A pair of Chinese gouache and watercolour paintings on paper (and framed in bamboo), c.1856. Pearl River village scenes – fishermen families and their boats; flowering branches being sorted, with a figure smoking a pipe seated beside a staircase in the foreground. The pair come from an album of 49 leaves painted in 1856 1856. The album, sent as a gift to family in Dortmund, came with a German inscription which stated it was from Loo Ling Hong, Shanghai, March 1861 (Loo Ling was the Hong name for Dircks & Co., Commission Merchants). Dircks was originally a Swatow (Shantou) based firm from the 1860s founded by H. A. Dircks and Louis Ortmann.
Looking through some old books I came across this copy of The Companion Book Club’s (UK) newsletter from 1956 (my mum was a member in the 1950s and 60s).
And it just happened to include a profile of Ernest K Gann and his (then) new book Soldier of Fortune, set in Hong Kong and Macao and later a Clark Gable movie. I recently wrote about the novel for my column in Macau Closer magazine if your interest is piqued….. click here
Arthur Waley, the English orientalist and Sinologist who achieved both popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry, hung out with the Bloomsbury Group, had a messy private life and worked at the British Museum with Laurence Binyon join the London Library in 27/10/21, the independent lending library in St James’s, established in 1841. The London Library recently made some of their archive records available online.
Waley was Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum at the time he joined on 27/10/21. However, he fairly swiftly resigned on 1/8/22 citing the introduction of earlier closing times. Another great mystery solved!!!
Portrait of Arthur Waley by Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe (‘Ray’) Strachey, 1925
Massive congratulations to Yang Shuang-zi and translator Lin King on the excellent Taiwan Travelogue winning the International Booker 2026 (and on being first book in mandarin Chinese to do so)….. if you haven’t read it, but it today (and support small presses too….)
As people ask me about vintage Chiang Yee books occasionally – there’s a Silent Traveller in Dublin up for sale at a reasonable price… sale is on 17 June 2026….click here
I happened to be on Wyndham Street in Marylebone today passing by William Somerset Maugham’s old home.
Maugham moved here just after WW1. He was newly married to Syrie and they had a daughter. But Maugham was of course gay and had already met his lifelong partner Gerald Haxton. Forced to choose the future of his life Maugham and Haxton travelled to Asia in 1919-20. Upon returning to Wyndham Street Maugham wrote On a Chinese Screen and his The Painted Veil, his two great China-related works.
A Shanghai Driving License issued to A Hindson, 23 years old and living on Aivei Road, better known as Avenue Road, and now Beijing Lu. The licence was issued on November 19, 1930 (19 being a reference to Chinese Republic years since 1911). Interestingly the licence specially states that Hindson is driving a Morris Cowley (I’ll put a pic of one below for non-British readers who may not be familiar with the classic UK car). I don’t know much about Hindson except that he obviously liked machinery and tech – he was the secretary and treasurer for the Shanghai Amateur Photographic Society for a while. I think he was from a family that had been in China for some time as a man also called Hindson, who could well be his father, appears in the records working for the Shanghai Public Health Department and then Rose, Downs and Thompson (Far East) traders.
In March I spent some time with John le Carre’s biographer Adam Sisman. We spoke at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and the Macao International Literary Festival (aka The Script Road) about le Carre, his time in mid-1970s Hong Kong and his Hong Kong-set magnum opus The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). You can see a video of our conversation in Macao’s Casa Garden here…
And there’s also a piece by me on le Carre’s time at the Hong Kong FCC (then at Sutherland House on Chater Road just before it moved to its current location on Lower Albert Road) and an interview (again by me) with Sisman in the bar at the FCC in the most recent edition of the Club’s in-house magazine, The Correspondent. Click here or read the entire magazine online here…
