The first book in my new China Revisited series (with Blacksmith Books) of old China travel memoir reprints is an abridged version of Harry Hervey’s 1924 Where Strange Gods Call. In the book Hervey recalls a short visit to Macao at the time. Naturally the passages have interested the media in Macao.
Here’s an article (below in Portuguese) by Helder Beja in Macao’s Ponto Finalnewspaper and Telegrafo literary supplement magazine (and online here) complete with an illustration by Hervey’s good friend, the artist Christopher M Murphy of Macao.
this week was book 8 in my Ultimate China Bookshelf forThe China Project – Maurice Collis’s Foreign Mud (1946) – a selection of covers over the years… click here to read the entry….
Join our panel of experts as they explore the long history of the Chinese people in Britain.
This is an online only event hosted on the British Library platform. Bookers will be sent a viewing link shortly before the event and will be able to watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time.
This event will be live captioned.
The Chinese presence in the UK goes back much further than many realise.
Our panel of experts and historians come together to explore this long history – from the first recorded presence in the 1600s, to trade during the 17th and 18th centuries, and from the Opium Wars, to the Chinese communities now calling Britain Home.
Footballer Frank Soo & author Ling Shuhua
Dr Hao Gao is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter. He is a historian of British imperialism in Asia, China in global history, particularly the encounters between the British and the Chinese empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr Gao is the author of Creating the Opium War and various research articles in both English and Chinese journals, including History, Historical Research, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Britain and the World. He currently serves as the University’s Academic Director for the UK-China Humanities Alliance (UKCHA).
Julia Lovell is professor of modern China at Birkbeck, University of London. Her most recent book is Maoism: A Global History. She has translated many works of Chinese fiction into English, including for Penguin Classics Monkey King: Journey to the West and The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. She co-curated the 2023 British Museum exhibition ‘China’s Hidden Century’.
Dr William Poole is a Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, where he is also Senior Tutor and Fellow Librarian. He is an expert in early modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history, and has interests in both early modern and modern education
Dr Anne Witchard is Reader in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Lao She in London which situates the Chinese writer as a central figure of transcultural modernism, influenced by the collision of Chinese and British literary traditions. Other publications include, England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and The Great War, and as a co-editor, Chiang Yee and his Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950. She is currently working on a book tracing Sino-British circuits of cultural exchange in the early twentieth century with a focus on performativity and dance.
Frances Wood studied Chinese at the universities of Cambridge, Peking and London. She was head of the Chinese collections in the British Library until retirement and her books include Did Marco Polo Go To China?, the Blue Guide to China, The Silk Road, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port life in China 1843-1943 , Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War and The Diamond Sutra.
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Details
Name:
The Chinese in Britain: A Long History
Where:
Online
When:
Thu 9 Mar 2023, 19:30 – 20:45
Price:
From £2.50 – £5 Members’ priority booking opens 31 January, general sale 1 February
Heads Up – I’ll be giving this workshop in Hong Kong on Sat, 11 March 2023, 13:00 – 14:30 HKT
The growth and popularity of family history means more people than ever are looking to use archives that reveal stories from China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Self publishing, podcasts, blogs and websites mean so many more unique and valuable histories are appearing. But how to go about finding the illusive details of trips, sojourns and lives in China?
Paul French, who has successfully recreated any number of old China stories from Beijing true crime to Shanghai high society to lost artist lives and hidden gangster underworlds reveals some of the tricks to tracking down those seemingly lost to history.
For an arresting mosaic of the great and complex metropolis known as Hong Kong – and an insight into what the people of the city live by and die for – a reader need look no further than the Collected Hong Kong Stories of David T. K. Wong.
Wong, a native son of this once British Crown Colony and now Special Administrative Region of China, has drawn upon his own experiences as a journalist, educator, government official and businessman to assemble a range of memorable characters for his tales. They range from barmen to labourers, from jockeys to expatriate bureaucrats, from scholars to tycoons, and each is infused with insights into the collective soul of the edgy, anomalous and perplexing place he finds himself.
These 18 stories are carefully crafted in the grand tradition of O. Henry, Maugham and Saki. Each has been individually published in a magazine or broadcast over radio in Britain, the United States, Hong Kong or elsewhere. They can be dipped into and savoured separately or feasted upon all in one go. Either way, the result can only be satisfying.
“David T. K. Wong is an exceptionally fluent writer whose compelling stories cover a wide range of themes. His talent sparkles, inveigles and mesmerizes.” – Sylvia Tankel, Editor of Short Stories International
Maurice Collis’s Foreign Mud (1946) is book 8 on my Ultimate China Bookshelf for The China Project. Click here.
It’s essentially a historical recreation of the events (or “imbroglio,” as the British press often referred to it) surrounding the illegal trade of opium in Canton during the 1830s and the Opium Wars.
To understand China’s “outrage” and subsequent negotiating stances in trade disputes, we all need to understand the original — and nastiest — trade dispute of them all: the Opium Wars.
Just noting that my Destination Shanghai & Destination Peking collections (from Blacksmith Books of Hong Kong) are on the amazons as kindles for UK£5.99/US$7.99 (& you can’t expect indie publishers to do much better than that despite the ever downward price push of ebooks)
A Katharine Jowett painting that came up for auction recently (estimated at £400-600) I had not seen before – Forbidden City, Peking, 1935 – For more on Jowett see my article on her from the South China Morning Post last year (here)…
