All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
My piece for the Mekong Review from November 2022 on the evolution of the spy novel with a Chinese element is up as the Review‘s “Free Read” for a while. You can read it here…and there’s lots more on their website here plus, of course, you can subscribe and support a most excellent publication.
Chinese Autobiographical Writing: An Anthology of Personal Accounts, edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey is professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington. Her many books include The Cambridge Illustrated History of China and Emperor Huizong. Cong Ellen Zhang is professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is author of Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China and Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China: Family, State, and Native Place. Ping Yao is professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles. She is author of Women, Gender and Sexuality in China: A Brief History. Together, they are the editors of Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives.
Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. From poetry, letters, and diaries to statements in legal proceedings, these engaging and readable works draw us into the past and provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century. Some focus on a person’s entire life, others on a specific moment. Some have an element of humor, others are entirely serious. Taken together, these selections offer an intimate view of how Chinese men and women, both famous and obscure, reflected on their experiences as well as their personal struggles and innermost thoughts.
With an introduction and list of additional readings for each selection, this volume is ideal for undergraduate courses on Chinese history, literature, religion, and women and family. Read individually, each piece illuminates a person, place, and moment. Read in chronological order, they highlight cultural change over time by showing how people explored new ways to represent themselves in writing.
A nice one pataca stamp Macao stamp from 1950 featuring the Porta do Cerca, or old barrier gate between Macao and China. A bit more built up these days!!
And now somewhat less appealing…
An interesting stamped letter from 1938 for a number of reasons – 1) identifies the offices of the Indo-China Steam Navigation at 27 The Bund; 2) the postage cancels commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the transfer of the Chinese capital from Peking to Nanking (in 1927 obviously); 3) on the right hand side you can see the mark of the Steamer Postmaster.
BTW on the adressee: Wilfrid “Fox” Hamlin (more commonly spelt Wilfred – so this may be a typo on trhe letter) was born in 1883 in Shanghai. AS a young man he appears to be have been a Post Office employee based briefly in Chinkiang (Zhanjiang) in Jiangsi provoin ce on the Yangtze. He also seems to have work in insurance for Cornhill in Shanghai for a time before joining the Shanghai Municipal Police in 1928 but seems to have left the SMP’s employ within a year and then presumably joined the Indo-China Steam Navigation company as a Purser. He married Rose Ellen Loxton and had 2 children. Wilfred and Rose (but seemingly not their children) were interned in Yangchow A Camp in Shanghai in 1943, later being moved to Chapei Camp (he was recorded as a ‘clerk’ on the camp records). He died in Vancouver in 1949
Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, edited by Jennifer Altehenger (Editor) Denise Y. Ho (Editor)….interesting subject, great cover image…
The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to have had little material culture to speak of. Yet people attributed great meaning to materials and objects often precisely because they were rare and difficult to obtain. This first volume devoted to the material history of the period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough.
Bringing together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more, this volume shares groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film. With engaging narratives and probing analysis, the contributors make a place for China’s experience in the history of global material culture and the study of socialist modernity.
ntroduction: Making Revolution Material / Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho
Sadly Helen Burton and her great store The Camel’s Bell (which once stood in the lobby and third floor of the Peking Hotel (now the Nuo Hotel) is largely forgotten now. She is important though – an American woman entrepreneur in inter-war China, a very famous store at the time, she also ran trunk sales of her Chinese stuff (purses, furs, dresses, various jewellery and objet etc) across America. I think she was from Bismark, Nebraska. She was briefly interned by the Japanese in WW2 in China but swapped for Japanese citizens in America and returned home. She never married but adopted about half a dozen young Chinese girl orphans. She should be much better known. Her parties at her hutong home and an old temple she rented in the hills outside Peking were legendary!
Many thanks to a ChinaRhyming reader for sharing this beautiful purse – if you’re interested by the way, it may be up for sale, so let me know and I’ll connect etc….
Sanshichiro Yamamoto (1855-1943) was a Japanese photographer from Okayama Prefecture. He started a photo studio in Shibahikage-cho (near present day Shimbashi Station) in Tokyo, Japan, in 1882 (the 15th year of Meiji Era). Yamamoto later moved to Peking (Beijing) and opened a photo studio (Yamamoto Shōzō Kan or Yamamoto Syozo House), from where he sold photographs, souvenir photobooks and coloured post cards, of Beijing, its suburbs and people, at the end of Qing period.
Accompanied by one photograph from Sze Yuen Ming, Shanghai.The Chinese studio Sze Yuen Ming and Co was known in Chinese as Yao Hua studio (Shangyang Yaohua zhaoxiang 上洋耀華照相). This studio based in Shanghai and active between 1892 and the 1920s was directed by Shi Dezhi 施德之 (1861-1935). Szes production ranged from portraits (notably popular hand-tinted photographs of courtesans) and news pictures, to topographical scenes that suited the tastes of both Chinese and Western communities. Szes landscape photographs received official recognition at the Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1900 with the jury awarding the studio a honourable grant. It became then the only studio in the late Qing dynasty period to be awarded an international prize. Yamamoto’s photographs were published in Views of the North China Affair, Picturesque Views of Peking and View and Custom of North China (1909).
Patricia, the author of Policing Hong Kong – an Irish History and ‘Women, Crime and the Courts: HK 1841-1941’, spoke at VIBE bookstore in Mui Wo on Lantau Island on Saturday 28th January about ‘Murder on the Islands’ which you can watch here…
