All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Listen to an abridged version of the chapter – Shanghai’s Most Charming Gangster:
Elly ‘The Swiss’ Widler (1940) from Destination Shanghai (Blacksmith Books)
Listen to an abridged version of the chapter – Nearly Snubbed by Shanghai: Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford (1929) from Destination Shanghai (Blacksmith Books)
Perhaps the best known watch brand of post-1949 and pre-reform China was the Shanghai Watch Company. Second to them was Zuanshi Watches and today Zuanshi timepieces are far harder to fin d than the fairly common Shanghai watches. Shanghai Watch was better known and remains more widely found in auctions and markets because a) it was in business longer than Zuanshi b) it produced a lot more models than Zuanshi and c) Shanghai Watch was championed by Zhou En-lai which gave it a status and street cred in the 60s and 70s. It’s Shanghai factory and workers housing down in Yangpu by Dalian Road was demolioshed in 2011. A part of the factory remained for a few years and certainly until about 2012 where Saturday mornings saw dealers (mostly former employees who had managed to get a lot of watches) and collectors (on my visits always all, except me, Shanghainese). All of that lot was then cleared (see here)
Zuanshi though was also a Shanghai-based watch company that launched its first watches in 1958 and in the 1960s continued to put out various wrist watches and also stopwatches. I beleive the company closed down in the late 1970s as a separate operation and merged with a Hangzhou weatch company. There are some nice example here.
I got a bag of random Chinese watches at an auction lately that included worthless rubbish Mao waving watches, some decent Shanghai watches and two nice Zuanshis…so you can spot them at your local auction here’s the ones I got…
Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide (trans: Joshua L Freeman – Jonathan Cape Books)…
If you took an Uber in Washington DC a few years ago, there’s a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets, and one of only a handful from his minority Muslim community to escape the genocide being visited upon his homeland in western China.
A successful filmmaker, innovative poet and prominent intellectual, Tahir Hamut Izgil had long been acquainted with state surveillance and violence, having spent three years in a labour camp on fabricated charges.
But in 2017, the Chinese government’s repression of its Uyghur citizens assumed a terrifying new intensity: critics were silenced; conversations became hushed; passports were confiscated; and Uyghurs were forced to provide DNA samples and biometric data.
As Izgil’s friends disappeared one by one, it became clear that fleeing the country was his family’s only hope.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night charts the ongoing destruction of a community and a way of life. It is a call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe, an unforgettable story of courage, escape and survival, and a moving tribute to Izgil’s friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.
the Japanese Aesthetics of Recycling Exhibition is on at SOAS’s Brunei Gallery, London, till September 23. More details here…
This weeks ultimate China book is David Kidd’s memoir of a traditional courtyard life disturbed by the interregnum following 1949 and the CCP seizure of power. Click here – https://thechinaproject.com/2023/09/07/all-the-traditions-lost-after-the-communists-entered-beijing/
Somehow I missed Edward Wilson-Lee’s A History of Water (HarperCollins) when it cvame out earlier his year – so here it is now…and well worth reading too…
A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them – an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music – returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other – a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan – ends up as the national poet of Portugal.
The stories of Damião de Góis and Luís de Camões capture the extraordinary wonders that awaited Europeans on their arrival in India and China, the challenges these marvels presented to longstanding beliefs, and the vast conspiracy to silence the questions these posed about the nature of history and of human life.
Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.
RKO used to make a little extra by publishing with Frederick Ungar Books of New York) the screenplays of their movies. Star pictures on the front and back, 8 pages of stills from the movie inside and a short introudction – in the case of Josef von Sternberg’s Macao by the film critic Andrew Velez. Useful for people like me who write about old movies…
