Talking about the Roger Fry exhibition at Charleston yesterday (details of that show here) it’s possible to dig a little deeper into Fry’s relationship with the English orientalist and sinologist who achieved both popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry. Waley, from 1913 the Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum. Waley’s supervisor at the museum was the poet and scholar Laurence Binyon, and under his nominal tutelage, Waley taught himself to read Classical Chinese and Classical Japanese, partly to help catalogue the paintings in the museum’s collection. Despite this, he never learned to speak either modern Mandarin Chinese or Japanese and never visited either China or Japan – and never went east of Switzerland.
So, Waley lived in Bloomsbury and had a number of friends among the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom he had met when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Fry, somewhat older than most of the Bloomsburyites and Waley, would have been interested in Waley’s role at the British Museum and the China/Japan collections. Fry’s interest in things Chinese and Japanese was shared by the Bloomsbury Group. And so back to the Roger Fry Exhibition at Charleston, former Sussex home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
First here is Fry’s portrait of Waley… painted in 1915 when Waley was 26 and had recently (in 1913) joined the British Museum.
Arthur Waley (1915) by Roger Fry
There’s another link to Waley and Charleston – in the house you can view The Famous Women Dinner Service, a collection of 50 hand-decorated plates by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, celebrating famous women throughout history, commissioned by art historian and museum director Kenneth Clark in 1932. The portraits – subdivided into Women of Letters, Queens, Beauties, and Dancers and Actresses – include George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the Queen of Sheba and Elizabeth I; Dante’s Beatrice and the pre-Raphaelite Elizabeth Siddal; Greta Garbo and Ellen Terry. Many of these women lead complex and scrutinised lives, resisting marriage in favour of unconventional domestic arrangements and individual freedom.
One of these 50 hand-decorated plates, below, is of Murasaki Shikibu, ’Lady Murasaki’, a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, widely considered to be one of the world’s first novels, written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012. And whose translation of The Tale of Genji do most of us as English speakers read? The Waley translations published in 6 volumes from 1921 to 1933.
Virginia Woolf championed The Tale of Genji, praising Arthur Waley’s 1925 translation in British Vogue, seeing Murasaki Shikibu as a literary ancestor for her focus on nuanced human life and emotion, rather than war or politics, though she critiqued its pacing compared to Tolstoy’s force. Woolf’s review significantly boosted the Japanese classic’s Western recognition, highlighting its psychological depth, beauty, and cultural insight, despite some contemporary racial exoticism and her incomplete reading of the text.
Jonathan Spence perhaps best expresses why we still read Waley’s translations:
‘…selected the jewels of Chinese and Japanese literature and pinned them quietly to his chest. No one ever did anything like it before, and no one will ever do it again. There are many westerners whose knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is greater than his, and there are perhaps a few who can handle both languages as well. But they are not poets, and those who are better poets than Waley do not know Chinese or Japanese. Also the shock will never be repeated, for most of the works that Waley chose to translate were largely unknown in the West, and their impact was thus all the more extraordinary.’
(of course Spence should have said ‘in English’ rather than ‘in the West’ as others like Judith Gautier in France were also translators with language skills and poet skills).
And so Bell and Grant were extremely familiar with Lady Murasaki and Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji…
Charleston, the former home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in East Sussex, is currently hosting the first major exhibition in over 25 years dedicated to their friend and Bloomsburyite, Roger Fry as a painter, unveiling a lesser-known aspect of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century British art. Best known for his work as an art critic, writer, and curator, Fry was instrumental in bringing post-impressionism to England. His 1910 and 1912 exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London, featuring Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, and others, were revolutionary. The exhibition is on till the 15 March 2026, at Charleston (details here).
One thing the exhibition does stress is that Fry studied, collected and promoted art and antiquities from Asia, including China….below is his painting (included in the exhibition) – Still Life with T’ang Horse c.1919-21….
And the actual sculpture of a T’ang horse (618-907) that was in Fry’s collection and sat in his studio at Durbins, near Guildford….
Please join our newest Book Club Convener, Dr. Yanfeng Li, for a 1.5 hours discussion of Bai Xianyong’s short story “The Eternal Snow Beauty” (永远的尹雪艳). Afterward, you are invited to bring the literature in live context with optional dancing at the historic Paramount Ballroom—a high-society landmark since 1933. The story prompts readers to uncover the truths beneath Yin Xueyan’s glamorous façade as a legendary socialite in both Shanghai and Taipei. The electronic story will be made available in advance to those who register for this event.
Bai Xianyong (白先勇, born 1937) is a Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Barbara and a renowned writer who spent his youth in Shanghai and Nanjing before relocating to Taipei. He holds a B.A. from National Taiwan University and an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. His celebrated short story collection, Taipei People (臺北人), portrays the lives of prominent mainland emigres in Taiwan, many of whom, living suspended between their past and present. “The Eternal Snow Beauty” is the iconic piece in this collection. Please note this is a book discussion. The author will not be present.
About the Spaker: Yanfeng Li (PhD in Chinese Literature, University of Hawaii) taught at the University of Pennsylvania and CIEE Shanghai Center (ECNU) for eleven years. He then travelled and wrote about the regional cultures of Qinling and Basha (Shaanxi/Sichuan), resulting in the trilogy Distant Mountain Trails and other works. He is now excited to bring his “On-site Literature” practice from the mountains to the city.
I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012) about just how opium keeps on fascinating us. However, 2025 was a little thin compared to other years so I skipped it – so any other spotted references most welcome?
