All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A rare edition of Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang’s diary extracts from the 1936 kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek. Entitled Sian: A Coup D’Etat and published in Shanghai in a limited edition by Kelly & Walsh in 1937. It was printed on specially-prepared Chinese handmade paper made from bamboo fibre. The silk cover has Chinese calligraphy in Chiang Kai-Shek’s own hand.
“Royal Naval Frigate off the coast of Macao”, an admittedly rather crude pen and watercolour, painted c.1805-1813 by Lt George Crichton, Royal Navy. Crichton was, I believe Scottish and after the Navy became Manager of the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leith Shipping Company at Leith of Glasgow , Lanarkshire. His major claim to fame was that he proposed the idea of the Trinity Chain Pier that spans the Firth of Forth. From Macao to Edinburgh!
Some Shanghai silversmiths i’ve noted before include Wang Hing, Wo Shing, Hung Chong, Luen Wo, and Zeewo, Tuck Chang. Add to this list Zee Sung, yet another Shanghai based silversmith. There were many silversmiths operating in the first few decades of the twentieth century targeting mostly the tourist and Shanghailander trade. Many were originally Canton (Guangzhou) based tradesmen but moved north to Shanghai withb the growth of the fpriegn population and development of the city as a major stopping off point for ocean liners.
For the next few weeks on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf we’re getting into Maoism and starting with a small, but essential, biography of The Great Helmsman by the preeminent Sinologist of his generation, Jonathan Spence’s Mao….click here to read…to see all previous books click here.
Xin Zhang’s The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China is out from Harvard University Press this April….
Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.
Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships.
Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.
My Crime & the City column for Crimereads bounces around all over the globe, but occasionally is a place that might particularly interest China Rhyming readers. This fortnight’s edition is on Lhasa and the mysteries of Tibet…Click here to read…
In case you’re not near a bookshop that is stocking my new China Revisited series of historical reprints on Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China, or like amazon, then they’re on bookstore.org too (supporting independent bookstores globally)…
Harry Hervey – Where Strange Gods Call
Constance Gordon Cumming – Wanderings in China
