All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
The new edition of the Mekong Review is out – all excellent content as ever – and I have a rather tongue-in-cheek piece on the history of China and the spy novel and the problems implicit in crafting a good espionage tale in the era of Xi Jinping. The Mekong Review is a subscription publiction (in paper and online) and well worth supporting – click here.
Seems the notion of keeping a bookshop afloat by selling a whole range of other products – greeting cards, wrapping paper, toys, sweets, stationery, whatever – is not that new. The venerable booksellers of Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Kelly & Walsh, were selling cigars alongside books. This advert from 1911.
Last year I wrote a Long Read for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on the old Shanghai Academy founded and run by the artist Liu Haisu. The Academy was housed in the same building for many decades on rue Bard (now Shunchang Lu), which is sadly slated for demolition at some point soon. You can read the article here.
Anyway, a few new pictures (to me at least) of the old rue Bard and the Shanghai Art Academy….
A good long review of Joseph Sassoon’s The Global Merchants by Jordyn Haime for the Tablet magazine, with a few quotes from me too! Click here to read. And, by the way, my own review of the book for the South China Morning Post is here.
Tom Pellman’s novel The Soul of Beijing (from the good people at Camphor Press in Taiwan) out this December is a nuanced and intricate portrait of near contemporary Beijing…
New Year fireworks illuminate the Beijing night, but all twenty-year-old Panzi can think about is the mysterious former classmate who has just burst back into his life. Impulsive, spontaneous, and full of compassion, Xiao Song is like no one he has ever known – the first person who has made Panzi feel whole since his father’s suicide.
Across town and a thousand social strata away, the son of Beijing’s vice mayor and his gilded friends tear through the night in a cherry-red Ferrari, swerving off the road and into Xiao Song’s life. Panzi rushes to the scene just as a barely conscious Xiao Song is whisked away and evidence of the crash scrubbed out of existence.
The police stonewall Panzi. His mother tells him to let sleeping dogs lie. Desperate and unwilling to give up, he enlists a hard-nosed trainee journalist and a loser expat English teacher in his search. They comb Beijing – from homeless shelters to gaudy faux-French penthouses – inching closer to the truth about Xiao Song, the crash, and the soul of the city itself.
Fantastic marketing all along the Seine in Paris for Marek Halter’s new novel of the Shanghai Jewish ghetto – La Juive de Shanghai... A rough translation of the publisher’s book blurb below, though I can’t explain why the woman on the cover is dressed in a traditional Vietnamese Ao Dai garment, which would have been pretty rare to non-existent in 1940s Shanghai.
Berlin, 1937. Ruth, juive et talentueuse couturière de 22 ans, se lie d’amitié avec Clara, jeune résistante allemande. Pourchassées, elles décident de rejoindre une destination inattendue : Shanghai, où des milliers de juifs se sont réfugiés.
Clara est la première à partir pour la Chine. Ruth, elle, doit traverser l’Europe entière… jusqu’en Sibérie. Grâce au consul japonais de Lituanie, elle obtient un visa pour Kōbe, le grand port du pays du soleil‑levant. Parvenue enfin à Shanghai – ville bouillonnante où se côtoie un monde interlope d’espions, de trafiquants d’opium et de résistants –, elle y retrouve miraculeusement Clara, devenue agente des communistes.
La suite ? C’est Bo Xiao-Nao, la fille de Ruth, qui la raconte. orpheline, elle tombe sur un carnet tenu par sa mère. En le feuilletant, elle découvre, bouleversée, le destin fascinant de celle qu’on appellera à jamais la Juive de Shanghai…
The Frida Kahlo exhibiton at the Palais Galliera in Paris reveals this Chinese skirt and shawl that was in her wardrobe. Apparently acquired on her first visit to San Francisco and the city’s Chinatown in 1930-1931. Kahlo wrote back to her father in Mexico City: ‘Imagine, there are 10,000 Chinese here, in their shops they sell beautiful things, clothing, and handmade fabrics of very fine silk.’
Yesterday I noted the new exhibition on early Chinese phootgraphy currently on at the Peabody Essex Museum yesterday – there is an accompanying book.…
Photography’s development as a new form of art and technology coincided with profound changes in the way China engaged with the world in the nineteenth century. The medium evolved in response to war, trade, travel, and a desire for knowledge about an unfamiliar place. Power and Perspective provides a rich account of the exchanges among photographers, artists, patrons, and subjects in the treaty port cities that connected China and the West. Drawing primarily from the Peabody Essex Museum’s historic and largely unpublished collection of photographs, this generously illustrated volume examines the confrontations and collaborations that shaped the adoption and practice of photography in China. Offering an original reassessment of the colonial legacy of the medium, Power and Perspective addresses photography’s representations of racial hierarchy and its entanglement with histories of European imperialism in nineteenth-century China.