Novels:
Opium as a pain killer, but with a propensity to turn patients into addicts, makes repeated appearances in Xiaolu Guo’s reworking on Moby Dick with a female protagonist Call MeIshmaelle…. Saint Tropez opium runners get a mention in Helen Wolff’s 1932 novel Background For Love, recently translated into English from German for the first time by her grandson, Tristram Wolff. Opium made a return in Abir Mukherjee’s latest Wyndham and Bannerjee novel set in 1920s Calcutta, Burning Grounds. Wyndham is still struggling with the Big Smoke.
Authors Christopher Chu and Maggie Hoi’s Camilo Pessanha’s Macau Stories is part novel, part biography, part epistolary journey, part history but does tell the life of the Portuguese Symbolist poet Pessanha who lived for several decades in Macao, and was a ferocious opium addict too….
TV:
Mark Gatiss’s wonderful Bookish set in post-war London featured a morphine addict…
Apparently the Black Stuff is not always enough and Anne Guinness enjoys a bit of laudanum with her family beverage in Netflix’s House of Guinness…
And of course Sugar Goodson (the never-disappointing Stephen Graham) in A Thousand Blows was on the tinctures….
This is an opportunity to show how dumb AI is…. I happen to know (via old school tech, like a book) that the publisher Jonathan Cape undertook a round-the-world trip in 1934.
A major stop of the tour was China but ask AI for information on that trip and AI denies it ever happened!! This is because AI thinks you’re referring to Peter Fleming’s One’s Company: A Journey to China, a massive bestseller in 1934 and recounting Fleming’s trip from Peking to Kashgar in 1933. It was published by Jonathan Cape, a good friend of Cape’s. But, Cape did go to China and, indeed, hoped to see Fleming there. (more below)…
However, when Cape’s liner arrived at Shanghai he missed Fleming but did go to see another author of his who lived in Shanghai, Florence Ayscough (according to Michael Howard’s 1971 bio of Cape). Ayscough (pronounced “Askew”) had been born in Shanghai but been educated in Massachusetts where she met the American poet Amy Lowell. She was was a lecturer on Chinese art and literature and was the author of eight books on Chinese history, culture, literary criticism and translation. Cape had published her books A Chinese Mirror (1921), The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1927) and Tu Fu (1929 – on the poet). Cape felt warmly towards Ayscough as all her books had sold well for Cape, indeed A Chinese Mirror had been one of Cape’s first books.
I blogged the first volume of Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro’s “O que foi, não volta a ser…” (“What Once Was, Will Never Be Again…”) when it came out in 2022. Now there is a second volume, again juxtaposing photographs of Macao’s past and present. There is also an accompanying exhibition at the Rui Cunha Foundation (FRC) gallery until January 10 2026 (admission free)…
Happy to have been asked to blurb Joseph Yen’s memoir, Book of Lost Dreams(Earnshaw Books) of Mao’s China translated by Stephen Hallett and Wang LiliLili…..
“A fascinating memoir of troubling times in China, Joseph Yen offers a very personal description of the dramatic changes from tradition to modernity, the passage of endless political movements and his own discovery of his sexuality with charming honesty.” – Frances Wood, Former Curator Chinese Collections, British Library; author of ‘Did Marco Polo Go To China’, ‘Great Books of China’ and other works
“A very personal memoir of a country in civil war, revolution and times of jarring change when a family collides with the new political realities of China’s tumultuous, and often disastrous, rollercoaster twentieth century.” – Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking
Joseph Yen was born in Shanghai in 1942 and moved with his mother to Beijing in 1946, as China was still gripped by civil war. He witnessed first-hand the Communist victory and the steady tightening of the CCP’s control over the years that followed. He went on to study English language and literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute and, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, was assigned to work at Radio Peking. As political campaigns deepened, many of his friends and colleagues became entangled in factional struggles. Joseph himself was sent down to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’, an experience that convinced him he had no future in his homeland. In 1975 he was permitted to visit his father in Hong Kong, after which he left China and settled in England. He pursued a distinguished career as a broadcaster and journalist with the BBC Chinese Service, producing programmes and commentary for Chinese audiences worldwide. He is now retired and lives in London.
Albert Nachbaur ran all his businesses, including his book publishing business from #16 Kan Yu Hutong. Now Ganyu Hutong it runs west to east from Wangfujing to Dengshikou subway station.
This fact is of interest to me as Kan Yu Hutong was something of a centre for European aesthetes in Peking. It is where the English aesthete, writer and artist Osbert Sitwell rented a courtyard hutong home (after a period staying with his old friend Harold Acton). Translated as Alley of the Sweet Rain, this is where Sitwell worked mornings on his planned book about Brighton (Sitwell and Margaret Barton, Brighton, London: Faber & Faber, 1935, and which fascinatingly includes an 1877 account of Brighton by a visiting Chinese diplomat, and translated by none other than Arthur Waley) and then spent his afternoons exploring the hutongs and temples of the city during his sojourn.
Kan Yu Hutong was something of a locale for French aesthetes. Nachbaur’s friend, the French Sinologist, writer, diplomat and translator André d’Hormon (1881-1965) who taught at Beijing University between 1906 and 1955 lived on the hutong while the well-known long time French resident of Peking Dr. Jean Jerome August Bussière (the French Legation doctor who also treated Yuan Shikai and Gladys Werner, wife of ETC Werner and mother of Pamela Werner – see my book Midnight in Peking). Bussière knew everyone medically and artistically in the Foreign Colony and also had a much-admired retreat in the Western Hills. Bussière, Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), and Li Shizeng [5] (1881-1973) founded the Franco-Chinese Center for Sinological Studies in Beijing, of which d’Hormon was the director.
