After a year of frenzied blogging, here’s a seasonal retrospective guide to navigating a diverse ouevre—as much for my sake as as for yours. Meretricious and Happy New Year!

Call me a nerd [You’re a nerd—Ed.], but taxonomy and indexing are so funky… As you see from the (updated) homepage, the whole site began as an introduction to my work on the Li family Daoists, and my portrait film remains one the most enchanting presences there. The Li family has its own category in the sidebar, with a plethora of articles (not least a whole series on our French tour in May 2017, and an update on Li Bin’s diary).

Other pages in the top menu also tend to be rather substantial, with

• a series of lengthy articles under Local ritual (mostly based on previous work, but elaborated here with maps and many colour photos)—mainly on north Shanxi, Hebei, and Shaanxi; see also tags like Beijing, Hebei, Gaoluo, Shanxi (other), Shaanbei, Buddhism. Articles on Gaoluo appear both under the Other publications menu and as blogposts (e.g Women of Gaoluo). Many other posts are related too, such as this on nuns of Hebei.
• And do relish the playlist in the sidebar, with commentary here.
• Many articles on Western Art Music—which also gets its own category, as well as tags for Bach, Mahler, Ravel, Messiaen, conducting, Proms, and so on.
• Some important conceptual background under Themes, mainly on fieldwork (which also has its own profuse category).
• Rants on the heritage shtick, kicking off with the so-called Hengshan Daoist music troupe.

Still in the top menu, MY BLOG contains all my myriad posts (“delighting in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse“), with helpful Categories and Tags in the sidebar, as well as a monthly archive there. Here are some of the more stimulating:

• Gender category, including the status of women in China (series on Women of Yanggao, Gaoluo, and a great Beijing scholar) and elsewhere, feminist punk, and so on.
• Jokes, including Chinese jokes (some sub-heads here) (the drôlerie category is voluminous yet unwieldy; see also Jeux d’esprit).
• *MUST READ!* category, and “likes” in sidebar.
• Jazz, and wind bands in China and Europe.
• German tag, including major articles on Ravensbrück, the GDR, Nazism, and conductors; other regional tags include Italy, Iberia, Irish, Indian.
• Fiction, including Nina Stibbe, Lao She and Timothy Mo—but stellar Stella Gibbons, Myles, and Alan Bennett have their own tags.
• Also not to be missed are Bach à la chinoise; my fellow-students in the Cultural Revolution; and the most inspiring videos of Billie Holiday and Ronnie’s miraculous 147.

As you can see from this post alone, I just love doing internal links (in blue in the text). So whether you first came here for Daoist ritual, football (indeed, Daoist football), punk, Bach, modern China, or even just for the jokes, they’re all connected, so please do click away on the links!

Last but, um, not least, do click on the links to the relevant posts and pages in the photos in the sidebar.