Heads up for Friday night, March 6 – Nightcaps and Narratives at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2026 – I’ll be with an amazing groups of writers – Hernan Diaz, Emma Pei Yin, the poet Anthony Tao, Xu Xi for an evening of a few drinks, a lot of conversation and some readings all in the amazing surroundings of the China Club…. and all celebrating the festival’s 25th anniversary….tickets here…
I’m looking to commission some new titles for my Asian Arguments series for Bloomsbury Publishing. Contemporary issues, concisely written, approx 65k words. Perspectives from journalists, NGO folk, think tankers, academics aiming for a wider trade market, all welcome…
Subjects that particularly interest me right now:
Organised crime, cyber fraud, scam economies
China-Afghanistan relations
Xinjiang and Central Asia society/relationships
Nomadic communities
Mongolia and the commodities curse
China-Russian Far East developments
The state and prospects for the Japanese far right
Any other good ideas….
(At the moment i’m good for anything related to Myanmar, Hong Kong, DPRK)
Next title in the series, Jerome Sauvage’s Witness to North Korea is out this August….
The whole series is here – https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/asian-arguments/
Anyone with ideas and the right background to write the book drop me an email (paul@chinarhyming.com)
A Hong Kong University Zoom – Eileen Chang spent less than three years living in Hong Kong, but her student days at the University of Hong Kong proved to be a formative experience that would help
I’m not one to usually post stamps, but these interested me and are, I think quite rare – Shanghai Municipality ‘Postage Due’ stamps (i.e., the recipient had to pay some charge) from the late nineteenth century between 1893 and 1894.
Some great events coming up from the Royal Asiatic Society China, Beijing – including a March 15 charabanc trip and hole-in-the-wall lunch with me to Bussiere Garden, the newly restored Western Hills retreat of Doctor Jean-Augustin Bussière of the French Legation, Peking Union Medical College and personal physician to Yuan Shi-kai….it was also a weekend retreat and salon for Peking’s most interesting French people such as the poet Saint-John Perse and the Sinologist André d’Hormon – places are limited I’m afraid (what with it being a bus and that…) communications@rasbj.org
BTW: if you’re interested you can now listen to my BBC Radio 3 “Between the Ears” documentary “Return to the City of Darkness: Kowloon Walled City” on BBC.com and on the BBCSounds app (here)…
Return to Kowloon-Walled City, aka City of Darkness, so called because the sunlight rarely penetrated its dense layers of industry and life. A teeming Hong Kong megastructure constructed haphazardly, buildings leaning into each other, passageways punched through corridors no wider than the spread of one’s arms. People cheek by jowl in a ramshackle, higgledy-piggledy world of furious, sweated energy. At one point, the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on the planet.
Writer Paul French talks to former residents who grew up there, like Louisa Wong and Albert Ng, and those who meticulously chronicled its last months, like artist Fiona Hawthorne, then architectural student Suenn Ho and the photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, who created the definitive visual record of its existence with their book Kowloon-City of Darkness.
The Walled City was frequently a place seemingly beyond the law. Autonomous, ungoverned if not untouched by Colonial authority and a refuge for the desperate, the dodgy and the poor. A rookery, festooned with cables, pipes and dripping water, teeming with sounds and the fetid ‘dragon’s breath’ of furious energy and existence. Now, it has become a semi-mythic memory of old Hong Kong; celebrated on film, in manga and prose ,but once it was an astonishing, living entity.
With the voices of: Greg Girard, Fiona Hawthorne Suenn Ho, Pastor Albert Ng, Guy Shirra, Louisa Wong and Chan Woonie.
Readers: John Chan, Jon Chew, Betty Lo, David Tse, Kevin Ung, Charlie Wong
Sound Engineer-Duncan Thornley Producer-Mark Burman A Storyscape Production for Radio 3.
Margot Fonteyn, official portrait, circa 1960’s, signed by Fonteyn in 1975 with a dedication to her friend Janna Seagrim, with who she had attended ballet class in Shanghai as young girl. (for more on Fonteyn and her early ballet classes see my South China Morning Post long read on Shanghai ballet here)
