All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
As I scanned it in I thought I’d post it for you lot. Carl Crow’s map of Tientsin and the foreign concesssions that was included in his Handbook for China, the original Rough Guide/Lonely Planet that went through numerous reprints between 1913 and 1949 and is still an instructive read – for instance ‘Wuxi – nothing of interest’, and who could disagree really!
Shanghai-based photojournalist Dvir Bar-Gal shares his series of photographs taken over the last decade in this constantly changing city at an exceptional time in its history. “I found myself increasingly fascinated by the endless ironies and cynicism Shanghai offered, which reveal a multi-layered understanding and interpretation of Shanghai and became, for me, the unique soul of the city.”
M on the Bund
Sunday, January 23, 4pm
So in the last couple of week a couple of people emailed me to say I’d made a mistake in my Old Shanghai A-Z – it’s not “Hai-Alai” they say but “Jai-Alai”. And it’s true, it usually is spelt Jai-Alai, but not in old Shanghai. Herewith, in support of my case, two pieces of evidence are submitted – m’lud first, a paragraph from the wonderful 1930s guide to the city – Shanghai: High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights and then the old logo of the Hai-Alai Auditorium over in Frenchtown by the Canidrome.
“Hai Alai, which takes place continuously out in a splendid new auditorium in Frenchtown is interesting, has many followers and is as good a way to lose your shirt as we know of. You can lay a bet here just as easily as you could get converted at the Methodist Mission. Hai Alai is an old Basque game, and tho town is filled with Basquards who have been imported to lend the local game an authentic touch.”
…nough said
The Penguin Classics lunches series is running on into the new year. First up this Friday at M on the Bund:
Brook Larmer, author of Operation Yao Ming, talks about his favourite Penguin classic: 1984 by George Orwell. Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.
About the Author: Brook Larmer was the Newsweek bureau chief in Buenos Aires, Miami, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. As a freelance journalist, he has written for numerous publications including National Geographic and New York Times Magazine, he is now based in Beijing. Operation Yao Ming is the riveting story behind NBA giant Yao Ming, the Chinese sports machine that created him and the East-West struggle over China’s most famous son.
Friday, January 21, 12pm
RMB 188, includes a three-course lunch, coffee and tea
人民å¸188å…ƒ/ä½, 包å«3é“èœåˆé¤åŠå’–啡或茶
Reservations Essential/需æå‰é¢„定: 021 6350 9988
reservations@m-onthebund.com
I’ve mentioned Pete Spurrier’s excellent Heritage Hiker’s Guide to Hong Kong previously. Since it was published it’s consistently been a top 10 selling English language book in Hong Kong. Now, people do like going walking and hiking in Hong Kong and walking books do well, but I like to think that support for Pete’s book is also linked to changing attitudes in the former Colony about heritage and preservation. These changing attitudes are hopefully on both sides of the tracks – the government not simply handing over heritage to be, invariably, bulldozed by property developers and ordinary people getting involved more and more (especially yoiung people as we saw with the campaign (ultimately unsuccessful) to save the Central ferry pier clock tower.
Anyway, I was in Hong Kong last week and took the opportunity to meet up with Pete, take a walk along some of the conservation and heritage sites around Hollywood Road and the mid-levels area and have a chat about what’s going on in the heritage and preservation movement in the SAR. Click PF & Pete Spurrier – HK Heritage pod – 11 Jan 2011 to listen (it’s only about ten minutes long)
(PS: this podcast was done for Ethical Corporation magazine, a publication I write a column for)
Interesting and out now with some good images – Cheng Po Hung’s Early Prostitution in Hong Kong – And I don’t mean fat ex-pats heading to Wanchai and those dreadful girlie bars straight after lunch….
An interesting new study published by the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery. I am not sure if this book deals with both Chinese and western prostitutes or just Chinese but should be a good addition to the literature anyway. As ever blurb below:
Karen Abbott’s Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul was a terrific read a few years ago. The story of the bordellos, madams, working girls and punters of Chicago. Now she has a new book out on the life and times of Gypsy Rose Lee, American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare. Abbott writes with great gusto and is always fun as well as informative. She manages not to sink into a boring TOTAL political correctness that could stifle this sort of subject in the hands of an academic without writing a daft book – i.e. she strikes a great balance. I have my own research reasons for finding Abbott’s work interesting…but more on that at a later date. As ever blurb below:
With the critically acclaimed Sin in the Second City, bestselling author Karen Abbott “pioneered sizzle history†(USA Today). Now she returns with the gripping and expansive story of America’s coming-of-age—told through the extraordinary life of Gypsy Rose Lee and the world she survived and conquered.
