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)…
A candid, rollicking literary travelogue from a pioneering New Yorker writer, an intrepid heroine who documented China in the years before World War II. The blurb below, by the way, is from the RAS Shanghai (you may very well agree, I could not possibly comment, as Francis Urqhart used to say….)….
Deemed scandalous at the time of its publication in 1944, Emily Hahn’s now classic memoir of her years in China remains remarkable for her insights into a tumultuous period and her frankness about her personal exploits. A proud feminist and fearless traveler, she set out for China in 1935 and stayed through the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War, wandering, carousing, living, loving and writing.
Many of the pieces in China to Me were first published as the work of a roving reporter in the New Yorker. All are shot through with riveting and humanizing detail. During her travels from Nanjing to Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong, where she lived until the Japanese invasion in 1941, Hahn embarks upon an affair with lauded Chinese poet Shao Xunmei; gets a pet gibbon and names him Mr. Mills; establishes a close bond with the women who would become the subjects of her bestselling book The Soong Sisters; battles an acquired addiction to opium; and has a child with Charles Boxer, a married British intelligence officer.
In this unflinching glimpse of a vanished world, Hahn examines not so much the thorny complications of political blocs and party conflict, but the ordinary – or extraordinary – people caught up in the swells of history. At heart, China to Me is a self-portrait of a fascinating woman ahead of her time.
Author, historian and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Uther Charlton-Stevens, will talk with writer Paul French about his book Anglo-India and the End of Empire. Learn about the lives of luminaries from mixed communities of European and Asian descent that existed throughout Asia as a result of western colonial trading systems.
Anglo-Chinese Eurasians such as businessman Sir Robert Hotung in Hong Kong, identified himself as Chinese despite his generous support of fellow Eurasians. In contrast, India’s Eurasians, known as Anglo-Indians, almost always saw themselves as more British than Indian. Yet famous examples Merle Oberon and Boris Karloff hid their Anglo-Indian roots, enabling them to rise to fame. Hear their stories for the first time in this riveting session.
Uther Charlton-Stevens is an author, historian and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. His latest book, Anglo-India and the End of Empire, was released by Hurst Publishers in London and Oxford University Press in New York towards the end of 2022. Rights to the South Asia edition have been sold to HarperCollins India. Charlton-Stevens grew up in Hong Kong before returning to the UK to study at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. His writing draws inspiration from the stories told to him in childhood by his Anglo-Indian grandmother, including of her time as an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps in India during the Second World War.
Historian Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. He has contributed to many publications around the world, including the China Economic Quarterly and The Guardian and has written various books about China. His novel Midnight in Peking was a New York Times bestseller, and this and his most recent book, City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir are currently being developed as movies. He is a regular contributor of long-reads to the South China Morning Post weekend magazine and broadcasts often on RTHK3. He is currently working on a biography of the year that Wallis Warfield Spencer, later the Duchess of Windsor, spent in China (1924/1925) for publication in 2024.
“100 photographs for 100 years” at musée des Confluences, Lyons, France … The exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of birth ofMarc Riboud, it’s on to the end of the year and Riboud took some amazing photos of China on his visits. More details here…
If you can’t get to Lyon a catalogue is on the way…here… in March apparently.
Book 7 in The China Project Ultimate Bookshelf is is the first in the Inspector Chen series of crime novels that defined the city and the 1990s era…click here
