Strolled past the partially restored Union Church at the weekend – built in 1885 and designed by William Dowdall. It was wrecked by fire but the exterior has been restored – the interior still needs work and there’s no stained glass while, unsurprisingly, at the weekend it was all bolted up so forget the basic role of the place as, eerrr, a site of worship! No vicars around, just jackbooted, microphoned up Rockbund goons hassling poor migrant workers who stopped for a little sit down and made the place look untidy.
Still the church has become a major location for Shanghai couples to come and have their wedding photos done…on the outside only obviously…
Nice to see church weddings are still popular!!
Rockbund goons in the foreground…wedding couples in the background
The Party and its censors are getting rather too worked up over a few time travel entertainment dramas on TV. Of course even simple fun shows like these are political in China – getting history ‘wrong’ is a major crime of Orwellian proportions and opens a major can of worms. Getting history ‘wrong’ right in the here and now is complicated enough – what if the ‘line’ on history changes and then the show is repeated and reveals that the line has changed and….you see it’s Orwell redux in China once again so brilliantly. Oh if only old Eric Blair could have lived to see this!! And what if the person going back to the past is from the future like some Chinese version of Doctor Who – what’s the future like and the past he’s going to and….oh my brain aches (and the Doctor isn’t even human! – are Time Lords communist or just misguided but generally well intentioned alien patriots?? More censorship needed – there could be Trotskyists on Galifrey for God’s sake! Or maybe even alien Dalai Lamas!! As for China’s Communist Party – well, obviously they’re Daleks. But now this is another post altogether!! Back to the point….EXTERMINATE). And that’s just entertainment on TV…what about ‘real’ history!!!
This year I’ve moved around China a bit for work – still based in Shanghai and up in Beijing for a few days most months. Trips around my bit of the world, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Wuxi as well as (most importantly for this story) Nanjing. A quick slide through Guangzhou and Shenzhen en route to Hong Kong and a couple of longish trips to Taipei. In Taiwan the Xinhai centenary is well underway and everywhere on the street and in media (see previous posts here, here and here). Yet, on the mainland I’m yet to see any events or references to the downfall of the Qing, the creation of the Republic and the subsequent that led to 1949. So, as the young folk say, what gives?
Seemingly no special place for the harmony disrupting doctor this year
Some people tell me not to be paranoid – wait until the autumn, October, when the Double Ten comes along. They’re just saving themselves. Perhaps, but so far I see no indication that the PRC is planning to even mention the anniversary. Of course current historical tautology in China goes something along the lines of revolution to establish republic led by ‘well meaning patriots’ (Dr Sun etc), who got led astray by slightly less well meaning patriots (Chiang etc) but everything eventually righted itself thanks to the CPC in 1949. Not my version of history but what gets punted out of The Ministry of Truth in Beijing these days (which admittedly is an improvement on a decade ago).
My own theory at the moment is that China’s historians and politicians (communists) cannot agree on how to interpret or to present the Xinhai to the masses. A similar impasse seems to have led to the botched historical job that is the new National Museum. The problem, I suspect, is that dealing with the issue of 1911 as a progressive and necessary change means accepting the, now highly problematic, contention that upheaval, or a little suspension of harmony while things get resolved, is essential. Nobody seems to be able to deal with that whether it be in regards to Libya or Xinhai. So, best to just ignore it and find some Party anniversaries as an excuse to get out the minority dancers and the fireworks.
Flags out in 1911 in Shanghai…but not in 2011
As the year rolls on and October approaches we shall see….we are of course getting some Catherine Wheels and marches linked to the 90th anniversary of the CPC (perhaps, like my old grandfather, having a big bash for their 90th because there’s only a slim chance of making it to 100?? Let’s hope so!)
By the way would I be totally paranoid to think that actually Beijing and the Party now finds it easier to deal with the cultural Chernobyl that is Disney than Sun Yat-sen? While seemingly being completely unable to deal intellectually or ideologically with Xinhai, Shanghai seems to have rolled over and offered itself up completely willingly to a dose of American soft power via the toxic rat – have we reached the point where American culture appears less threatening to the Party than modern Chinese history (what would that old bastard Joe McCarthy have made of that) and that, in fact, the former is to be welcomed while the latter is to be run away from?
Personally of course I’ll take Xinhai, or just about anything, including obviously the trash that is Disney.
The new literary journal from the Chengdu Bookworm, Mala, has issued its second number and it’s chunkier and slicker than the launch issue so things must be going well out west in the literary sense. Gotta support initiatives like this really.
MaLa – the Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal is a collection of short fiction, literary non-fiction, poetry and work in translation, supported by art works and photography. The MaLa Faultlines issue looks at geological fractures and beyond, to intersections of gender, class, age and culture.
Featured in the Faultlines Issue:
Original works by award-winning American writer, comedian and radio contributor David Sedaris, Leave Me Alone Chengdu author Murong Xuecan, the Inspector Chen series author Qiu Xiaolong, Hong-Kong based humorist Nury Vittachi.
