Timed to appear to coincide with the new China’s Hidden Century exhibition at the British Museum that starts in May (here), Creators of Modern China, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell have compiled 100 biographies of key figures of the late Qing Dynasty.
This book sprang from a simple but original ambition: to provide an understanding – told through the lives of 100 significant individuals – of how China transformed from dynastic empire to a modern, republican nation during the period 1796 to 1912.
Both famous and surprisingly little-known women and men are brought together in eight thematic sections that illuminate the birth of modern China. Featured figures include the Dowager Empress Cixi, the power behind the throne of the Qing dynasty for fifty years; Yu Rongling, who is regarded as the founder of modern dance in China and who trained in Paris with Isadora Duncan; Duanfang, China’s first serious collector of international art before being murdered by his own troops in the 1911 Revolution that destroyed the Qing dynasty; Shi Yang, the greatest woman pirate in the world who is now celebrated in popular culture as a powerful feminine icon; Luo Zhenyu, the ‘father’ of Chinese archaeology whose discoveries confirmed the antiquity of Chinese civilization; and many others.
Written by a large team of specialists, this book breathes life into China’s history and international relations, providing multiple insights into the history of this vast country and its role on the world stage.
I happened to be reading Harry A Franck’s Roving Through Southern China (1925). Franck was known as “The Prince of Vagabonds” and spent a lot of time travelling all over China, Hong Kong and Macao. Visiting Canton (Guangzhou) in 1923 he spent some time with Sun Yat-sen and noted the ominous and looming prescence of Morris Cohen, Two-Gun Cohen, SYS’s famus bodyguard. The legends about Cohen started young – already in the 1920s Franck is talking about Cohen’s boxing exploits and time in the Wild West (neither of these was quite true – admittedly he did brawl a bit and he spent time in Canada).
An interesting new book of photographs from Macao-based photo-journalist Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro. O Que Foi Nao Volta Ser… (or What Was Doesn’t Come Back to Be), a project carried out between November 2021 and November 2022 that involves placing old photographs of Macau, taken in black and white between the 1930s and 1990s, in the same places today. The original images, many captured by unknown authors, are part of Gonçalo’s personal collection of old photographs, acquired in auctions and antique houses.
I blogged recently on Anna May Wong’s fleeting but memorable appearance in Elstree Calling a filmed review show from 1930 where she appeared in a strange skit on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Those posts are here and here…
My thanks to Dr Anne Witchard of the University of Westminster (whose book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown discusses Anna May Wong’s London sojourn in depth) who points out that Wong is wearing her costume (sans headpiece) from Piccadilly, the film she made in London the year before, 1929. Piccadilly was made by British International Pictures which was in a consortium with British National Studios and Elstree Studios, so perhaps her costume as Shosho, London pub scullery maid who becomes a West End performer, was just waiting for her when she turned up to film Elstree Calling?
“The question I shall discuss is how members of the Communist Party should cultivate and temper themselves,” Liu Shaoqi wrote in the early days of the Chinese Communist Party. Is anyone still interested in the answer? click here to read book #17 on The China Project’s Ultimate China Bookshelf…
Liu Shaoqi illustration by Derek Zheng for The China Project
