All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A set of three prints/engravings – panoramic Views of Hong Kong Island and the Vicinity, with Named Landmarks, as seen from, and drawn by, Lieutenant L. G. Heath, R.N. of H.M.S. Iris in 1846. I also add below a painting of Iris in Hong Kong in 1846….
….is this week.
Graham Sutherland painted Maugham in 1949 at Cap Ferrat. The artist Gerald Kelly told Maugham ‘you look like the madam of a brothel in Shanghai’. Maugham’s reaction is not known. The portrait now resides the Tate Collection
As Blacksmith Books have just published the fourth in the China Revisited series of reprints of old writing on Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China (Harry A Franck’s Roving Through Southern China) you can catch up with a series bundle from Blacksmith and save 20% on the combined price of the four – that’s a good Stretched January deal for you!!
click here to order….
A photo of the unveiling of the statue of Zhou En-lai in the North Korean city of Hamhung, South Hamgyong province. The Statue was unveiled in May 1979 (or Juche 68 for those so inclined) with attendant wreaths, a few years after Zhou’s death. Zhou had visited the city in 1958. I see some later pictures on the internet and it remains in place, largely unchanged though the base seems a little reduced, but otherwise….
A pair of 1920’s watercolour views of Queen’s Road, Hong Kong, signed indistinctly – if anyone can make out or recognises the signature i’d be much obliged…
(NB: thanks to Maile Cannon of Beijing we can identify the artist as Lee Hung, born 1942, a graduate of the Guangzhou Arts Institute who moved to Hong Kong. Apparently (an anonymous quote) “He has determined to rediscover the old Hong Kong to the modern people. He has devoted much of his time to conduct [research] and organize findings. Although the places he [has] drawn have changed drastically, his pictures are all [original] from his substantial investigations.”
Matthew H Sommer’s The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China from Columbia University Press….
n imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years.
Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.
Thomas M Larkin’s The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society from Columbia University Press…
What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.
Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.