Interviews with Bi Feiyu, Jonathan Watts, Peter Hessler
Chengdu photographer Zhou An’s images of Shuijingfang
Photojournalist Lei Yu’s documentation of the Wenchuan Earthquake
New Fiction from China and Beyond
Reportage and Memoir from Wenchuan
Poetry in Translation by Xi Yongjun, Han Dong and Ma Yan
Excerpts from Ian Buruma, Fergal Keane, Graham Earnshaw, Roy Kesey and Michael Kohn
Mala’s web site is here – so you can send them submissions or order copies
Came across this ad for the old China Press newspaper the other day – the China Press was founded by Americans and employed Carl Crow when he arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and then a whole host of great American, Chinese and assorted other nationals over the years. Till the end of its days it remained Shanghai major American-run newspaper. Kiukiang Road, where the China Press had its offices, is now Jiujiang Road.
The mighty Old Lady of the Bund, the North-China Daily News felt proud in 1924 to have been around since 1850. Not so long in their new Bund offices back then. Nice to see they maintained correspondents in every major town -Â and they did, not just Peking and Shanghai but the NCDC had folk in Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Tientsin, Wuhan, Chungking and other cities and towns right through to the Second World War.
This weekend – some old adverts from some former bastions of the old pre-1949 China Coast press – a time when independent journalism, journals, magazines and newspapers in a wide variety of languages from Ukrainian to Hebrew, Old Testament English (honest…some bored ex-pats actually launched a journal in old testament English in Chungking to amuse themselves – sadly I don’t believe any copies survive) to Korean flourished in Shanghai, Tientsin and other treaty ports. Now all sadly gone, expect the lone hold out of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Worth remembering.
The China Illustrated Review was an off shoot of the daily Peking and Tientsin Times newspaper which was actually printed and based in Tientsin. It was a sort of version of ‘The Week’ rounding up what was going on, the North-China Daily News did a similar thing out of Shanghai with the North China Herald once a week as a round up publication.
BTW: Victoria Road in Tientsin’s former British Concession is now Jiefang North Road in Tianjin
It’s that time again for the M Literary Residences in Shanghai and India…
Calling all writers of fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, drama!
M Literary Residency Invites Applications
The M Literary Residency Program has been established to disseminate
a broader knowledge of contemporary life and writing in India and China today
and to foster deeper intellectual, cultural and artistic links across individuals
and communities. Applicants are invited to apply for three month
residencies in India or China.
Applications for the 2012-13 Residency are now being accepted.
The application deadline is Friday, 1 July 2011, and decisions
will be announced 31 October, 2011.
To download the Programme Guidelines, click here.
To download the Application Form, click here.
2011 Residency recipients are Rachel DeWoskin (China)
and Francesca Marciano (India).
A slightly tenuous link in Singapore for this statue and memorial – but still Conrad of course deserves to be remembered. The problem is that Conrad memorials could go in a lot of places – Polish born, English naturalised, served with both the French and British merchant navies. And then the books – Heart of Darkness could mean a memorial in Africa, The Secret Agent could justify one in Greenwich and of course he did write a few books that took place aboard ships in the old Malay Federated States. So Singapore has a small claim, and not a lot of other people to erect monuments to I suppose now that all the raffles ones have been done. So here’s the Conrad memorial that sits outside the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. Conrad did apparently spend a few months in Singapore and plenty of kids (me included way back when) got fascinated by South East Asia reading Conrad novels like Lord Jim and Typhoon.
So here’s the memorial with the text on it reproduced below for the interested:
Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski, a Pole by birth, British Master Mariner and a great English writer who made Singapore and the whole of Southeast Asia better known to the world.
Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski, born on the 3rd of December 1857 in Berdichiv (today’s Ukraine, then under Russian rule) in a Polish family, is one of the masters of modern English prose. Although English was his third language, after Polish and French, he wrote in it such classic works as “Heart of Darkness” (1899), “Lord Jim” (1900) and “Nostromo (1904).
The son of a Polish writer and patriotic leader, Conrad experienced political repression while in exile with his parents in Russia. Orphaned at twelve, he left Poland for France when he was seventeen. For four years he served in French merchant vessels. In 1878, he signed up with a British shop and started to learn English. He became a British subject in 1886. As a seaman, later Master Mariner, he sailed several times to Southeast Asia and Australia. Conrad made eight voyages to Singapore between March 1883 and March 1888. Singapore was his home-port for five months in 1887-88 while he served as first mate in the Vidar, a steamboat that plied the trading routes of West Borneo and Celebes (now Sulawesi).
Conrad’s impressions of Singapore appear in several of his stories, notably “The End of the Tether” (1902). At that time, all incoming vessels would have to report at the General Post Office (presently the Fullerton Hotel) to collect and deliver mails. When Conrad’s ships docked in Singapore, he would have used the postal services of the Master Attendant’s Marine Office at the General Post Office.
In 1896, Conrad settled permanently in England. He died in Canterbury on the 3rd of August 1924.
This plaque was officially unveiled by H.E. Aleksander Kwasniewski, President of the Republic of Poland, on 24th February 2004.
