Book #23 on The China Project Ultimate Bookshelf Midway through the reign of the Qianlong Emperor in the most prosperous period of China’s last imperial dynasty, a mass hysteria broke out among the people. They feared that sorcerers were clipping off the ends of men’s queues (the braids worn by imperial law), chanting magical incantations, and stealing their souls. Kuhn’s book examines this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of the supposed Soulstealers that ensued.
When 8 year old Kim Gordon set off for China in 1965, it set in train a tale of passion, imagination and still unanswered questions. Kim’s parents were committed communists in the thick of Mao’s cultural revolution. Kim became a Red Guard, one of an army of children and teenagers marshalled in support of Mao and he had a ringside view of the vast rallies in Tiananmen Square. But when the political tide turned against foreigners, the family was imprisoned for two years in a tiny hotel room, Room 421.
The Gordon family had no contact with the outside world for two years and their families back in Britain had no idea where they were. With only a block of paper and a wild imagination for company Kim passed the time by writing letters that could never be sent, and thrilling plays which he’d act aloud playing all the parts himself. His story reveals much about families and loyalties; on the grip of ideology; and the ingenuity of a child shut in an empty room. A rich and strange reminiscence not just of China but of the human heart.
Charlie Brand plays young Kim in this dramatic, intimate documentary.
And for those who know their old Peking well – though called the ‘Peking Hotel’ the Gordon’s were not kept in the better known Peking, or Beijing, Hotel but rather in the large, square, soviet style Hsin Chiao Hotel (New Sojourn). This is now, I think, the 700 room Beijing Novotel Xinqiao Hotel (which fancies itself 4 star but…) which had a statue of Chairman Mao in the lobby till 1971.
Vaudine England’s excellent history of Hong Kong, Fortune’s Bazaar, is out now… and the South China Morning Post has published an excerpt online – “Prostitutes and ‘kept women’ in Victorian Hong Kong – and how they shaped its character”.
I’m excited to see the publication of Marie-Astrid Prache-de Mézerac’s Et Shanghai Demeure (And Shanghai Endures), a biography of the wonderful Russian-emigre, later French poet (and in between Shanghai dancer, beauty queen and lover of Sir Victor Sassoon) Larissa Andersen. Larissa was a minor character in my book City of Devils and I always wanted to find time to research and write about her more – but she enters and exits the tale fairly rapidly. Anyway, Marie-Astrid has now done the job and her book is now published by Paulsen in France (here)…. And if you’re in France in June she’s on tour….
The great novelist of expatriate Peking between the wars, Ann Bridge (best known for Peking Picnic), wrote Four-Part Setting in 1939, though it is set a decade previously – late 1920s…
Fleeing from her failed marriage, Rose Pelham seeks sanctuary in Peking, China, with her cousins, Anastasia and Antony Lydiard. The romantic attentions of Captain Hargreaves are a welcome distraction from her woes, but in the society of Anglicised 1920’s Peking, it is hard for such relationships not to draw notice and create scandal.
Among the Legation Quarter types she encounters is Lady Harriet – and Lady Harriet has opinions on who anyone arriving in Peking should read….Rose is in deparate need of schooling having ‘only read two or three books about the Empress Dowager…’ And so the books ‘strewn about Lady Harriet’s sitting-room…’
‘Backhouse and Bland, the Abbe Huc, Giles, and more modern ones like Rodney Gilbert, “La Chine en folie”, and a set of paperbound volumes in Italian, Vare’s Novelle di Yenching, which Lady Harriet has especially commended to her, “my dear, he’s really the Kipling of China.”‘
So, Lady Harriet’s Ultimate China Bookshelf (and where authors have multiple titles I’ve opted for the ones most widely rewad by the Peking foreign colony):
Sir Edmund Backhouse and JOP Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager (1910)
Everiste Regis Huc (aka Abbe Huc), Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China During the Years 1844-1846, (English translation, W. Hazlitt), (1851)
Herbert Giles (many possibles but let’s opt for…) China and the Chinese (1902)
Rodney Gilbert, What’s Wrong With China? (1926)
Daniele Vare, The Novels of Yenching (by which Lady Harriet means the famed Italian diplomats colected novels – The Maker of Heavenly Trousers, The Gate of Happy Sparrows, and The Temple of Costly Experience)
Bridge rather falls down here on her timeline of the late 1920s as these books were published in 1926 and then 1936 and 1937 respectively – but, she does note Lady Harriet has ‘paperbound volumes’ in Italian – early proofs? She is well connected enough)
With a population of nearly 1.5 billion and the world’s second largest economy, China is a major player in the world today, and yet many in the West know very little about contemporary China. This book provides a clear, authoritative and up-to-date history of China since 1949, drawing on extensive research to describe and explain the key developments and to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding this twenty-first-century superpower.
In contrast to many commentators who overstate the novelty of the Communist regime, Guiheux emphasizes instead its complex political heritage, highlighting the many continuities it shares with the reformers and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the ability of China’s authoritarian regime to transform the economy and society is key to understanding its breakneck trajectory of modernization – an ability that, as Guiheux explains, far outweighed the importance and effectiveness of Mao’s utopian vision. Guiheux also aims to ‘de-exoticize’ China. While not on the path of a Western-style modernity, China has experienced the same phenomena that have characterized every historical process of modernization: industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and globalization.
This expertly researched history of the People’s Republic of China will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese history and politics, and for anyone interested in contemporary China.
Wonderfully there’s a Vietnamese language edition of my book Midnight in Peking coming out this summer from Hanoi publishers Nhà Xuất Bản Thanh Niên and the cover is, frankly, very different and wild….
