The Royal Asiatic Society China Journal 2025 in Hard Copy….

Lovely to see a hard copy of the RAS China Journal Vol.85, No.1. with articles on Shanghai urban patchwork quily by John Villar, fake Ming ceramics by Alan Babbington-Smith, the female fighter pilots of China in WW2 by Zou Dehuai, the life of dealer Susan Chen Hardy by Edith Terry, Ernest Ludwig in Late Qing China by Lukas Gajdos and an obituary of Shanghailander historian, guide and author Tess Johnston (1931-2025) from Julie Chun.

And my article junk traffic statistics through Shanghai between 1902 and 1941 and what they tell us about the maritime life of Shanghai, the Huangpu and the lower Yangtze. Metrics are an important part of history. Particularly in the case of a city as economically and politically turbulent in the twentieth century as Shanghai: population statistics-births, deaths, marriages, occupations, crimes and a whole lot of other data are instructive. For a riverine city, river traffic statistics are also a key indicator of economic vicissitudes, political crises and war, both within Shanghai and far beyond the estuary that linked the city to the East China Sea and the world.