It was amazing to spend a week in and around Macao’s Casa Garden (Praça de Luís de Camões) for the Macao International Literary Festival….
Originally built in 1770 as Macao’s first villa-style garden residence for the wealthy Portuguese merchant Manuel Pereira.
In the early 19th century, it was leased to the East India Company as their Macau HQ, housing high-ranking directors.
It has hosted figures such as Lord Macartney (Britain’s first envoy to China) and former US President Ulysses S Grant.
Around 1850 George Chinnery painted “A View of Macao Looking Towards the Casa Garden”, taken from a high point above the inner harbour looking towards the Casa Garden. The pitched roof of the Camões Grotto is visible among the trees of the Casa Garden in the middle distance.
More recently Casa Garden housed the Camões Museum before being purchased by the Oriental Foundation in the 1980s.
There is still time to see the exhibition of black and white photos taken by António Duarte Mil-Homens celebrating the work of the late Macanese Modernist architect José Maneiras -“José Maneiras: From Architecture to Urban Management in Macau” – at the Casa Garden until April 5 2026.
Maneiras studied architecture at the University of Porto’s Faculty of Fine Arts, graduating in 1962 and then returning to Macao.
Below just two of Maneiras’s many projects. The Edificio Fung Wong (1966), close by the ruins of St Paul’s on Rua de Sao Paulo and the Residence for the Visually Impaired (1970) in the Areia Preta neighbourhood (Hac Sa Wan).
The presence of hundreds of thousands ethnic Koreans in Japan, or “zainichi Koreans,” is one of the visible legacies of Japanese colonialism. A surprising and influential group among zainichi Koreans that persists to this day is Chongryon, the only pro–North Korean diasporic group based in a capitalist society. Chongryon historically represented the central grassroots force seeking to liberate Koreans from Japan’s imperial and neo-imperial influences. At the heart of the Chongryon community stands a political organization equipped with a central bureaucracy in Tokyo, with a headquarters in nearly every prefecture. Often called a de facto embassy of North Korea, the Chongryon organization has, in effect, functioned as a state within another state—operating hundreds of schools, banks, hospitals, business associations, publishing houses, and many other institutions across Japan.
Based on extensive archival research and nearly 250 original interviews collected with co-researcher KumHee Cho, who was raised within the Chongryon community, Sayaka Chatani offers a sweeping social history of this secretive, protective community in xenophobic Japanese society. Weaving together personal accounts and situating them in a multi-layered, transnational political context, the book offers a finely textured, intimate narrative of the community’s tumultuous history and decolonial praxis. Through the stories of Chongryon, this book provides a bottom-up analysis of power politics among zainichi Koreans and reshapes our understanding of Japanese history, Korean history, and the Cold War in Asia.
The Original London Chinatown Revealed- Myths and Realities
Exhibition at St.Anne’s Limehouse, March 20 to July 2026
This exhibition is about the Chinatown that grew up right next to this church, flourished 1900 -1955 and yet almost disappeared from sight in the 1960s. Only a few clues remain…
Screenshot
We explore how Limehouse Chinatown has been represented and misrepresented in newsprint, fiction, film and popular music. And we contrast this with some of the true stories from the real Chinatown – describing family life, social life and commercial life in an urban village, – with the help of witness testimony and the work of ceramicist Charles Ng.
We explain the mystery surrounding Limehouse Chinatown- how did it appear? – how did it disappear? How did it become associated with powerful urban myths?
And finally, we consider the legacy of the small Chinese community who lived so close to this church
(to see more photo albums from Japan and China just put “photo albums” in the search box)
This album, from 1936 contained pictures taken from a tour of SE Asia, Hong Kong, Japan and the South Pacific in 1936 on a Dutch steamer, the SS Grootekerk. I think the album was probably acquired in Singapore, their first stop (or possibly KL or Penang), given the images attached to the cover – one being supposedly humourous. The reverse of the album is a cloth textile covering with floral motifs.
A last-minute “Pop-Up” event in Shanghai this Sunday courtesy of the good folk at Historic Shanghai. 7pm, Garden Books, Changle Lu – use the QR code or info@historic-shanghai.com
It’ll be a loose format. Happy to talk about anything anybody wants to? – writing/publishing/reading Old China – but expect gangsters, criminals, murderers, Badlands denizens, Nazis on the Bund, Hongkou Jewish resisters, advertising mavericks and Old Peking too of course.
My VoiceMap Publishers GPS walking tour “Kowloon Tong: Art Deco and Hidden Heritage in Hong Kong” takes you through the impressive yet overlooked Art Deco and Modernist structures of Kowloon between Boundary Street and Mongkok East – Prince Edward Road West, Kadoorie Hill and the Braga Circuit. All were constructed in the 1930s.
The tour starts at Mary Knoll Convent School on Waterloo Road, with its fascinating blend of Art Deco and Gothic Revival styles. This amazing photo I saw recently shows the area around Boundary Street and Waterloo Road in 1936. Mary Knoll was just being built but you can see St. Teresa’s Roman Catholic Church, an intriguing blend of Romanesque architecture and Art Deco influences, clearly visible. It had been completed earlier in 1932.
Take the tour to discover much more about this fascinating area of Hong Kong here…
