Preparing “What we Lost 2011” – Your Help Required

Every year I put together a list of the most notable architectural losses suffered in Shanghai every year – here is the 2009 list and here’s last year’s 2010 list. Those were both bad years (though when was it last a good year for architecture in Shanghai?!) and I sense that with the end of the awful EXPO and a bit of economic cooling 2011 might have been a bit better, but even a cursory glance around the city shows that we still lost some interesting and historic architecture this year too.

Anyone in Shanghai who got any information on buildings that were destroyed this year, partially or wholly, including interior guttings please let me know so I can include.

And here, a gate that now goes nowhere on Huimin Road where once a full block of 1920s housing stood.

Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London – Anne Witchard – Uni of Westminster – 7 December

Next year as part of the launch of the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai’s China Monographs book series (in conjunction with Hong Kong University Press and with me as series editor) one book I’ll be publishing is Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution by Dr. Anne Witchard, an expert on modernism, British literature and Chinoiserie in British culture. The book will be out next summer/early autumn but Anne is presenting the subject of Lao She’s years in London in the 1920s, and his exposure to English literature, British Modernism, bohemian London and the old Limehouse Chinatown, at the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre.

Well worth getting along if you’re in London – details below – a lot more to follow on the book as we get closer to publication date.

More on the RAS Shanghai-HKUP China Monograph series here

Need Christmas Pressie Ideas??? Here’s One if You Love 1930s Architecture

Apologies – a non-China posting here, but hopefully interesting all the same and an important cause down in a part of the world I have a strong affection for:

I know, I know, you’re expecting me to recommend one of my books as a Christmas present (and by the way why not consider a copy of the beautiful Old Shanghai A-Z (paperback or Kindle) for your loved one – a charming and beautiful book remembering the old Shanghai) but here’s an even more worthy cause. The beautiful Saltdean Lido has managed to survive as a classic example of a gorgeous 1930s outdoor art-deco swimming pool. There’s very few left now in England thanks to the ignorant and the barbarous knocking them down for Tesco superstores and out-of-town retail parks!!  As a kid I used to swim every summer in the Southbury Road Lido in Enfield, now sadly gone and turned into a giant Pizza Hut for North London’s more obese and cardiac challenged (I shit you not my friends!!).

Anyway Saltdean is, of course, threatened by some barbaric property developer who wants to destroy most of it and turn it into miniscule but highly priced flats. There’s been a long running and excellently supported local campaign down in Sussex to save Saltdean Lido- so far successful. However, property developers, like hyenas, rats and cockroaches, are quite hard to fully eliminate and they keep on coming. To raise funds the campaign has launched a lovely 2012 Calender – it’s lovely and available at the ridiculously cheap price of a fiver and a bit more to pack and post it to you – some lovely art-deco images and a wonderful way to try and save a true national treasure of a building. Click here for details.

Jim Thompson Reassessed

I haven’t seen a copy of this book yet but the Jim Thompson legend continues to echo down the decades and he (and his demise) remain enigmatic and tantalising to this day. A few years ago I was in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and wandered through the jungle tracks past the “Moonlight” bungalow where Thompson was last seen. It is quite an eerie place and easy to get lost around that area due to the dense jungle.Joshua Kurlantzik’s The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War. As usual blurb and cover below – downloadable extracts here:

Jim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? In a story rich with insights and intrigue, this book explores a key Cold War episode that is still playing out today.

• Highlights a pivotal moment in Cold War history that set a course for American foreign policy that is still being followed today
• Explores the dynamics that put Thailand at the center of the Cold War and the fighting in neighboring Laos that escalated from sideshow to the largest covert operation America had ever engaged in
• Draws on personal recollections and includes atmospheric details that bring the people, events—and the Thailand of the time—to life
• Written by a journalist with extensive experience in Asian affairs who has spent years investigating every aspect of this story, including Thompson’s tragic disappearance

Who’s Afraid of China? Reviews

I’m happy that the publisher tells me that the first two books in my Asian Arguments series for Zed Books are selling well. The series aims to raise subjects and issues of current interest in a readable and well researched form but sticking to around a manageable 60,000 words and stripping out the academese and using real English rather than the elongated and largely unnecessary verbiage that has become a rather sad motif for academic writing these days. Yea, yea, I know “aca-bashing” – but they do deserve it in general I’m afraid.

So I’m happy that Kerry Brown’s Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State is selling well and getting good reviews. Our second book, Michael Barr’s Who’s Afraid of China: The Challenge of Chinese Soft Power has also sold well, was picked out as notable on the Sinica podcast and just been well reviewed in the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

Shanghai Jimmy’s Up and Running

I’ve had the rather nice chore of having to eat me tea in the new (ish) Jimmy’s Kitchen in Shanghai,located inside the old Jingiang Hotel (formerly Victor Sassoon’s Cathay building). All has gone pretty well the times I’ve eaten there – good food, better than average service, a nice welcome and generally I like the place.If you’re a serious foodie don’t pay attention to me – I liked the food but then I liked school dinners and my definition of a great meal is either fish and chips on the seafront or a bowl of noodles in a hutong.

Anyway, as noted before on this blog, Jimmy’s has a long history in Shanghai and then Hong Kong, so for the interested not in Shanghai I’ll just note that the Jimmy’s folk have put some historical details upon their website here.

Talking of Flit – Carol Alcott on Station XMHA 8pm Daily – Tune In

In 1940 Carrol Alcott was THE Shanghailander to listen to on the radio – he may have been slightly overweight in real life (see the picture of him and bio in my book Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists From the Opium Wars to Mao). He nightly antagonised the Japanese about their aggression in China (and they tried to assassinate him several times for his trouble). If you want to read more about XMHA radio as well – Shanghai’s leading English language station – try Michael Kysko’s recently published book American Radio in China.

That Alcott’s show was sponsored by the great brand of FLIT was humorous in that Alcott would liken the Japanese aggressors to annoying flies in need of eradication…driving the Japanese propaganda goons to new heights of distraction and rage.

Shanghai’s Leading Brand of Insecticide in 1940? Flit of course

Flit was phenomenally successfully at selling itself in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s – a truly successful global brand actually that had been launched in 1923. It had good distribution in China as it was a product of the Standard Oil Company of New York (SOCONY) who had been successful with their oil products in China (and if you haven’t read Alice Tisdale Hobart’s brilliant novel about the SOCONY men of China Oil for the Lamps of China then you really should). Incidentally, the mad insects were originally the creation of Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr Seuss). This ad ran in the North-China Daily News.