Random Old Taipei Building

Nothing to say about this building down opposite the Taiwan Normal University campus – just caught my eye and thought it worth preserving in a picture in case it disappears soon.

Taiwan Cooperative Bank Building – Taipei

Don’t know anything about the history of this building – the Taiwan Cooperative Bank on Taipei’s Hengyang Road – but it is a nice example of a colonial era structure I think and seems to be in pretty good condition.

Taipei – Japan-era “Preserved” Housing

Up a back street of Taipei near the Normal University and the Shida district are some ‘preserved’ houses that formerly belonged to the Forestry Department. The local government seems pretty proud of the ‘preservation’ though most of them looked pretty gutted though some appear lived in still. The gardens are rather overgrown and some in a state of disrepair. So if this is Taipei city government’s definition of preservation I’d hate to see what happens when they totally don’t give a s**t.

Here’s some photos of the houses anyway, as much as you can get given the high walls and lack of access.

Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History

An interesting book about how we look at Singapore history Raffles Renounced from Singapore’s Ethos Books….

Drawing upon a wealth of historical documentation, including speeches, newspaper articles, petitions and songs, “Merdeka / 獨立 /சுதந்திரம்” confronts us with questions about our colonial past and how it still echoes through our present and into our future. Written by Alfian Sa’at in collaboration with Neo Hai Bin, this provocative and moving new play examines how our history and humanity have been shaped – and shattered – by the forces of colonialism.

Why did independent Singapore celebrate two hundred years of its founding as a British colony in 2019? What does Merdeka mean for Singaporeans? And what are the possibilities of doing decolonial history in Singapore? Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History presents essays by historians, literary scholars and artists which grapple with these questions. The volume also reproduces some of the source material used in the play Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (Wild Rice, 2019). Taken together, the book shows how the contradictions of independent nationhood haunt Singaporeans’ collective and personal stories about Merdeka. It points to the need for a Merdeka history: an open and fearless culture of historical reckoning that not only untangles us from colonial narratives, but proposes emancipatory possibilities.

About the Editors

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His plays with Wild Rice include Hotel (with Marcia Vanderstraaten), The Asian Boys Trilogy, Cooling-Off Day, The Optic Trilogy, Homesick and Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (with Neo Hai Bin). He was the winner of the Golden Point Award for Poetry and the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature in 2001. His publications include Collected Plays One, Two, and Three; poetry collections One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript; and short-story collections Corridor and Malay Sketches.

Faris Joraimi is pursuing his BA(Hons) in History at the Yale-NUS College. His research interests lie in the narrative traditions, cultural politics and intellectual history of the Malay world. He hopes to pursue graduate studies and explore ways in which texts and their materiality reflect broader processes of exchange, circulation and consumption in the early modern Nusantara. He has written for a number of platforms, including s/pores, Mynah Magazine, New Naratif, Karyawan, Passage, Budi Kritik and 天下 (Commonwealth Magazine, Taiwan). 

Sai Siew Min is a Taipei-based Singaporean historian who researches Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia with a focus on imperial formation in Southeast Asia, the cultural politics of colonialism and nationalism, language, race and Chineseness. She is a founder member of the s/pores collective. Her essays on historiography in Singapore have appeared online in s/pores: new directions in Singapore Studies. Her academic writings have appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She is also co-editor of the book Reassessing Chinese Indonesians: History, Religion and Belonging.

