All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Talking of Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time (1950) yesterday – Book #4 on my Ultimate China Bookshelf for The China Project click here… I didn’t really emphasise enough how good his illustrations are in the book…so here’s a selection…
Book #4 on my Ultimate China Bookshelf for The China Project – Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time (1950)…click here…
If you’ve never read Jane Gardam’s Old Filth then you are in for a treat. A marvellous & funny evocation of Empire Hong Kong & Malaya, the perfidy of the legal ‘profession’ & the sad inevitable return to a home never really known. A lovely 50th Anniversary Edition (the 50th of Abacus Books, not Old Filth) out next week from Hachette.
This list is from 1930 and, I presume, was used by Asian hotels to facilitate guests doing the Grand Far Eastern Tour and moving from establishment to establishment. Who the hell thought this up I have no idea!
They built a police station on Shanghai’s Blood Alley where Jack Riley once ran the Manhattan bar – (officially named Rue Chu Pao San; now Xikou Lu)…
Back in the Day….
Now…
I hadn’t posted Jing Tsu’s book, Kingdom of Characters, earlier as I didn’t know it had quite so much really fascinating history in it….so let’s remedy that – a totall engrossing read by the way…
What does it take to reinvent the world’s oldest living language?
China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language – a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike – accessible to a globalized, digital world.
Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script – and the value-system it represents – to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences.
With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic transformations.
I’ll be at the Hong Kong Young Readers Festival in March this year, part of the larger Hong Kong International Literary Festival. So if you’re a school….I’m in town!
see the brochure of available speakers for schools and possible topics here
I’ve blogged previously about a number of silversmiths who operated in Shanghai from around the mid-1800s to 1949 largely targeting the Shanghailander and tourist market. Many of these firms were run by Cantonese silversmiths who had moved their businesses north to the potentially more profitable location of Shanghai.
Some silversmiths i’ve noted include Wang Hing, Wo Shing, Luen Wo, and Zeewo, Tuck Chang. Here’s another, Hung Chong, another Shanghai-based silversmith and retailer, based in Shanghai and operating between 1830 and 1925. Not sure why Hung Chong went out of business (or was acquired/merged) in 1925 as is reported on the internet?
triangular silver napkin ring embossed with a dragon and monogrammed cartouche