China Rhyming

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2009-05-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

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Deviation Posting: Time for a Good Left-Wing Read

2009-05-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

The other day I had a meeting here in Shanghai with a visiting private equity type from America. He was extremely young in a sort of faux-donnish style and extremely right wing which made the non-essential chit-chat rather gruesome. As we parted he gave me a gift – a copy of Ann Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. He assured me that this was helping him through the current hard economic times when he felt his basic values might be challenged by such outrageous hard line socialists as Obama. I was naturally graceful in acceptance though having read it many years ago knew how distasteful I personally found the book and its message. Ho, hum.

Anyway, that got me wondering what classics we should be digging out and then by complete accident (serendipity I guess you’d call it) I came across The Independent’s feature - Black and white and red all over: Left-wing reads.

I’ll assume their first choice – Mao’s Little Red Book – was a joke

Then we get:

2) Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists from 1910 which I agree is a timeless classic – it’s been 20 years since I read it so that might be a good one to re-read

3) Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth from 1961 – ashamed to say have never read

4) Emma Goldman’s Living my Life from 1931 – a great read and reminds us there’s historically been more choice in American politics than the risible differences between Bush and Obama

5) Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex from 1949 – which I personally remember as a bit of a slog

6) Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath from 1939 – which I’m sure reads today as well as the first time I read it as a teenager

7) Gramsci‘s Prison Notebooks from 1929-35 – which I confess to occasionally still dipping into to keep on track

8) Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole from 1932 - which remains a classic British novel though rarely read I fear these days

9) Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? From 1862 – which I did read ages ago but none has remained in my mind sadly

10) Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness from1928 – never read, sorry

11) Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front from 1928 – which dad made us all read as kids to learn to hate war – it worked!

12) Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from 1906 – which, talking of my dad, is his favourite book and which made a huge impression on me as a kid

13) Zola’s Germinal from 1885 – but then anything from Zola including especially I think La Bete Humaine would do

14) Marx’s Capital from 1867 – still original and best

15) Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England from 1845 – which I re-read recently over a long weekend in Manchester and is still great (there’s also an apparently an excellent new biography of Engels out too)

16) Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women from 1792 – of course

17) Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s A New Civilisation from 1935 – questionable this one – important at the time certainly; the social engineering and USSR admiration comes over a little trite now though

18) Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia from 1938 – which is of course (as is everything) great and Orwell a God but if it was my list…as a socialist classic Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in London and Paris would win out

19) CLR James’ The Black Jacobins from 1938 – a classic from a great man – a socialist who loved cricket – now that’s who should run the world!

20) Rosa Luxemburg’s The Junius Pamphlet from 1916 – fascinating but I’m over by teenage crush on Rosa these days

A very interesting list and only a few I’d add:

Jon Don Passos’ USA – which make a mark on me as a lad
Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Rudolf Rocker’s Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
Anything by Tony Negri
And probably a few others that’ll come back to me as soon as I’ve posted this!

Shanghai Race Club - 75th Anniversary

2009-05-12T01:13:00.000-07:00

The one thing most people know about old Shanghai is that there was a race club and it was massively popular. A friend and another long-term Shanghailander Byron Constable has started to really get moving on his long awaited Shanghai Race Club board game. It’s a game where you can bet on the races at the old Shanghai club. I played a very early prototype version of the game and had fun as did the 7 year old with us – so ‘fun for all the family’ as they say though I’m sure there are purists who will argue with me – “you let a 7 year old gamble!!”

Anyway, Byron’s also organising Shanghai Race Club Champagne Brunch on Sunday the 17^th May (like many modern day Shanghailanders the concept of the Champagne Brunch seems to have an especial appeal – can there by anywhere else where people obsess and get excited about such a thing as Shanghai – I fear not). A bit of promotion for the board game but also to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Shanghai Race Club (building and grandstand as seen left). It should be interesting as Peter Hibbard, author of The Bund and éminence grise of Shanghai’s Royal Asiatic Society will give a short talk on the history of the old race club and I’m told a few words will be said by Danny Du, great-grandson of Shanghai gangster Du Yue Sheng.

Anyway – details of the brunch here – which is being held at Kathleen’s 5 which is on the roof of the old Race Club building (now the Shanghai Art Museum though those with longer memories will remember it as the library and only those with really old memories will now remember it as the Race Club!). Kathleen’s 5 is a rooftop place so you get a view over what was the Race Course, now the morass of People’s Square.

Nazis on the Huang Pu

2009-05-11T01:11:00.000-07:00

That’s Shanghai magazine put together a series of features on Nazis in Shanghai (back in the 1930s and 1940s that is rather than any knocking about now). Of course given Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism there were plenty of Nazis and they were pretty well organised and had, obviously, a Jewish community to hate too.

Of course the series of articles are far from definitive on the subject and, to be fair, you wouldn’t expect that. A full book on the subject remains to be written. There’s also a piece on Dai (Tai) Li and the fascistic Blue Shirts in Shanghai, the major Nazi Party leaders in Shanghai, a tie in with the opening of the new Sino-German movie about John Rabe (who was a Nazi Party member) and (beware plug coming!) an excerpt from my imminently forthcoming book on foreign journalists in China about the Nazi and anti-Nazi press in Shanghai during the period.

Old Cemeteries, Graveyards and Remains

2009-05-10T01:08:00.000-07:00

For some reason I’ve been thinking about old cemeteries in China recently (and did post about the Cimetière Française de Kilung). Not sure how this started, probably a conversation with a friend about the fact that Beijing and Shanghai appear to be among some of the few major cities internationally that have no cemeteries in their inner cities left. Shanghai certainly has no equivalent of Highgate Cemetery in London or the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. Other cities of course also have their traditional cemeteries – get the bus from Hong Kong’s Central to Aberdeen and you pass the vast cemeteries somewhere up behind Happy Valley while I stayed recently in KL at a city centre hotel whose swimming pool overlooked a Chinese graveyard behind the property while in Malacca you can wander among the graves of the city’s former Dutch and English traders.

Of course I’ve visited the vast cemeteries now on Shanghai’s fringes but the downtown cemeteries are all built on. Interestingly no one much, in what can be a very superstitious city, seems bothered by this and I have no idea whether the old graveyards were just churned up or remains taken away. Some of the city’s most notorious buildings sit above former graveyards – the Pearl Oriental Tower must, at least in part, be built over the old Pootung Point graveyard while the fascistic architectural horror that is the JW Marriot at the ridiculously named Tomorrow Square sits on land (according to my old map of Shanghai) that was also a graveyard. Much the same appears to be true of Beijing – I recently went looking for a graveyard noted in an old record but it was firmly gone under the concrete of the Second Ring Road. As far as I could ascertain there was no formal removal of remains to anywhere else.

A few other cemetery related observations noted recently:

I just read Philip Pan’s excellent Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China which has a fascinating chapter on a surviving graveyard full of people who died in the Cultural Revolution- that it survived was remarkable; that people were intrigued and cataloguing the dead there a fascinating example of how not everyone accepts that all in China should just forget the CR in the rush to the glory and wonder of total KFCification.

I also recently bumped into Dvir Bar-Gal (at an incredibly bad talk by someone on the history of Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai by the way, where the speaker would neither discuss opium, slum landlordism or anything that might have reflected badly on the likes of Sassoon, Hardoon etc – really a very bad example of history as celebrity PR) who has done so much to preserve the Jewish headstones of Shanghai when he can find them. His latest efforts are noted in an article on the JTA website. Dvir notes that, ‘The four cemeteries that once served this city’s (Shanghai’s) small but prosperous Jewish community disappeared in the late 1960s during China’s Cultural Revolution. The sites were paved over to build a factory, park, hotel and Muslim cemetery, their history forgotten.’

The Gurkhas, Justice and a National Embarrassment

2009-05-09T02:13:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to be anything but disgusted with the British government’s attitude to the Gurkha’s and the pension row. The history of the Gurkas as fighting men in the pay of Britain goes back a long - Gurkhas served as troops under contract to the East India Company. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Gurkhas fought on the British side, and became part of the British Indian Army on its formation. The 2nd Gurkha Rifles (The Sirmoor Rifles) made a particularly notable contribution during the conflict, and indeed twenty-five Indian Order of Merit awards were made to men from that regiment during the Siege of Delhi. Their exploits and courage are of course legendary - the Gurkha momument in London pictured left.

From the end of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 until the start of the First World War the Gurkha Regiments saw active service in Burma, Afghanistan, the North-East and the North-West Frontiers of India, Malta (the Russo-Turkish War, 1877–78), Cyprus and Malaya. Naturally, as I hope most people know, the Gurkha’s were of course on the front line in WW1 (200,000 served with 20,000 casualties), WW2 and the Falklands among other recent conflicts. A Gurkha light infantry group pictured left about 1890.

For the purposes of this blog it’s worth remembering that the Gurka’s also saw active service in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 (Gurkhas in China are pictured left) and Tibet during Younghusband's bloody Expedition of 1905. I’m not going to argue whether or not any of the wars above were politically acceptable – the Gurkha’s were a key part of the military arm of the British Empire obviously. Still, the current (and long running – all my life as far as I can remember) row about why Gurkhas receive smaller pensions than their British equivalents sticks in the throat as fundamentally unfair, racist and a prime example of petty government penny saving.

There is a campaign currently running to support Gurkhas and pressure the UK government into giving more help and equal treatment to Gurkhas, called Gurkha Justice that has caught the public’s imagination and widespread support. A motion was voted on in the House of Commons on the 29th April 2009 by the Liberal Democrats that all Gurkhas be offered an equal right of residence in the UK. This resulted in a defeat for the Government by 267 votes to 246, the first, first day motion defeat for a government since 1978. The Commons vote is not binding, but it represents an embarrassment for the government. Yet Phil Woolas, the immigration minister (and, as I well remember a nasty little self-centred careerist when he was head of the National Union Students in my college days - a real horrible little greasy pole climber who obviously hasn't changed one jot) continues to prevaricate and pettifog.

If you want to support the campaign for full Gurkha Justice – on their site you can sign the petition calling calling on the UK Government to act immediately to change the law to allow all retired Gurkhas the right to stay in the UK, without reservation. (By the way if you sign the online petition you subsequently get a thank you email from none other than Joanna Lumley, which for all Englishmen of a certain age is rather thrilling!)

Nanjing Massacre Films

2009-05-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

Two films are doing the rounds at the moment concerned with the Nanjing Masscare of 1937 - Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death, from the point of view of the city's military defense, civilian refugees, and Japanese invaders, and John Rabe, a Sino-German production, looking at the Massacre through the experiences of the title character, a German businessman with Siemens and Nazi Party member in China who helped set up a refugee zone in the city.

I haven't had a chance to see either film - and may well never see either as I don't watch TV much and never go to the cinema. Still they're hard to ignore and should be interesting one way or another for the reaction to them in China. Danwei has a post on both films and some initial reactions which I'll just link to for now.

Images of American Colonialists in the Philippines

2009-05-07T01:04:00.001-07:00

A slight deviation today but I came across these photographs of American ex-pats in the Philippines in the early 1900s the other day. Of course the Philippines was really America’s major experiment with colonialism and, by their own admittance, they weren’t that great at it. It seems that American colonials basically rarely interacted on a social level with Filipinos (except in the brothels of Manila) and kept themselves to themselves pretty much.

Anyway here they are – Americans trying to be colonials circa 1905:

An American picnic party

Americans at Baguio, the hill resort they built for themselves

American women strolling through a Filipino town

An American woman teacher at an American-run school for Filipino children

Clarification on the Tunsin

2009-05-06T01:55:00.000-07:00

My musings on the old Tunsin Road in Shanghai and the origin of its name (see previous post) actually did result in some useful additional help. First a quick correction – it wasn’t John Swire who came up to Shanghai but his son.

Swire did have a ship called Tunsin which was originally owned by a company called George Barnet & Co. of Shanghai - Tunsin was their Hong name meaning that the street may have been named after the Hong rather than the vessel – this is actually more likely as several other streets in Shanghai were named after Hong names – Jinkee Road (now Dianchi Lu) after the Hong name of Gibb, Livingstone (their building on the road is left) and Chaoufoong Road (now Gaoyang Lu) after the Hong name of Jenner Hogg & Co.

I’m very grateful to Charlotte Bleasdale who works with Swire’s Group Public Affairs Department that maintains their archives for also telling me that the Tunsin was built in London, supposedly as a blockade runner for use in the American Civil War, but was purchased half-built by Barnets, arriving in Shanghai in May 1864 and placed in service on the Yangtze. In March 1867 the Tunsin was sold to F.A. Groom, for a Chinese syndicate, managed by Glover & Co. In July 1867 she was transferred to Union S.N.Co. (Glovers also managers) and in 1873 sold to CNCo. In 1885, CNCo converted the ship to a hulk for use as a landing stage at Swatow (Shantou - left).

All this talk of blockade running certainly gives the ship a slightly more romantic history. Seems that mystery is now solved.

Why Old Shanghai's Tunsin Road was Called Tunsin Road

2009-05-05T01:11:00.000-07:00

For years now I’ve come across the odd reference to businesses on Tunsin Road in the old International Settlement of Shanghai – up in Hongkou. Not a very long or prestigious road but intriguing, as I was never sure why it was called Tunsin.

