All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
An event at SOAS in London open to all on Chiang Yee and his London Circle (published by Hong Kong University Press) with Paul Bevan, Sarah Cheang, Craig Clunas, Anne Witchard, Frances Wood and me…. open to all – this Thursday (4/12/24) – Click here…
Just received a copy of Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon (University of Chicago Press) – looks excellent. But that cover image does look awfully familiar!!!
For those that value independent media and quality writing covering Asia, the quarterly Mekong Review is a must – subscriptions are available for print and/or online….ridicouslously cheap subscription details here (from a paltry $3 a month – keep independent media on Asia alive!)
Out now is the November 2024-January 2025 issue and, among all the other good stuff (check out the latest issue’s contents here), is my review of North Korean senior defector Thae Yong-ho’s (who slipped away from the DPRK’s London embassy in 2016 to Seoul) new memoir Passcode to the Third Floor: An Insider’s Account of Life Among North Korea’s Political Elite (Columbia University Press) – paywalled, but subscribers can read here….
Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen’s Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press)….
The Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley is home to over 470 graves connected to the city’s Japanese population. Most of these graves belong to individuals who died during the Meiji era (1868–1912), a remarkable period of modernisation and opening up of Japan that saw thousands of its inhabitants travel to other parts of the world to study, work, and settle. Who were these people? What were they doing in Hong Kong? And why were unbaptised Japanese buried in what was called at one time the ‘Protestant Cemetery’?
Hong Kong’s Meiji-era Japanese community was one of two halves. Company executives sat atop the social ladder and karayuki-san, or prostitutes, occupied the lower echelons, with tradespeople and professionals somewhere in between. By revealing the personal journeys of these mostly forgotten Japanese, the authors aim to add to transnational perspectives on Hong Kong and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as increase recognition of this fragmented community’s place in the development of this diverse city.
Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong.
Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. Born in England, she grew up in Switzerland and has called Hong Kong home since 1990.
Robert J. Antony’s Outlaws of the Sea: Maritime Piracy in Modern China (Hong Kong University Press)….part of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies series…
In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J. Antony provides a comprehensive account of the history of maritime piracy in coastal south China from the 1630s to the 1940s. He neither romanticizes nor maligns pirates, but rather analyzes them in the context of their times and the broader world in which they lived. The author demonstrates that Chinese piracy was a pervasive force shaping maritime society as it ebbed and flowed between sporadic, small-scale ventures and professional, large-scale enterprises in the modern era. This book offers important new insights into the underside of modern China’s history and the interactions between pirates, foreign traders, local communities, and the state.
Before retiring in 2019, Robert J. Antony was Distinguished Professor at Guangzhou University and recently visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. His publications include Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China (HKUP, 2016) and Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas (HKUP, 2010).
I’ll be on Times Radio tonight at 9.15pm talking live with Hannah MacInnes about Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot & Thompson)….
So, if you got on the committee of the Shanghai Club, home of the legendary Long Bar at #2 Bund you got a badge!
I should tip my hat to one of the best novelists to describe the insular “goldfish bowl” world of the Legation Quarter Set of 1920s Peking – Ann Bridge (aka Lady O’Malley). Wife of a British diplomat, she lived in Peking from 1925 to 1927, almost contemporaneous with Wallis. Afterwards she wrote 3 highly descriptive novels of the city and its 1920s “Foreign Colony”, all worth reading – Peking Picnic (1932), The Ginger Griffin (1934) & Four-Part Setting (1938). All contain Wallis sojourner-like characters enchanted with Peking, making it on their wits, and much desired within the male heavy society. Sadly not much read today Bridge deserves a revival…..
