Contemporary Asian culture does not suffer from a lack of coverage. It suffers from a lack of useful coverage. A short explanation of what we are trying to do here, and how we intend to do it.

The word

Asia is an awkward term and we should say so at the start. It describes more than half the world's population across dozens of languages, cultures, economies and political systems. Singapore does not resemble Ulaanbaatar. The differences are usually more interesting than the similarities, and any publication that treats the region as one culture will produce nonsense.

We use it anyway, because things move between these places. People, ideas, ingredients, money, music, design and taste. A bartender in Hong Kong may have worked in Singapore and Seoul. A designer in Bangkok may be watching Jakarta more closely than London. A chef in Paris may be cooking with an ingredient from Indonesia and feel no obligation to translate it into European terms first.

The connections are the interesting part. The idea of a single Asian identity is not.

The test

We apply one question before commissioning anything. Would somebody interested in contemporary Asian culture want to read this even if they had never heard of The Orientalist?

If the answer is yes, it belongs here. If it exists mainly to promote a bottle, an award or an event, it belongs on another part of this site. We are publishing that rule rather than keeping it internal, because a rule nobody can see is not much of a rule.

How we work

Coverage is not for sale. We do not accept payment, in kind or otherwise, in exchange for a story, a mention or a placement. Contributors are paid by us, never by the people they write about. Many of the people we want to write about also stock, serve or work with The Orientalist. Refusing to cover them would empty the platform, so the rule is disclosure rather than avoidance. Where a subject has a commercial relationship with us, or where we commissioned the work being documented, we say so beneath the byline.

We check facts before publishing. Subjects may check their own quotations for accuracy. They do not see the article beforehand. We correct in the open. A corrected story carries a dated note at the foot rather than being quietly amended. Writers, photographers, film-makers and artists are credited by name and keep the copyright in their work.

Who is publishing this

The Orientalist publishes Perspectives, so we should be plain about our position. We make spirits from ingredients drawn from across Asia. We benefit directly from the culture, the people and the ideas described here. We have made our own choices about what to explain and what to leave alone, and we have not always got them right.

That is where we are writing from. It is not what we are writing about. We will get things wrong. Anyone writing across a region this size will. Better to be specific and occasionally wrong than broad, polite and safe.

We are always reading pitches. info@theorientalistspirits.com