The great novelist of expatriate Peking between the wars, Ann Bridge (best known for Peking Picnic), wrote Four-Part Setting in 1939, though it is set a decade previously – late 1920s…
Fleeing from her failed marriage, Rose Pelham seeks sanctuary in Peking, China, with her cousins, Anastasia and Antony Lydiard. The romantic attentions of Captain Hargreaves are a welcome distraction from her woes, but in the society of Anglicised 1920’s Peking, it is hard for such relationships not to draw notice and create scandal.
Among the Legation Quarter types she encounters is Lady Harriet – and Lady Harriet has opinions on who anyone arriving in Peking should read….Rose is in deparate need of schooling having ‘only read two or three books about the Empress Dowager…’ And so the books ‘strewn about Lady Harriet’s sitting-room…’
‘Backhouse and Bland, the Abbe Huc, Giles, and more modern ones like Rodney Gilbert, “La Chine en folie”, and a set of paperbound volumes in Italian, Vare’s Novelle di Yenching, which Lady Harriet has especially commended to her, “my dear, he’s really the Kipling of China.”‘
So, Lady Harriet’s Ultimate China Bookshelf (and where authors have multiple titles I’ve opted for the ones most widely rewad by the Peking foreign colony):
Sir Edmund Backhouse and JOP Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager (1910)
Everiste Regis Huc (aka Abbe Huc), Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China During the Years 1844-1846, (English translation, W. Hazlitt), (1851)
Herbert Giles (many possibles but let’s opt for…) China and the Chinese (1902)
Rodney Gilbert, What’s Wrong With China? (1926)
Daniele Vare, The Novels of Yenching (by which Lady Harriet means the famed Italian diplomats colected novels – The Maker of Heavenly Trousers, The Gate of Happy Sparrows, and The Temple of Costly Experience)
Bridge rather falls down here on her timeline of the late 1920s as these books were published in 1926 and then 1936 and 1937 respectively – but, she does note Lady Harriet has ‘paperbound volumes’ in Italian – early proofs? She is well connected enough)
With a population of nearly 1.5 billion and the world’s second largest economy, China is a major player in the world today, and yet many in the West know very little about contemporary China. This book provides a clear, authoritative and up-to-date history of China since 1949, drawing on extensive research to describe and explain the key developments and to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding this twenty-first-century superpower.
In contrast to many commentators who overstate the novelty of the Communist regime, Guiheux emphasizes instead its complex political heritage, highlighting the many continuities it shares with the reformers and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the ability of China’s authoritarian regime to transform the economy and society is key to understanding its breakneck trajectory of modernization – an ability that, as Guiheux explains, far outweighed the importance and effectiveness of Mao’s utopian vision. Guiheux also aims to ‘de-exoticize’ China. While not on the path of a Western-style modernity, China has experienced the same phenomena that have characterized every historical process of modernization: industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and globalization.
This expertly researched history of the People’s Republic of China will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese history and politics, and for anyone interested in contemporary China.
Wonderfully there’s a Vietnamese language edition of my book Midnight in Peking coming out this summer from Hanoi publishers Nhà Xuất Bản Thanh Niên and the cover is, frankly, very different and wild….
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)…
silver rectangular cigarette box, quite plain, hinged cover, cedar lined
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.