I think I now know the answer. The likeliest answer seems to be that when John Swire (left), the Yorkshire-born tycoon who had founded Taikoo Sugar, came to Shanghai, he saw the potential for steam shipping on the Yangtze River - then the West's only key to trade with China's interior. With the backing of Alfred Holt, and the latter's Clyde shipbuilder back in Glasgow, Scotts’ Shipbuilding & Engineering Company, Swire formed The China Navigation Company (CNCo) - registered in London and with Butterfield & Swire appointed managers in Shanghai.

Swire immediately ordered three Mississippi-style paddle steamers for the new company. But even before these vessels - Peking, Shanghai and Ichang - had arrived in China, he had snapped up the assets of a newly bankrupted line, Union Steam Navigation, which provided valuable waterfront properties along the Yangtze, as well as two steamers. USNCo’s veteran Tunsin (pictured above) was thus destined to become the first vessel to sail under the Swire flag in 1873.

Seems to fit.

Anniversaries - May Fourth 1919 – Who Covered it for the Foreign Press Then?

2009-05-04T02:22:00.000-07:00

This incredible year of anniversaries in China rolls on today. It can be argued that modern China really began, or at least showed itself formed to a degree, on 4th May 1919 with the protests following China’s disappointment after its betrayal at the Versailles Peace Conference. Despite pledges that every country would be represented, China was not. The European Great Powers and America did not apply any more than cursory pressure on China’s behalf and Japan retained the “special rights” it had snatched from the Germans in Qingdao and Shandong.

The seats at Versailles reserved for the Chinese delegation were never occupied and the Chinese decided not to sign in protest against the clauses in the treaty agreeing to the transfer of German leaseholds to Japan. On 4 May, angered at the betrayal and fired up with a justified nationalist fervour, radicalised students staged largescale demonstrations across China. These were the first mass protests in modern Chinese history (as in Peking left) and in many ways set the hallmark for the 1920s as a decade of domestic protest and internal unrest — what became known as the May Fourth Movement.

Among the foreigners who actually observed the 4th May events a few stand out as interesting I think. Not least Dr. Paul Reinsch, the US minister to China. Reinsch, who was generally pro-Chinese, had been angered by Japan’s 21 Demands on China during WW1. He felt personally compromised by America’s lack of support for China in Paris despite Wilson’s pledges and resigned in 1919 to take up a post advising the Chinese government in Washington. The great Bill Donald – Donald of China - who was briefly editing the Far Eastern Review penned a lengthy editorial sympathetic to the May Fourth Movement.

Also interesting was the pioneering American missionary Frank J. Rawlinson, who developed a brand of liberal Protestantism after becoming involved in the May Fourth Movement. Rawlinson had been born into a Plymouth Brethren family but arrived in China in 1902 as a Southern Baptist missionary and remained based in Shanghai for his entire career until his death in 1937. After becoming radicalised, he split with the Southern Baptists and joined the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In 1914 he became the editor of the interdenominational Chinese Recorder, which under his tutelage reflected his liberal and often outspoken views forged in 1919.

I think the best foreign chronicler of the May Fourth Movement at the time was Pennsylvanian native and Harvard graduate Rodney Yonkers Gilbert, who had come to China as a medicine salesman in 1912 before becoming a long-standing Beijing-based reporter for the North-China Daily News. Gilbert covered the May Fourth demonstrations in the city and attended the lively and raucous meetings held at Peking University. He seemed to be broadly supportive of the student’s anti-Japanese stance, or at least applauded their decision to organize and take action, writing: “The advertisement given to this gathering inspired the local students to do something on their own account, and whatever one thinks of the action they eventually took they certainly deserve full credit for being the first in China to substitute action for talk”.

However, Gilbert was an extremely contradictory character. His initial enthusiasm would later become tempered with cynicism. He concluded his 1926 book What’s Wrong with China, which was widely read at the time, with the passage: “We have therefore to be grateful to the firebrand element in China which is driving furiously on towards the complete ruin of China as a nation, the utter collapse of foreign trade with this bad-boy people, and very possibly the martyrdom of those of us who are foolish enough to live in China: and out of great weariness of the spirit and something like Petronian good cheer in the face of what is coming, our toast is: ‘More power to their elbows!”’

I’d also note Joseph Washington Hall in Tianjin for May 4th. Hall worked for the American Legation’s espionage service in Shandong from 1916 to 1919. He left the service in time to observe the student protests in Tianjin, which he supported, as a journalist. He freelanced for the China Weekly Review and as a Beijing correspondent for the China Press using the penname Upton Close.

The Industrial Penetration of China in 1925

2009-05-03T03:38:00.001-07:00

Picked up a copy of a map from 1925 the other day entitled The Industrial Penetration of China. It was produced in the United States for a guide to China’s industries and economic development.

By the wonders of modern science if you click on the image it becomes larger and clearer.

It’s rather confusing though does indicate some interesting facets – the clearly highly important role of Hankow as a centre of ironworks, flour mills and cotton mills and the heavy concentration of electricity plants around Shanghai and eastern China gives a good indication of where people had access to electricity – no wonder the Socony men heroes of Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China were all sent deep into the hinterland. Wusih (Wuxi) was clearly an important industrial centre as was, unsurprisingly, Shanghai. The concentration of industry in north east China was obviously something the Japanese took note of thinking, as they were at this time, of annexing Manchuria. Hong Kong was also a major shipbuilding centre at the time as well as port. Peking? Then as now it seems they preferred scholarship and governing to manufacturing.

Carl Crow’s Final Resting Place

2009-05-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

As my new book is out soon (look at the left hand column for details) I feel it’s time to finish of the last few bits of Carl Crow stuff I’ve got lying around. Carl pops up in the new book as it is a history of the old China press corps but not too much to avoid repetition. It’s also the case that I have edited Carl’s diaries from his Burma Road trip in 1939 from Rangoon to Chungking and they’ll hopefully be published later in the year (autumn probably).

While I was researching the book a friend in America was good enough to track down Carl’s grave. I knew that Carl had died at his apartment on Washington Place, New York City on the 8th June 1945 of cancer. He was then transferred to the Walter B Cooke Funeral Home on West 72nd Street, Manhattan, for final internment at the Odd Fellows Cemetery on Main Street, Fredericktown, Missouri, where he was eventually buried next to his mother and father. His final instructions were for no flowers but all contributions to be sent to the American Society for the Control of Cancer. Carl was originally from Missouri and this was his wish.

Unfortunately I could never quite find the time, money or a decent excuse to get to Fredericktown. Still a friend helped while passing close by. He found the Odd Fellows Cemetery and Carl’s grave as you can see in the pictures. It looks a peaceful place.

May 1 - International Workers' Day

2009-05-01T04:44:00.000-07:00

For those, like me, who grew up on the Left – today is the big one – May 1 - International Workers' Day. Of course the holiday in its leftist incarnation arose after the first nationwide General Strike in America in 1886 for the 8-hour day, which was then officially commemorated in 1889 as the first International Labor Day. 340,000 workers in Chicago, Milwaukee & other cities struck and the state fought back - four demonstrators were killed & over 200 wounded when police attack the Chicago rally in what became known as the Haymarket Riot. America, fearing world solidarity, moved its Labor Day holiday to the first Monday in September.

As far as I’m concerned the best known image for May Day is Walter Crane’s poster – left. Born in Liverpool, Crane was part of the socialist inclined Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris. He produced paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts.

I’m glad to see that other authors and artists keep the tradition of political posters alive still. I particularly like (and it’s relevant to this blog I guess) the poster by Micah Wright – left - a clever parody of an old WW2 propaganda poster.

German Tsingtao Flag

2009-05-01T02:46:00.001-07:00

Coming across the old flags of Weihaiwei yesterday I also came across the flag that used fly over Tsingtao (Qingdao). A bit of a different story here. The Kiautschou territorywas leader in 1898 to Germany for 99 years – Tsingtao being the main town (left: German troops on parade in Tsingtao). It was popular with the Germans, nice climate, popular holiday destination for foreigners in the China treaty ports and also a base for the German fleet that looked after the Kaiser’s rather disparate and cobbled together Pacific empire that they kept until World War One – people forget now German New Guinea, the German Solomon Islands, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands and German Samoa). Anyway, in 1918 Tsingtao was transferred to Japan.

The Germans never actually designed a specific flag for Tsingtao but they did use the so-called flag of the German colonies - horizontal black-white-red with the Imperial eagle without crown in the middle of the white stripe.

Flags of British Weihaiwei

2009-04-30T02:51:00.000-07:00

Posting about British rule in Weihaiwei yesterday led me to come across the old flags of Weihaiwei during the British years. I’d never thought about Weihaiwei having a flag before, but they did.

From 1899 to 1902 they used the so-called flag of the Commissioner of Liu Kung Tau/Weihaiwei (above) and blue ensign version (left) for shipping.

Then in 1902 a purely Civil Commissioner, J.H. Stewart Lockhart, was appointed who wrote to London declaring, “The design of the flag hitherto used by the Commissioner of this Dependency is a dragon on the Union Jack and is in my opinion quite unsuitable. I have therefore to request that the Crown Agents may be instructed to have made for the use of the Commissioner two new flags, the device of the Mandarin Duck being substituted for the Dragon, which is as you are aware the national emblem of China and not appropriate in the case of a British Dependency.”

The Mandarin Duck design (they are both ducks), which was part of the Seal, was approved by King Edward VII at some time in 1903. Apparently reflecting native wildlife to that area.

So then they appear to have used the flag left and the blue ensign version for shipping.

All quite confusing so I might have got this a bit wrong. If anyone knows better do let me know.

Weihaiwei – The British, Kangaroo Courts and the Llandudno of China!

2009-04-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Weihaiwei, now more simply Weihai, seems to be very popular at the moment with any number of books and papers appearing on the place. Fair enough as it is an interesting place given that it was neither a full colony or a treaty port but rather a leased piece of land – the lease lasted as long as the Russians were in Port Arthur to maintain the balance of Great Power influence (the Americans were very keen for the British to be stationed at Weihaiwei) though China never surrendered sovereignty on the land. Britain then left and returned control in 1930 as part of the deal to extend the lease on the Hong Kong New Territories. The map below shows how the British were able to balance Russian naval power around the Gulf of Chihli.

The administration of Weihaiwei involved several interesting characters including Reginald Johnston (Pu Yi’sold tutor) and JH Stewart Lockhart. Weihaiwei’s legal system including some interesting murder cases is the subject of a new book by Carol Tan of SOAS called British Rule in China: Law and Justice in Weihaiwei: Law and Justice in Weihaiwei 1898 – 1930. Sadly it’s a bit expensive and in hardback only so hopefully you’ve got a decent library near you. Carol also gave an interesting talk to the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai recently.

However, I personally wasn’t convinced that anything like an even negligibly acceptable level of justice was available in British Weihaiwei – the jury pool was tiny and meant both the same people constantly being on juries and, inevitably, defendants being known to jurors while lawyers were sparse. Even worse we are presented with the joke of the horrendously self-important Reginald Johnston believing none of this was a problem as he had some sort of Confucian ability to adjudicate without legal training, being a local or any decent juries. Academics are nice people who don’t like to judge – even when looking at history – but of course there is no other conclusion than that the legal system and the British courts in Weihaiwei were nothing more than kangaroo courts and merely devices for maintaining British rule.

One interesting thing I didn’t know was the silly comparisons people made with Weihaiwei. I’ve noted daft foreigners comparing places in China to European locations before in a post and Weihaiwei’s a good addition. Apparently some touted Weihaiwei as China’s Biarritz or Naples –which isn’t too bad. But then others, apparently with straight faces and thinking it might attract people, compared Weihaiwei to Llandudno and Ostend!! Great – not sure the current tourism authorities in Weihai will be keen to make the claim to rival either of those places!

Flags of British Weihaiwei

Junk Sunk

2009-04-28T22:58:00.000-07:00

A shame to see that the replica 16th Century Chinese junk, the Princess Taiping, has sunk off Taiwan, one day short of completing its epic voyage to America and back. The Ming dynasty-style Princess Taiping was trying to prove that China's admiral, Zheng He, could have reached North America 600 years ago a la the claims in Gavin Menzies's much talked about 1421. While the claims in 1421 may or may not be accurate (and most people I talk to think it not likely except the Chinese government who love the idea) the Princess Taiping would have been an interesting experiment.

Indeed it still is as it did survive several storms during its 10-month voyage and was only sunk after being broken in two after it was rammed by a freighter just off Taiwan's coast. Given that there weren’t any large metal freighters around during the Ming Dynasty we can assume Zheng He didn’t worry about them too much or collide with too many. Of course the Princess Taiping has slightly better maps, technology etc.

Deviation Posting – Recession and 1945

2009-04-28T01:38:00.000-07:00

Apologies for quick deviation into British history and politics today but I got a bit narked listening to the radio. The newspapers, radio and TV have quickly latched on to this idea that the recession is now the worst since World War Two in Britain. Maybe, maybe not. Politicians in the UK have decided that this means they can say that the economy (and by extension they claim life in general) is as bad as it was in 1945. This is of course nonsense and one of those arguments only possible in a world where people don’t read enough history.

