Harriet Low herself chose the title Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life, for her journals. They chart her amazement at leaving Salem, Massachusetts, for Macao, a Portuguese colony off the China coast. Perhaps no greater contrast was imaginable in 1829. Harriet lived the constricted lifestyle of the foreign merchants’ wives, forced by the Chinese to live in Macao while their husbands traded tea and opium in Canton; balls, operas and picnics; Chinese customs and Catholic processions; true friendship and false; romance or religion are all reflected in the pages of her journal.
As ever for June 4th, this incredible picture of June 1989….. what a potential world was destroyed that day! The joy & the hope of China captured by (I think) Mark Avery of AP….
(In Portuguese) My latest column for Macao’s Paragrafo (the bimonthly literary supplement to Ponto Final newspaper) – The Macao of Shogun – the underlying importance of the Portuguese colony to Clavell’s great novel (Shogun). (English version out soon) – click here
Reading Truman Capote’s unfinished final novel, the catty Answered Prayers…. a little reference to Shanghai showing how the Bohemian sojounrer culture of the city permeated wider society once…
Jonathan Chatwin, whose new book The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future is the latest publication in my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series (out now everywhere including Bloomsbury’s site here). Jonathan just wrote an interesting piece for CNN Style on how Zhongnanhai became the secretive centre of Chinese communist power….here…
HOW THE US, UK & OTHERS MADE CHINA THE WORLD’S FOREMOST TRADING POWER – Today’s contentious trading relationship between China & the West shows how times have changed, according Made in China by Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson. I spoke with Ingelson for my May China-Britain Business Council Focus magazine author Q&A – click here to read…
