All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
1927 – what a year in Shanghai! Labour troubles, fighting between the Nationalists and the Communists, the streets running red with blood, gangsters gone wild…but remember, it’s Shanghai, and even in 1927 property was the big winner!!
H. P. Wasson and Company, aka Wasson‘s, was an Indianapolis, Indiana department store. In 1929 they had a “Peking” themed Christmas promotion – candleabras, embroideries, kettles, tea sets, ginger jars, incense burners and….opium bowls (from a buck to $6.95)!….
Shanghai 1937 – a disastorous year, the Japanese attacked, the “Bloody Saturday” bombings, the Settlement and Frenchtown surrounded and the start of Guodo (Solitary Island) period….and the last handkerchiefs to make it out to America…fortunately in time for Christmas…
Far East Interport Rifle Match 1933 prize shield, silvered base metal plaque showing British Royal Crest surmounted by lion on crown, central device of two figures supporting panel engraved “Inteaport (sic) Challenge Trophy – Singapore Shanghai Penang Hong Kong” with various flags and allegorical figures supporting. A scroll below “Far East Interport Rifle Match. Winners Shanghai Score…”
Luis Chan (1905-1995) is widely regarded as Hong Kong’s pioneer of modern art. Chan was known for his exquisitely-drawn realistic landscape paintings in watercolour at the beginning of Chan’s artistic career, earning a reputation as the ‘King of Watercolour’. Later, Chan’s works were mostly imaginative and colourful, depicting dreamlike scenes with whimsy. Developing his distinct artistic style, Chan transcended any genres of the art and culture. Chan’s works are matched by an equally vibrant personality.
Coinciding with the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s 45th anniversary, this flagship exhibition explores Chan’s art and legacy in a thematic survey that highlights the artist’s perceptive portrayal of daily urban drama and identity, his love of narrative and storytelling, and his uplifting spirit throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
This exhibition is divided into four chapters—’The Artist and the Critic’, ‘Hong Kong Through the Looking Glass’, ‘Luis in Artland’, and ‘Vision is a Many-Splendored Thing’—featuring Chan’s paintings from 1950s to 1980s where different visual expressions can be discovered in different state of creation. The exhibition presents Chan’s kaleidoscopic creative trajectory, inviting the audience to the fantastical stage of Luis Chan.
More details here
Count Arthur Cassini was a legendary Russian ambassador (his family had Italian roots) to China in the late nineteenth century. He was ambassador at a fascinating and rocky time in Sino-Russian relations – The Triple Intervention, the negotiation for the Russian lease over Port Arthur (Lushun), and of course the Russo-Japanese War. But I had never really followed what happened to him after he left China and moved on.
I’m currently reading Helen Rappaport’s excellent After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris Between the Wars. Rapport has the sad story of Cassini after the 1917 Russian Revolution when he was in exile in Paris. Stephen Bonsal, an American journalist, war correspondent, author, diplomat, and translator, was in Paris for the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 and noted, in his memoir Suitors and Supplicants, the despondent Russians on the streets . Among them:
‘I saw Count Cassini, so long ambassador extraordinary of Holy Russia, running through the sleet and rain on the Place de la Madeleine to catch a bus to take him to the modest suburban retreat, or refuge, with which the French government has provided him.’
Bonsal remembered that the last time he had encountered Cassini was back in 1896 when he had been ‘lording it over all China’,
‘When he moved through the streets of Peking, sotnias* of Cossacks dashed ahead and cleared the way for the little man with the monocle who over four years, with the dreaded power of Russian behind him, dominated four hundred million Chinese and made them do his bidding.’
Cassini died in Paris later in 1919 at age 83.
This exhibition tells the often turbulent story of the quest for colour on porcelain in China and France. It contrasts two crucial moments in the history of porcelain driven by the desire to extend the range of enamels. They occurred at the turn of the 18th century in China and during the 19th century in France, two periods during which the interactions between Europe and China, whether cultural or belligerent, were particularly intense. The first room in the exhibition introduces visitors to enamelling techniques, the notions of translucent and opaque enamels, and to the famille verte and famille rose. This is followed by a presentation of Chinese enamelled porcelain, principally from the reigns of Kangxi (1662–1722), Yongzheng (1723–35), and Qianlong (1736–95), which are among the jewels of Alfred Baur’s collection and which exemplify the use of colour on porcelain over a period of more than a century. The new palette developed in the imperial workshops was soon exported from the port of Canton on porcelain and copper-enamel wares on that had been specially designed for the Western market. The second section of the exhibition takes place a century later in France, at the Sèvres manufactory, where Chinese colours, long coveted for their brilliance, were keenly researched. Missionaries, chemists, and French consuls in China all contributed to bringing back samples to France where the mysteries of Chinese manufacturing techniques could be fathomed. The last part of the exhibition introduces more contemporary research on the use of colour, first of all by Fance Franck (1927-2008), who from the late 1960s worked with the Sèvres factory to recreate the famous “fresh red” or “sacrificial red” that had been mastered by the potters in Jingdezhen several centuries earlier. The exhibition’s investigation into this endless chromatic quest is brought to a close by the pure and gleamingly colourful works of Thomas Bohle (born in 1958).
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Theodore Huters’ Taking China to the World….
Modernity, modernization, modernism, and the modern have all been key, interrelated terms in post-traditional China. For all their ubiquity, however, in previous studies of Chinese culture and society there has been insufficient clarity as to what the precise meanings each term has encompassed from the period beginning in 1895, the year of China’s catastrophic defeat by Japan. The importance of these terms is underlined by their implication in China’s positioning in the world over the course of the past century and a half, as well as the path China will follow in the future.
Looking into a set of concepts and practices that have been instrumental in China’s road to modernity, namely, the definition of the modern itself, a new notion of literature, linguistic reform, translation, popular culture, and the transformation of the publishing world, Taking China to the World explores the various ways in which activity in the cultural sphere shaped Chinese perceptions of both how its historical course might evolve and how all-compassing change needed to be managed.
Most studies of China’s modern transformation have implicitly based themselves on the inevitability of a process of cultural, social, and institutional rationalization, more often than not based on Western models, without grappling with the full extent of the struggles to reconcile needed changes with a grand tradition, which, for all the condemnation aimed at it after 1895, still held a powerful appeal for most of those who seriously considered the full extent of the interactions between new and old. That an idea of a monolithic new seemed to take hold of many members of the Chinese elite after the period circa 1920 does not rule out the subtle hold that key portions of the grand tradition have had over modern China. No other book offers this kind of analysis of both the historical origins and contemporary consequences of the agonizing choices made by actors in the cultural sphere who occupied core positions in the life of the Chinese nation.
Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity is a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in all subfields of Chinese studies, particularly for those engaged in charting the transformation of Chinese culture and society over the last 150 years and considering what those transformations might hold in store for the future.