Indeed to argue that anything now is like 1945 is so daft that any politician you hear mentioning this comparison should immediately have ensured you’ll never vote for them again. Just consider the picture of the Gorbals in Glasgow (which appears in David Kynaston’s excellent book noted below) above – now while the Gorbals is still far from paradise, whatever it is it isn’t anything like this anymore, the people who live there are different, the jobs they do (or don’t do) completely changed etc. In 1945 Britain was victorious but bombed out and knackered, rationing was in place, shortage widespread, the Treasury bust in a way it isn't now – to compare 2009 to 1945 is bizarre – sound bite politics I guess. Below I’ve noted a couple of books that describe that time excellently from David Kynaston and Maureen Waller that are well worth a read.

However, one thing about 1945 is instructive and we could learn from it. Right now it seems that we’re just going to let the same politicians and bankers that broke their own system put it back together way they like and that suits them best. This would be a tragedy. In 1945 Britain rejected the Tories as a party of the past (they were then, they are now) and elected a government that launched a programme of broadly socialist egalitarian ideas – the NHS, extensive nationalisation, education and housing. Politicians can try and score points by evoking images of 1945 and ruin; they might want to remember what arose from those ruins based on the idea of taking control of an economic system for the good of the many rather than just a financial elite. And, oh yeah, while I'm on a rant, bring back imperial measurements.

Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 - David Kynaston

Londo n 1945 – Maureen Waller

A Few Posts on Keelung VI - Ershawan Fort

2009-04-27T01:43:00.000-07:00

Just to quickly finish of my few posts on Keelung that kept getting interrupted I want to speedily note the remains of the Ershawan Fort (also known as the Haimen Tiansian) on the top of Ershawan Mountain (now a big park) overlooking the harbour of Keelung. There’s a few cannons and some remnant including a entry gate and steep steps to prevent attack (but my camera battery ran out at that point!).

The fort was specifically meant to repel any British invasion of the port around the time of the First Opium War which largely worked though the French took it in 1884.

As you can see it did offer a rather good view of the entrance of the harbour.

A Few Posts on Keelung I - The Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building

A Few Posts on Keelung II – The Cimetière Française de Kilung

A Few Posts on Keelung III – The Monument to Prince Kitashirakawa

Why Empire of the Sun was Important

2009-04-26T02:51:00.000-07:00

Since JG Ballard’s death recently I’ve heard a lot of people on the radio, in print and in casual conversations praise Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. Perhaps the conversations are not that surprising as I’m in Shanghai so obviously the novel has a certain resonance for people here interested in the history of the pre-revolutionary Shanghailanders. So I’ll throw in my twopenny worth for what’s its worth.

Personally I’ve never actually thought Empire of the Sun was a great book – at least not within Ballard’s overall cannon which contains several more important and greater works notably Crash (1973) and his other dystopian novels of the British new wave (a wave he largely created).

In this sense Empire is an aberration rather than the norm in terms of Ballard’s work. A "novel",

though obviously based on Ballard’s own experiences, rather than an autobiography and not intended as a a reliable historical text. Indeed Ballard never claimed it should be used as such (when other internees disputed his book he had to point this out repeatedly to peopel who refused to see the word "novel" on the cover) and insisted the words ‘A Novel’ appeared on the cover. Of course Spielberg’s film (and it’s hard to imagine the Hollywood engendered Spielberg liking anything else of Ballard’s – surely he would have been put off by the "adultness" and remorseless downbeat nature of his fiction) further removed the book from any reality with the rather annoying insertion of several scenes not in the book that seem to add nothing except a certain late twentieth century political correctness Spielberg is of course noted for.

So if it’s not exactly a great book why is it important? It seems to me that Ballard’s stark dystopian literature, his nervousness of the culture of consumption and general social vacuity are best understood

through the prism of his wartime experiences. That’s why reading Empire (and his decidedly less commonly read, but arguably more revealing, follow up The Kindness of Women, published in 1991) is important – not to learn anything about Shanghai (which you won’t unless you know absolutely nothing about the place and time, in which case sue your history teachers) or particularly Ballard’s experiences or feelings at the time (Jim is not him he was always keen to point out and says little about the situation either personally or politically) but to better understand the roots of Ballard’s incredibly important fiction that he wrote after he returned to England.

I think Ballard himself saw Empire this way. In one of his last interviews with the BBC he discussed his youthful experiences. Ballard accepted that of course his fiction would have been totally different if he had not undergone the unpleasantness of inte rnment in Shanghai and of course it had changed and shaped him to a great extent. Ballard’s fiction often challenges the assumptions of the security of daily life we generally have and, of course, at a young age Ballard saw those illusions shattered completely.

In Shanghai Ballard learnt the essential surrealism of life – he remembers walking the previously neat and prosperous streets and seeing cars on their roofs (the bomb that fell outside the Cathay Hotel left), apartment buildings shattered to reveal their innards of 20 living rooms and 20 private lives that weren't meant to be on public display and of course dead bodies littering the pavement (both the starved and the bombed). Ballard believed that the war had made him nervous of bland reassurances that everything was all right and that when anyone told him everything was “all right”, it was invariably anything but. As he said, ‘reality is a stage set that can be swept aside, as I saw as a boy in Shanghai.’

Clearly that loss of one privileged life for another dystopian one is key as was (and noted in The Kindness of Women) the unexpected death of Ballard’s wife at a young age that left him a widower with three children to care for) proved to him the transient and temporary nature of everyday seemingly constant reality.

What else did he take from his Shanghai days? I think an instinctive distrust of uncircumscribed and rampant capitalism (though he was far from a revolutionary socialist) and a certain sense that anarchy can break out in a moment and things, however seemingly permanent, can be smashed to smithereens in the blink of eye (or the fall of a Japanese bomb on Shanghai Railway Station 1937 as left). I think he also learnt to appreciate the ridiculous lengths people go to protect themselves from perceived threats real and false,to insulate themselves. This comes out in numerous Ballard novels where people retreat behind walls they think can protect them - think of the horrendous gated communities of his 2000 novel Super-Cannes. Of course Ballard saw walls around everyone's properties in Shanghai in the 1930s - another tradition that continues today as everyone puts up walls, hires guards and puts bars on their windows to protect them from...what? Ultimately Ballard knew that once inside such supposedly secure and isolated places you then went basically nuts, became paranoid and broke down.

Interestingly I think one of the most important things he took from Shanghai that became a recurrent theme for him - the human struggle within a consumerist landscape – ended in 1937 but has come back to haunt the city as the post-1949 powers that be encourage consumption over spirituality and shopping as the great ideology-religion-culture to end all others and to negate opposition or disgruntlement with one's lot in life.

It was these experiences that shaped Ballard’s incredible fiction and therefore why reading Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women remains important. The interesting thing to ponder is quite how Ballard partly predicted the descent of Shanghai into a consumerist driven dystopia where briefs fads for fusion cuisine and competitive shopping replace thought and experience? There can be few more “Ballardian” spots on earth than the vacuous self styled “elite” crowds gathering on the balcony of 3 on the Bund, the oddly philistine speculators of Shanghai’s art scene or the injunction of the local government that to shop is patriotic; to question dissent – in this sense Ballard did come full circle whether he thought about modern Shanghai or not.

Remembering JG Ballard - Lunghua Airfield

2009-04-25T02:45:00.000-07:00

As someone who hates gyms in all their incarnations and all forms of organised “games” I do still accept that I need some exercise. Walking, or occasionally a swim, suffices. Walking is also educational and instructive unlike time spent in a gym as well as having the added bonuses of seeing things (other than CCTV9 or CNN, neither of which interest me in the slightest) and of being able to wear normal clothes rather than the ridiculous outfits I see people “heading for the gym” wearing. Therefore an interest in psychogeography, I think, is the answer.

For those not au fait with psychogeography it’s basically a strategy for exploring cities in such a way that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. Perhaps Will Self is the most famous practitioner of the discipline at the moment – walking to Heathrow while of course the novelist Ian Sinclair experienced the outer rim of London anew by walking the M25. I’ve decided to coin the term psychohistoricalgeography and so my Saturday…

This weekend I was struck with the idea of two things – the need for fresh air and wanting to commemorate the sad passing of JG Ballard in some way. Actually I live just round the corner from Ballard’s old family home on Shanghai’s former Amherst Avenue and do occasionally eat in the restaurant that now inhabits the former Ballard residence – not much good but a nice house. Architecture trumps cuisine anyday, and anyway James Fallows’ on his excellent blog has already posted photos of the interior and exterior of the former residence.

So here was my solution – Ballard, as everyone knows from Empire of the Sun, was interned in the Lunghua (Loonghwa) Civilian Assembly Centre on the outskirts of Shanghai and which abutted the Lunghua Airfield and was close to the Lunghua Pagoda – all are shown in the film and described in the book. He was interned in 1943 with his parents and younger sister, spending over two years, the remainder of World War Two, in the camp. His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-story residence for 40 families. He attended school in the camp, the teachers being inmates from a number of professions. I’m not sure if JG himself had to walk to the Camp but many internees did – I did the walk on a breezy, sunny Saturday morning without a suitcase containing my most precious belongings and without any Japanese guards shouting at me to hurry up. I’m also a reasonably fit 42. Many of the internees were much older, unwell and had to make the walk in either far colder or far hotter weather depending on when they were interned.

So I walked from Ballard’s childhood home on Amherst Avenue to Lunghua Airfield, or what’s left of it. This is not an overly long walk – tales about 90 minutes at most out from the former Western Roads Settlement (where Ballard’s family house was and not the French Concession as so often written) along the old Siccawei Road (now Huashan Road) through Siccawei itself (now the Xujiahui shopping district) out past the sports stadium, past the Lunghua Revolutionary Martyrs memorial and to the Lunghua Pagoda (which is these days adjacent to a Tesco supermarket for those that like to make points about that sort of contrast). Continue slightly further along and you’ll reach the rather grand edifice of the old modernist-style air terminal, with its sweeping observation deck and control tower still reasonably intact. Inside are a reasonable Shanghainese restaurant where I lunched and a KTV joint.

In the film, if I remember correctly, you see the Japanese planes fly over the terminal building with the Pagoda (which is obviously still a major tourist attraction) in the background sans Tesco. There is still some original tiling left in the building and it does rather have the aura of old time air travel. The area is a striking image in the book and also in the film – and if you get into the right psychohistoricalgeographist mindset still quite atmospheric.

Here’s remembering the great JG once again

A Few Posts on Keelung III – The Monument to Prince Kitashirakawa

2009-04-24T01:37:00.000-07:00

Before moving on to other things a couple of posts about a recent trip to Keelung in Taiwan to get out of the way. Today the small monument to the Japanese Prince Kitashirakawa. It’s hidden just slightly back from the road that runs around the base of the old Ershawan Fort.

Kitshirakawa (1847-1895) was the 2nd head of a collateral branch of the Japanese imperial family and a professional soldier who had been trained in Germany. After the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, he was transferred to the elite IJA 1st Division and participated in the Taiwan Expedition of 1874. During the invasion, he contracted malaria and died outside of Tainan. This meant that Prince Kitashirakawa was the first member of the Japanese imperial family known to have died outside of Japan, and the first (in modern times) to have died in war.

The monument itself was erected in 1933 by the Japanese to commemorate their “conquest of Taiwan”. It has been restored now and has some pretty complete guides placed alongside to explain its history. It seems (understandably perhaps being in an obscure location and being Japanese) rarely visited now but remains in a small garden. To be honest I stumbled across it walking from the French Cemetery mentioned the other day back into town.

A Few Posts on Keelung I - The Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building

A Few Posts on Keelung II – The Cimetière Française de Kilung
A Few Posts on Keelung VI - Ershawan Fort

Today is World Book Day

2009-04-23T03:22:00.000-07:00

In most of the world today is World Book Day. The date of April 23rd is apparently the selected date due to the (contested) fact that Shakespeare died on on April 23, 1616. Or if you like his birth which is widely assumed to have been on April 23, 1564 (and also happens to Nabokov’s birthday too). Interestingly Miguel de Cervantes also died on April 23rd. (actually their deaths were ten days apart as Spain had already switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, while England, ever the contrarian nation, didn’t switch to the Julian calendar until 1752.

And talking of British contrarianism - in the UK, birthplace obviously of Shakespeare, World Book Day is held on March 5th! I love being a Brit sometimes. You see there’s a clash as April 23 is already taken by England’s patron saint, St. George.

Anyway – World Book Day seems like a good idea to me whether in March or April or any month – so go buy a book. If you can’t think of one to buy look down the left hand column of this blog for possible inspiration!. In Taiwan the Japanese book chain Kinokuniya issued this rather nice card to celebrate the event.

Deviation Posting – Probably the Best Cast Ever – Probably the Worst Film Ever

2009-04-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

Imagine this – a film with the following cast of amazing actors:

Kenneth Branagh

Bill Nighy

Tom Wilkinson

Terence Stamp

Eddie Izzard

Kevin McNally

Tom Hollander

Kenneth Cranham

David Bamber

Bernard Hill

And not forgetting the fantastic Dutch actress from Black Book - Carice van Houten

That is one of the best cast lists any film could have

But then they got Tom Cruise and make Valkyrie

Trains of the Kowloon-Canton Railway

2009-04-22T02:22:00.000-07:00

While in Tai Po last weekend (see previous post) I couldn’t of course resist a trip to the (free!!) Hong Kong Railway Museum. The museum is home to the original Tai Po Market train station which was a stop on the Kowloon-Canton Railway that obviously ran from Guangzhou right down the harbour at Tsim Tsa Choi originally.

