Julia Boyd on the Lost World of Beijing’s pre-1949 Expats – China Speaking tour
Posted: October 8th, 2012 | 1 Comment »I’ve recommended Julia Boyd’s latest book A Dance with the Dragon: the Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign Colony before. And Julia is on a little tour out East, so if you’re in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou or Hong Kong this October…
Here are details of Julia’s talks in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival on the 10th and 11th of October
14th October – Royal Asiatic Society Suzhou talk – Suzhou Bookworm
16th October – Shanghai Royal Asiatic Society talk
21st October – Beijing Bookworm
And here’s a longer interview with Julia about her book, old Peking and the foreigners that lived there conducted by the Beijing Bookworm folk
I would also like to contribute a great quote from a book tilted The Years that Were Fat Peking, 1933-1940 by George N. Kates that I read some years ago and like very much: What is true of the people is also true of the land. It is broad open country, wept by every wind of heaven, under a boundless sky, its blue often so pure as to be truly celestial; but also occasionally streaked with dust storms that completely obscure the sun, tearing dragonlike toward the walls of the capital from the deserts of Central Asin. Man fits well into this land. Blue-clothed figures are ever at work in the fields, the unbroken succession of the simple crops harmonizes with the cycle of the year; and agraian China, leviathan, deeply good, touchingly simple, is indeed the true China. (Oxford, 1952, p. 215)While Fei Xiaotong seemed to be speaking, as it were, from the village street or off the Suzhou canal, Kates gave an incredibly long shot. Both are great.