Sheila Myoshi Jager’s The Other Great Game (Harvard University Press) is a welcome addition to the Korean history shelf…
In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.
When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.
A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.
Follwing the panoramas of Hong Kong yesterday taken by members of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the 1890s here are two pictures they also took when visiting Peking… c.1896…
Hatamen Street (Chongwenmen Street) and adjacent hutongs
The Tartar Wall and its very undeveloped exterior to the south (I think)
My thanks to Meaghan Walsh Gerard of Savannah, Georgia for sending me this lovely Kodak snap of Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road).
The photo paper dates it as 1930s and it is titled on the reverse, as you can see – a worthwhile US$2.98 and so kind of her to send it to me.
BTW: Meaghan is a prolific and excellent book and film reviewer (which I think is how we first met ages ago) – her website is here. But I must thank her massively and repeatedly for helping me access the Harry Hervey archives at the Georgia State Historical Society when a combination of a) the archive imminently closing for some time for major building works and b) covid prevented me from getting over there in person.
In case you don’t know Hervey was a Charleston and Savannah inhabitant who was obsessed with Asia and ‘the Orient’. He wrote a number of exotic novels before even visiting. In the 1920s he then did a couple of extensive tours of Japan/Korea/Hong Kong/Macao and mainland China, as well as South East Asia and French Indochina. I reproduced some of his travel writing in my first China Revisited reprint (with Blacksmith Books) – Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Herveys 1920s Hong Kong, Macao & Canton Sojourns.
But most importantly Hervey wrote the original treatment for the movie Shanghai Express and sold it to Josef von Sternberg – cue Marlene, Anna May and one of the best movies ever. I dug that out of the Stanford Archives and then found that Hervey’s own archives were also at the Georgia State Historical Society including letters and a bunch of obscurely publoshed, or totally unpublished, but really very interesting, short stories featuring Peking. Meaghan got those for me and I wrote about them in a chapter of my collection Destination Peking – Harry Hervey’s Peking of the Imagination.
Author Mike Chinoy discusses his new book “Assignment China” with moderator Melinda Liu
WHEN: June 28, Wednesday, 7:00 to 8:00 PM Beijing Time (online)
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Published recently by Mike Chinoy, “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic” tells the story of foreign correspondents in China and their coverage of stories from the 1940s’ civil war to the COVID-19 pandemic. The author uses the journalists’ own words to document the insights, trials and tribulations of the foreign media in China over a period of 70-plus years. Chinoy will discuss how the foreign media sought to “test the boundaries, challenge the restrictions on coverage…and explore parts of Chinese society that had long been off limits”, in conversation with foreign correspondent Melinda Liu.
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: Click “Register” or “I will Attend” and follow the instructions. After successful registration and payment, you’ll receive a confirmation email. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder. If you encounter difficulties paying via WeChat Pay, you may wish to try Alipay instead. Members of partner RAS branches: Please register at least 72 hours in advance to allow time for membership verification. You will receive several emails from RASBJ: one confirming receipt of your registration request, another requesting payment, and a third confirming your registration and payment, with a link to join the event. In cases of non-payment, you will not receive login information. If you have questions please contact communications@rasbj.org
My monthly author Q&A for the China-Britain Business Council magazine Focusthis June is with Vaudine England & her excellent new history of Hong Kong, Fortune’s Bazaar (CorsairBooks) – click here…
This is the logo of the Yamamoto photo studio in Peking from about 1914….
Bristol University’s Historical Phootgraphs of China (HPC) site has this to say of the man and his company:
Sanshichiro YAMAMOTO 山本讃七郎 (1855-1943) was a Japanese photographer, born in Okayama Prefecture. He had a photography studio in Shibahikage-cho (near present day Shimbashi Station) in Tokyo, Japan, from 1882 to about 1897. When news of the Boxer Uprising swept the world, he quickly went to Peking (Beijing) to photograph the historic activities of foreign troops in the capitol, including the Japanese. After photographing the aftermath in Peking (Beijing), he finally settled down in Tientsin (Tianjin) and opened his third photographic studio (Yamamoto Shōzō Kan or Yamamoto Syozo House), from where he sold photographs, souvenir photobooks and coloured post cards, taken in and around Beijing and North China. Yamamoto’s photographs were published in Views of the North China Affair, Picturesque Views of Peking and View and Custom of North China (1909).