The station house is excellent with some old signalling gear, the train masters office and the old ticket booth with a display of old KCR tickets. The building is marvellous and typical of the old KCR stations. Inside are some nice exhibits including an old KCR poster (which I’d really like – very annoying they weren’t selling reprints) and some old black and white pictures of crowds at the station.

There’s also a few oddities like an old trolley (left) which looks fun. There’s an old puffer that ran on the line in the 1920s (middle), a more recent (1950s) diesel (right) and a couple of old carriages you can stroll through.

A nice fast visit. Strangely the place was mostly full of happy young newly weds having their wedding photos taken next to old diesel trains and in front of the current lines of the KCR train sweeping past from the border at Lo Wu down to Tsim Sha Choi East. Takes all sorts I suppose.

A Few Posts on Keelung II – The Cimetière Française de Kilung

2009-04-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting sites in Keelung is the Cimetière Française de Kilung. The French cemetery is a reminder of the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885 (see my other posts on this war as related to Danshui) located on a plot hemmed in by apartment buildings near the ruins of the old Ershawan Fort.

Actually this is not the original French cemetery, which was moved from a seaside location in 1909. It is reasonably well maintained though, unlike the foreigners’ cemetery in Danshui, the site has not been designated a national relic, though is open to the public. Two obelisks stand at opposite ends of the plot - one in French is dedicated to soldiers and sailors; the other, in both French and Chinese, is dedicated to officers as well. Ranks and officers kept apart in death too it seems!

The total number of French soldiers and sailors buried in Keelung is unknown, though the most common figure cited in 600 French officers, soldiers, and sailors. Approximately 120 of them were killed in battle, while 150 died later of their wounds. The majority succumbed to malaria, cholera, dysentery, or other maladies. More than a fifth of the French force never returned home.

The French cemetery is the subject of a book by Christophe Rouil titled Formosa: Some Nearly-Forgotten Battles, (or at least Formose, des Batailles Presque Oubliées – I’m not sure if there’s an English version or not) which took the author a year and a half to research and write. Rouil notes that after World War II the cemetery fell into disrepair. In 1947, M. Bayens, a French diplomat based in Shanghai, reported to his superiors that the graveyard was in a terrible state. Rather than wait for instructions from Paris, he spent around US$100 of his own money (which was later reimbursed by France's foreign ministry) to have the cemetery fixed up.

To get there just follow the harbour road around the port past the hilly park that houses the Ershawan Fort and you’ll find it on the left hand side.

A Few Posts on Keelung I - The Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building

A Few Posts on Keelung III – The Monument to Prince Kitashirakawa

A Few Posts on Keelung VI - Ershawan Fort

JG Ballard – 1930-2009

2009-04-20T05:03:00.000-07:00

After a long illness JG Ballard died yesterday. He will be truly missed.

Of course he was one of Britain’s greatest modern writers but will be remembered by many for Empire of the Sun, the fictionalized account of his own childhood in a Shanghai (Lunghwa) internment camp. Steven Spielberg turned the novel into a 1987 film, which was nominated for six Oscars, and as far as movie versions of books go wasn’t bad at all.

Born in Shanghai on November 15, 1930, Ballard was the son of a British executive. He was growing up in the city’s privileged expatriate community when the Japanese invaded. At the age of 12, he was interned with his mother and father in a camp where he would spend two and a half years.

Recently Ballard had written again about Shanghai in his autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton.

For those interested the former Ballard family still stands and is now a restaurant on Panyu Lu near the corner with Xinhua Road. I can’t recommend the food but a stroll by to doff your cap in respect is in order if in you are in the area.

Tai Po - The Old District Office North

2009-04-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

Found myself with a blessedly work and interruption free day in Hong Kong last weekend so decided to head out to Tai Po where I’d never been before. The main object of a quick look-see was the old District Office North, the earliest remaining seat of the British civil administration after the lease of the New Territories. The building dates from around 1907.

The building was the centre for administration, legislation and land regulation for the area that lies to the north of what is now Tseun Wan. The building was also a planning centre – where the first modern roads, electricity systems and rail lines in the New Territories were planned out. Until 1961 the building housed the Magistrate’s Court for the local area. Obviously responsibilities were handed over in1997 though the building remained in use as a government centre till the mid-1980s and now seems to be mostly occupied by the Boy Scout movement.

The building is a typical colonial-style structure typical of the 20th century. It’s sited at the top of a hill up a path from Wan Tau Street just round the corner from Tai Po Market train station (on the East Kowloon Railway line). These sort of colonial buildings were often at the top of hills for obvious imperialist reasons. It’s a typical red brick structure building that hasn’t been mucked about much and even still has the original fireplaces.

It’s nice to see such a well preserved building though of Hong Kong’s record is extremely patchy at preservation – as I’ll note later in the week.

A Few Posts on Keelung I - The Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building

2009-04-16T06:26:00.000-07:00

Passed through the Taiwan port city of Keelung (Jilong) over Easter. As a port Keelung is on the decline though the city, a 40 minute train ride from Taipei, remains a bustling and crowded place. The area behind the train station is particularly tight knit. So I’m going to post about a few interesting places and buildings in Keelung.

Keelung is nicknamed the Rainy Port - indeed it rained all day when I visited. The history is a mix of influences of those who've occupied the port over the centuries - the Spanish for a while and between 1642 to 1661 and then again between 1663-1668, the Dutch – they were ousted for a couple of years by the great Anti-Qing pirate Koxinga. The Keelung Campaign was an important subsidiary campaign in the Sino-French War (August 1884 to April 1885) and the French occupied the port from October 1884 to June 1885 and then after the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, which handed all Taiwan over to Tokyo, the Japanese ran the port.

And a building worth looking at if you visit is one of the structures the Japanese left behind - Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building – close to the train station on the harbour. It also includes what is now the main Post Office in Keelung (left). It was Japanese designed and built and was completed in 1934 as the headquarters of the Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration. Now the main building hosts a variety of firms as well as some of the present harbour authority’s offices and the aforementioned post office.

OK, so it’s not the most gorgeous building in the world – but is a pretty good example of Japanese modernist colonial architecture of the time – you see the same in Korea as well as parts of northern China and Manchuria, particularly Changchun. The interior seems fairly well preserved and actually the entrance lobby (left) is still rather nice though sadly a bit cluttered and not lit well.

A Few Posts on Keelung II – The Cimetière Française de Kilung

A Few Posts on Keelung III – The Monument to Prince Kitashirakawa

A Few Posts on Keelung VI - Ershawan Fort

John Thomson Exhibition Opens in Peking

2009-04-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

I mentioned it previously in a post but it’s worth reminding the interested that the China Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872 exhibition opens today at the Beijing World Art Museum – the show runs till 18th May.

If you want to know more about Thomson and his pioneering photographic work in China there’s a good discussion you can listen to or download the text of on the BBC web site – click here. There’s also a useful appraisal of the exhibition and Thomson on the Asian Art web site – click here.

Maurice Bowra - A Footnote to the History of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs

2009-04-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

This is a wee bit of an obscure posting but I know a lot of people are interested in the history and characters involved in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs run for so long by Sir Robert Hart, the "IG". One of the fascinating things about the Maritime Customs administration is the number of serious scholars it produced – I posted about a new biography of one, Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor, a noted translator recently.

For those who like ephemera about the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs they may like to note that one person being remembered at the moment through a new biography was the son of a Maritime Customs administration official in China who rose to prominence in British academia between the wars – Maurice Bowra. Nowadays Bowra is pretty obscure though I seem to come across references to him regularly in the biographies and autobiographies of old Oxford types where he was a well known Don for decades. Last year I enjoyed reading AN Wilson’s biography of John Betjeman who was tutored by Bowra and who seemed to affect the young poet.

Bowra is also largely forgotten as he never really produced any seminal scholarly works (though did write a few understandable books about ancient Greece) and his famous bon-mots and supposedly cutting remarks don’t really translate to 2009, if they were ever funny outside of a bunch of public school boys – ‘a man more dined against than dining’ may have had the young fogies in stitches back in the 1930s but doesn’t mean much now. However, his remark (alluding to his rather mysterious sexuality) upon marrying a noted lesbian that, ‘My dear, buggers can’t be choosers’ is quite amusing.

He also wrote and apparently regularly recited some pretty bad poetry. Still, as an inspiration to a bunch of largely privileged boarding school boys embarking on university life he was influential. And to several generations too - he was Warden of Wadham College (left) from 1938 to 1970 and served as Vice-Chancellor of the Oxford from 1951 to 1954. If he has a lasting claim to fame it’s probably in his role as a defender of the university from the pernicious influences of politicians seeking to interfere and meddle with the place.

The point of this digression is that, as a footnote to a history of the impact of the Maritime Customs administration, Maurice Bowra’s father was Cecil Arthur Verner Bowra and Maurice was born in Jiujiang in 1898, then of course Kiukiang on the southern shores of the Yangtze River in northwest Jiangxi province. However, China doesn’t really seem to have had much effect on his life – at a young age he was sent to school at Cheltenham College and then New College, Oxford before serving in the First World War and then heading back to Oxford seemingly not leaving the place until he died. (the Kiukiang Bund early 20th century pictured opposite).

As I said it’s a small footnote in the history of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. I know nothing else really about Bowra or his father in China though there is a new biography of him – Leslie Mitchell's Maurice Bowra: A Life – that seems to have been generally well reviewed.

Cultural Revolution Photos in Shanghai

2009-04-14T01:41:00.000-07:00

An interesting exhibition in Shanghai at the moment - Beijing Sixty Six, featuring some amazing photographs of the Cultural Revolution by Solange Brand. What makes them startling is that they are mostly colour and for some reason (perhaps just in my mind’s eye) photos of the CR always seem black and white to me.

Solange Brand, then the Art Director for Le Monde Diplomatique visited China between 1966 to 1968, Some of the most interesting photos are around the journeys people made to the large rallies held in Beijing by the Red Guards. These were incredibly mass movements of people. In fact I can’t think of too many other great ideologically or religious motivated movements on the same scale with the exception of the Haj and the kumbh mela.

Anyway Beijing Sixty Six runs until May 22 at the Beaugeste Photo Gallery, Building 5 Space 519, Taikang Road Lane 210 – the supposed art space or something down where about 3,000 instant coffee and tat shops have opened.

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies - The Ibis Chrestomathy

2009-04-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

As I’m on holiday for a few days I decided to reread Amitav Ghosh’s fantastic Sea of Poppies from last year. When I first got a copy I raced through it knowing that I’d very much liked his major Asian saga The Glass Palace that roamed from Burma up to India and down to Malaysia. Sea of Poppies is the first in a planned trilogy about the China-India opium trade with a magnificent cast of characters. But what sets it apart and makes it brilliant is Ghosh’s use of pidgin English and nautical slang throughout the book – a quite bewildering array of terminology and words to make any lover of the Hobson-Jobson swoon.

So it requires a second reading to really relish the language. To get an idea of the plot, here’s the publisher’s synopsis:

“…set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China.”

The point of this post however is to highlight the web site that goes with Sea of Poppies – www.seaofpoppies.com. On that site there is a downloadable pdf called The Ibis Chrestomathy (The Ibis being the ship at the centre of Sea of Poppies and a chrestomathy being a collection of choice literary passages, used especially as an aid in learning a foreign language) a most useful dictionary of the pidgin and slang used in the book and a great read in and of itself – if you have the slightest interest in pidgin English (Indian or China Coast), Lascar sailing terminology or Hobson-Jobson like Anglo-India words it’s must read – click here.

I eagerly await the second part of the trilogy.

BTW: I posted once before about Ghosh, Sea of Poppies and Lascars in particular in case you’re interested.

Randall Gould and Old China Hands

2009-04-12T03:56:00.000-07:00

I came across a nice quote while re-reading Randall Gould’s great China memoir China in the Sun (1946) the other day. Gould was a veteran member of the old China press corps before the war. He happened to mention to Madame Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling) that he was thinking of writing his memoirs. She replied:

“Whatever you do, don’t write like an old China Hand, please!!” - Madame Sun (left with Dr Sun Yat-sen) disliked the old Treaty Porters.

Gould supplies a definition of what he thought should be the definition of a real old China Hand – “...someone who liked the Chinese and meant them to profit by presence as he in turn profited by the Chinese.”

Seems fair enough to me

Yoshiko Kawashima - Eastern Jewel - Pictures

2009-04-11T03:20:00.000-07:00

After adding some images relevant to Ian Buruma’s fictionalistion of the life of Yoshiko Yamaguchi this week – The China Lover – I note from emails that a lot of people seem to have Yoshiko Yamaguchi (Manchruian-born Japanese actress) confused with Yoshiko Kawashima (Manchu princess raised in Japan who became a spy).

