took control of lucrative ports for three centuries. Bowring concludes that liberation and a half century of nation-building may contribute to a stronger regional identity. – YaleGlobal

View of Pisang Island: Corocores of Guébé Island by Par L Garneray after A Pellion, engraved by Couton

“Maritime Southeast Asia” is a recent, western-derived geographical term linked to neither culture nor history. Austronesian Asia on the other hand defines the language group into which all the region’s major languages fall – Malay, Javanese, Tagalog, Visayan and many local variations. Nusantaria is an extension of “Nusantara,” the Sanskrit term used to describe the island realm of the Java-based Majapahit Empire and in modern Malay refers to the Indonesian archipelago. Today it includes the Philippines and has historic links to Taiwan, Vietnam, the Marianas and Madagascar.

Frieze of a Nusantarian ship on the 8th-century Borobudur Buddhist stupa in Central Java. C Snoek drawing 1978

 

This region has many characteristics which set it apart from mainland Asia and have provided it with a common identity. Today this identity is more often than not submerged by national focus on recently created modern states, or on religious divides created by the rival, imported Semitic religions, Christianity and Islam, which now predominate. But the identity is never far below the surface.

It is no accident that Indonesians and Filipinos comprise a large proportion of the seamen aboard many of today’s merchant fleets. The sea has defined the region since the melt at the end of the last Ice Age, more than 20,000 years ago, when rising seas created most of its major islands. Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Palawan and Taiwan were previously joined to the Eurasian mainland. 

The Lozano Album

At wonder | wander | world we love pouring through old prints and images of a history long lost to us today. Fine art that reignites our spirit and feeds our soul.

The Lozano Album consists of 60 illustrations depicting daily Filipino life in the 1800s by painter Jose Honorato Lozano.

Lozano (1821-1885) was a Filipino painter born in Manila. Lozano was the son of a lighthouse keeper at Manila Bay. He grew up in Sampaloc, Manila outside the walled city of Intramuros. 

A folio of Lozano's watercolors surfaced in a 1995 episode of Antiques Roadshow (the UK edition) with appraiser Peter Nahum. 

The album had been commissioned by Emile Nyssens, and was sold at Christie's in 1995. In September 2016, an extremely rare set of 12 watercolors by Lozano, originally in the possession of a Spanish marquess, was offered at auction with a starting bid of ₱5 million. 

trees heal us

Rather than flip out in fear that climate change will cook us all to a crisp, here at wonder | wander | world we choose to be hope full. 

Yes - we intend to remain filled with hope however dire, nagging, and truthful the doomsayers are. 

Yes - no matter how well-informed we are, we are surely not alarmed enough. 

According to this Intelligencer article by David Wallace-Wells - Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak sooner than you think - is a scary but vital read. 

Chipko tree huggers 

Yes - it is also possible to grow a forest in twenty years. So let us do that instead. 

And while we are at it - here are more sweet encouragements to entice us. 

A relationship with a tree is a mutually beneficial one which needs to be nourished.