For a long time, silk, tea, sinocentrism, and eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau joss-stick makers, Hong Long locals, and Cantonese working-class musicians featured in this collection provide us with a glimpse of how East Asia’s inhabitants braved, with versatility, the ripples of political centralization, cross-border movement, foreign imperialism, nationalism, and globalism that sprouted locally and universally. Demonstrating the rich texture of sources discovered through non-official pathways, the ten essays in this volume ultimately reveal the timeless interconnectedness of East Asia and the complex, non-uniform worldviews of its inhabitants.

Photovoltaic electricity generation is a rapidly growing industry, and a key pillar of a decarbonised energy system. In modern solar cells, laser technology is used to form localised structures such as a selective emitter through doping or to locally ablate dielectric layers for contact definition. A critical factor is the ability to passivate the laser-induced defects to prevent premature charge carrier recombination reducing the cell efficiency. Hydrogenation is such a passivation technique. The exact mechanisms have until recently been poorly understood, so this timely reference covers the recent breakthroughs in the understanding of hydrogen passivation.

Diaspora transformed the urban terrain of colonial societies, creating polyglot worlds out of neighborhoods, workplaces, recreational clubs, and public spheres. It was within these spaces that communities reimagined and reshaped their public identities vis-à-vis emerging government policies and perceptions from other communities. Through a century of Macanese activities in British Hong Kong, The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting explores how mixed-race diasporic communities survived within unequal, racialized, and biased systems beyond the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. Originating from Portuguese Macau yet living outside the control of the empire, the Macanese freely associated with more than one identity and pledged allegiance to multiple communal, political, and civic affiliations. They drew on colorful imaginations of the Portuguese and British empires in responding to a spectrum of changes encompassing Macau’s woes, Hong Kong’s injustice, Portugal’s political transitions, global developments in print culture, and the rise of new nationalisms during the inter-war period.