In part this confusion is perhaps due to similarity in names and that they were both around at roughly the same time and also that there happens to be a fictionalisation of Kawashima’s life out at the moment to (which is also a good read) Maureen Lindley’s The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel.

So here’s some pictures of Yoshiko Kawashima – Eastern Jewel – and the basic details:

Manchu princess Aisin Gioro Xianyu – also known as Eastern Jewel;

Born in Peking 1907, the 14th daughter to Shanqi, the 10th son of Prince Su;

Adopted by Naniwa Kawashima, Japanese spy and mercenary;

raised and educated in Matsumoto,

Nagano, Japan;

married off to Ganjuurjab, the son of Inner Mongolian Army General Jengjuurjab, leader of the Mongolian-Manchurian Independence Movement;

She runs away from Mongolia to Shanghai after two years and becomes a spy;

As part of these activities she is also sent to spy on the Last Emperor Pu Yi;

Arrested in Peking at end of World War Two and beheaded as a spy

And the interesting bits:

Sex all over th e place – straight, gay, prostitute – she apparently didn’t care;

Wore men’s clothes, especially uniforms;

Has long been rumoured to have never been executed, but paid a dying girl to stand in for her and is still alive somewhere.

Whatever, Yoshiko Kawashima is a great character, quite well brought to life by Lindley in her novel and worth a picture or two here.

An Australian in China Reprinted

2009-04-10T01:05:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of George Ernest Morrison – Morrison of Peking – though I enjoyed Linda Jaivin’s recent novelisation of his love life An Immoral Woman. Still, I think he was grossly overrated and just gets endlessly recycled as great without anyone reading his actual despatches. I argue as much in my forthcoming (June) book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists From Opium Wars to Mao.

Still if you are going to read anything by Morrison then his earlier travelogue An Australian in China is probably best. When Morrison first arrived in China in 1894, he set out on what he described as “a quiet journey across China to Burma”. Dressed as a Chinese and engaging guides and servants as needed, he travelled by riverboat, sedan chair, mule, pony, and mostly on foot. In this book, Morrison describes his journey with the same vivid and precise vision that would later make him world-famous.

Nice to see it republished.

The China Lover Images IV – Post the Movies

2009-04-09T07:07:00.000-07:00

If it was possible Yoshiko Yamaguchi’s life got weirder after her acting career was over. In the early 1960s she became a hostess and anchorwoman on daytime TV talk shows aimed at Japanese housewives. She interviewed a range of people from Kim Il-sung to Zhou En-lai and became involved in the Palestinian cause (meeting Leila Khaled (left), then the pin up girl of the movement) and covered the Vietnam War. She had always wanted to be a journalist and eventually became one.

In 1974, she was elected to the House of Councillors of the Japanese parliament, where she served for 18 years (three terms). She co-authored a book, Ri Koran, Watashi no Hansei (Half My Life as Ri Koran) and became Vice-President of the Asian Women’s Fund.

She did eventually return to China where a musical about her life was staged. In 1992, as part of the 20th anniversary of normalization in Sino-Japanese relations, the musical was staged in China (left) and was, according to the China Daily at least, welcomed by the Chinese audiences.

Fuji Television made a TV movie - Sayonara Ri Kouran –in 1989, as a special project to commemorate their 30th anniversary and a two-part TV movie - Ri Kouran - made about her early life in China in 2006.

As far as I’m aware she’s still alive and living in Tokyo at the grand old age of 89. Here she is pictured left on her 88th birthday looking hale and hearty and getting some house red down her.

The China Lover – A NOVEL

The

China

Lover Images I - Li Xianglan/Ri Koran The Manchurian Days

The China Lover Images II – The Tokyo Years

The

China

Lover Images III – The Hollywood Sojourn

The China Lover Images III – The Hollywood Sojourn

2009-04-08T01:10:00.000-07:00

In the 1950s Yoshiko established her acting career as Shirley Yamaguchi in Hollywood and on Broadway in the U.S., and appeared in several films made in Hong Kong. She toured the US in a stage production of The King and I that bombed. The movies fared a little better.

In 1952 she appeared in King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride. The film tells the story of a wounded Korean War veteran who returns to his California home with his Japanese wife. The pair are subjected to plenty of good old American racism and bigotry from their neighbours and family. At one point the husband cries out, “Don't call my wife a geisha girl...” – well the times were different back then! Press reaction was apparently mixed.

Her most successful Hollywood outing was probably House of Bamboo, directed by Samuel Fuller in 1955 – very noir – and starring Robert Ryan, Robert Stack and DeForest Kelley (later to Bones on Star Trek). Though Hollywood fare it was set in Tokyo. The movie got some good reviews in America but not in Japan, where the press felt Yamaguchi was overly exoticised.

She then made Navy Wife in 1956 which unfortunately didn’t set the world alight. And that was pretty much it. Yamaguchi was popular with some, praised for her looks and seems to have enjoyed herself in Hollywood striking up friendships with the likes of Chaplin and Yul Brunner. In 1958 she retired from the movies and acting.

The China Lover - A NOVEL
The China Lover Images I - Li Xianglan/Ri Koran The Manchurian Days
The China Lover Images II – The Tokyo Years

The China Lover Images IV – Post the Movies

The China Lover Images II – The Tokyo Years

2009-04-07T01:13:00.000-07:00

Following on from the previous post about her Manchuria days and early film career - Yoshiko Yamaguchi was arrested by the Chinese at the end of World War Two but managed to get herself released and headed to Japan, a country that she barely knew despite having Japanese parents. Of course when she arrived it was the American occupation of a devastated country.

In 1946 Yoshiko Yamaguchi made it to Tokyo and resumed her movie career. She made a number of films including Akira Kurosawa’s (far left) story of paparazzi, celebrity and a court case Scandal (1950), one of the best films of those years. It happened to co-star Toshiro Mifune (left), a Kurosawa favourite, who also happened to have been born in China to Japanese parents (though Qingdao rather than Manchuria).

During this period she also married Isamu Noguchi, the prominent Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Noguchi was highly celebrated and has a museum dvoted to his work in Long Island. Yoshiko met Noguchi in New York in the autumn of 1950. They were married in Japan in May 1952, and lived that year on the land of eminent potter Kitaoji Rosanjin. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In the later 1950s Yoshiko looked for work in Hollywood movies – see next posting.

The China Lover - A NOVEL
The China Lover Images I - Li Xianglan/Ri Koran The Manchurian Days

The China Lover Images III – The Hollywood Sojourn

The China Lover Images IV – Post the Movies

The China Lover Images I - Li Xianglan/Ri Koran The Manchurian Days

2009-04-06T01:01:00.000-07:00

As promised some images associated with Ri Koran, the subject of Ian Buruma’s The China Lover. Today, her early career in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and work for the Manchuria Film Association.

Born in Fushun, Manchuria to Japanese parents in 1920 as Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Working for the Japanese-run Manchurian Film Studios (below) she was billed as Li Xianglan in Chinese, or Ri Kōran in Japanese hiding her true origins. As these were propaganda movies where Chinese girls saw the Japanese not as territorial invaders but liberators these deceit was considered necessary by the head of the studio Masahiko Amakasu (left).

These films were straight out propaganda but the song Yoshiko became forever associated with, China Nights, also came out of this period.

At the end of World War II, Yoshiko was arrested by the Chinese government for treason and collaboration with the Japanese. However, she was cleared of all charges since she was not a Chinese national, and thus the Chinese gover nment could not try her for treason. She then left for a second phase of her career in post-war American occupied Tokyo.

The China Lover – A NOVEL

The China Lover Images II – The Tokyo Years

The China Lover Images III – The Hollywood Sojourn

The China Lover – A NOVEL

2009-04-05T01:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve been very surprised by the number of bad, or at least less than stellar, reviews Ian Buruma’s The China Lover has got. Though rarely trashed, many reviewers seem to have been left unsatisfied arguing the book is disjointed, inchoate or incomplete; that we never quite get to fully understand the main character Yochiko Yamaguchi, who is of course a real life character, the Manchurian-born, Japanese actress known alternatively as Li Xianglan, Ri Koran or Shirley Yamaguchi.

This incompleteness, the never quite knowing seems to me a poor thing to criticise Buruma for. First of all, though Yochiko Yamaguchi is a real person the book has the words “A NOVEL” stamped on the front of it. Unlike a lot of reviewers I chose to interpret this to mean that it was (surprise, surprise) a novel rather than A BIOGRAPHY. While a biography of Yochiko Yamaguchi would be interesting, and several exist, the point that she was never just one thing and the fascinating life of being born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (China) to Japanese parents and then appearing in the Japanese-made propaganda movies shot in Manchuria and having to pretend to be Chinese lends itself to fiction. To an extent all actors and actresses are fictions – Yochiko was a double fiction, if not triple or quadruple.

I’m not going to reprise her life anymore or review the book (available with a couple of covers) – just read it. What I thought I’d do is try and add the photos that would have probably been in the book had Buruma decided to include any. He didn’t – which is his business and fine (reminder to churlish reviewers – on the cover it says A NOVEL) – but I’m adding them here.

I’ll break the posts by the phases of Yamaguchi’s career - the Manchurian days, Tokyo after the War, her brief (and not altogether successful) flirtation with America-Hollywood and finally her post-movies life. That’ll keep me posting for the rest of the week.

The China Lover Images I - Li Xianglan/Ri Koran The Manchurian Days
The China Lover Images II – The Tokyo Years
The China Lover Images III – The Hollywood Sojourn

The China Lover Images IV – Post the Movies

Undoubtedly the Best Guide to Shanghai Ever

2009-04-04T01:25:00.000-07:00

Another plug for the excellent Shanghai-based Earnshaw Classics series of reprints on China. Some of the best, and I think most popular have been the old guides to China – I’ve mentioned their reprint of The Standard Guide to Shanghai from 1934 before in a post. Now they’ve reprinted one of the most funny and irreverent guides to Shanghai ever published (let’s be honest nobody does good Shanghai guides now – all boring museums and parks and no dope, whores and booze anymore in these sad PC days).

Tael Lights by Maurine Karns and Pat Paterson was first published in 1936 and it’s a guidebook to the seamier side of Shanghai in the mid-1930s, when it was at its most outrageous. The authors, two pretty dissolute foreigners living life to the fullest and working at least partially in a Whangpoo whiskey haze, stress the nightlife, particularly the sex and sin side of the city. Political correctness hardly enters into it thankfully. Even the accompanying Sapajou cartoons and maps list the best bordellos and bars rather than maps now that point out the dirge that is People’s Square and such innocuous “delights” as the ridiculous Xintiandi and boring shopping malls as if this is all people can enjoy in our horrendously sanitised 21^st century.

The “nymphs de pave” chapter starts by telling us that, “No small part of the nocturnal street scene in Shanghai is contributed by the ladies whose commodity is love, cash and carry." Another chapter is called “Fleshpots” which is a collection of dives that make the sad wanna-bes of Bar Rouge or the tackiness of Tongren Lu all too apparent to the modern reader – who, for instance, wouldn’t pass on a night at the ghastly vandalism and snobbishness that is 3 on the Bund when offered the Venus – “The Venus begins to come to life at about three when some of the other spots begin to close.Four kinds of people go there. The people who don't go to Del Montes, the people who want to sin conspicuously, the people who want to sin inconspicuously and those who have that happy alcoholic feeling, and want to keep it.”

The ad opposite is for Ciro's in 1937 - couldn't find one for The Venus.

Oh what we missed! And how pathetic is what we have been given!

White Working Class Hong Kong in the Nineteenth Century Revealed

2009-04-03T01:31:00.000-07:00

Wandering around the dank recesses of the interweb the other day I stumbled across this piece by Professor HJ Lethbridge. It’s a great piece though I’m not sure exactly when or where it’s from (probably the 1960s sometime). In his paper Condition of the European Working Class in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong (thanks to Hong Kong University Library for putting it on line) Lethbridge manages to both reveal a world that is often ignored compared to all the endless tomes on taipans and tycoons, and moves beyond boring bios of long forgotten governors to remember some of the ordinary working class Europeans who lived and worked in Hong Kong.

I won’t write much more – best to read it – especially if you like whores, beachcombers, loafers, criminals and ne’er-do-wells (all of the above in my case).

BTW: Lethbridge was a fascinating chap, an early sociologist at Hong Kong University who wrote on many subjects, Chinese and foreign. I came across him years ago when he wrote an introduction to an old reprint on Carl Crow’s Travellers Handbook to China and Juliet Bredon’s excellent Peking, Vicki Baum’s Shanghai ‘37 and many other classics. I’ve since found pieces by him on such riveting subjects as murders, prostitution and all manner of nefarious goings on in old Hong Kong.

Couldn’t think of a picture to stick with this so the above are some shots of HKU (above left) and Victoria Harbour (top) around 1946.

North Korean Movie Poster Art of the 1970s

2009-04-02T03:07:00.000-07:00

In the interests of fairness (and a favour to a mate) after three days of South Korea it’s time for a North Korea post. So, a quick plug for Nick Bonner’s Pyongyang Art Studio in Beijing. This online and actual gallery presents original art work from the DPRK. Since 1993 Nick has been collecting DPRK art and is now putting on his own exhibitions. He recently did one at the Korea Society in New York.

