All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Submarines proved their worth in World War I. Afterwards Britain’s Royal Navy deployed its newest ones to Hong Kong to eradicate piracy from beneath the waves. But when a Hong Kong-based submarine hunting pirates fired on a ferry carrying 200 and it sank there was hell to pay… click here to read…
Some pictures that recently surfaced in an old album put up for auction of the Spring 1921 Tientsin (Tianjin) races at the Tientsin Race Course. The Tientsin Race Course was slightly less grand than Shanghai but definitely better laid out and with attendant stands and club than the Paomachang course in Peking – see Austin Coates’s great study, China Races, for more on all these courses.
A delightful book from 1930 edited by Wu Luen Tak and published by the Liang You Printing & Publishing Co…
China – A Cruise of Chinese Waters: Being the Log of The Fortuna by Captain Augustus F Lindley was published in 1880. In 1859, Lindley was a young Royal Navy officer stationed in Hong Kong where he became betrothed to Marie, the daughter of the Portuguese consul at Macao. In 1860 he resigned his commission, taking a job as the executive officer of a trading steamer smuggling specie to the Taiping reform movement in Shanghai. He accepted a commission from Taiping general Li Xiucheng, and helped train their soldiers in British Army techniques, while Marie became a sniper! After her death, he returned to England. In 1866, he wrote and published Ti Ping Tien Kwoh: or the History of the Taiping Revolution and included a dedication: To Le-Siu-Cheng, the Chung-Wang, “Faithful Prince,” Commander-in-Chief of the Ti-Ping forces, this work is dedicated if he be living; and if not, to his memory.
Your can read Lindley on archive.org here…
A rare book this one – Shanghai, Buildings Of Today And Tomorrow, A Review Of Modern Construction, An Illustrated Review published by Trollope & Colls (an architecture firm) of London in 1924. 1924 is really an important year as I think many Shanghai scholars would agree it’s the year the city really takes off architecturally.
A good quote from from Daniel Carney’s 1975 novel Macau…
Wang Shaoling (Wong Siu Ling), 1909-1989, a native of Taishan, Guangdong, was a Hong Kong’s first generation artists. In 1913, Wong moved to Hong Kong and studied Western painting. In 1935, Wang and some Hong Kong artists, including Luis Chan, joined the Hong Kong Arts Society where he met the Peking-based artist Xu Beihong. In 1937, together with Li Tiefu and Yee Bon, Wang went to visit Guilin with Xu Beihong. In 1938, with the encouragement of Xu Beihong, Wang left Hong Kong for the United States to further his studies in art at the California School of Fine Arts. He specialised in oil and watercolour painting. Here are two portraits that came up for auction recently…
A couple of reeeads this week….
I’d forgotten how much I rather like Austin Coates’s The Road from 1959. 1950s novels are always much more overtly sexual than you expect. Coates was a District Officer in Hong Kong with a wry eye and a deft pen. And so his comic novel of 1950s manners includes an attempt to build a road on an outlying island, a rather over-focused official, his scandalous novelist wife, the crooks on the island, a dodgy temporary Governor, a host of venal civil servants, wealthy bit vacuous mid-levels types, dopey academics and an hilarious scene at a British Council event (as all British Council events are rather doomed to be ridiculous) is on the money. Plus ca change – Nothing changes, everything changes. A charming period piece still.
Stella Benson was worshiped in her day (the 1920s) though, i think, it’s a little hard to see why nowadays. But interestingly she lived in many obscure treaty ports (wife of a customs officer) and Hong Kong while being feted in far off literary London and occasionally visiting to escape backwater Pakhoi or Nanning and swan around Bloomsbury. She lacks the light gossipy touch of an Ann Bridge or the insider knowledge of a Nora Waln – both slightly later contemporaries in China – and rather overwrites her scenes. Still, The Poor Man, a tale of a failing man who drinks a bit much and eventually ends up in China has some nice Peking and Chungking scenes – places she knew well.
