All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Produced in 1899 by the Hydropgraphic Office in London for the Admiralty, a map of the SE China Coast including Macao and running to Pedro Blanco.
Pedro Blanco by the way is an isolated rock pinnacle 85km east of Hong Kong…
I blogged recently on Anna May Wong’s fleeting but memorable appearance in Elstree Calling a filmed review show from 1930 where she appeared in a strange skit on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Those posts are here and here…
My thanks to Dr Anne Witchard of the University of Westminster (whose book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown discusses Anna May Wong’s London sojourn in depth) who points out that Wong is wearing her costume (sans headpiece) from Piccadilly, the film she made in London the year before, 1929. Piccadilly was made by British International Pictures which was in a consortium with British National Studios and Elstree Studios, so perhaps her costume as Shosho, London pub scullery maid who becomes a West End performer, was just waiting for her when she turned up to film Elstree Calling?
“The question I shall discuss is how members of the Communist Party should cultivate and temper themselves,” Liu Shaoqi wrote in the early days of the Chinese Communist Party. Is anyone still interested in the answer? click here to read book #17 on The China Project’s Ultimate China Bookshelf…
It may not look that much like her (while her image on the US Quarter was very good), but the new Anna May Wong Barbie doll does at least exist…
My monthly author Q&A this April for the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine is with Philip Snow, author of the authoritive China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press)…click here
My latest long read for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine – What would interwar Shanghai or Tokyo look like almost empty? How a Taiwanese artist found fame by stripping cities of people & traffic, leaving only calm. The beautiful art but ultimately tragic life of Tan Teng-pho – click here
A Fette-Li Chinese rug, c.1920s. I wrote about the Fette-Li Rug Co for the South China Morning Post last year (click here). Their rugs in good condition are pretty rare now (moths, wear & tear, not valued much in China for a long time) so good to see new ones not seen before.
Out this week – Wang Xiaobo’s (trans: Yan Yan) Golden Age. A bestselling novel from the 90’s in its first full English translation. A satire of the Cultural Revolution –
Twenty-one year old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape of the beautiful doctor Cheng Qinyang. So begins the riotously funny story of their illicit love affair, the Party officials who enjoy their forced confessions a little too much, and Wang’s life under the Communist regime: his misadventures as a biology lecturer in a Beijing university, and his entanglements with family, friends and lovers. Golden Age is an explosive, subversive, wild and hilarious satire, featuring one of literature’s great protagonists, a sensation when it was published in the 1990s and beloved today.