All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Recently several Japanese photo albums have come up for auction – images taken by Japanese invading soldiers of themselves mostly occupying China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)… I’m afraid i can’t really identify any of the locations….
Not what I’d personally want on my desk but here’s a horses hoof inkwell. The top is engraved with the sobriquet ‘Ugly Buck’ of the King’s Dragoon Guards 1864. In 1860 this Regiment played a very active part in the Second Opium War receiving the Battle Honour ‘China’ ‘Taku Forts’ (Tianjin) and ‘Peking’ for their actions…Ugly Buck, the way, was (I think) a horse….
2025 is the 30th anniversary of Eileen Chang/Zhang Ailing’s death. A few commemorative events have been happening including an exhibition about her time at Hong Kong University at the uni library and the ongoing exhibition about her relationship with the old Repulse Bay Hotel at The Repulse Bay (including my recent event with Bookazine there which focussed on her 1943 novella Love in a Fallen City).
And visiting the large Page One bookstore at Qianmen in Beijing I see they have their own Eileen Chang display remembering her work…
Was out walking in Beijing today and wandering fairly aimlessly found myself outside Wallis Simpson’s old hutong home at #4 Shijia Hutong….
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
Ponte da Chen Cheong, Rua do Almirante Sérgio, Macao – former head office of the famous Kwong Hing Tai firecracker company founded in the 1920s by Chan Lan Fong and with a fsctory in Taipa. Chan Tai Kee (same family) made firework rockets…
A rare copy of Nigel M. W. ‘Harris’s Sampan Pidgin: Being a History of the Shanghai Rowing Club, (Shanghai: The Mercantile Printing Co., 1938). The Book remarkably remained in the Shanghai Rowing Club during the period of the Japanese Occupation and was recovered by the author from the Club House in May, 1949, shortly before Communists troops entered Shanghai. Harris, as well as obviously a member of the rowing club, was an RAF Squadron Leader in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
When Wallis arrived in Peking in December 1924 the city was in construction mode. Modern road surfacing was underway and the first tram lines, through Tiananmen from Qianmen and then along Chang’an, were laid in the forst half of the 1920s. This photograph (by American missionary Arthur H Smith) from around that time shows a steamroller laying road surface in the Tartar City….
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
As you may well know the English writer and artist Denton Welch was born in Shanghai in 1915 where he spent much of his youth. I’ve talked about Welch’s writings on his Shanghai boyhood before (just put Welch in the search box here on the right), most notably in my collection Destination Peking (Welch once spoke a very interesting Christmas in Peking)….
John Swarbrooke Fine Art in London has a new exhibition on Welch – it runs till October 30. You can, however, see most of the paintings online here…
