This Weekend at the China Literary Festivals - Weekend I

The literary festival season kicks of this weekend. Some China history-related events at the Festivals over the next few days that might be of interest.

Shanghai – M on the Bund:

Saturday March 7 - 11a.m. - Frances Wood - The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to JG Ballard – Wood, the keeper of the Chinese collection at the British Library, has a new book out on foreign writers in China that she’s launching at the Festival. Frances is always interesting and her previous books are well known including Did Marco Polo go to China; No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China, 1843-1943; and a biography of the First Emperor of China.


Sunday March 8 - 5pm - Stella Dong - My Three Shanghais – Dong is well known for her so-so biography of the city - Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 – which is pretty old now but never mind. Not sure if she’s got anything new to say or present about though.



Suzhou – Suzhou Bookworm

Sunday March 8 - 6pm - The China Lover, in conversation with Ian Buruma – Buruma will be talking about his new novel, The China Lover, a fictionalised account of the life of Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a singer and actress who was the toast of Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the 1930’s.



Chengdu – The Chengdu Bookworm

Monday March 9 - 7.30pm - The Shadow of the Past: how China's modern history influences its present, with Jonathon Fenby - Fenby will look at how the course of China’s history since 1850 influences the People’s Republic of China today, the subject of his new Penguin Modern History of China. He will examine the shift from poverty and instability to growing prosperity and stability, and how that has benefitted the regime in recent years. But with the recent economic downturn and social protests, is this sustainable? Will history repeat itself in dynastic difficulties?

Hong Kong – Fringe Theatre

Monday March 9 – 1pm - The Harbin Files: Secrets and Spies - Mara Moustafine tells the story of her family’s life over fifty 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. Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files was awarded a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 2003 and shortlisted in 2004 for the Kiriyama Prize and Australia’s National Biography Award.

Dalian Notes IV – The Yamato Hotel Centenary

The old Yamato Hotel in Dalian still dominates the Zhongshan roundabout just as it did when it was the Yamato Hotel and Dalian was Dairen. It’s now called the Dalian Hotel. On the south side of Zhongshan Guangchang, it was originally built in 1909 and described in a 1920s guidebook as "one of the finest hotels in the Far East."





The picture left was taken fairly early and shows women in Japanese dress walking across the square in front reflecting the Japenese influence, occupation and population of Dairen at the time - though whether the ladies are "staged" or just happened to be walking around I don't know. It was originally a part of the Japanese-owned Yamato Hotel chain which had other branches in north east China including one in Port Arthur, Lushun now, just up the road from Dalian.


In general the guest rooms are large with small beds but clean, sizable bathrooms. Nowadays the place looks a little tatty and the furnishings fail to match the grandeur of the building itself, but no it’s still got a touch of the old glamour. The old staircase is intact (left) and the lobby's not in bad shape (far left).

The hotel is obviously 100 years old this year and deserves commemorating as one of the great old hotels left in China not to fall to the rapacious bulldozers of the “modernisers”.

Dalian Notes I - China's Best Letter Boxes

Dalian Notes II – Coming Down Alert
Dalian Notes III- A Centenary of Trams

Art Deco in Shanghai and Miami Beach

Shanghai and Miami Beach are two of the great architectural repositories of art-deco architecture in the world though of course the pot is slowly emptying in Shanghai as roads trump buildings while, as far as I can tell, Miami Beach seems to have done a far better job at preservation.

The comparison is stark in the new Old China Hand Press volume Art Deco in Shanghai and Miami Beach which follows their 2007 Shanghai Art Deco. The new book features 50 photographs of each city by photographer Deke Erh (Er Dongqiang). There’s also text on both from Tess Johnston in Shanghai and Clotilde Luce in Miami Beach - a mini-tutorial on Art Deco's many and varied features, most far better preserved in Miami Beach. Johnston argues that Miami Beach can well serve as an example to the city of Shanghai on how the preservation of the old can enrich a 21st century city, both aesthetically and financially.

Miami Beach has also now got a very good warts and all history with Stephen Gaines’s Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach which is well worth a read for details on both how the city was preserved and also the sleazy fun side of the place.

That’s Shanghai magazine reviews Art Deco in Shanghai and Miami Beach and quoted Deke Erh as saing “fortunately the Shanghainese have come to attach importance to the conservation of their historical buildings.” The magazine then notes some guff about the run up to EXPO which I assume is required by the censors these days. This of course is nonsense given that I recently had to post about supposedly preserved buildings in the old Jewish ghetto being torn down to allow a road to be widened. EXPO will lead to more being destroyed not less. Truth is there’s no real sign of any heightened consciousness of architectural heritage yet and may never be until everything is gone.

