Suzhou RAS Events Coming Up – Starting 14/10/12
Posted: October 14th, 2012 | No Comments »Julia Boyd – A Dance with the Dragon
Sunday, October 14, 2012
2pm
Julia Boyd comes to the Bookworm in Suzhou to regale attendees at the next session of the Royal Asiatic Society-Suzhou with tales of Peking’s foreign community between the world wars. Julia is author of A Dance with the Dragon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). With its diplomats and dropouts, philosophers, fossil-hunters, writers, explorers, missionaries and refugees, Peking’s foreign community was as exotic as the city itself. Peking was the last great capital to remain untouched by the modern world. Th capital both entranced and horrified its foreign residents, whose response was to create their own extraordinary world of parties, picnics and club gossip. Ignoring the poverty outside their gates, they danced, played and squabbled among themselves, oblivious to the great political events unfolding around them that were to shape modern China.
Julia Boyd is the author of Hannah Riddell, An Englishwoman in Japan  and The Excellent Doctor Blackwell, a life of the first woman physician. A former governor of the English-Speaking Union, Julia is married to John Boyd who was posted twice to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and is a former British Ambassador to Japan.Â
At the Suzhou Bookworm: tell your taxi driver the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
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Or, take the subway to the Lindun Lu stop in downtown Suzhou and take a 10 minute ride by pedicab or five-minute taxi ride to the Bookworm. It’s a fifteen minute walk due south from the Lindun Lu subway station: Gongyuan Lu (across from the old Sofitel Hotel – now Marco Polo), cross Shi Zi Jie to Wu Que Qiao. The Bookworm will be on your left at the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
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30 rmb for students; 50 rmb for members; 90 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer. For more information or membership applications, contact Bill Dodson at  bdodson88@gmail.com.
Lao She in London
Sunday, November 18, 2012
2pm
In November Anne Witchard comes to Suzhou to discuss one of China’s greatest modern writers, Lao She. Anne is author of Lao She in London. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. However, the four years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924-1929 have largely been overlooked. Anne Witchard, a specialist in the modernist milieu of London between the wars, reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce.Â
Anne Witchard is Lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate Publishing, 2009), co-editor with Lawrence Phillips of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum, 2010) and editor of  Chinoiserie and Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
At the Suzhou Bookworm: tell your taxi driver the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
Â
Or, take the subway to the Lindun Lu stop in downtown Suzhou and take a 10 minute ride by pedicab or five-minute taxi ride to the Bookworm. It’s a fifteen minute walk due south from the Lindun Lu subway station: Gongyuan Lu (across from the old Sofitel Hotel – now Marco Polo), cross Shi Zi Jie to Wu Que Qiao. The Bookworm will be on your left at the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
Â
30 rmb for students; 50 rmb for members; 90 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer. For more information or membership applications, contact Bill Dodson at  bdodson88@gmail.com.
The Royal Asiatic Society-Suzhou notes with great regret the loss of a tremendous supporter and active member of the chapter, Michelle Blumenthal. Michelle was instrumental in providing the Suzhou RAS chapter with a pipeline of great speakers. She took ill mid-summer with pneumonia-like symptoms, and passed away on August 18, 2012. Â She is missed.
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