All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A close up of the large Sine Pharmacy billboard on Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) in 1949. Rather than repeat the excellent work of the Industrial History of Hong Kong Group’s blog I’ll link to them here for the history of the firm…
Want to keep up with news from Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Eagle home while travelling in China…in 1925…no problem (expect it seems in Shanghai surprisingly, but anyway…maybe Brooklynites were a little vulgar and low class for snooty Shanghai?)…
My review of Adam Brookes’s excellent Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City (Penguin)….in this weekends SCMP Post magazine…here…
British explorer, writer, scholar, diplomat, and soldier Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) died in Trieste where he was British Consul. Burton is primarily associated with the Near- and Mid-East as well as Africa rather than the Far East. His travels and writings are too numerous to mention here, but if you’re not familiar with him and his work then he has an extensive Wikipedia page.
Anyway, I came across these paintings of his Trieste house painted in 1889 by Albert Letchford (1866-1905), an English artist resident in Italy and also provided some (actually 72) illustration to books in Burton’s 17-volume translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The paintings reflect various aspects of Burton’s life – his ambivlance yet fascination with religion, his books and files, artworks and momentos as well as (in the first painting) a Chinese/Japanese parasol and in his bedroom (bottom painting) a Chinese/Japanese paper lantern hanging from the ceiling.
These paintings now reside in the Burton Collection in Orleans House, Twickenham, West London.
More than 1001 Days and Nights of Hong Kong Internment by Chaloner Grenville Alabaster and edited by David St Maur Sheil, Kwong Chi Man, and Tony Banham as part of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series…
More Than 1001 Days and Nights of Hong Kong Internment is the wartime journal of Sir Chaloner Grenville Alabaster, former attorney-general of Hong Kong and one of the three highest-ranking British officials during the Japanese occupation. He was imprisoned by the Japanese at the Stanley Internment Camp from 1941 to 1945. During his internment, he managed to keep a diary of his life in the camp in small notebooks and hid them until his release in 1945. He then wrote his wartime journal on the basis of these notes. The journal records his day-to-day experiences of the fall of Hong Kong, his time at Stanley, and his eventual release. Some of the most fascinating extracts cover the three months immediately after the fall of Hong Kong and when Alabaster and his colleagues were imprisoned in Prince’s Building in Central and before they were sent to the camp, a period little covered in previous publications. Hence, the book is an important primary source for understanding the daily operation of the Stanley Internment Camp and the camp’s environment. Readers will also learn more about the daily life of those imprisoned in the camp, and Alabaster’s interaction with other prisoners there.
David St Maur Sheil is the great-grandson of Sir Chaloner Grenville Alabaster and has been conducting research into his family’s long history in Hong Kong and China. Kwong Chi Man is an associate professor in the History Department of Hong Kong Baptist University. Tony Banham has studied the Battle of Hong Kong for a quarter of a century and has written on the subject, aided in the production of television documentaries, and helped many children of veterans in their researches into their parents’ war years.
Four marvellous painting of author and art critic Douglas Sladen’s #32 Addison Manions flat from 1915 painted by the Japanese artist resident in London Yoshio Markino. Sladen was a champion of Markino’s work and a keen lover of Japanois in the late 19th and ewarly 20th centuries. Sadly the building is gone, but Markino’s paintings remain…Addison Mansions comprised two blocks of apartments on Blythe Road, Hammersmith, opposite the Olympia Exhbition Centre built around 1888. (pic of the building at bottom of post).
This years Indiana University Kenshur Prize for 18th century studies awarded to Henrietta Harrison for The Perils of Interpreting (Princeton University Press). I had a chat with Henrietta about the book & translation for the China Britain Business Council magazine Focus recently -click here
January 1925 and if you lived in Saratoga (California) you might have been worried that you weren’t going to get the Chinese lantern you’d craved. But fear not, they arrived…
