All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Just a moment to plug the audio book version of Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson. It’s available now on Audible (at a great discount) and other audio stores. The book is read brilliantly by Laurel Lefkow. So, if you’re planning a lot of driving around this holiday season maybe 10 hours of Laurel, Wallis and 1920s China might make the journey a little easier!
A rare Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps Officer’s pagri badge c. 1920-29, worn by Sikh members of the HKVDC on their turbans….
mThrough Hong Kong with a Camera by Julius Arnold, published by Hood & Co. of Middlesbrough, 1910
I’ve written before about the old Shanghai Academy of Art. In 1952 the new government got around to rearranging the entire art education system in China. The Shanghai Art Academy was closed with elements of it being incorporated into the new East China Arts Academy in Wuxi. But the decentralization of education as part of the Great Leap Forward, also led to the establishment of many short-lived local art colleges and the Shanghai Art School was founded in March 1959, under the auspices of the Bureau of Light Industry. The academy was initially organized as a technical school at the high school level (zhongzhuan ) and had a three-year curriculum. In 1960, junior college and college programs were added, and the academy was reorganized under the Shanghai Department of Education. During its brief existence, it moved at least four times, occupying the grounds of an old middle school, then an abandoned synagogue, and finally moving into the old campus of St. John’s University, where it shared its facilities with the Shanghai Institute of Social Sciences.
The college was then closed in 1965 as priorities changed again and the Cultural Revolution beckoned during which art education was not high on the priorities list.
An event at SOAS in London open to all on Chiang Yee and his London Circle (published by Hong Kong University Press) with Paul Bevan, Sarah Cheang, Craig Clunas, Anne Witchard, Frances Wood and me…. open to all – this Thursday (4/12/24) – Click here…
Just received a copy of Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon (University of Chicago Press) – looks excellent. But that cover image does look awfully familiar!!!
For those that value independent media and quality writing covering Asia, the quarterly Mekong Review is a must – subscriptions are available for print and/or online….ridicouslously cheap subscription details here (from a paltry $3 a month – keep independent media on Asia alive!)
Out now is the November 2024-January 2025 issue and, among all the other good stuff (check out the latest issue’s contents here), is my review of North Korean senior defector Thae Yong-ho’s (who slipped away from the DPRK’s London embassy in 2016 to Seoul) new memoir Passcode to the Third Floor: An Insider’s Account of Life Among North Korea’s Political Elite (Columbia University Press) – paywalled, but subscribers can read here….
Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen’s Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press)….
The Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley is home to over 470 graves connected to the city’s Japanese population. Most of these graves belong to individuals who died during the Meiji era (1868–1912), a remarkable period of modernisation and opening up of Japan that saw thousands of its inhabitants travel to other parts of the world to study, work, and settle. Who were these people? What were they doing in Hong Kong? And why were unbaptised Japanese buried in what was called at one time the ‘Protestant Cemetery’?
Hong Kong’s Meiji-era Japanese community was one of two halves. Company executives sat atop the social ladder and karayuki-san, or prostitutes, occupied the lower echelons, with tradespeople and professionals somewhere in between. By revealing the personal journeys of these mostly forgotten Japanese, the authors aim to add to transnational perspectives on Hong Kong and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as increase recognition of this fragmented community’s place in the development of this diverse city.
Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong.
Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. Born in England, she grew up in Switzerland and has called Hong Kong home since 1990.