Deviation Posting - What's It Like Working in the Map Room at Stanfords?

Stanfords of Long Acre in London's Covent Garden is a favourite bookshop of mine - it has a wealth of travel writing and guide books but mostly it has racks and racks of maps which for a map nut like me is a couple of hours wasted browsing every time. I always thought working there might be quite nice and then noticed that on Stanfords web site someone who actually does work in the map department has written about working there (click here).

Perhaps it's not quite as romantic as I imagined - after all you do actually have to work rather than just spend all day looking at the maps apparently which is a bit disappointing. I think I'll stick to the occasional visit when in London, drag out a bunch of maps, unfold them all and then decide not to buy them as usual before feeling guilty and settling on a small mapof Burma (the last time I visited anyway).

Now Out – Solomon Bard’s Light and Shade

Solomon Bard is turning 93 this year but he isn’t slowing down any – he’s got a new memoir out from Hong Kong University Press and, will be in Hong Kong to conduct at the Passionne Shanghai concert of Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, 27-28 March.

Bard is a physician, musician and, for good measure, an archaeologist. In Light and Shade: Sketches from an Uncommon Life he recalls his childhood and time during World War II when Dr Bard served in the Hong Kong Volunteers Field Ambulance Unit; the hopeless defence of Hong Kong and the joy of liberation. It’s a great memoir. Click here for more information.

The Peking-Mukden Line and Baldwin Locomotives

Came across this advert the other day for Baldwin Locomotives in 1925 – proud supplies of locomotives to the Peking-Mukden (Shenyang) Railway. And fine locomotives they are as well. For Baldwin, the maker of the original Old Ironsides, this was an export order to shout about and so they took out these ads in the China coast English-language press. They must have done well to outbid the Brits who had supplied a lot of trains previously.

Baldwin was an American firm based in Philadelphia and nearby Eddystone, Pennsylvania founded in 1831 by Matthias Baldwin. Although the company was successful as a producer of steam puffers they never survived the transition to diesel trains and went out of business in 1956 despite making some good looking trains. In WW2 they were one of the companies that made the Sherman tank.

The Peking-Mukden Railway was a jewel in the crown of China’s railroad system. The standard gauge Peking-Mukden Railway (also known as the “Ching-Feng” and later the “Pei-Ning” line in Chinese or the “IRNC” or the “Northern Railway” in English.) passed through Tientsin and joined the Southern Manchurian Railway (SMR) at Mukden.

Hong Kong Quick Posts III - Gaslight in Hong Kong

Before electric lights there were gas lamps – before them not much except candles and a lot of darkness. Cities were dark places before gas – when gas lamps came along suddenly the urban night was lit up – it must have been amazing to live through that transition – from a city of darkness to one of flickering gas lamps and the ability to see all the teeming life, crime and fun of the night-time city. . George Augustus Sala commented in 1859. “As I walk about the streets by night, endless and always suggestive intercommunings take place between me and the trusty, silent, ever watchful gas. Gas to teach me; gas to counsel me; gas to guide my footsteps, not over London flags, but through the crooked ways of unseen life and death”


I got all these ideas about the effect of gas light after listening to the excellent BBC Radio 4 show Thinking Allowed on gaslight with Laurie Taylor and subsequently reading Chris Otter’s book, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910. Suddenly seeing things changes everything from police and government to criminals and ne-er-do-wells.

All this brings me, in an admittedly long and roundabout way to Hong Kong’s Duddell Street gas lamps which I often stroll past and rather like. Gas lighting came to Hong Kong shortly after being introduced in England in the 1860s and lighting up Hong Kong at night must have been similarly spectacular. The Duddell Street lamps at each of the stone steps (built between 1875 and 1889) were manufactured in 1922 Suggs & Co. Hong Kong had many other gas lamps, these being mounted on the balustrades were shorter than the regular street ones. Gas lamps like these were popular as they did not require nightly lighting and extinguishing in the way the previous kerosene lamps did.

After World War 2 gas lamps were steadily replaced by electric lights throughout Hong Kong though these four at Duddell Street have remained and are still maintained by TownGas and come on every night to give a slight flavour of what gas lit Hong Kong must have been like.







Hong Kong Quick Post I - Central Police Station and the Magistracy
Hong Kong Quick Post II - Tai O Police Station Development