All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Heads Up: I’ll be Hong Kong International Literary Festival as part of this panel on The Nuts & Bolts of Getting Published with Jo Lusby (my former editor at Penguin China) & Pete Spurrier (my sometime publisher at Blacksmith Books in HK) – 7/3/23 at the Hong Kong Fringe Club…more details here…
My long read for the South China Morning Post last weekend on the Fette-Li Rug Company of Peking and Tientsin…click here…
At the turn of the twentieth century any discerning American home whose inhabitants displayed ‘taste’ had an oriental rug, invariably a Chinese one. But, by the 1930s tastes were evolving and while there was still a great appreciation of the aesthetics of Chinese rugs, the traditional patterns and skilled weaving, there was also a desire for rugs that incorporated the modern, abstract designs and vibrant, striking colours of the art-deco age. One Chinese company sought to successfully assimilate these two desires marrying traditionally woven carpets with new avant garde designs – the Fette-Li Rug Company of Beijing and Tianjin.
Legendary old Jewish Harbin researcher Dan Ben-Canaan’s Tombstone Histories of Jewish lives in Harbin.
Tombstone Histories is a venture into the strange past of a great Chinese city.
Harbin, established in northeastern China in 1898 by Russians and others, was for a time home to some 38 different national communities, before war and revolution destroyed their lives. Harbin also became a safe house and waystation for Jews escaping pogroms and hatred in Europe, and Tombstone Histories presents the Jewish experience in the city in a personal and unforgettable way. It paints a revealing picture, never shown before, of Jewish daily life in this faraway and alien land, of how people functioned, struggled and sometimes thrived in a space that was so different and unfamiliar. Tombstone Histories offers glimpses of the lives of the rich, the poor and those in between with daily stories and reminiscences of close to sixty families.
History so often ends up as just a series of tombstones, but this book provides the other side to the story—the personal details of lives which allow readers to draw their own conclusions about the human experience, especially survival.
My piece for the Mekong Review from November 2022 on the evolution of the spy novel with a Chinese element is up as the Review‘s “Free Read” for a while. You can read it here…and there’s lots more on their website here plus, of course, you can subscribe and support a most excellent publication.
Chinese Autobiographical Writing: An Anthology of Personal Accounts, edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey is professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington. Her many books include The Cambridge Illustrated History of China and Emperor Huizong. Cong Ellen Zhang is professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is author of Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China and Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China: Family, State, and Native Place. Ping Yao is professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles. She is author of Women, Gender and Sexuality in China: A Brief History. Together, they are the editors of Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives.
Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. From poetry, letters, and diaries to statements in legal proceedings, these engaging and readable works draw us into the past and provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century. Some focus on a person’s entire life, others on a specific moment. Some have an element of humor, others are entirely serious. Taken together, these selections offer an intimate view of how Chinese men and women, both famous and obscure, reflected on their experiences as well as their personal struggles and innermost thoughts.
With an introduction and list of additional readings for each selection, this volume is ideal for undergraduate courses on Chinese history, literature, religion, and women and family. Read individually, each piece illuminates a person, place, and moment. Read in chronological order, they highlight cultural change over time by showing how people explored new ways to represent themselves in writing.
A nice one pataca stamp Macao stamp from 1950 featuring the Porta do Cerca, or old barrier gate between Macao and China. A bit more built up these days!!
And now somewhat less appealing…
An interesting stamped letter from 1938 for a number of reasons – 1) identifies the offices of the Indo-China Steam Navigation at 27 The Bund; 2) the postage cancels commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the transfer of the Chinese capital from Peking to Nanking (in 1927 obviously); 3) on the right hand side you can see the mark of the Steamer Postmaster.
BTW on the adressee: Wilfrid “Fox” Hamlin (more commonly spelt Wilfred – so this may be a typo on trhe letter) was born in 1883 in Shanghai. AS a young man he appears to be have been a Post Office employee based briefly in Chinkiang (Zhanjiang) in Jiangsi provoin ce on the Yangtze. He also seems to have work in insurance for Cornhill in Shanghai for a time before joining the Shanghai Municipal Police in 1928 but seems to have left the SMP’s employ within a year and then presumably joined the Indo-China Steam Navigation company as a Purser. He married Rose Ellen Loxton and had 2 children. Wilfred and Rose (but seemingly not their children) were interned in Yangchow A Camp in Shanghai in 1943, later being moved to Chapei Camp (he was recorded as a ‘clerk’ on the camp records). He died in Vancouver in 1949
Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, edited by Jennifer Altehenger (Editor) Denise Y. Ho (Editor)….interesting subject, great cover image…
The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to have had little material culture to speak of. Yet people attributed great meaning to materials and objects often precisely because they were rare and difficult to obtain. This first volume devoted to the material history of the period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough.
Bringing together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more, this volume shares groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film. With engaging narratives and probing analysis, the contributors make a place for China’s experience in the history of global material culture and the study of socialist modernity.
ntroduction: Making Revolution Material / Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho