All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Quite a detailed account across a goof few hundred pages…but more a think to look at than study for the casual scholar….here the edition from the London Library…
Paper Republic’s definitive guide to contemporary Chinese literature in translation features detailed biographical entries covering almost 100 of the most important writers working in the Chinese language today, from Anni Baby to Zhang Yueran, by way of Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan. The biographies are complemented by in-depth essays:
Link to buy here
More details here
The logo of the Vienna Bakery. There were a number of businesses called the Vienna Bakery in Shanghai over the decades, dating back to the start of the twentieth century. This though is from 1946 and was the Vienna Bakery on, I think, Broadway (Daming Lu)…
Now, thanks to Katya Knyazeva, up on the internet archive….click here
For German reading fans of Emily Hahn…Shanghai Magic, Hahn’s reporting for the New Yorker has been reissued in a new edition…..
Amy Matthewson’s Cartooning China is recently published…
This book explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841-1901.
Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the author engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness.
With a wide array of illustrations, this book in the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series will be an important resource for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political history and Empire, Chinese studies, popular culture, Victoriana, as well as media studies. It will also be of interest to readers who want to learn more about Punch, its history, and Sino-British relations.
My four-part podcast, The Lady from Hong Kong, uncovering the true case of Miss Seto Gin, arrested for smuggling opium in San Francisco in 1939, who got her into that situation, why escaping a wartorn China made people desparate and what happened to her and her lover/drug kingpin Chung Lei. Recorded for RTHK3 Hong Kong…
As i mentioned yesterday this year books published in 1926 come into the public domain. See Gowen & Hall’s Outline History of China here and Elizabeth Crump-Enders Temple Bells & Silver Sails here. Another is Thomas Steep’s Chinese Fantastics, first published by Century in 1925, a somewhat entertaing engagingly written account of early 1920s China. the book claims to be a guide ‘how to understand and interpret the Orient’.
As a young man Cincinnati-born Steep was sent as a reporter on a roving tour of ther American South, then to Cuba and then to cover the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The London Mail then sent him to cover the political upheavals in Mexico around Diaz and Pancho Villa. He then went to China as a reporter with the Associated Press before joining the staff of the New York Herald Tribune.