At the moment the Studio has a fascinating exhibition of original printed North Korean film posters from the 1970's – the height of North Korean Hollywood! The exhibition is at the Pyongyang Art Studio and runs until the end of June and is open Monday to Friday 10am to 6pm.

Pyongyang Art Studio
27 Beisanlitun Nan (East courtyard),
Dongzhimen
北京市朝阳区北三里屯南27号东侧院102
Tel: +86-10-6416-7544
www.pyongyangartstudio.com
info@pyongyangartstudio.com

A Few Random Posts on Seoul III - Insadong

2009-04-01T01:34:00.000-07:00

A final posting on Seoul as I want to note for any who haven’t been there the Insadong district of the city. Insadong is about as charming and historic as Seoul gets - the main street, Insadong-gil, is connected to a multitude of alleys that lead deeper into the district and are filled with small restaurants, bars, coffeeshops, craft shops and art galleries.

Insadong has a more organic feel than somewhere like Shanghai’s grasping and overcrowded Taikang Lu but is a pleasant enough stroll comparable to Beijing’s Nanluoguxiang hutong street. Though Insadong is also increasingly home to a wealth of Korean tat shops all selling the same cheap and tacky gifts to the few tourists around.

Insadong has been a central part of Seoul’s culture since the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) and is still a cluster of arts and antiques shops though the inevitable (not sure why I say inevitable but it feels that way) Starbucks has infiltrated to add a philistine contrast.

The alleys that run off Insadong-gil are the most interesting part of the area and worth an explore while if you can find spots to get slightly higher you’ll get some views of the area’s rooftops.

A Few Random Posts on Seoul I - The Dongdaemun Gate

A Few Random Posts on Seoul II - Seoul Railway Station

2009-03-31T02:03:00.000-07:00

It appears that the old railway station in Seoul, which is adjacent to the new and more modern one, is undergoing a refurbishment at the moment. It’s a classic piece of Japanese-style imperial architecture that wouldn’t be out of place anywhere else in the former Japanese empire such as Dalian (see earlier posts and pics). It was originally built to serve the line between Seoul and Uiju and Seoul and Wonsan and had a strategic use – i.e. to ferry troops towards the invasion of China.

Construction of the two storey station (there’s also a floor below ground too) designed by Tsukamoto Yasushi of Tokyo Imperial University began in 1922 of mixed stone and brick and was finally completed in 1925. It was originally known as the Keijo Station Building and renamed Seoul Station in 1947.

The pictures here show the station as it would have originally appeared although later northern and southern terminals were added in the 1960s to allow for additional capacity. This is apparently the oldest surviving railway station in Korea.

Before this building there had been a previous station which opened in 1900 as Gyeongseong Station and was renamed Namdaemun Station in 1905, due to its proximity to the Namdaemun Gate.

In 1910, the name of the city (Seoul) was changed from Hanseong to Gyeongseong (Keijo in Japanese) by the Japanese imperialists. The station reverted to the name Gyeongseong Station in 1915.

There is a small museum and gallery attached but both it and the rest of the building was closed last weekend when I visited for what appears to be a general tarting up.

A Few Random Posts on Seoul I - The Dongdaemun Gate

A Few Random Posts on Seoul III - Insadong

A Few Random Posts on Seoul I - The Dongdaemun Gate

2009-03-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

I know this blog is called China Rhyming and not Korea Rhyming but I just spent a few days in Seoul, mostly eating, and so a few Seoul Posts will follow like it or not. I’m a Seoul fan – particularly of the restaurants and street food - but haven’t had an excuse to visit for a few years so it was nice to reacquaint myself over the weekend.Sadly, since I last visited the Namdaemun gate in the centre of the city has burnt down - spectacularly in a 2008 arson attack - and remains shrouded in hoardings so I assume restoration is still ongoing.

However, the Dongdaemun (Great East Gate) still stands (above) and is worth a note. Originally called Heung-injimun (“Gate of Uplifting Mercy” or “Benevolence”), it once served as the main eastern gate in the wall surrounding Seoul. First built in 1397, renovated in 1453 and was rebuilt in 1869 in its present form. Most people probably don’t make a visit to the Dongdaemun but probably stumble across it after visiting the extensive Dongdaemun Market. It’s now in the middle of a roundabout but still fairly imposing and worth a stroll to see.

A Few Random Posts on Seoul II - Seoul Train Station

A Few Random Posts on Seoul III - Insadong

The Lure of China

2009-03-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

It would be remiss of me not to give a quick plug for Frances Wood’s new book The Lure of China: Writers From Marco Polo to JG Ballard. It’s another in the rather lovely and nicely illustrated Catalpa Series (“China in the West: The West in China”) jointly published by Yale University Press and Joint Publishing HK Co. The series is edited by Lynn Pan who’s own Shanghai Style is also one of the series.

I’m assuming that anyone reading this blog will have read at least one or more of Frances’s books – No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China is just one stand out title from her among several. In The Lure of China Wood segues neatly between Marco to the Jesuits; the diplomat-scholars to Malraux and Somerset Maugham and takes in the lady travel writers, old Etonians, Bloomsbury types and the hacks that covered China.

Though there are numerous pen portraits of writers on China - some familiar; some less so. My own favourite, for what it’s worth, was Paul Claudel (left) who I knew nothing about. Claudel wrote a number of scintillating titles such as The Olive Oil Business in Fuzhou (1896) and The Packaging of Biscuits for Export (1901) which sound like my day job! But he also wrote plays, had a succession of affairs and wrote great prose – at which points our lives depart!!

I missed Frances when she spoke recently at the Shanghai International Literary Festival at M on the Bund but the good people at City Weekend magazine recorded it and uploaded it – listen here.

China Cuckoo Live in Shanghai

2009-03-25T23:22:00.000-07:00

China Cuckoo author Mark Kitto is talking to the Shanghai FCC next Wednesday - it's a great book about the old Zhejiang hill resort of Moganshan and he should be an entertaining speaker - see my earlier post reviewing the book.

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club Presents:

China Cuckoo
Mark Kitto

The Mix at Mesa

Wednesday, April 1st, 7pm (talk starts at 7.30pm)

A legend in Shanghai as the founder of that’s Shanghai and its sister publications, Mark Kitto saw his business empire crumble around him in traumatic circumstances in 2004. Yet rather than giving up on China, he decided to plunge even deeper into local life, eventually moving with his family to Moganshan, the once famous mountain retreat in Zhejiang which he has now helped to revive, running a coffee house in an old hotel, and writing regular columns on life there for the British magazine Prospect. His experiences in Shanghai, the story of that’s, and the history of Moganshan, are vividly described in his entertaining new book, China Cuckoo. Mark will discuss the highs and lows of doing business in China, and the different challenges of life with the wild boars, retired4G military officers and would-be real estate developers of Moganshan.

Venue details: The Mix, 1/F, Mesa, 748 Julu Lu, near Fumin Lu (6289 9108)

Admission: Members free; Non-members 50 RMB.

RSVP: https://mail.google.com/mail/h/v3jwiqh7j7p7/?v=b&cs=wh&to=fcc.sfcc@gmail.com by March 31st

About the Speaker:
Mark Kitto studied Chinese, served as a captain in the Welsh Guards, and worked as a metals trader in London and China before moving into magazine publishing. After a brief flirtation with Clueless in Guangzhou, in 1998 he set up that’s Shanghai with his business partner Kathleen Lau, later launching similar publications in both Guangzhou and Beijing. After losing control of the business to an official publisher in 2004, he moved to Moganshan, where he and his wife now run a coffee shop. His book ‘China Cuckoo: How I lost a fortune and found a life in China’ has just been published by Constable.

Carl Crow’s Very Particular Chinese Customers

2009-03-25T00:58:00.000-07:00

The other day someone asked me to dig out a couple of old case studies from Shanghai about the problems with designing products that appealed to the rather particular Chinese consumer and some rather disastrous attempts from the old days. Naturally I fell back to my old standard – Carl Crow’s 400 Million Customers (now reprinted and available here) and came up with the following two examples – fags and soap. Of course if you find Mr Crow interesting then someone not a million miles away from writing this blog did indeed do a highly praised biography of him, which you can also buy (click here). As you can see said biographer continues to milk the Carl Crow cow dry!!

Carl Crow’s Very Particular Chinese Customers

Marketing disasters, products nobody wants and sales falling short of exaggerated expectations in China is nothing new. Products, brands and manufacturers struggling to find Chinese customers today are merely repeating the efforts of their fathers, grandfathers and even great grandfathers.

Carl Crow, a Missourian, arrived in Shanghai in 1911 as a journalist but soon swapped over to running an advertising agency deciding that’s where the money was to be made. His agency, Carl Crow Inc., dominated the advertising and marketing of foreign brands in Shanghai and throughout China for the next 20 years. In 1937 he wrote a best selling book – 400 Million Customers: The Experiences – Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him. It instantly became a classic.

Carl’s major point in his book was that few foreign brands took the time to understand the peculiarities of the Chinese consumer – they simply assumed he or she would like their product and instantly drop brands they knew well for these new arrivals – it didn’t quite work like that then; it doesn’t quite work like that now. Carl wrote in the foreword to 400 Million Customers:

“Not only do Chinese have very decided ideas as to what they like and dislike , but once they have become accustomed to a certain brand, no matter whether it be cigarettes, soap or toothpaste, they are the world’s most loyal consumers, and will support a brand with a degree of unanimity and faithfulness which should bring tears of joy to the eyes of the manufacturer.”

If only you can persuade them to change! Carl gave two initial examples of disasters – cigarettes and soap.

The Very Particular Chinese Customer I - Cigarettes

"I had not been conducting my advertising agency many months before a visiting manufacturer who was looking for trade opportunities in China said to me: “I suppose the Chinese will buy anything, provided the price is cheap enough.” That is an idea held by most people, even by some foreigners who live in China and should know better. In fact, I remember that I agreed with this manufacturer. It is easy to see how one might come to that conclusion. No one gets more enjoyment out of a bargain than the Chinese, or will search further or haggle more ardently to get one, but, on the other hand, no one will more stubbornly and successfully resist attempts to sell him something he does not want, no matter what the price may be. Mere cheapness is not enough to make him change his tastes or forget his prejudices. The widely prevailing demand for a distinct type of cigarette affords a good example of this and taught me my first lesson about the fixed tastes of the Chinese consumer who has for years smoked the British-style aromatic blends of Virginia and Turkish tobacco rather than American-style Virginia and Burley blended tobaccos.

One of our clients…felt so sure he was right about Chinese consumers that we undertook his blended cigarette advertising with a good deal more than the usual enthusiasm inspired by a new and potentially large advertising account. Nothing was overlooked in launching the venture. Salesmen got the brand stocked everywhere, and it was advertised by every approved method we or the manufacturers could think of. They were so certain of success that they were willing to let next year’s business pay for this year’s advertising, and they were generous in their anticipation of what future profits would be. Thanks to the assistance given by their New York advertising agency, one of the best in America, the campaign we put on in China was far better than anything that had ever been seen there before. But in spite of all that we could do, the cigarettes remained on the dealers’ shelves. Maybe the hypothesis that anyone who changed to a blended cigarette would smoke that kind ever after really would prove correct in China, if given a fair trial. But we were never able to prove it. So far as we could discover, w never succeeded in getting a single Chinese to become a smoker of our brand of blended cigarettes, and so couldn’t tell whether or not he would become a regular consumer once he got used to them.

Any number tried to smoke them, but, after a few puffs, they found the taste both strange and odious and would not buy a second packet. The Chinese sales fell back to the zero point from which they had started, and the advertising campaign was dropped by common consent of everyone who had anything to do with it. The only satisfaction we got out of the experience was that everyone praised the advertising."

The Very Particular Chinese Customer II – Soap

"In a recent very comprehensive market survey we found that a world famous British household soap enjoys such popularity in parts of North China that nine out of ten shops which sell soap do not stock any other brand, though dozens of cheaper competing soaps are on sale in this territory and a few manufactured locally. Once in a while, when there has been a flood, or a drought, and the purchasing power of the local resident falls even lower than usual, he will buy a cheaper soap; but that is a temporary expedient, and with the return of a reasonable degree of prosperity he goes back to his old favorite brand, which was also the favorite of his grandfather. A big and apparently impregnable market like this is just the sort of thing other manufacturers like to train their heavy batteries on, and many of them have made used up a lot of ammunition and made a lot of noise, but without results.

No doubt many of them have made a soap practically as good and offered it at a cheaper price, but not one of them has ever built up a volume of sales big enough to let our clients know that there is any serious competition in the field. The consumer who occasionally tries the competing soap because of its cheaper price may fully appreciate its good qualities, but he is not sure the next cake will be so good. He has been fooled before by manufacturers who do not maintain the quality of their products, and is therefore suspicious. On the other hand, he has full confidence in the old brand. He has used it for years, his father and his grandfather used it, and it has always been the same.

The satisfactory domination of the North China market by this brand has a sound merchandising basis ands is due to the high quality of the soap in a very difficult field. Most of the water in North China is extremely hard, and cheap soaps, which will produce a satisfactory lather in the soft rainwater of the Yangtsze Valley, curdle in this water, which comes from springs and wells and is full of alkali."

