RAS Book Club – The New Penguin Classic Edition of Vare’s Fantastic Maker of Heavenly Trousers
Posted: March 18th, 2012 | No Comments »RAS BOOK CLUB – The Maker of Heavenly Trousers – Daniel Vare
Monday 19th March 2012 at 6.30pm
The PuLi Hotel and Spa
1 ChangDe Road, JingAn District, Shanghai
With Michael Tsang (Penguin Editor)
The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss Daniele Varè The Maker of Heavenly Trousers. Michael Tsang the editor in charge of this new publication in the Penguin Modern Classic will join us for the discussion with the members. Michael will share with us his intimate experience of the book in editing this new edition.
Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for part exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Membership applications and renewals will be available at these events.
RSVP: bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
N.B RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT
MORE ABOUT THE MAKER OF HEAVENLY TROUSERS
‘A delightful story, in which the author’s fancy imparts new and whimsical aspects to familiar things and scenes’
Times Literary Supplement
A Peking love story first published in 1935, The Maker of Heavenly Trousers tells the story of an unnamed foreign bachelor who lives in a courtyard dwelling alone but for the Five Virtues, the nickname for a family of mischievous Chinese servants who run his household as they please. It is they who take pity on their neighbor, Kuniang (literally, “young girlâ€), whose father is rarely in Peking, inviting her to come and join them in their master’s home.
Independent and free-spirited, Kuniang is swept into a life of excitement, fleeting friendships and family. She encounters eccentrics, millionaires and a shadowy former mistress of Rasputin, gains many admirers and slowly she captures the heart of her guardian as well. But when Kuniang is unwittingly pulled into a strange and dark Eastern hypnosis a terrifying vision threatens their prospects and their charmed and charming world very nearly comes crashing down around them.
Set against the mysterious and turbulent backdrop of early twentieth century Peking, with its disparate inhabitants, The Maker of Heavenly Trousers brings China to life. It has been reprinted numerous times following its initial publication in 1935 and is an absolute favorite amongst Sinophiles the world over. With this new edition, The Maker of Heavenly Trousers is taking its rightful place in the Penguin Modern Classics series as the first of many to be published by Penguin China.
Daniele Varè was born in 1880, the son of an Italian nationalist exiled with Mazzini by the Austrian regime. Although he spent several years in England and Scotland, he returned to Italy with his mother at the age of eleven and eventually entered the diplomatic service. He served in Vienna, Geneva, Copenhagen and Luxembourg. However, his chief posting was in Peking where he first arrived in 1912. During his time there he observed the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, civil war and the effects of both the Russian Revolution and the First World War as exiles fled into China from abroad. Many of these experiences became the subject matter of his novels.
The Maker of Heavenly Trousers was first published in 1935. It was followed soon after by its two sequels The Gate of Happy Sparrows and The Temple of Costly Experience, and by the author’s autobiography, The Laughing Diplomat, in 1938. Daniele Varè died in 1956.
Notes for Editors
About the Penguin Modern Classics
Penguin Modern Classics began in 1961, when an unconventional Penguin editor – Tony Godwin – decided that authors of his time were producing books that deserved classic status just as much as the works of Dickens or Homer. Many of the early titles published in the list (including Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby) are still considered landmark classics.

Penguin Modern Classics have caused scandal and political change, inspired great films, and broken down barriers, whether social, sexual, or in the case of Ulysses, the boundaries of language itself. They remain the very best, most provocative, exciting, groundbreaking, inspiring, revolutionary works of the last 100 years – an organic, ever-growing and ever-evolving list of books that we believe will continue to be read by generation after generation.
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