All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A pair of watercolour portraits of high-born children by Yat On, an early 20th Century Chinese School artist. But what is perhaps most interesting is the Wyndham Street studio label on the reverse…
Antonio Caeiro’s O dia em que Portugal entrou na China (in Portuguese, 2021) – Shanghai 1927. The day Portugal entered China is an investigation into the landing of Portuguese troops in Shanghai to defend their compatriots who lived in the economic capital of China, known as the “Paris of the East”. The Portuguese became the third largest European community in Shanghai. Click here to read free from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian…
Lovely to see the Chinese edition of Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic & Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930-1950 (Hong Kong University Press) with me & Anne Witchard, Craig Clunas, Paul Bevan, Tessa Thornily, Sarah Cheang, Ke Ren, Diana Yeh and Frances Wood – available now on all PRC platforms…
Revenue stamp for cigarette tax, Chinese National Wine and Tobacco Bureau (c.1912)
In issue #33 of the Mekong Review, the November-January 2023/2024 edition, I review Florence Mok’s Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97.
J Sligh & Co, Peking tailors, Morrison Street (Wangfujing). I believe they also had a branch in the old Grand Hotel de Wagons Lits in the Legation Quarter.
Shanghai Scottish Company (aka The Highland Company) of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps glengarry cap badge circa 1914. central thistle superimposed on saltire
Gloria Grahame’s centenary this week – of course she was fantastic in The Bad & the Beautiful, In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, but I always think of her as croupier and gangster’s moll Margie in 1952’s Josef von Sternberg/Nick Ray movie Macao (with Robert Mitchum & Jane Russell)
