Bookazine is back at Repulse Bay…. So let’s celebrate by remembering the literary history of the old Repulse Bay Hotel, once the stunning resort centrepiece of Hong Kong Island’s “Southern Riviera”.
Eileen Chang’s aquamarine seas of Repulse Bay were the setting for romantic trysts while Han Suyin relished Sunday afternoon swimming parties with her secret lover. Jane Gardam recreated a world of moonlit dinners while Timothy Mo harked back to the hotel’s famous tea-dances. Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway celebrated cocktail hour while Emily Hahn drank gimlets and smoked cigars as the world fell apart around them.
For half a century, from its grand opening in 1920 to its closure in 1982, the Repulse Bay Hotel was a tranquil haven of passionate honeymoons and illicit affairs, curry tiffins and Sundowner drinks on the veranda. Literary guests included Noël Coward, Lin Yutang and George Bernard Shaw. In the late 1930s the hotel became a sanctuary for literary intellectuals fleeing war-torn Shanghai. Finally Repulse Bay became the site of travel writer Jan Morris’s classic evocation of Hong Kong as the symbol of Britain’s imperial sunset.
Join writer and historian Paul French (Midnight in Peking, City of Devils, Her Lotus Year) in conversation with RTHK3’s Annemarie Evans at Bookazine Repulse Bay for a glass or two of wine and some literary readings, anecdotes and memories of the old Repulse Bay Hotel.
October 18, 5pm – the event is free and you also get free access to the Repulse Bay’s current Eileen Chang exhibition (HK$40 normally) but please sign up here – for numbers (and to ensure there’s enough wine!!)…
RTHK3’s The Brew is running an adaptation of my story about The Murderous Marchesa of Peking all this week with 4 episodes at 12:40pm daily.
BTW – i’ll be live with host Phil Whelan on Thursday to talk about the deadly scandal in the 1920s that stained Italy’s reputation in the ‘Far East’. A diplomatic love triangle ignited an international incident that embarrassed not just the Italian nobility, but the country as a whole.
Outisde HK you can listen to this (audio only) on Facebook live – https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1AsdAz1DqF/
RTHK3’s The Brew is running an adaptation of my story about The Murderous Marchesa of Peking all this week with 4 episodes at 12:40pm daily.
BTW – i’ll be live with host Phil Whelan on Thursday to talk about the deadly scandal in the 1920s that stained Italy’s reputation in the ‘Far East’. A diplomatic love triangle ignited an international incident that embarrassed not just the Italian nobility, but the country as a whole.
Outisde HK you can listen to this (audio only) on Facebook live – https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1AsdAz1DqF/
I’ve posted JL George furniture before (use the blog search engine if interested). The firm interests me because they were enormously popular with both Chinese and foreign homeowners and because they are a good example of a big Shanghai company that moved to Hong Kong in the late 1940s. Here a camphor wood lined & decorated hardwood chest with interior tray made in Shanghai before 1949 at their premises on Avenue Road (Beijing Xi Lu)…
It’s feeling wintry – if you want a weekend listen and missed it when it came out my BBC drama-doc The Defectors is still in Sounds, iPlayer and Listen Again…inspired by the defection of North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the UK, interwoven with accounts of real people who made the journey from North Korea to the UK.
Just a note to say all my books with Blacksmith Books – The Destination…. series and the China Revisited series are now available in Australia through the online bookseller Woodslane.
A new collection of Eileen Chang/Zhang Ailing stories is always to be welcomed. The latest from the NYRB Classics imprint – Time Tunnel.It’s out October 21, 2025, and features translations by Karen Kingsbury and Jie Zhang. No question it’s being added to my Chang shelf….
But reading the blurb that accompanies it I have a question – to which I don’t claim to have a definitive answer. The full blurb is as below – but I wonder about the phrase “from her glamorous debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai…”? I wonder if publishing a wartime German writer married to a Nazi Party official and writing for NSDAP-funded journals, or a French writer married to a Vichy official and writing for collaborationist magazines we’d phrase the blurb quite like that?
Chang was after all married to Hu Lancheng (from 1943), a ranking propaganda official in Wang Jing-wei’s Japanese puppet collaborationist regime in Shanghai. Her writing did become popular during this time, and she published on Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue, arguably two of her best (and certainly best-loved) works. But she also wrote for various journals, notably her film reviews and journalism in XXth Century, published in Shanghai but financed by the German Foreign Office.
Hu Lancheng, Deputy Propaganda Minister, Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China
While she certainly had her “debut” in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the war and, through her husband was connected to the upper regimes of the occupiers and the puppet collaborator regime (as well as time spent with Japanese propaganda stars in China such as the actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi), I wonder how many would consider this time “glamorous” or glamour to be an epithet best applied to a very dark time in Shanghai and China’s modern history?
Chang and Yamaguchi in |Shanghai, 1945
The Full NYRB Classics blurb:
Time Tunnel offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang, from her glamorous debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai through her flight, following the Revolution, to Hong Kong and America, to her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles.
“Genesis,” left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” addresses the perils and uncertainties—the vertigo—of exile, while in the late masterpiece “Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now,” Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years.
Essays like “Return to the Frontier” and “New England Is China,” both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.
I was prepping in the London Library today for an event at the old Repulse Bay Hotel later this month on literary reminiscences and writing about the old place. One person I definitely want to include is Martha Gellhorn who visited the Repulse Bay Hotel with her then husband Ernest Hemingway in March 1941 en route to Chongqing. It was a disappointing trip for her – Hemingway was predictably being a bit of a dick, not taking his reporting gig seriously and lazy about heading into mainland China. Eventually Gellhorn left him to his childish antics and went alone. He caught up later a little shamefacedly. It didn’t help that they also hit the colony in the midst of a typhoid epidemic. They retreated from the typhoid to the Repulse Bay Hotel, then as she saw it, ‘a country hotel’ – not for long, but enough to make some notes about it.
Anyway, I dug out the London Library copy of her 1978 memoirs, Travels with Myself and Another, to remind myself of what she had to say about the Repulse Bay Hotel and interestingly the copy they have was donated by Gellhorn herself, which to me is rather special. From 1980, when she was about 70, (and when she donated the copy presumably while in London) she moved to live in Kilgwrrwg near Devauden in Gwent, South Wales.
And, if you’re in Hong Kong on October 18th do come along to Repulse Bay to hear more….(it’s free, but do sign up here)