(From Carl Crow’s 400 Million Customers: The Experiences – Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him, 1937)

Hamilton House Shanghai

2009-03-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

I popped in for dinner the other night at the relatively new done up Hamilton House on the junction of Fuzhou Lu and Jiangxi Lu. If nothing else the restaurant affords a view of the Fuzhou/Jiangxi intersections which has to be one of the most beautiful, impressive and (after about 7pm) deserted major circuses in any city. The former Shanghai Municipal Council building, the Central Police Station and the Metropole Hotel are all viewable while eating.

I’ll leave someone more knowledgeable than me to comment of the food which I’m told is “French in the traditional way” but I wouldn’t know about any of that. Tasted all right to me.

Still the building was a Sir Victor Sassoon property and designed by the well known and prolific (in Shanghai) architects Turner & Palmer. It was completed in 1934 and is a fine art-deco property. I’m pretty sure the American Consulate had offices here for some time and many Japanese and other international companies. There’s some penthouse apartments and a rooftop garden though of course, like everywhere, else it was wildly subdivided after 1949 and has around 1,500 people living in it for many years and plenty are still there.

Of course they push the old ‘remember the glamour of 1930s Shanghai’ line (it has a vague 30s feel but, of course, like so much retro-Shanghai, it's a contemporary take on the 30s and feels more 1980s wine bar than authentically 1930s). So a recreation of the 30s it only vaguely is, and then through a 21st century prism but it is a nice location and worth a visit.

Hamilton House

137 Fuzhou Lu,

near Jiangxi Lu

6321-0586

Stop the destruction of Staunton, Wing Lee and Bridges Street TODAY

2009-03-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

I posted only recently about the uncertain fate of Hong Kong’s Central Police Station and it seems that the horrific combination of Hong Kong’s philistine government and rapacious nasty land developers are back in action destroying whatever they can get their hands on. Honestly, hanging, drawing and quartering is too good for them.

The immediate threat is to Staunton Street, Wing Lee Street and Bridges Street which are all key to retaining the ambience of the old Central and mid-levels district. These threatened streets are just behind the Hollywood Road Police Quarters and compose largely low-rise properties running between the Central Police Station and Tai Ping Shan. Bridges Street is also home to the old YMCA building (left).

Arguably Wing Lee Street is the most beautiful of the three with its row of tong laus, the tenement building design that was developed from the late 19th Century to the 1960s and is unique to Hong Kong and southern China encompassing a mix of Chinese and European architectural features. Tong laus have traditionally been shop houses (see left on Staunton Street) with the commercial premises on the ground floor and living accommodation above and often open and airy roof spaces. Many have traditional Canton floor tiles, the original wooden floors and joists and many unique decorative features.

Many of the tong laus around the area under threat have been restored and well looked after (by their owners rather than the philisitines in the government) – to show how well they can be restored see the picture above of the recently renovated tong lau on Johnston Street in Wan Chai.

The current plans are:
Site A (Wing Lee Street): a row of 6-storey low-rise (9 of the original 12 tong laus will be demolished, only 3 will be kept);
Site B (88-90 Staunton Street & 2-10 Shing Wong Street): an 8-13 storey building behind the tong lau in 88-90 Staunton Street;
Site C (60-66 Staunton Street, corner Aberdeen Street): 28-storey high-rise with podium.

The Central and Western District Concern Group's requests are:
1) The entire site should comprise only low-rise (less than 6 storey) buildings.
2) All the historic low-rise tong laus (tenement buildings) on Wing Lee Street should be preserved.
3) New developments should comprise only small land blocks, in keeping with the current characteristics of the area.
4) Bridges Street Market should be re-zoned (to GIC) for community use.
5) Current owners should be allowed to live in their already renovatedbuildings.

To OBJECT to the Urban Renewal Authority’s planned destruction project H19 and support The Central and Western District Concern Group's ideas the deadline for objections on the Town Planning Application A/H3/387 is TODAY, 24 March 2009, at midnight HK time. For more information click here or visit here. Or if you know how it works, you can send your OBJECTIONS directly to the Town Planning Board here.

A Boat Called Henry

2009-03-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

You are one of the wealthy, mighty and seemingly all powerful Keswick family (so posh you pronounce your name with a silent 'w', "Kezzick") who control the Jardines empire. Known by all as the latest taipan of the Jardine Matheson empire built out of running dope into China in quantities the Medallin Cartel would envy, you pitch up in Hong Kong after a few years in Jardines’ New York office. You get to represent Hong Kong at the coronation of King George V in 1911 and then return in triumph in 1922 aboard your own yacht, the Cutty Sark, and then you remain a Director of Jardines until your death. That was Henry Keswick.

So how to honour such a great taipan who balances great wealth with great power and is a lynchpin in the British Empire east of Suez? Why surely there could be nothing better than having a “twin screw tug and salvage steamer” named after you!! What an honour – having perhaps one of the ugliest little craft to ever sail upon the seas named in your honour – not a cruise liner or a battleship but a dirty old tug!!

Still, someone at the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Co. Ltd., must have thought it a good idea – they even ran this ad in the North-China Daily News in 1904 showing the horrid little thing chugging away like an emphysema ridden pensioner. Sadly old Henry Kezzick’s reaction to this honour remains unrecorded. We expect he emitted a mighty harrumph.

Musings on Early China Photography III – Lai Fong

2009-03-22T01:06:00.000-07:00

Many of the Chinese who worked as assistants to the early European and American photographers in China naturally learnt a lot and ultimately decided to set up shop as photographers themselves. Among them, the best known was probably Lai Fong.

I don’t know much (actually nothing really) about Lai Fong except that I think he had learnt from one of the early photographers – someone once told me its Felix Beato but it might have been either Milton Miller or John Thomson…or someone else. So any biographical details much appreciated.

Anyway, came across this advertisement for Lai Fong’s Shanghai studio the other day – it’s from the North-China Daily News in 1904. Seems he took portraits, painted portraits, did silk screening and sold his own photos too. We can assume it was a pretty solid business as he’s got a good address on Nanking Road. I wonder if the prices really were “moderate”?

Musings on Early China Photography I - Beijing to Get a John Thomson Exhibition

Musings on Early China Photography II - What Herbert Ponting Did Before the South Pole

Happy Shanghai Day - March 21

2009-03-21T00:37:00.002-07:00

March 21st 1937 that is…

In 1937 Shanghai Mayor Wu Te-chen (left) suggested that the city hold an official Shanghai Day. The aim was to boost pride and the prosperity of the city – “one day in which people from all walks of life will be given a chance to forget daily toil and gather together at various celebrations in a spirit of informality and gaiety” Li Ta-chan, Sectional Chief of the City Government told JB Powell’s China Weekly Review.

Apparently it happened and events were attended by representatives of over 20 public organisations and everything was presided over by Sectional Chief Li who ensured informality and gaiety were forthcoming. The plan was for Shanghai Day to become an annual event but the Japanese spoiled the party - in August the bombs fell on the city and by March 1938 China was at war with Japan and nobody felt very gay.

Who Doesn’t Like Immoral Women?

2009-03-20T01:12:00.000-07:00

Linda Jaivin, a writer of erotic fiction and a Sinologist (a combination not as rare as you might think actually), has written a new book, A Most Immoral Woman. I’m quite excited to read this book as Linda knows her stuff and the book is based on her findings about the real-life love affair between The Times of London Peking correspondent George (“Morrison of Peking”) Morrison and Mae Ruth Perkins, nympho daughter of an American millionaire. Morrison was captivated by her, a lot of sex ensued and all against the backdrop of 1904 when Japanese and Russian forces were closing in on China's Northeast. So China, history and a lot of sex, which I believe covers all the bases of Jaivin’s interests.

I must confess to knowing Linda a little bit – we had a dinner in Shanghai a while back when she was finishing the book off. Now, I generally like to consider myself a relatively unshockable man of the world but when Linda outlined some of the details I was embarrassingly reduced to a stupid, blushing British schoolboy! Ozzie frankness combined with the details being lavishly laid out before me saw me retreat swiftly to my closeted English socio-cultural roots.

I have a slightly different take on Morrison (as outlined in my forthcoming book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao – a seamless plug I’m sure you’ll agree) to Linda – not that that detracts from enjoying her story of GE and Mae Ruth one bit. I think Linda rather likes him whereas I’ve always been sure he was a pompous, arrogant and hugely overrated bore who trod on anyone who got in his way, never gave proper credit to those who made him appear knowledgeable and got just about everything about China wrong from the Boxers to Yuan Shih-kai. Still, I’m sure Linda will outsell me by miles – and I can’t promise any sex in my book unless you include a description of Emily Hahn’s pet gibbon Mr. Mills masturbating furiously at a posh Shanghai dinner party (there’s a niche market for everything I’m told).

Can’t say much more as I haven’t been able to get a copy of the book yet. Still you can hear a highly entertaining interview with Linda about the book on ABC Radio’s excellent The Book Show by clicking here – and you can read an excerpt from the book on Danwei by clicking here.

This Weekend at the China Literary Festivals – Weekend III

2009-03-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

The final weekend and another year draws to a close and just about all the remaining action is in Shanghai.

Shanghai – M on the Bund

Friday, March 20 - Literary Lunch - 12.30pm - Stefan Schomann - Last Refuge in Shanghai – Of Love and War and Troubled Times, moderated by Tess Johnston

Friday, March 20 - 4.30 pm - Miriam Clifford, Cathy Giangrande – China: museums -afternoon tea and talk. A museum walk precedes the talk, open to those who purchase the book; spaces limited.

Saturday, March 21 - 10am - Cyril Cannon - The Life and Times of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor - See my previous post on this book

Saturday, March 21 - 2pm - Stephen Mackinnon - Intrigue and Romance in the 1930s – Agnes Smedley’s Shanghai - personally I've never warmed to the severe, butch and rather odd Smedley (which was a common attitude to her at the time) but perhaps Mackinnon can convince me otherwise?

Sunday March 22 - 3pm - Pan Jian Feng, Ou Ning and Lynn Pan - The Look of the Book: Chinese Graphic Design and Typography, moderated by Defne Ayas

Chengdu – Chengdu Bookworm

Friday 20th March - 7:30pm - True Histories? With Mara Moustafine and Kate Grenville - Memoirist Mara Moustafine and novelist Kate Grenville discuss the different approaches in tackling historical writing. How do characters, truths and research combine to make a cracking yarn and when does a personal story become a public one and how does it intersect with capital H history.

Musings on Early China Photography II - What Herbert Ponting Did Before the South Pole

2009-03-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

There is a wonderful new resource on the Internet called the Freeze Frame archive. The Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Now most of these are online with detailed catalogue entries provided for each image. They are truly stunning. Do take a look.

The most amazing images are those by Herbert Ponting (above). Ponting (1870-1935) was a professional photographer and is best known as the expedition photographer and cinematographer for Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and South Pole (1910-1913). If you don’t know the history of that expedition then I’m not going to tell you – you clearly didn’t go to school.

On that expedition Ponting took incredible photos and was also one of the first men to use a portable movie camera in Antarctica. His images became known as “Pontings” as he always had to try to get people or objects to stand in the shot otherwise the vastness of the Antarctic was hard to convey. The other expedition members hated having to stand still for ages in the cold while Ponting got his shot. His image of the Terra Nova amid the ice is probably his best known work (above).

So why I am I going on about an Antarctic photographer on a China blog? Because, Ponting is less well known as one of the best early photographers of China too (as in his picture of the Great Wall left). Though his shots of China and Japan were among the best taken up till the time his best work was during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Ponting was a great photographer remembered now almost exclusively for his work in Antarctica but he deserves to be remembered for his China photos too.

Musings on Early China Photography I - Beijing to Get a John Thomson Exhibition
Musings on Early China Photography III - Lai Fong

All the Tea in China, London and Munich

2009-03-18T01:24:00.000-07:00

I’m a fan of all things tea – though growing up in London it was always called a cup of cha and now I’m in Shanghai and it’s a cup of cha once again! Happen to be reading Sarah Rose’s new book For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula of the World's Favourite Drink while having a cup of tea (M&S for the record).

Then came across this wonderful Art Nouveau poster advertising the Marco Polo Theesalon or Tea Salon in Burgstrasse in Munich. Of course Marco Polo famously made no mention of tea in his travels which some consider odd – though it was at the time a drink mostly consumed in southern China and Marco didn’t get down there much which might explain it. Still the esteemed house of Mariage Frères, founded 1660, still produces a Marco Polo Tea apparently.

Musings on Early China Photography I - Beijing to Get a John Thomson Exhibition

2009-03-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

Excellent to see that the Beijing World Art Museum is to host the Wellcome Collection’s extensive collection of John Thomson’s (self-portrait left) nineteenth century photographs of China – even though in their advertising the Beijing World Art Museum has managed to spell his name wrong (there’s no ‘p’). The exhibition Through the Lens of John Thompson 1868-1872 (sic) will be on display at the museum between 16 April and 18 May.

The collection was wisely purchased by Henry Wellcome in 1921 and is held at the Library’s Euston Road library in London.

