The British had controlled
Until 1937
,
The Voyage East I - Gallions Reach: Where the Journey Began
The Voyage East II - Port Said
The Voyage East III - Alexandria
n Hall is decked in Chinese lanterns and planning a big celebration this Sunday on February 1st. Just round the back Chinatown is also decorated and celebrating and looks very nice.
dstone who's statue stands in Albert Square right in front of the Town Hall and will be surrounded by celebrants welcoming the Ox this Sunday. Gladstone was not a fan of the opium trade - declaring opium the ‘pernicious article’ in 1840.
ne perhaps had good reason to hate opium as his sister was an addict. However, beyond that, as Anne Isba says in her book Gladstone and Women, '...opium was a milestone in his (Gladstone's) political growth: a defining moment in the making of him as a liberal.'
As I’m out of
Regular readers will know I have posted on Limehouse before (see post on Brilliant Chang). I used to visit the area regularly as a little kid in the mid-70s with my Dad who worked all over the
But all that’s gone now and to be honest prett
y much everything was already gone long before. The London County Council (LCC) has slated the old
So I popped down to Pennyfields for a nostalgic look around.
Pennyfields, the 
old heart of
If you want to see some images from the BBC of the old Limehouse Chinatown and some Chinese-Cockneys talking about what the old Limehouse was like click here.
So thanks to those bastards in the Luftwaffe who really, really hated Cockneys be they English, Jewish, Chinese or anything else, only the names and the memories remain. Still, it was nice to spend Chinese New Year wandering among ghost
s.
rma Road was forced to close in late July 1940 as the Japanese invaded Burma and the British retreated effectively cutting of China. The Road didn't open again to Allied supply convoys (pictured left and above) until today in 1945. So the anniversary gave me a chance to plug the forthcoming work!
Martha Gellhorn’s 1941 trip to
Despit
e her fearless reporter reputation, it seems Gellhorn rather crumbled in
A few people have complained to me that they can't get a lot of
Hong Kong University Press is now selling its catalogue through the San Min Book Company (三民書局) in
Good new for book buyers in
and we got two things that continue to fascinate many: 1) she made the contacts that meant she starred with Dietrich in von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express where both looked sensational (and Dietrich’s stroll down the train and final turn to camera can still make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck as she looks so amazing) and 2) we got the enduring rumour that Anna May and Marlene had a brief lesbian affair – Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich together wearing beautiful dresses, drinking and smoking – how Weimar is that!! More proof that some of us were born at the wrong time!! 
with life in Shanghai where he continued doodling and drawing local scenes while he worked out how to rebuild his life. Despite job offers from major newspapers around the world in 1925 he joined the staff of the A friend is currently putting together what looks like it will be a fantastic collection of Sapajou cartoons from various newspapers, books and adverts. This prompted me to remember I had a piece of commercial work Sapajou did in 1937 for Aspirin that seemed worth posting (his own self-portrait left).
ied again and picked another Western, 3.10 to Yuma with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale (yes, I know, the kid out of Empire of the Sun). Of course I should have realised – the old West in the 1870s, a train and a railway are obviously going to figure given the title and yet I was still surprised when Russell Crowe rides into a railway navvies camp and is suddenly surrounded by Chinese railroad workers. I should have seen it coming!!
I am editing a manuscript from 1939 at the moment that will hopefully be published later this year – it is the diary of someone that spent most of 1939 in
What I had forgotten till I transcribed this passage was that Lin was also an inventor who designed a Chinese typewriter – something I’ve always wanted to find in a flea market but never have…so far (Japanese ones pop up every now and again but rarely Chinese).
Lin worked hard on Gwoyeu Romatzyh, a new method of romanizing the Chinese language, and he created an indexing system for Chinese characters. Since obviously Chinese is a character-based rather than an alphabet-based language it had always been difficult to employ modern printing technologies. For many years it was doubted that a Chinese typewriter could be invented. Lin, however, eventually came up with a workable typewriter which he launched in the middle of the war with
As the picture shows the typewriter was the size of a normal one but the typefaces fit on a drum. A so-called “magic eye” was mounted in the centre of the keyboard and when the user pressed several keys, according to a system Lin devised for his dictionary of the Chinese language, a Chinese character appeared. To select a particular character, the typist then pressed a "master" key, similar to today's computer function key –if you use pinyin software on a computer you’ll recognise the basic process.
Sadly the typewriter was never produced commercially. According Lin's daughter, Lin Tai-Yi, the day Lin was to demonstrate the machine to executives of the Remington Typewriter Company, he couldn’t make it work. Lin ended up deeply in debt.
Others did 
make it into production - the first typewriter with Chinese characters was produced about 1911-14. The Japanese Nippon Typewriter Co. began producing typewriters with Chinese and Japanese characters in 1917 with a flat bed of 3,000 Japanese characters (which would effectively mean typing only shorthand).The picture left is a Japanese typewriter.
ships. White Russian émigré journalists, foreign correspondents living double lives and a host of amazingly seductive women characters - Furst has them all.
