WHAT: Author Paul French introduces “The World of the Peking Aesthetes” during a small-group RASBJ dinner in the former residence of Peking opera star Mei Lanfang
WHEN: Monday, Oct 27, 2025, from 7:00-8:45 PM Beijing Time. Doors open at 6:45 PM.
WHERE: Qingyun Huai 49 Yan Laofangu Master Ji (or “Banquet 1949”), Qingyun 23 Artistic Center, Neiyuan, Dongcheng (青云淮四九宴老饭骨大师技)
Between the world wars Peking was home to many long-term sojourner aesthetes, European, American and Japanese men and women sensitive to art and beauty. Writers, artists, translators and scholars, though often dilettantes, and occasionally fabulators and frauds. They were invariably of the “lost generation”, often gay, the men independently wealthy and the women newly independent of bad and boring marriages. They made hutongs and former temples their homes, they cultivated their appreciation of Chinese art, style and opera. They wrote, painted and collected. Their fabulous friends visited. They made alliances and close friendships with like-minded Chinese. And they recorded their experiences in memoirs, novels, plays and letters. They were the Peking Aesthetes.
I’ve posted this sketch of Wallis Simpson before – Wallis Simpson Serving Cocktails, London, 20 November 1936, a Cecil Beaton gouache featuring Wallis signature China-inspired chignon hairstyle and Mainbocher interpretation of a qipao. But I hadn’t realised it was owned by the fashion designer Dries Van Noten.
He has apparently loaned it to the new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World (on until January 26 2026) so we can now all see the original.
If you’re interested and in Hong Kong places are strictly limited but you can try via inquiries@lrc.com.hk
“This October New York Times bestselling author and regular South China Morning Post weekend magazine contributor Paul French joins us for a conversation about books, Chinese history and telling lost stories. French has explored modern Chinese history through different genres and forms of writing to reach wide audiences worldwide. His work includes the awarding-winning true crime Midnight in Peking set in 1930s China, while City of Devils revisits the wild and crazy nightlife of wartime Shanghai, His latest book, Her Lotus Year, explores the scandalous 12 months (1924/1925) Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, spent in Hong Kong and China. We’ll talk about finding stories, recovering the forgotten and weaving their lives into China’s grand narrative to make compelling reads.”
Corrine Lamb’s (nominative determinism?) study of Chinese manners and dining etiquette first published in 1935 by Henri Vetch of the Peking Bookshop in the lobby of the Grand Hotel de Pekin (Chang’an Jie). Complemented by a selection of Chinese proverbs, line drawings (by long time Peking based American illustrator John Kirk Sewall) and photographs. Chapters deal with the convention of Chinese food, wine, ingredients, and how to order a meal. In addition, the book features a selection of recipes gathered by the author over twenty years of hospitality at the tables of princes, peasants, generals, and innkeepers.
Bookazine is back at Repulse Bay…. So let’s celebrate by remembering the literary history of the old Repulse Bay Hotel, once the stunning resort centrepiece of Hong Kong Island’s “Southern Riviera”.
Eileen Chang’s aquamarine seas of Repulse Bay were the setting for romantic trysts while Han Suyin relished Sunday afternoon swimming parties with her secret lover. Jane Gardam recreated a world of moonlit dinners while Timothy Mo harked back to the hotel’s famous tea-dances. Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway celebrated cocktail hour while Emily Hahn drank gimlets and smoked cigars as the world fell apart around them.
For half a century, from its grand opening in 1920 to its closure in 1982, the Repulse Bay Hotel was a tranquil haven of passionate honeymoons and illicit affairs, curry tiffins and Sundowner drinks on the veranda. Literary guests included Noël Coward, Lin Yutang and George Bernard Shaw. In the late 1930s the hotel became a sanctuary for literary intellectuals fleeing war-torn Shanghai. Finally Repulse Bay became the site of travel writer Jan Morris’s classic evocation of Hong Kong as the symbol of Britain’s imperial sunset.
Join writer and historian Paul French (Midnight in Peking, City of Devils, Her Lotus Year) in conversation with RTHK3’s Annemarie Evans at Bookazine Repulse Bay for a glass or two of wine and some literary readings, anecdotes and memories of the old Repulse Bay Hotel.
October 18, 5pm – the event is free and you also get free access to the Repulse Bay’s current Eileen Chang exhibition (HK$40 normally) but please sign up here – for numbers (and to ensure there’s enough wine!!)…
RTHK3’s The Brew is running an adaptation of my story about The Murderous Marchesa of Peking all this week with 4 episodes at 12:40pm daily.
BTW – i’ll be live with host Phil Whelan on Thursday to talk about the deadly scandal in the 1920s that stained Italy’s reputation in the ‘Far East’. A diplomatic love triangle ignited an international incident that embarrassed not just the Italian nobility, but the country as a whole.
Outisde HK you can listen to this (audio only) on Facebook live – https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1AsdAz1DqF/
RTHK3’s The Brew is running an adaptation of my story about The Murderous Marchesa of Peking all this week with 4 episodes at 12:40pm daily.
BTW – i’ll be live with host Phil Whelan on Thursday to talk about the deadly scandal in the 1920s that stained Italy’s reputation in the ‘Far East’. A diplomatic love triangle ignited an international incident that embarrassed not just the Italian nobility, but the country as a whole.
Outisde HK you can listen to this (audio only) on Facebook live – https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1AsdAz1DqF/
I’ve posted JL George furniture before (use the blog search engine if interested). The firm interests me because they were enormously popular with both Chinese and foreign homeowners and because they are a good example of a big Shanghai company that moved to Hong Kong in the late 1940s. Here a camphor wood lined & decorated hardwood chest with interior tray made in Shanghai before 1949 at their premises on Avenue Road (Beijing Xi Lu)…
