Londoners by now hopefully know that Amy Poon, on the legendary Poon’s family of Chinatown restaurateurs has opened a sumptuous new restaurant at London’s Somerset House – if in town do check it out. She also very kindly invited me and some writerly types to dinner at her home and for the Financial Times’ How To Spend It magazine on how to host a dinner party –
“Amy Poon hosts a steamy hotpot party. Immense fun to be fed by the legendary Amy Poon, watered by her sommelier smart husband Michael Mackenzie and be photographed by the FT. All in the company of eminent travel writer Colin Thubron and his wife the Shakespeare scholar Margreta de Grazia, Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Tash Aw, food writer Fuchsia Dunlop, author Paul French and SOAS student Alegra Giercke, whose family runs the Genghis Khan Retreat in Mongolia. Their conversation ranges from the intellectual to the naughty, taking in Wham!’s tour to China in the 1980s and how to cook a Mongolian camel’s pizzle along the way.”
I’ll be at the 2026 Hong Kong Young Readers Festival start of March next year with workshops on writing for magazines and how to solve 90 year old murders!! Most suitable for Year 10 upwards. If you’re a teacher, librarian or got kids in school in Hong Kong bookings are now open…. and you’ll be supporting the fantastic Hong Kong International Literary Festival too.
The utter nonsense being talked about bamboo scaffolding among some in China/HK & almost universally in the western media… here the Cathay (Peace) Hotel on the Shanghai Bund under construction in 1928 with bamboo scaffolding…. credit: the University of Bristol ‘Historical Photographs of China’ project….
Anyone gifting a copy of Her Lotus Year (or any of my books) this Christmas? If you want a signed exlibris bookplate let me know and i’ll get one in the post to you….
Kim Il Sung ruled his country, North Korea, for longer and shaped it more profoundly than almost any other modern leader. He created a unique and seemingly bizarre and menacing political and social system, establishing a dynasty that has maintained it for two more generations. Yet he remains a curiously inaccessible, little understood figure, partly due to the closed and secretive nature of the state he founded. Michael J. Seth puts together what we know of Kim’s life from all available sources and places it in the context of Korean and modern world history to make both Kim and North Korea comprehensible. He looks at the unusual circumstances that contributed to Kim’s rise to power and at the early experiences that help to explain the directions he took his country. Seth examines his impressive early achievements and his later failures, which left North Korea the isolated, impoverished half of a divided nation. Kim was a charismatic and resourceful leader determined to reunify and modernize his country. But he pursued these aims with ruthlessness, egotism and extreme narrow-mindedness. Ultimately, his political inflexibility led to disaster.
Two works by Lui Shou-Kwan (1919-1975), one of the most prominent Cantonese painters of the 20th century and a founder of the Hong Kong New Ink Movement. What also makes these intreresting is that they come from the estate of Lord Murray Maclehose (1917-2000), the 25th Governor of Hong Kong from 1971 to 1982….
Recently up for auction was a diarised account of the invasion of China by the Eight Power Allied Army in 1900 in response to the Boxer Uprising and the Siege of the Legations. It was written by Morris Edward Cochrane, Sub-Lieutenant on HMS Centurion, part of the 2,000 strong force led by Admiral Edward Seymour that left Tianjin attempting to reach Peking by rail. Having received orders on Sunday 10th June at 5.30am to make ready his men within the hour, Sub-Lieut. Cochrane describes in great detail the advance and subsequent retreat back to Tianjin of the multi-national force ending his account on Thursday 25th June, in jubilant mood having just met with the Russian relief column, the force having been under almost constant fire with few provisions for much of the preceding two weeks. The journal is accompanied by a letter to his family dated June 29th written once back onboard Centurion.
Morris Edward Cochrane was born in 1879, the youngest son of J. H. Cochrane and Charlotte Newton. He entered the Royal Navy as a Naval Cadet on 15 January 1893. He was appointed a Midshipman in February 1895 and was promoted to Sub-Lieutenant in August 1898. On 9 November 1900 he was promoted to Lieutenant for his services in China. He later served in Somaliland and was mentioned in despatches. He was advanced to Lieutenant-Commander in November 1908 and Commander in May 1919. For his services in the Great War he was awarded the D.S.O., the Italian Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus and the Serbian Order of the White Eagle.