Contributors

Alfian Sa’at • Neo Hai Bin • Hong Lysa â€¢ Huang Jianli • Sai Siew Min • Faris Joraimi â€¢ Azhar Ibrahim • Nicholas Lua • Jimmy Ong â€¢ Joanne Leow

Crime and the City 2019

Here’s all my Crime and the City columns uploaded to www.crimereads.com in 2019 – all available on http://crimereads.com – just use the search function or look under ‘reading lists’

Travel planning? here’s all my Crime & the City columns published on Crime Reads in 2019: Taipei, Naples, New Orleans, Jo’Burg, Helsinki, Bucharest, Montreal, Kingston, French Riviera, Athens, Oxford, Algiers, Dubai, Bali, Buenos Aires, KL, Madrid, the Hamptons, Budapest, Rangoon/Yangon, Berlin, Havana, New Delhi, Alaska…

Reading the 228 Massacre #2 – Formosa Betrayed

Well done Camphor Press for issuing George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed…

RIP Dongtai Lu – A New Stage in the Blanding of Shanghai

I blogged back in September 2014 about the announcement that Shanghai’s Dongtai Road, its much-loved tat (and the odd antique) street, was coming down, as all old roads must eventually in Shanghai. There was nothing amazingly historic about the Dongtai Road market – it had only been around since the 1980s. However, the street itself had a longer history – Dongtai Lu was once Rue Tai Chan in the French Concession and constructed around 1902. The street was originally named after Taishan in Guangdong Province and well-known by many at the time as it is estimated that over 75% of all overseas Chinese in North America until the mid- to late-twentieth century could claim origin from Taishan. It was    renamed in 1906 after A. Hennequin, a member of the Conseil Municipal de Changhai and an agent of the Messageries Maritimes shipping line. Though French he was elected Chairman of the British dominated Shanghai Club in 1878. The road was a popular location for street entertainers long before it became a market.

The point about Dongtai Road’s destruction is that it leaves another swath of land with nothing planned but tower blocks, car parks and malls extending across from Xintiandi effectively. With Jingling Road (formerly Rue du Consulat) being destroyed at the moment that could leave the entire stretch from the river at Zhongshan No.2 Road (often called the Bund by people, but formerly the Quai de France as it was Frenchtown) as far west as the North-South Elevated Road completely flattened and rebuilt. That is a substantial section of the former French Concession and remember that the destruction of the old town, to the south of this area, is already substantial too.

There’s another point too, though one I know the master builders of Shanghai have no interest in. The former French Concession is now (with the exception of a couple of small indoor food markets) completely free of street markets. If, like me, you think street markets an essential part of a city then you should mourn the passing of Dongtai Road. Across Asia street markets have succumbed to the thirst of developers for land – Hong Kong being a prime example. In Shanghai, I think, it’s both a hunger for development/profit opportunities by the philistine combination of the Party-state and property developers, but also a slight distrust of markets, places where people gather, mingle, talk, argue and act as a community in a way far less controllable than in a heavily mediated public square, a shopping mall or an anodyne faux-space such as the Xintiandi development. Street markets have an inherent chaotic vitality and pleasant anarchy to them that is naturally abhorrent to the city authorities.

Imagine a London without Portobello Road, Petticoat Lane or Leather Lane; a Paris without Clignancourt, Port des Vanves or the numerous flea markets; Taipei without its night food markets (a phenomenon almost totally gone now in mainland China and Shanghai – see previous posts on the end of Wujiang Road/Love Lane back in 2010/2011) – most cities of any interest have their street markets. Shanghai now does not and has not really for some time had traditional street markets – Xiangyang Road remains as a street food market I think, but the old push and shove of the Huating Road market (moved up the road, cleaned up, made orderly and then bulldozed to make way for yet another office block) is over 15 years ago now.

The loss of the old Rue Hennequin is sad – now another ghost street that once existed but no longer. The loss of the Dongtai Road market is also a shame, though not in the way of lost architecture or buildings, but more in a loss of a vital ingredient to urban life – a little piece of the chaotic vitality of the people’s market against the blanding, smoothing, antiseptic, air conditioned, controlled city that Shanghai has become.

Thanks to Gary Bowerman of Scribes of the Orient for this picture of Dongtai Lu last week – gone!

The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Meredith Oyen’s Diplomacy of Migration looks interesting…and a great cover!

See a review here on the Taipei Times site…