Posting about
I was also thinking about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 which was fought largely on 
Chinese Manchurian soil and had so much to do with later Japanese desires over the region. I’d always known there was a song the Russian soldiers sang (left - Cossacks fighting in 1905) called The Hills of Manchuria – bizarrely I once heard a Red Army choir sing it in a draughty, freezing cold Hall of the People in Vladimir in the “Golden Ring” outside Moscow one winter around 1988-89. I’d gone to see a vast outdoor museum where wooden churches had been brought to Suzdal from across the
However, Suzdal and nearby Vladimir town centres were still very Soviet - nothing in the shops, the main road badly repaired and so we accepted the invitation to see the show in the hope it would be warmer in the theatre than in our chilled hotel rooms – it wasn’t. But the show was good - a Red Army choir is right up there with a bunch of Volga Boatmen or some Welsh Miners. The programme was a series of revolutionary songs, then songs from the Second World War (“The Great Patriotic War” in Suzdal of course) and finally a few oddities thrown in for good measure and one was The Hills of Manchuria which struck a chord with me obviously being interested in China and also as it was the only pre-revolutionary song they sang that night – but I guess a Russian soldier is a Russian soldier and fighting for the Tsar or the General Secretary doesn’t make much difference in the end.
I also like to think that The Hills of Manchuria appeals to the Russian soul as it was a 1988, a depressing time of shortag
es and everyone knew the end of the USSR was coming (it was ‘when’ not ‘if’ by this point) and a grand failure, as the 1905 war was, for Russia probably appealed to some. Anyway I decided to dig out the words – remember this was a soldier’s song, sung by them as they retreated in defeat (left) and left Manchuria for the long walk back to Russia (the reference to ‘kaoliang’ by the way is to the tall grass found everywhere in Manchuria and that makes the local sorghum booze)
The Hills of
Music by I.A. Shatrov, lyrics by S. Petrov
Around us, it is calm. Hills are covered by darkness.
Suddenly, the moon shines through the clouds,
Graves hold their calm.
The white glow of the crosses — heroes are asleep.
The shadows of the past circle around,
Recall again and again the victims of battles.
Around us, it’s calm; the wind blew the fog away,
Warriors are asleep on the hills of
And Russian weeping cannot be heard.
Dear mother is shedding tears,
The young wife is weeping
All like one are crying,
Cursing fate, cursing destiny!
Let kaoliang’s rustling lull you to sleep,
Rest in peace, heroes of the Russian land,
Dear Fatherland’s sons.
You fell for
Believe us, we shall avenge you
And celebrate a bloody wake
nese of course invaded Manchuria after the 1931 Mukden (Shenyang) Incident. This was a provocation staged by the Japanese and blamed on the Chinese as an excuse to annex Manchuria (see Japanese troops entering Mukden left and above). It was, in effect, round one in the Sino-Japanese War that was to escalate in 1937 – remember when you watch the video – that the bombing of Shanghai and the Rape of Nanking has already taken place so few could be in any doubt how horrific (and genocidal) life under Japanese occupation could be.
han, who became a national hero for a while. Manchuria remained under Japanese occupation until 1945 (see Japanese Renault manufactured tank in Manchuria left). As well as the repression of Nationalist Chinese during the period, the rape and pillaging, enslaved 'comfort women', the Japanese asset stripping of Chinese industry and hoarding of their food, they also sought to infliltrate large amounts of opium into China to weaken the resistance of the army for what the Japnese high command in Manchuria knew was the coming war to take control of all of China. Koreans and Chinese became forced labourers and can be seen in the video working. It was a time of great evil.
na the Japanese occupation of Manchuria is rarely talked about much these days though it was bloody (Japanese troops in Manchuria left). So people are able to glibly stick up unbackgrounded videos like this. I doubt a video of ‘Paris 1943’ would be put up without some more background on the occupation of the city by the Nazis, the acxtions of the French Resistance, the deporation of the Jewish community to the death camps etc. 
Coal mining in
The Winter issue of the Asia Literary Review has a series of remarkable and poignant portrait paintings of Chinese miners by Chen Guangming. They are extremely striking and, while I’m not sure I’d want one hanging on the wall reminding me of how tough life is for some compared to me, they do make you stop and think about work, struggle, life and the dignity of the working class. Again of course none of this is fashionable in the era of asset stripping hedge fund managers and Bernie Madoff but I’m old school about such things.
The artist, Chen Guangming, hails from Inner Mongolia and studied at the Central Institute of Fine Art in
In the Asia Literary Review he has also written a commentary to accompany his portraits of the miners which focuses on t
heir working conditions, low incomes and sadly their meagre status in society where they are too often looked down on as unskilled while believe it or not people who work for McKinsey are considered highly skilled geniuses!! As they used to say about taxi drivers in
To see more of Chen’s portraits see the Asia Literary Review or the Wellington Gallery’s web site from
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