America in the Roaring Twenties. Vaudeville was king. Talking pictures were only a distant flicker. Speakeasies beckoned beyond dimly lit doorways; money flowed fast and free. But then, almost overnight, the Great Depression leveled everything. When the dust settled, Americans were primed for a star who could distract them from grim reality and excite them in new, unexpected ways. Enter Gypsy Rose Lee, a strutting, bawdy, erudite stripper who possessed a preternatural gift for delivering exactly what America needed.
With her superb narrative skills and eye for compelling detail, Karen Abbott brings to vivid life an era of ambition, glamour, struggle, and survival. Using exclusive interviews and never-before-published material, she vividly delves into Gypsy’s world, including her intensely dramatic triangle relationship with her sister, actress June Havoc, and their formidable mother, Rose, a petite but ferocious woman who seduced men and women alike and literally killed to get her daughters on the stage.
American Rose chronicles their story, as well as the story of the four scrappy and savvy showbiz brothers from New York City who would pave the way for Gypsy Rose Lee’s brand of burlesque. Modeling their shows after the glitzy, daring reviews staged in the theaters of Paris, the Minsky brothers relied on grit, determination, and a few tricks that fell just outside the law—and they would shape, and ultimately transform, the landscape of American entertainment.
With a supporting cast of such Jazz- and Depression-era heavyweights as Lucky Luciano, Harry Houdini, FDR, and Fanny Brice, Karen Abbott weaves a rich narrative of a woman who defied all odds to become a legend—and whose sensational tale of tragedy and triumph embodies the American Dream.
I have the recent Best of the Booker promotion to thank for being introduced to JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. This tale of an Indian town and its foreign residents during the Indian Mutiny (or the Indian Rebellion depending on how recently you were taught history) was inspired by events at Cawnpore and Lucknow. It’s extremely witty (and the only book I’ve read by the apparently consistently witty Farrell) and won the Booker in 1973. That’s a bit before my time and the book rather sunk from the reading list in the intervening decades (Farrell apparently didn’t endear himself by slagging of the Booker firm when he accepted the award). I liked his style so much I’m looking out Farrell’s The Singapore Grip about the colony in the days before the Japanese invasion. As usual blurb below as well as, first, the current cover and after that the original one:
“The first sign of trouble at Krishnapur came with a mysterious distribution of chapatis, made of coarse flour and about the size and thickness of a biscuit; towards the end of February 1857, they swept the countryside like an epidemic.”
Students of history will recognise 1857 as the year of the Sepoy rebellion in India–an uprising of native soldiers against the British, brought on by Hindu and Muslim recruits’ belief that the rifle cartridges with which they were provided had been greased with pig or cow fat. This seminal event in Anglo-Indian relations provides the backdrop for J.G. Farrell’s Booker Prize- winning exploration of race, culture and class, The Siege of Krishnapur. Like the mysteriously appearing chapatis, life in British India seems, on the surface, innocuous enough. Farrell introduces us gradually to a large cast of characters as he paints a vivid portrait of the Victorians’ daily routines that are accompanied by heat, boredom, class-consciousness and the pursuit of genteel pastimes intended for cooler climates. Even the siege begins slowly, with disquieting news of massacres in cities far away. When Krishnapur itself is finally attacked, the Europeans withdraw inside the grounds of the Residency where very soon conditions begin to deteriorate: food and water run out, disease is rampant, people begin to go a little mad. Soon the very proper British are reduced to eating insects and consorting across class lines. Farrell’s descriptions of life inside the Residency are simultaneously horrifying and blackly humorous. The siege, for example, is conducted under the avid eyes of the local populace, who clearly anticipate an enjoyable massacre and thus arrive every morning laden with picnic lunches (plainly visible to the starving Europeans). By turns witty and compassionate, The Siege of Krishnapur comprises the best of all fictional worlds: unforgettable characters, an epic adventure and at its heart a cultural clash for the ages.
