Beijing RAS – The Badlands – a book launch with Paul French – Beijing Bookworm 13/4/13

An event I’m doing for the newly found (and congratulations and welcome) Beijing Royal Asiatic Society at the Beijing Bookworm on Saturday night, should you happen to be in the capital….

Saturday, April 13 7:30pm
The Badlands – a book launch with Paul French and RAS Beijing

40/50rmb

The Badlands, a warren of narrow hutongs in the eastern district of pre-communist Peking, had its heyday in the 1930s. Home to the city’s drifters, misfits and the odd bohemian, it was a place of opium dens, divebars, brothels, flophouses and cabarets, and was infamous for its ability to satisfy every human desire from the exotically entertaining to the criminally depraved. Paul French’s latest The Badlands – is a series of vignettes of eight non-Chinese residents of the precinct – White Russians, Americans and Europeans. Join us as French brings the Badlands vividly back to life, providing a short but potent account of a place and a way of life until now largely forgotten, but here rendered unforgettable.