Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China’s war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, government officials, professionals, and merchants flocked into India for training, business opportunities, retreat, and rehabilitation. This book is about how the activities of the Chinese sojourners in wartime India caused great concerns to the British colonial regime and the Chinese Nationalist government alike and how these sojourners responded to the surveillance, discipline, and check imposed by the governments. This book provides a subaltern perspective on the history of modern India-China relations that has been dominated by accounts of elite cultural interaction and geopolitical machination.
Seattle people of my acquaintance – you’re getting a superb rare books store in a former Starbucks at the Washington Shoe Building courtesy of Jeffrey Long & Long Bros Fine & Rare Books (who often have amazing China books in stock). This should make you happy as there’s nothing bad about this news!
Chiang Yee and His Circle celebrates the life and work of Chiang Yee (1903–1977), a Chinese writer, poet, and painter who made his home in London, England during the 1930s and 1940s. It examines Chiang’s relationship with his circle of friends and colleagues in the English capital and assesses the work he produced during his sojourn there. This edited volume, with contributions from eleven distinguished scholars, tells a story of a Chinese intellectual community in London that up to now has been largely overlooked. It portrays a dynamic picture of the London-based émigré life during the years that led up to the war and during the conflict that was the catalyst for many of them moving on. In addition, the book broadens our understanding of cultural interactions between China and the West in Hampstead, one of the most vibrant artistic communities in London.
The new edition of the Mekong Review is out – all excellent content as ever – and I have a rather tongue-in-cheek piece on the history of China and the spy novel and the problems implicit in crafting a good espionage tale in the era of Xi Jinping. The Mekong Review is a subscription publiction (in paper and online) and well worth supporting – click here.
Seems the notion of keeping a bookshop afloat by selling a whole range of other products – greeting cards, wrapping paper, toys, sweets, stationery, whatever – is not that new. The venerable booksellers of Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Kelly & Walsh, were selling cigars alongside books. This advert from 1911.
Last year I wrote a Long Read for theSouth China Morning Post weekend magazine on the old Shanghai Academy founded and run by the artist Liu Haisu. The Academy was housed in the same building for many decades on rue Bard (now Shunchang Lu), which is sadly slated for demolition at some point soon. You can read the article here.
Anyway, a few new pictures (to me at least) of the old rue Bard and the Shanghai Art Academy….
Rue Bard, French Concession, 1920s
Front entrance of the Shanghai Art Academy, Rue Bard, French Concession, 1920s
An exhibition of student work, first floor gallery, Shanghai Art Academy, Rue Bard, 1920s
A good long review of Joseph Sassoon’s The Global Merchants by Jordyn Haime for the Tablet magazine, with a few quotes from me too! Click here to read. And, by the way, my own review of the book for the South China Morning Post is here.
Tom Pellman’s novel The Soul of Beijing (from the good people at Camphor Press in Taiwan) out this December is a nuanced and intricate portrait of near contemporary Beijing…
New Year fireworks illuminate the Beijing night, but all twenty-year-old Panzi can think about is the mysterious former classmate who has just burst back into his life. Impulsive, spontaneous, and full of compassion, Xiao Song is like no one he has ever known – the first person who has made Panzi feel whole since his father’s suicide.
Across town and a thousand social strata away, the son of Beijing’s vice mayor and his gilded friends tear through the night in a cherry-red Ferrari, swerving off the road and into Xiao Song’s life. Panzi rushes to the scene just as a barely conscious Xiao Song is whisked away and evidence of the crash scrubbed out of existence.
The police stonewall Panzi. His mother tells him to let sleeping dogs lie. Desperate and unwilling to give up, he enlists a hard-nosed trainee journalist and a loser expat English teacher in his search. They comb Beijing – from homeless shelters to gaudy faux-French penthouses – inching closer to the truth about Xiao Song, the crash, and the soul of the city itself.
