A Chinese silver matchbox holder with engraved bamboo decoration to each side, c.1900, stamped CJ for the China Jewellery Company, active in Shanghai between 1875 and 1920.
#46 is up – A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, published in 1995. Blood Red Sunset (translated by Howard Goldblatt) is the memoir of a former Red Guard, a Beijing boy who heads to Inner Mongolia to help the peasants in 1968. However, the Cultural Revolution he supports turns against him. He is arrested, tortured, jailed, and betrayed by his best friend and branded a counterrevolutionary before being sent into internal exile in Inner Mongolia during the last years of the Cultural Revolution. There are side plots about the author’s martial arts prowess and his infatuation with a girl. It’s fair to say that not everyone liked Blood Red Sunset. It divided opinion among readers with many finding it too personal, and too divorced from history.
My author Q&A column for this months China-Britain Business Council‘s Focus magazine – Richard Hu’s Reinventing the Chinese City (Columbia University Press) on the work being done in China to urbanise its cities in recent years – & looking ahead to the next 10… click here…
Mid-19th century naïve oil on board of Victoria City, Hong Kong Harbour. Unknown artist but clearly got back to England and was sold through Cronshaw’s of Blackburn (who I don’t think are in business anymore)…
A very rare copy of Island Stories (1905) subtitled, Extracts From The Papers of Mr John Westwood, Mariner of London and Shanghai, with Original illustrations From Descriptions Supplied By The Author. The book was printed and published by The North-China Herald. The book is mostly reminisicences of travel to the South Seas.
