Hong Kong history novelised – City of the Queen

For those that like their Hong Kong history novelised, James Clavell, Shih Shu-Qing’s City of the Queen may appeal….

From its beginnings as a pestilent port and colonial backwater, Hong Kong became the “pearl” of a declining British empire, and then ascended to its present status as a gleaming city of commerce. Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been steeped in drama, intrigue, and seismic social shifts. Shih Shu-ching, an acclaimed Taiwanese writer, sets her epic tale of one beautiful and determined woman’s family amid this rich and colorful history, capturing in vivid, panoramic detail the unique tensions and atmosphere that characterize the city. Critically praised and long popular in the Chinese-speaking world, City of the Queen is now available for the first time in English. After being kidnapped from her home in rural China, Huang, the novel’s heroine, is brought to Hong Kong and sold into prostitution. Thanks to her shrewd, sometimes devious business dealings and unexpected twists of fate, she emerges from these cruel beginnings to become a wealthy landowner. City of the Queen follows the fortunes of Huang’s family, including those of her devoutly Christian daughter-in-law, who tries to redeem the sins she believes Huang has committed; her grandson, who becomes the first Chinese judge on the Hong Kong Supreme Court; and her great-granddaughter, a quintessential Hong Kong young woman, who turns her back on family tradition to revel in the pleasures offered by the 1970s and 1980s metropolis. The novel introduces a range of other Chinese and British characters, examining the complicated relationships between colonizer and colonized in a searing and perceptive portrayal of colonialism. There is Adam Smith, the British officer who struggles with the competing seductions of Huang’s beauty and British respectability; Qu Yabing, Smith’s servant, who despises anything Chinese, yet becomes Huang’s lover after she is abandoned by Smith; Colonel White, the sadistic colonial police chief; and Auntie Eleven, a concubine who owns a pawnshop and teaches Huang the secrets of the trade.

Xinjiang and the Expansion of Chinese Communist Power: Kashgar in the Early Twentieth Century

Michael Dillon’s Xinjiang and the Expansion of Chinese Communist Power looks interesting (especially as my Zed Asian Arguments series has a book next year on more recent redevelopment and issues in Kashgar from Sam Chambers coming out that looks at more recent developments in Kashgar)…

Visualising China’s New Blog

For those who don’t know this treasure trove, Visualising China is a project to allow users to explore and enhance more than 8,000 digitised images of photographs of China taken between 1850 and 1950. It allows access to many previously unseen albums, envelopes and private collections and also major collections such as Historical Photographs of China, the Sir Robert Hart Collection and Joseph Needham’s Photographs of Wartime China. It’s a lot of fun, a way to spend hours lost in old China on a rainy day and the brainchild of Prof Robert Bickers at Uni of Bristol.

And now they’ve started a blog the idea of which is to find new ways to offering fresh perspectives, thoughts, and digging out new themes etc on the photographs on the site. Simply choose a photo, or couple of photos, and offer some insight. I rashly decided to try this and, probably due to not having much to do or something compared to everyone else (slightly worrying), ended up their debut blogger talking about the old Jessfield Park in Shanghai (Zhongshan Park as now is)…..click here

Tiananmen Revisited – Frontline Club 29/7/14

Just to note I’ll be chairing a discussion on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre at the Frontline Club in London on 29th July with Louisa Lim (author of the recently published The People’s Republic of Amnesia) and James Miles, the Economist’s new China Editor and author of The Legacy of Tiananmen)….RSVP here

In the early hours of 4 June 1989, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on a pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, killing untold hundreds of people. Twenty five years on, the event has been commemorated around the world, but how does China remembers this defining moment in the country’s history?

We will be joined by a panel including the award-winning journalist Louisa Lim, whose book The People’s Republic of Amnesia charts how events unfolded that night, revealing previously unknown details.

Whilst looking back, we will also trace the effect the crackdown had on society then and the impact it continues to have today. We will explore how the events of twenty five years ago have shaped national identity in China.

Chaired by Paul French, an author and a widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international bestseller Midnight in Peking.

The panel:

Louisa Lim as an award-winning journalist who has reported from China for a decade, most recently for National Public Radio. Previously she was the BBC’s Beijing correspondent. She is author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited.

James Miles is the outgoing Beijing bureau chief of The Economist, a position he took up in 2001. He will begin a new appointment in August as The Economist‘s China Editor, based in London. He is the author of The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray.

H.B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China

A biography of HB Morse – interesting as don’t know of another one and a reissue of John K Fairbank’s bio….

Hosea Ballou Morse (1855-1934) sailed to China in 1874, and for the next thirty-five years he labored loyally in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, becoming one of its most able commissioners and acquiring a deep knowledge of China’s economy and foreign relations. After his retirement in 1909, Morse devoted himself to scholarship. He pioneered in the Western study of China’s foreign relations, weaving from the tangled threads of the Ch’ing dynasty’s foreign affairs several seminal interpretive histories, most notably his three-volume magnum opus, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (1910-18).

At the time of his death, Morse was considered the major historian of modern China in the English-speaking world, and his works played a profound role in shaping the contours of Western scholarship on China.

Begun as a labor of love by his protégé, John King Fairbank, this lively biography based primarily on Morse’s vast collection of personal papers sheds light on many crucial events in modern Chinese history, as well as on the multifaceted Western role in late imperial China, and provides new insights into the beginnings of modern China studies in this country. Half-finished when Fairbank died, the project was completed by his colleagues, Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard J. Smith.

John King Fairbank (1907-1991) was Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History at Harvard University and founder/director of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center, now the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
Martha Henderson Coolidge is associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University.
Richard J. Smith is professor of history and director of Asian Studies at Rice University.

Atención – Medianoche en Pekín es publicado

The Spanish edition of Midnight in Peking – Medianoche en Pekin – is now available courtesy of my Spanish publishers Plataforma Editorial – many thanks to Ricard Vela for the translation…

Indian Hill Station Development

I’ve long been interested in the old hill stations of India and those summer resorts and hill stations that existed elsewhere, notably China (Moganshan, Kuling etc – which I’ve posted about before – just use the search box for those posts) but also those in Vietnam, the Philippines, Ceylon and elsewhere. This interest was partly sparked by Barbara Crosette’s excellent book from the 1990s (and still eminently readable) The Great Hill Stations of Asia as well as the novelist JG Farrell’s The Hill Station. For those with an interest in Moganshan there’s also Mark Kitto’s history of Moganshan China Cuckoo and a rather fun novel (featuring Wallis Simpson and her wild times in China) called Mokanshan. Others have also grabbed my attention for posts and visits including Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands and Maymo in Burma.

Anyway, according to the FT, Hindustan Construction is to float its hill station subsidiary, Lavasa. Lavasa is a rather newer incarnation of the tradition established during the British Raj of places to escape the lowland heat – India has about 80 hill stations. A more interesting question might be whether or not the existing hill stations that date back to the Raj may also be revived?

Nora Waln’s House of Exile, Penguin Edition 1933

Nora Waln was one the first of the ‘girl reporters’ to head to China and once shared a house in with Edna Lee Booker (who I’ve blogged about previously). While in China Waln worked on her novels while reporting for the Atlantic Monthly.  Her reporting on Mongolia was especially interesting for the times when few went there.

Came across a 1933 Penguin edition of her China memoir The House of Exile the other day…