The Wellcome Library has digitised all 650 glass negatives in their collection – though I don’t know how many will be on show in Peking. All were taken by Thomson during his travels in the Far East in the 1860s and 70s. Thomson captured these rare scenes using the collodion process, a very early photographic technique and are generally clear and in very good condition.

I look forward to the exhibition and here’s hoping they get the man’s name right by April.

Musings on Early China Photography II - What Herbert Ponting Did Before the South Pole
Musings on Early China Photography III - Lai Fong

The Life and Times of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor

2009-03-17T03:32:00.000-07:00

As someone who wrote a biography of a great China Hand (Carl Crow) I'm interested in who other biographers choose. Isidore Cyril Cannon's new book Public Success, Private Sorrow is a biography of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor (1857-1938) a veteran of the Boxers and the Siege of the Legations, a long serving China Customs Commissioner and a pioneering translator of Chinese texts into English.

Brewitt-Taylor had a distinguished career in the Chinese customs service, an important institution that mediated China's relationship with the outside world. During the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 he was trapped inside the British Legation compound though survived the siege. But he was also a scholarly China Hand and undertook the first high-quality translation of the classic Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which made him an important interpreter of Chinese culture in the West.

Though these were the historical highlights of his life Cannon’s book is also fascinating in providing an insight into the experiences of those Britons who went abroad in the Victorian and Edwardian ages, particularly of course to China. Brewitt-Taylor was not just in large cities but often in remote outposts. He is also of interest to me in that he is a case study of the opportunities the Empire and foreign service gave to those of ordinary birth, or humble origins, to go East and make a career based on being smart and competent school without having to worry too much about all the what class are you?, where did you go to old boy? nonsense that the English upper classes revel in so drearily.

If you are in Shanghai this weekend you can hear Isidore Cyril Cannon speak on Brewitt-Taylor’s life and work and her book at the Shanghai International Literary Festival this Saturday morning:

Saturday, March 21

10am

M on the Bund

The Life and Times of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor

Isidore Cyril Cannon

More information click here

Shanghai Throat - Nothing New

2009-03-16T20:20:00.001-07:00

Oddly I saw this advert from 1937 the other day when trawling through a bunch of old advertising from Shanghai. Then I walked into a few meetings in the last couple of days here in Shanghai where people have moaned about sore throats. The change in the weather?; pollution?; too many fake Marlboros? - who knows. What I do know is that (surprise, surprise) sore throats are nothing new. Not sure where you'd get a pack of Allenbury's Pastilles now though.

Michael Aldrich and Vanishing Beijing in Shanghai

2009-03-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

I’m delighted to be chairing and introducing Michael Aldrich, the author of the excellent The Search for a Vanishing Beijing: A Guide to China's Capital Through the Ages (Hong Kong University Press, 2005) at this year’s Shanghai International Literary Festival at M on the Bund on March 19th (tickets and details click here).

Michael is a great raconteur and it’d be hard to find many others who know Peking’s history as well as he does. His book is a mix of essays and guides that forms a comprehensive narrative about the cultural mosaic of the capital of China - palaces, temples, back streets and markets. For me it’s become a reference guide that gets taken off the shelves with alarming regularity though it’s a great read from start to finish too. I’m looking forward to the 19th.

Deviation Posting – A Celebration of LT 's Artwork

2009-03-15T01:29:00.000-07:00

Another in an occasional series of deviation postings that have absolutely nothing to do with China. This time it's about the art commissioned by London Underground between the wars which is currently enjoying an exhibition and a man who did more than most to influence the city - Frank Pick - the man who introduced the famous roundel logo of the Tube.

The artwork that was commissioned and used by London Transport – both the tube, the train and the buses, between the wars was quite stunning. It’s good to see that the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden is having an exhibition of some of the best artwork commissioned by LT and that there’s an accompanying book London Transp ort Posters: A Century of Art and Design. There’s also an excellent web site with a lot of history and art around LT’s famous posters and Frank Pick (left)

The hero of the whole story of these posters designed to boost use of the capital’s public transport and also show the wonders of London and the Home Counties (wonders I admit me and many other Londoners invariably need reminding of) were the brainchild of a great man – Frank Pick (1878-1941). Pick’s contribution to London was immense as Managing Director of the London Underground Group from 1928 and Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board from its creation in 1933 until 1940. In these days of decline, the dreaded PPP schemes and so on it’s impossible to imagine a visionary and a cultured man like Pick even getting an interview at LT. He created LT’s strong visual style.

As well as the posters Pick was central to other wonderful gifts to London from LT – the extension of the Piccadilly Line northwards which gave us a series of wonderful art-deco stations, such as Southgate (my closest tube station when growing up and very influential personally on my tastes) and the HQ building for LT at 55 Broadway, St. James’s, completed in 1929 and for my money still one of the best buildings in London.

Do look at the posters (click here) and if you’re in London do go to the exhibition and if you’ve never wandered around 55 Broadway do go look at it. And then thank Frank Pick.

East and West Criminal Minds

2009-03-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

I've had a lot of fun the last two years moderating at the Beijing Bookworm International Literary Festival on crime writing. Last year we had a great session with Shanghai crime writer Qiu Xiaolong and Beijing based Catherine Sampson. This year Cathy was back again, this time with Ridley Pearson, a mystery and crime writer from America who sells fearsome amounts of books over there. Last year the subject was crime writing and place - China obviously given Qiu's Shanghai Inspector Chen series and Cathy's Beijing set books. This year the subject was the question of topicality and crime writing.

And thanks to a great question from the packed audience on Friday I think we've found our topic for round three in 2010 - Criminal Minds - or more specifically the idea that the criminal mindset in China might be different from that in the West giving us different sorts of crime in reality and in crime writing.

Ridley pointed out that (to paraphrase roughly) a psycho is a psycho is a pyscho and some criminals are just completely outside of normal moral and social boundaries and just don't care. But other factors are at play too - different understanding and interpretations of guilt and shame etc.

Chinese crime and crime writing is also fascinated by the opportunities for crime thrown up in current Chinese society with a still forming legal system, moral norms in a newly marketised economy and growing disparities in wealth - corruption, economically motivated revenge, issues around China's recent past are all popular themes in China set crim e novels while serial killers and "traditional" crime books of the heist, bank robbery type so common in the West are still rare. It's also interesting to note that "policiers", police procedurals, are yet to become popular in China though of course are standard in the West - perhaps this represents the ambigious attitude of the public to their police in China? On the other hand the West has little that is similar to the judge-led books that have appeared in China for years (a genre that has has proved popular of course with the great Judge Dee series in the West from the old China Hand Robert van Gulik).

Ill-formed thoughts admittedly but hopefully they'll firm up over the next year and become crystallised by March 2010!

A Rarity - A Profound Thought on Chinese History

2009-03-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

It's always good to hear a profound thought. Let's be honest they don't come along that often!

Last week I was in Hong Kong and went to a session of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival with Mara Moustafine, the author of The Harbin Files: Secrets and Spies which I've told you to buy before. Then this weekend I bumped into Mara again at the Shanghai International Literary Festival.

All week a comment she made has been buzzing around my head that relates to our understanding of Chinese history and if you read this blog and like it then it's pertinent.

Some time ago Mara took her parents back to Harbin where they'd lived and she was born. She commented that, "they see what what was there; we see what's left". Harbin - Shanghai- Peking - Wherever - makes you think about how we look at the these places. It's a useful mantra to keep in your head when you're visiting any of these cities or other places.

Think on!

Aye, There Be Pirates

2009-03-14T02:33:00.000-07:00

At the start, don’t say I didn’t warn you this is a blatant act of self-promotion. The new issue of the Asian Literary Review includes a piece by me on the pirates of the South China Sea past and present.

The piece interweaves my experiences travelling across the South China Sea last year on an oil tanker with stories of the pirates of old across the region from Southern China to Vietnam and Borneo to the Riau Islands. The Asia Literary Review people have illustrated it nicely with some old maps and images of South China Sea pirates.

Even if you’re not interested in pirates there’s plenty in the new ALR to enjoy:

Fiction from Alice Nelson, Anna Jaquiery, O Thiam China, Qiu Xialong, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Dipika Mukherjee and Tom Cho

Poetry from Margaret Atwood, Louise Ho, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Andrew Barker and Sally Dellow

An interview with Nadeem Aslam

An essay on writers on China from Frances Wood

Photography of the Mumbai bombings from Indranil Mukherjee

Details of how to get a copy from the ALR’s web site (Click here) or from bookshops in Hong Kong and selected other places (I’ve seen it in Daunts in Landon for instance).

This Weekend at the China Literary Festivals - Weekend II

2009-03-12T02:12:00.000-07:00

I’ll be in Beijing this Friday night moderating an event at the excellent Beijing International Literary Festival with New York Times bestseller and author of more than 30 novels Ridley Pearson and Beijing crime writer Catherine Sampson to flesh out the grisly details of what makes great crime fiction, and discuss the murky ethical issues surrounding serving up the seedier aspects of society for entertainment. More details here

Meanwhile elsewhere:

Beijing – Beijing Bookworm

Saturday 14th March - 10am - China Museums Tour - Cathy Giangrande and Miriam Clifford - Beijing’s Eunuch Museum, The Sichuan Cuisine Museum and Zigong’s Museum of Middle Jurassic dinosaur fossils are just a few examples of the little explored treasure houses now open to the public in China. Over four years the authors of CHINA: Museums Journeyed Across China to produce a museum guide for intrepid travellers wishing to enhance their understanding of China’s culture, history and art. The authors, Miriam Clifford and Cathy Giangrande will present a selection of their favourite places and then take you to Beijing’s Geological Museum where, together with a museum curator you will see the marvels in this collection – from rare mineral clusters to China’s famous feathered dinosaur fossils.

Monday 16th March - 12.30pm–2pm Secrets and Spies - Mara Moustafine, with Adam Williams - Mara Moustafine was born in Harbin to a family of Russian Jews. Her book, Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files tells the story of her family’s life over 50 turbulent years in China and her quest to uncover the fate of family members who fled the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, only to be caught in Stalin’s purges. She’s joined today by Adam Williams, whose equally fascinating family history in China informs his interest in Mara’s writing.

Chengdu – Chengdu Bookworm

Saturday 14th March - 7.30pm - Crossing Cultural Fault Lines and Writing Styles, with Ian Buruma - Buruma is a rare breed of writer whose prolific and diverse body of work has combined the clarity of a columnist, the insight of an historian, and the fantasy of a fiction writer. For more than three decades he has incited debate by dissecting the defining issues of our time – sometimes via academic tomes, on other occasions through newspaper columns, while for others the novel has been his vehicle of choice. Tonight he talks about how he makes the writing form fit the question marks, statements and cultural fault lines of the day.

Shanghai – M on the Bund

Saturday 14th March - 11am - Mara Moustafine Secrets & Spies: The Harbin Files – the Russians of China – see above

Saturday 14th March - 2pm - Jonathan Fenby - The Past is Always With Us: How China’s Modern History Shapes its Present – the Penguin History of Modern China author on China obviously.

Saturday 14th March - 4pm - Jeffrey Wasserstrom - Global Shanghai - Wasserstrom is currently a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. In his recent book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragmen ts, he debunks more than a few myths as he traverses 160 years of modern Shanghai history. The greatest of these is what he calls "The Shanghai Illusion", namely that the city has been represented and misrepresented in so many ways in literature, film and such, that it has become "virtually unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers".

Hong Kong

Friday 13th March – 08:00am – FCC - Jonathan Fenby - Oscar Wilde believed that "only dull people are brilliant at breakfast". We beg to differ. Come hear one of the Festival's early morning stars. Former South China Morning Post editor Jonathan Fenby is the author of the Penguin History of Modern China and four others on China and Hong Kong. He has also written books on France, naval disasters and the highly acclaimed Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another.

Friday 13th March – 1pm - Chinese University, Chung Chi College Library - The Art of Translation - Julia Lovell is the author of several books on China including The Great Wall: China Against the World and The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest f or a Nobel Prize in Literature. She has edited and translated in part Lust, Caution, a collection of short stories by Eileen Chang, and her translation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun will be published in 2009. A lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, she has translated several contemporary novels including I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen, poet, novelist and filmmaker. The English version was shortlisted for the 2008 Kiriyama Prize. Professor Barry Steben chairs a talk about the pitfalls in translation with Zhu Wen and Julia Lovell .

Saturday 14th March –2.30pm – The Fringe - China: From Then to Now - Frances Wood - Curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library, has written a number of books on China including Did Marco Polo go to China?, The Silk Road and The First Emperor of China. She is joined by Jonathan Fenby, who most recently penned the Penguin History of Modern China. In conversation with Justin Hill.

Sunday 15th March – 4.30pm – the Fringe - China Cuckoo -- Mark Kitto - Kitto was a successful magazine publisher in China. He built one of the best known English language titles in the country. But in 2004 things went awry. He lost his business, and suffered repeated court battles to recover it. To make matters worse, the initially enthusiastic book publishers of his business story backed out just before they went to print. Now, at last, Mr. Kitto tells his story, the happier one, of picking himself up again and getting on with life, in China Cuckoo: An Englishman who went to China in Search of a Fortune and Found a Life. In conversation with Nigel Collett.