All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
The Official Penguin Midnight in Peking Walking Tour with WildChina is on again in Beijing this May 25 2025. Use the QR code below or click here to sign up….
Heads up for next week’s RAS Beijing Zoom event – Linda Jaivin and moderator Paul French in conversation about her new book “Bombard the Headquarters” (Old Street Books), focused on the the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution in China. Nearly half a century after its end, the period still holds lessons regarding what is remembered and what should be remembered.
WHAT: “Bombard the Headquarters: The Cultural Revolution in China,” an RASBJ online conversation featuring author Linda Jaivin with Paul French
WHEN: May 28, 2025 Wednesday from 7-8 PM Beijing Time
Please sign up at https://rasbj.org/membership/
Writing desk from a suite at the Cathay Hotel (1929), The Bund, Shanghai. Made by Weeks & Co of Shanghai featuring Egyptian inspired triangles and swirls to match the hotel’s art-deco Egyptian-influenced style. Part of the M+ collection, Hong Kong
New Yorker writer Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Random House)…..
Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan–Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.
Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country’s history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals. At the book’s heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country’s first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.
In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.
While she was in Peking from December 1924 to July 1925 Wallis, like all Americans, regularly encountered the Fourth Marines who undertook Legation Quarter guard duties – here in winter uniform.
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
Anru Lee’s Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press)…
In 1973 twenty-five young women drowned in a ferry accident on their way to work in factories in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone. Their remains were recovered and interred collectively in what came to be called the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb. Without a husband’s ancestral hall where they would have been laid to rest, the spirits of these unmarried women were considered homeless and possibly vengeful, and so the Maiden Ladies Tomb was viewed as a place to be avoided—especially by young men traveling alone, fearful of encountering a female ghost searching for a husband. Over the years, numerous plans were made to revamp the tomb site; finally, in 2008, at the urging of local feminist communities, the Kaohsiung City government renovated the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb and renamed it the Memorial Park for Women Laborers.
Haunted Modernities interrogates the nature of shared expressions of history, sentiments, and memory as it investigates the role of these women and other female workers in the shifting public narrative during and after the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation. By exploring the ways in which the deceased young women were perceived to “haunt” the living and the diverse renovations recommended, the book illuminates how women workers in Taiwan have been conceptualized in the last several decades. In their proposals to renovate the tomb, the interested parties forged specific accounts of history, transforming the collective burial site according to varying definitions of “heritage” as Taiwan shifted to a postindustrial economy, where factory jobs were no longer the main source of employment. Their plans engaged with acts of remembering—communal and individual—to create new ways of understanding the present. The Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb as a heritage site elucidates how “history” and “memory” are not simply about the past but part of a forward-looking process that emerges from the social, political, and economic needs of the present, legitimized and validated through its associations with the past.
Sex, violence, suicide: love triangle scandal in 1920s Beijing that stained Italy’s reputation in China. A diplomatic love triangle ignited an international incident that embarrassed not just the Italian nobility but the country as a whole – and the story of the Mad Marchesa of Peking and her lovers…. I wrote the story some time back for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine (here), now it’s a four part audio for Hong Kong’s RTHK3 and a podcast…. more details to follow – the programmes will be broadcast and uploaded this June….
John Man’s Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict (Oneworld)…
The Great Wall of China – stretching from the arid rises of Gansu province to the cold waters of the Bohai Sea – remains an enduring symbol of Chinese might. And yet for all its grandeur, the Wall also marks a vulnerability: an ever-present reminder of old battlelines and never-ending tension with China’s northern neighbours.
Travelling by sacred mountains and along forgotten trade routes, John Man journeys through China and Mongolia, tracing the contours of their uneasy shared histories. From the tumult of the Warring States Period to the present day, Man weaves a thrilling tale of battling warlords, imperial power plays, Soviet interference and contemporary political manoeuvring. Looking to the future of the region, Conquering the North canvasses the still fractious interplay of two rival cultures and the continuing struggle for Mongolian sovereignty as China continues to edge north.