Posted Monday, November 15, 2004; 21:00 HKT
It's a Wednesday afternoon in August, and 50 people are sitting in a plush hotel-function room, eating lunch and listening to a lecture on the challenges China faces in modernizing its army. The speaker is Professor Yu Mao-chun—a top expert on the People's Liberation Army—and he addresses an audience of business types, fellow academics, sinophiles, diplomats, journalists and anyone else who likes their lunch with a side order of brain food. For this eminently civilized occasion, we have the Asia Society to thank.

When the Asia Society was founded in New York City nearly half a century ago by John D. Rockefeller III, its mission was to create a bridge between an Asia finally re-emerging from wartime upheaval, and the U.S., then but a youthful superpower. Since 1990, the society has organized not only lectures on everything from democracy to ceramics but also art exhibitions, film screenings and guided tours, in Hong Kong (where Yu's talk took place) and more recently Manila, Shanghai and Melbourne. In recent years, such diverse dignitaries as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid have all spoken at the society's events.

If that whets your appetite, you can join the Asia Society for a reasonable fee—but most luncheons are open to nonmembers. All you have to do is show up. And the food isn't bad either.

back: Museum Not To Miss

next: Best Place to be a Painter

October 11, 2004	July 26 - August 2, 2004	April 26, 2004