A brilliant polymath and part of the ‘first wave’ of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world. While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. His travels included the salons of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. Manning’s extraordinary story sheds a new light on English Romanticism.
My Crime and the City column for crimereads.com bounces all over the globe but occasionally to places readers of China Rhyming might find especially interesting – this go round, it’s Kabul…click here
Some time ago I did a story for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on Bertram Sheldrake, a UK Muslim convert offered the job of King of the short-lived Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (known as ETR – & now in what is Xinjiang) in 1933. Nobody in the region was best pleased! You can read that here.
Then rather wonderfully Sharon O’Connor, a local historiain in East Dulwich, looked into Sheldrake’s backgroud in East Dulwich, London SE19 & was a winner in the UK National Archives 20sStreets local history writing competition. So a little more on Khalid Sheldrake and his South East London life here…
I’ve posted about half a dozen other silversmiths in Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before (just put ‘silversmith’ in the search box to see). Here’s a smaller and less well known silversmith that moved from Canton to Shanghai sometime around the late nineteenth century as the trade moved up the coast…Lianchang (or sometimes spelt Lainchang). They were in business roughly c.1890-1925
Book #18 on my Ultimate China Bookshelf for The China Project is Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Posters…click here to read…
“A lavishly illustrated study traces the development of the style and content of the Chinese propaganda poster in the decade of reform, from its traditional origins to its use as a tool for political and economic purposes.” —Routledge
Timed to appear to coincide with the new China’s Hidden Century exhibition at the British Museum that starts in May (here), Creators of Modern China, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell have compiled 100 biographies of key figures of the late Qing Dynasty.
This book sprang from a simple but original ambition: to provide an understanding – told through the lives of 100 significant individuals – of how China transformed from dynastic empire to a modern, republican nation during the period 1796 to 1912.
Both famous and surprisingly little-known women and men are brought together in eight thematic sections that illuminate the birth of modern China. Featured figures include the Dowager Empress Cixi, the power behind the throne of the Qing dynasty for fifty years; Yu Rongling, who is regarded as the founder of modern dance in China and who trained in Paris with Isadora Duncan; Duanfang, China’s first serious collector of international art before being murdered by his own troops in the 1911 Revolution that destroyed the Qing dynasty; Shi Yang, the greatest woman pirate in the world who is now celebrated in popular culture as a powerful feminine icon; Luo Zhenyu, the ‘father’ of Chinese archaeology whose discoveries confirmed the antiquity of Chinese civilization; and many others.
Written by a large team of specialists, this book breathes life into China’s history and international relations, providing multiple insights into the history of this vast country and its role on the world stage.
