Tickets are free but space is limited to please RSVP here…
Xiaolu Guo is a prolific writer and filmmaker whose work embraces fiction, memoir, and documentary. Xiaolu talks to author Paul French (Midnight in Peking, Her Lotus Year)about her work and her journey as a writer – from China to England, from Chinese to English and from memoir to novels as well as new interests reflected in her recent books My Battle of Hastings, and a bold retelling of Moby Dick, Call me Ishmaelle, both of which of ultimately hark back to her Chinese roots.
Recently several Japanese photo albums have come up for auction – images taken by Japanese invading soldiers of themselves mostly occupying China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)… I’m afraid i can’t really identify any of the locations….
I think this is the kanji for Chu – loyalty/faithfulness/fidelity
Not what I’d personally want on my desk but here’s a horses hoof inkwell. The top is engraved with the sobriquet ‘Ugly Buck’ of the King’s Dragoon Guards 1864. In 1860 this Regiment played a very active part in the Second Opium War receiving the Battle Honour ‘China’ ‘Taku Forts’ (Tianjin) and ‘Peking’ for their actions…Ugly Buck, the way, was (I think) a horse….
2025 is the 30th anniversary of Eileen Chang/Zhang Ailing’s death. A few commemorative events have been happening including an exhibition about her time at Hong Kong University at the uni library and the ongoing exhibition about her relationship with the old Repulse Bay Hotel at The Repulse Bay (including my recent event with Bookazine there which focussed on her 1943 novella Love in a Fallen City).
And visiting the large Page One bookstore at Qianmen in Beijing I see they have their own Eileen Chang display remembering her work…
Ponte da Chen Cheong, Rua do Almirante Sérgio, Macao – former head office of the famous Kwong Hing Tai firecracker company founded in the 1920s by Chan Lan Fong and with a fsctory in Taipa. Chan Tai Kee (same family) made firework rockets…
A rare copy of Nigel M. W. ‘Harris’s Sampan Pidgin: Being a History of the Shanghai Rowing Club, (Shanghai: The Mercantile Printing Co., 1938). The Book remarkably remained in the Shanghai Rowing Club during the period of the Japanese Occupation and was recovered by the author from the Club House in May, 1949, shortly before Communists troops entered Shanghai. Harris, as well as obviously a member of the rowing club, was an RAF Squadron Leader in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
