All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
“100 photographs for 100 years” at musée des Confluences, Lyons, France … The exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of birth of Marc Riboud, it’s on to the end of the year and Riboud took some amazing photos of China on his visits. More details here…
If you can’t get to Lyon a catalogue is on the way…here… in March apparently.
Book 7 in The China Project Ultimate Bookshelf is is the first in the Inspector Chen series of crime novels that defined the city and the 1990s era…click here
I’m heading to Macao next Friday and speaking at the Portuguese Bookshop (Livraria Portuguesa) at 6.30pm….if you happen to be in Macao do come along…
I’ll feature the new Chinese edition of Da Zheng’s biography of Lady Precioius Stream playwrite and 1930s London resident Shih-I Hsiung as it’s a great cover (from Chinese University of Hong Kong Press)…. The English language version is here BTW…
Since first becoming a user of the HKU Library twenty-five years ago Paul French has mined its resources for material that has subsequently formed the backbone of his work. The source for many biographies, histories, novels, podcasts, and magazine articles have often come from HKUL collections. From discovering what exactly a Fox Spirit is and why you should worry if you meet one to finding lost lives in forgotten old memoirs, HKUL has proved to be a treasure trove. Such a hoard of great books in fact that the library doesn’t always realise everything it has – the old, and long thought lost, Foochow Club Library lies scattered throughout the stacks of HKUL just awaiting reassembly. A talk on how to constructively meander through miles of shelves while profitably procrastinating among the stacks with the New York Times bestselling author and HKUL aficionado.
It’s free and you can register here
A reder popped into the Foreign Languages Bookstore on Wanfujing in Beijing the other and bought a copy of my book Midnight in Peking, in English….They were surprised to find the censor elfs had been at work with the sticky tape and scissors… This appears to be new as the book has been on sale in China for nearly a decade (and is in Chinese translation), but obviously someone has issued an order!
the taped over lines….the only two references to Mao and Maoism in the book
“….finally as a people’s republic with a dictator.”
“…the drawing tight of the bamboo curtain under Mao.”
Environs of Macao by British painter Dr Thomas Boswall Watson (1815-1860)
As noted yesterday I recently wrote a piece on the Fette-Li Rug Company of Peking and Tientsin that mixed traditional desgins with art-deco styles in the 1920s and 1930s. The article, in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine is here.
And here are some more Fette-Li rugs to wish you owned…
