All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
The new biennial M Festival (so back in 2028) hosted and organised by Michelle Garnaut, formerly of M on the Bund and who many subscribers to this email will be familiar with, went off wonderfully at the end of July. Lots of great speakers, China as ever a major theme, wonderful food, music and parties…
Dai Sijie’s novel (really a novella at under 200 pages) “5000 mètres avant l’aube”(Gallimard, 2026) is out in France, but I don’t know if/when there will be an English edition but it sounds like an interesting read….
A French pilot of Eurasian descent, Jean Sautet, is taken prisoner. Matsui is stunned – a former runner on the national team, he was beaten by Sautet at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He devises an outlandish plan – to rebuild the Parisian Olympic stadium in the jungle and rerun the race.
Here we are once again on the anniversary of Shanghai’s “Bloody Saturday” – August 14 1937 – then the worst civilian aerial bombing to date. It was a confusing time, rumours and conspiracy theories ran rife, Shanghainese and Shanghailanders were scared… and killed. The architectural wounds of that day can still be seen on the old Cathay and Palace Hotels on the Bund, the Great World (Da Shijie) where another bomb fell remains. The death toll exceeded Guernica – it would be exceed again until the Japanese bombing of Chongqing and the Nazi Blitz on London and otrher British cities.
My Penguin China ebook Special Bloody Saturday: Shanghai’s Darkest Day recreating that day from a Shanghailander perspective is still available for just US$2.99/UK£2.99 – amazon.com, amazon.co.uk
Every year on the anniversary (which remains sadly pretty much totally ignored in China as it’s a complicated legacy that doesn’t necessarily reflect on anyone) I try to find another angle
the bizarre sight of a terrified ostrich getting loose and rampaging up and down Nanjing Road
US Marine Guards issue “Keep Off” orders in Shanghai
a local bookshop that swiftly created a window display recalling the bombings
US Marine remembrances of Bloody Saturday
Additional US Marine deployment to Shanghai the summer of 1937
You can also read the story of Cathay Hotel dancer and Bloody Saturday survivor and refugee Terese Rudolph from a bombed Shanghai to an earthquake destroyed Manila to a plagued Hong Kong and back to the stage of the Cathay Hotel’s Tower Club on an amazing journey that inspired her to create a modern dance interpretation of Bloody Saturday!! It’s in my collection Destination Shanghai….
You can also read the story of Cathay Hotel dancer and Bloody Saturday survivor and refugee Terese Rudolph from a bombed Shanghai to an earthquake destroyed Manila to a plagued Hong Kong and back to the stage of the Cathay Hotel’s Tower Club on an amazing journey that inspired her to create a modern dance interpretation of Bloody Saturday!! It’s in my collection Destination Shanghai….
I’ve had reason to mention the Austrian artist in Shanghai Friedrich “FH” Schiff many times, most recently in this post about his illustrations for a photography book with Ellen Thorbecke – Peking Studies (1934 – click here to read). Schiff was born in Vienna in 1908. He attended the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt and then the Akademie der bildenden Künste from 1924. In 1930, he travelled to Shanghai to visit his cousin Francis Gmehling, who ran an art and antiques shop there. He decided to stay and established himself as an artist and press illustrator, also opening a School of Applied Art. He worked with many restaurants and nightclubs including the Maskee, Roxy, The Pelican, Maxim, La Cumparsita, Bolero, Blue Peter Bar, (Jack Reilly’s) DD’s and Silk Hat. His cartoons, portraits and other work were published and mentioned in the local press, such as The North China Daily News, The Shanghai Herald, The China Journal, Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and the Shanghai Daily Tribune.
The great collector of old China ephemera Roy Delbyck saw my post and sent me the documents below related to the Gresham Apartments. Roy had acquired a batch of documents relating to the property seemingly owned by a Japanese lawyer named K Sugunama. He had inquired about the 29 residential units and four shops in the Gresham Apartments (where he lived at #12a) at 1228 Avenue Joffre (HuaiHai Lu) and some retail premises on Rue Gaston Kahn (Jiashan Lu), both in the French Concession. The documents were overseen at the offices of the well-known Frenchtown lawyer Paul Premet on Avenue Edward VII (Yan’an Lu) – Premet was known as a regular in the Shanghai courts and most famously had been engaged by accused Soviet spies in the 1920s and represented several Shanghai beauty queens (click here)
Among the list of renters in the Gresham Apartments in late 1941, is FH Schiff. There he is at #27…. Earlier records have one Otto Blume living at #27 so we can conclude that Schiff moved in sometime after January 1941.
London: Two upcoming opportunities to see Anna May Wong in Piccadilly, directed in London by EA Dupont, 1929.
Anna May Wong is perfectly cast as Shosho, a dishwasher so charismatic her elevation to the stage transforms the fortunes of a struggling nightclub. Between bustling kitchens, smoke-filled dive bars and art-deco dining halls, Shosho ascends, drawing envy and desire in equal measure. Wong outshines even the excess and sparkle of Alfred Junge’s opulent art direction in this tragic tale of mystery and murder
The BFI on the Southbank is doing 2 screenings of Piccadilly:
Tuesday 01 September 2026: 20:40
Saturday 12 September 2026: 12:10
Tickets and details here
David Wiley (who was the grandson of a Venetian master woodcarver) is best known as the BBC’s veteran Vatican correspondent, died last week at 93. I hadn’t known that prior to his long stint in Rome he had reported from Algeria, Vietnam and China. Wiley reported from Saigon on the early stages of the Vietnam War. In 1965 he based himself in Beijing at a crucial moment on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution, one of the first BBC correspondents back in China since 1949.
You can hear some of Wiley’s amazing reporting from Saigon and Beijing in this BBC radio tribute to Wiley…..
Two untitled studies of Chinese subjects by British artist Hilda May Gordon (1874-1972). Painted during her visit to China on a multi-stop six year tour of Asia between 1922-1928….
Gordon grew up on the Isle of Wight to Scottish parents who had previously lived in South Africa. She studied in part under the highly influential Frank Brangwyn. In 1922 she embarked on an independent round-the-world trip which eventually took six years to complete and involved visiting 22 different countries, including a number of the Balkan countries, Greece, India, China, Korea and Japan
Happy Publication Day to Jerome Sauvage, whose fascinating memoir of working for the UN in the DPRK, Witness to North Korea, reveals the country at a crucial time for the regime and the UN organisation is now available everywhere. It’s the latest book in my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series of shorter books on contemporary Asian issues…. And here’s the author in conversation about his experiences and the book with Alannah Hill of the essential NK News….