I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012) about just how opium keeps on fascinating us.
Let’s start with me! My new podcast this year, The Lady from Hong Kong, made with the South China Morning Post and RTHK3 in Hong Kong was all about opium smuggling from China to America in 1939. You can listen to all four episodes here.
And TV. The first episode of Series 2 of Vienna Blood – The Melancholy Countess – saw a Hungarian countess with a little bit of an opium problem. Opium also cropped up on the Victorian crime drama Miss Scarlet and the Duke (Alibi TV in the UK).
Some society wives in the French TV show Paris Police 1900 took to the needle for some opium injections too.
On the big screen opium among the Romantics appeared in Emily, the bio-pic of Emily Brontë that took a few liberties (the opium included).
And on to fiction…TL Mogford’s The Plant Hunter is a Victorian era romp that swings from London to China and Marco Polo’s footsteps with some opium and opium wars along the way.
And some non-fiction, primarily Peter Thilly’s The Opium Business….and Joseph Sassoon’s The Global Merchants, a history of the Sassoon clan, which also had numerous opium references obviously…
And…..opium on the stage!
Ballet Rambert’s Peaky Blinders ballet, Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby had a bunch of opium references…
Not to be outdone, China’s National Center For The Performing Arts and Guangzhou Drama Art Center staged the play Lin Zexu, about the man sent by the emperor to Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, to stop the illegal importation of opium from Britain in 1838.
A little heads up for a grewat new contemporary Chinese novel, Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree by Li Er (translated by Dave Haysom), out next Chinese New Year…
In one-child China, when a mother runs from home because of her illegal pregnancy, it’s Kong Fanhua’s problem.
She’s the only female village chief in Xiushui County, and her day-to-day tasks range from the mundane to the near-impossible: tracking down this runaway who left her twins behind, keeping rumours of a vengeful ghost at bay while trying to convince some rich American to invest in the local paper plant. Not to mention looking after her own farm and family. After all, the crops aren’t going to plant themselves.
While the incompetent men in local government fail to get much done, Fanhua picks up the slack. But when higher-ups start investigating her hometown’s birth quotas, just as she’s up for re-election, the squeeze is on. Can she keep all the plates spinning? Or will she resort to villainous tactics to keep the peace? And why won’t her lazy husband shut up about camels?
In Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) the author attempted to capture the vitality of the “black vagabonds” of urban America and Europe. Jake Brown, the protagonist of Home to Harlem, deserts the U.S. Army during WW1, hangs out in France and then lives in London until a race riot inspires him to return to New York and Harlem. In and out of the barrel joints, bars, cabarets, clubs and gin parties of Harlem and Brooklyn he notes the meteroic rise of ragtime and its spread to an interesting group of places:
‘All America jazzed to it, and it was already world famous. Already being jazzed perhaps in Paris and Cairo, Shanghai, Honolulu, and Java.’
This Christmas a festive whodunit for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine Christmas edition…Murder on the Shanghai Express…
Detective Chief Inspector John Creighton’s journey home for the holidays is derailed by a death, a dagger and a few drinks. Sit back and enjoy the ride….click here to read
From reform-era history and present-day policy to wartime history and protest fiction, regular contributors to The China Project (including me) round up their top picks from the China bookshelf of 2022. Click here to read.
The great Russian exile (until he later returned to the USSR) cabaret entertainer Alexander Vertinsky liverd in Shanghai for some years. Here’s his Christmas Eve party 1936 at the Balalaika nightclub…a White Russian get together for sure and a close up on the menu…
I don’t know much about American funeral director advertising trends but hats off to the Vermont town of Brattleboro and the funeral directors Moran and Rohde, down there on Oak Street. They decided to run an ad in December 1929. Being a tad classier than those showing discount coffins, affordable all-in-one packages or an array of brass fittings to see you onto the the side Moran and Rohde went with a soothing image of the marble bridge at the Summer Palace in Peking while noting that another interesting bridge in China is to be found at Hangchow (Hangzhou). Well death is figuratively a crossing so….
A biography of Fridtjof Nansen, the polar explorer and champion of the Nansen passports, originally and officially stateless persons passports. Nansen passports were internationally recognized refugee travel documents from 1922 to 1938, first issued by the League of Nations’s Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees to stateless refugees. To anyone studying the lives of Russian exiles in China between the wars knowing about Nansen is invaluable.
Alexis Jenni’s biography is in French, though will hopefully find an English language publisher too….
Comment passe-t-on de champion de ski à Prix Nobel de la paix ? De héros polaire à créateur d’un statut pour les réfugiés ? Alexis Jenni raconte à la façon d’un roman la vie extraordinaire de Fridtjof Nansen, homme doué en tout, qui fut champion du monde de patinage, consacra ses travaux scientifiques au système nerveux, dessinait fort bien et écrivait d’une plume remarquable. L’histoire d’un homme qui traversa le Groenland à ski puis tenta d’atteindre le pôle Nord et devint héros national norvégien. Un homme qui oeuvra pour le rapatriement des prisonniers de guerre, puis créa un passeport destiné aux centaines de milliers d’apatrides laissés pour compte par l’effondrement des empires en 1918. Un homme qui sauva des milliers de vies et qui se demandait avec mélancolie s’il n’avait pas raté la sienne
