All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Gdansk-born Eduard Hildebrandt (1817-1869) trained by Wilhelm Krause in Berlin, and most famous for his evening sunset pictures of varioius locales, took a 1862-1864 world trip, which included China, Macao and Hong Kong. This picture of Queen’s Road is from around 1862-1864. It was also produced as an engraving as below too…
Some Shanghai silversmiths i’ve noted before include Wang Hing, Wo Shing, Hung Chong, Luen Wo, and Zeewo, Tuck Chang, Zee Sung Luen Hing and others (just put “silversmiths” in the search box). Add to this Hong Kong and Shanghai-based Wing Nam (most of the silversmithing companies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Shanghai were originally from Hong Kong or Guangzhou)…
Alexander Bubb’s Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation….
The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well documented. Yet this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like ‘Kalidasa’ and ‘Firdusi’ were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women’s book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. But for the most part, such readers were not consulting the specialist publications of scholarly orientalists. What then were the translations that catalysed these intercultural encounters? Based on a unique methodology marrying translation theory with empirical techniques developed by historians of reading, this book shines light for the first time on the numerous amateur translators or ‘popularizers’, who were responsible for making these texts accessible and disseminating them to the Victorian general readership.
Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf explains the process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers. It uses the working papers and correspondence of popularizers to demonstrate their techniques and motivations, while the responses of contemporary readers are traced through the pencil marginalia they left behind in dozens of original copies. In spite of their typically limited knowledge of source-languages, Asian Classics argues that popularizers produced versions more respectful of the complexity, cultural difference, and fundamental untranslatability of Asian texts than the professional orientalists whose work they were often adapting. The responses of their readers, likewise, frequently deviated from interpretive norms, and it is proposed that this combination of eccentric translators and unorthodox readers triggered ‘flights of translation’, whereby historical individuals can be seen to escape the hegemony of orientalist forms of knowledge.
An interesting little story that appeared in the American newspapers in the 1920s – (fake) pearl sellers, a hundred or so, in Paris apparently attracted to the French capital by the tales of returning Chinese Labour Corps members. A strange tale as most of the CLC came from Shandong (though we know when they returned many got off the boat in Shanghai and stayed in the eastern China region. But, fake Zhejiang pearls were a well-known and big business between the wars and often a way for new emigrants to Europe to start making some money. Paris was a centre (as much of the business was done through a Sino-French company), but they were also spotted in Dutch, German and Spanish cities (and apparently Tokyo too) in the 1920s and 1930s.
A Hong Kong 1946 Victory 30c stamp – obviously with a youngish looking George VI.
Includes the slogan ‘1941-1945 Resurgo’, or ‘Arise’. The stamp was designed by Head Postmaster of Hong Kong, Edward Wynne-Jones, while he was interned in Stanley Camp, as an activity to relieve boredom. Eventually is rough pencil sketch done in Stanley. A fellow internee W. E. Jones (no relation), formerbeen Chief Draughtsman of the Hong Kong Public Works Department weorked it up in crayon.
A quite remarkable stamp – more on its unusual creation, production and issuance here from The Smithsonian….
Book #21 on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf is Ma Jian’s Red Dust (2001). Both an insider and an outsider, Ma Jian is concerned with discovering his own country—its vastness, but also how it became the nation it had by the early 1980s, and how he had been formed by that process as an individual. Click here… See all the shelf here…
A Pacific Ocean Islands illustrated travel map made in the USA . Discover the Pacific – published by the Pacific Area Travel Association in the 1960s featuring stereotyped illustrations of a whale in the waves at sea and smaller images representing the people and culture from the region including a traditional junk boat for Hong Kong and totem pole for Alaska being photographed by tourists, a lady in a kimono playing a shamisen music instrument for Japan and a Thai dancer in costume dancing in front of a buddhist temple building for Thailand, a sailing boat for the Philippines and lady walking in front of a long house for Indonesia, a tourist riding a rickshaw in front of palm tree leaves for Singapore and people riding an Indian elephant for India, a policeman in uniform directing traffic for the Fiji Islands and a lady in a straw skirt with flower garland around her neck for Hawaii in front of the volcano mountains, Maori carvings for New Zealand and a tourist petting a kangaroo in Australia.
The second season of the reboot of Perry Mason is now doing the rounds. It’s much tighter and more focussed than the first and really very good. Lots of good sub themes of the time – Hoovervilles, segregated housing, underground lesbian bars, gay blackmail, gauging grocers, gambling ships. One interesting aspect of season two was the recurring warnings of the impending Sino-Japanese War.
I don’t think an exact date for the events occuring in the plot are ever given but the internet tells me that one of the lead actors in the show, Perry Whigham told the press, “We’re in ’33 in Perry Mason,”. This makes sense as we have several references to Japanese agression towards China, a shot or two of a newspaper front page highlighting this and I assume that is the invasion and occupation of Manchuria.
We do see one of the baddies doing a business deal with the Japanese Ambassador Debuchi – Katsuji Debuchi was indeed Japanese Ambassador to the United States between 1928 and November 1933. We also see same baddie getting a bee sting treatment accompanied by Kikutaro Takahashi’s Sendo Kawaiya, a popular ryukoka (“popular song”) – though I think that song was first released in 1935.
And then we have the Los Angeles judge, in his chambers, feet up on the desk, reading Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth – released in 1931 and a best seller which most curious readers of the time would have dipped into. The judge finds it a bit flowery… Anyway, a nice sub theme of events showing that, alongside the contiuing and grinding Depression in California, the rest of the world is heading to hell in a handbasket too in 1933! But the theme of tensions in China is also very much a homage to Perry Mason’s original creator Erle Stanley Gardner…
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) created the investigating lawyer Perry Mason. As well as being a professional attorney, enthusiastic wildlife photographer and constant traveller most people don’t know that he was also “fluent” in Chinese. After growing up in Massachusetts and Oregon the young Erle made a brief living arranging unlicensed wrestling matches before being admitted to the bar in 1911. Business was slow and to make ends meet he defended Chinese clients who didn’t have much money but did have a lot of friends. Volume rather than value defined his law practise. He claimed he picked up Chinese (though what version of Chinese and how much is not altogether clear) through his clients and when he turned to pulp fiction writing used a lot of stereotypical Chinese villains such as Soo Hoo Duck, The King of Chinatown. Gardner written stories in China without ever having visited the country. So, with some income from his fiction in 1931 Gardner and his wife made a six-month tour of the country.
