When I first met the indefatigable Tess Johnston in Shanghai it was the legendary Grape Restaurant on Xinle Lu which, at the time, was a popular eating spot for foreigners in the city. She was described to me as Shanghai’s #1 Brickhugger. Over the years we became friends, regular co-panelists and jointly mourned and tried to at least remember the ongoing destruction of the city’s heritage. She was never anything less than fascinating, a great teller of anecdotes, a repository of facts and a first stop for so many interested in Shanghai’s past. Tess died last September.
There will be a Memorial/Celebration of Life and a luncheon at Dacor Bacon House in Washington DC on Tuesday, December 9, 2025 starting at 12:00 noon. (www.dacorbacon.org). The club is composed of foreign service and foreign affairs professionals – Tess was originally with the US foreign service. She a;s has financially supported Dacor Bacon House and donated some of her antiques as well.
Anyone who would like to attend please contact Katie Baker in DC (who has done so much for Tess) on katebaker99@yahoo.com
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….
