All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
In Rickshaw Boy, Lao She offers vivid descriptions of Republican-Era Beijing while crafting a timeless story about the vicissitudes of a worker’s life. In this weeks The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf entry we revisit this proletarian classic: click here
It also became a movie in 1982 when adapted by director Ling Zifeng…
This recently came up for auction and has in interesting provenance.
A Chinese oil on canvas portrait, early 19th century, possibly Lamqua. The bearded Government Official wearing a hat and beaded necklace, the blue robe with rank badge.
The seller inherited items from her great grandfather Captain John Dewar (ship master). He was born in Shanghai in 1866 and died in 1950. His wife Susan Smith Oudney (1875-1967) whose father was William Oudney a master mariner owned two clipper ships including The Coach Inn. John and Susan married in Shanghai in 1896.
For those interested in such vulgar things – it went for a (I reckon quite reasonable given provenance) £2,500 at auction.
For those in Hong Kong photographer Basil Pao will be talking about his book of set photography, The Last Emperor Revisited from Hong Kong University Press on November 9.
OK – so this is now out there in the world as happening next year – my new book explores Wallis Simpson’s time in China published in the UK by Elliot & Thompson & the US with St Martins Press
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson – he ‘explores the untold, colourful origin story of a woman too often maligned by history’
The latest in my occasional series of old Shanghai signage (use the search box if you want to see other examples). Nice to know, should you have found yourself stumbling around on a Shanghai ferry pier that the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) provided lifebuoys should you fall in the Whangpoo…
My new column for November’s issue of Paragrafo (#85), the literary and arts monthly supplement to Macao’s Ponto Final newspaper. It’s on the 1951 B-movie Smuggler’s Island and what it tells us about post-war Macao…. I’ll have an English version at some point so fear not non-Portuguese readers….
Click here to read…
You can also pick up Paragrafo and Ponto Final at the Livraria Portuguesa bookstore in Macao
I saw an early draft of Scott Seligman’s Murder in Manchruia but happy now, courtesy of Potomac Books to receive the final published book…
In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s “Wild East”—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspé, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation.
Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scott D. Seligman recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus—and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.
Jie Li’s Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press)…
How might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? In socialist China, the film exhibition network expanded from fewer than six hundred movie theaters to more than a hundred thousand mobile film projectionist teams. Holding screenings in improvised open-air spaces in rural areas lacking electricity, these roving projectionists brought not only films but also power generators, loudspeakers, slideshows, posters, live performances, and mass ritual participation, amplifying the era’s utopian dreams and violent upheavals.
Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, Jie Li examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. She considers the ideology and practice of “cinematic guerrillas”—at once denoting onscreen militants, off-the-grid movie teams, and unruly moviegoers—bridging Maoist iconography, the experiences of projectionists, and popular participation and resistance. Li reconceptualizes socialist media practices as “revolutionary spirit mediumship” that aimed to turn audiences into congregations, contribute to the Mao cult, convert skeptics of revolutionary miracles, and exorcize class enemies.
Cinematic Guerrillas considers cinema’s meanings for revolution and nation building; successive generations of projectionists; workers, peasants, and soldiers; women and ethnic minorities; and national leaders, local cadres, and cultural censors. By reading diverse, vivid, and often surprising accounts of moviegoing, Li excavates Chinese media theories that provide a critical new perspective on world cinema.