Xing Ruan’s Confucius’ Courtyard traces the history of the Chinese courtyard home….
For more than three thousand years, Chinese life – from the city and the imperial palace, to the temple, the market and the family home – was configured around the courtyard. So too were the accomplishments of China’s artistic, philosophical and institutional classes. Confucius’ Courtyard tells the story of how the courtyard – that most singular and persistent architectural form – holds the key to understanding, even today, much of Chinese society and culture.
Part architectural history, and part introduction to the cultural and philosophical history of China, the book explores the Chinese view of the world, and reveals the extent to which this is inextricably intertwined with the ancient concept of the courtyard, a place and a way of life which, it appears, has been almost entirely overlooked in China since the middle of the 20th century, and in the West for centuries. Along the way, it provides an accessible introduction to the Confucian idea of zhongyong (‘the Middle Way’), the Chinese moral universe and the virtuous good life in the absence of an awesome God, and shows how these can only be fully understood through the humble courtyard – a space which is grounded in the earth, yet open to the heavens.
Erudite, elegant and illustrated throughout by the author’s own architectural drawings and sketches, Confucius’ Courtyard weaves together architecture, philosophy and cultural history to explore what lies at the very heart of Chinese civilization.
I’ve blogged (here and here) as well as written (in my collection Destination Peking) about the earlier incarnation of the Zeitgeist Bookstore, a German communist run booskhop), a branch of the Comintern publisher Münzenberg, on North Soochow Road. It was host to many well known leftists in the early 1930s – Agnes Smedley, Hotsumi Ozaki, Lu Xun and other visitors such as Roger Hollis (the probably “fifth man” and later head of British Intelligence and probably recruited by Soviet Intelligence in the bookshop). That part of North Soochow Road (Suzhou North Road) was cleared for development (Embankment House etc).
However, there are references to a relocated Zeitgeist Bookstore at 425 Bubbling Well Road at the junction with Mohawk Road (Nanjing West Road at the junction with Huangpi Road – as this junction had a cemetery to the south west, the race club to the south east it was probably under what is now the Ciro’s plaza) around March 1932. Certainly it seems that Soviet super spy Richard Sorge visited. It also seems to have managed by the old Zeitgeist’s manager, Irene Irene Wiedemeyer, a German communist married to an early member of the Chinese Communist Party.
Just been rereading Hans-Otto Meissner’s 1955 book The Man with Three Faces about the Soviet spy in China and Japan, Richard Sorge. I’d forgotten about Sorge’s 1937 visit to Peking, which might have made a good chapter in my recent collection Destination Peking. Anyway, Sorge visits to deliver microfilm and see Colonel “Alex” Commander of the Soviet Fourth Bureau’s courier service. He was undercover as a Frankfurter Zeitung jounralist writing an article on Peking.
What interests me of course is that Meissner temptingly mentions Sorge investigating the ‘crowded side streets of Peking’, presumably the hutongs….Anyone got that article?
I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012) on just how opium keeps fascinating us.
TV first then – I only had one new opium ref this year (though that wasn’t for not watching a load of tele!!) Opium popped up in Glitch season 3, the Aussie back-from-the-dead show, as Chi (resurrected from the old Gold Rush days) remembers beginning work as a Chinese labourer in Australia after his career as a Chinese opera star ended. Chi it seemed also liked a go on the pipe.
With books i’ll kick off with non-fcition and Joel Dinerstein’s great book The Origins of Cool in Post-war America which, of course, looks at the role drugs played in developing the ‘cool’ in jazz, the movies, literature etc and opium’s role there. Also in non-fiction Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo tells the story of Egypt’s wild 1920s cabarets and nightclubs where a little opium did appear. There’s also some Cocteau and opium anecdotes in Simon Fenwick’s excellent book about The Crichel Boys and their post-war Doreset literary set. Christopher Othen’s The King of Nazi Paris about collaborationist gangsters in the Nazi-occupied city has a few tantalising details of the dealers of opium and cocaine throughout the period. And Diana S. Kim’s Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across South East Asia spanned a number of countries between the 1890s and late 1940s. Finally, Robert Wainwright’s biography of Enid Lindeman, Enid, who lived quite the life of wealth, war and tragedy features some 1930s battles against morphone addiction.
And some novels too – Modifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men(based on a true story but novelised) recreated Cardiff’s multicultural Tiger Bay of the 1950s and there’s a little opium in the neighbourhood too. Opium popped up among the hobos and Wobblies of Spokane in Jess Walters’s great epic novel The Cold Millions. Opium is being edged out in favour of cocaine in Jon Talton’s City of Dark Corners set in 1930s Phoenix.
Getting a little cozy with CS Woolley’s What Became of Henry Cartwright? Brigadier George Webb-Kneelingroach thought his days of serving his country were through, but with the new initiative in China to stop the Opium trade, the Empire calls on him once again. And finally, the latest in Abir Mukherjee’s Calcutta 1920s detective novels, The Shadows of Men, where opium invariably rears its head.
Next year Anna May Wong’s face will be found on American Quarter coins. George Washington on one side, Anna on the other. The image has been sculpted by John P McGraw and designed by Emily Damstra. It’s part of a series of American Women Quarters and will potentially be in your pocket in 2022.
Fine antique and vintage maps from 16th to 20th century
including a collection of city plans of Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai
Plan of Victoria, Hong Kong c1915
Wednesday 8th December 2021 – 6.30 – 8.30 pm
The exhibition continues until Saturday 8th January 2022 Wattis Fine Art Gallery 20 Hollywood Road, 2/F, Central, Hong Kong Tel. +852 2524 5302 E-mail. info@wattis.com.hk Gallery open: Monday – Saturday 12 – 6pm
Recently i did a quick Q&A for the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine with Sinologist Linda Jaivin on her new book The Shortest History of China…angled slightly towards the biz crowd but perhaps still of interest to China Rhyming readers….click here
The Sino-Russian border continues to be a place people want to write about (see previous entries in the genre from Ziegler and Thubron). A slightly more academic addition, On the Edge, to the shelf from Franck Bille and Caroline Humphrey…
The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It’s a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world’s political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world’s most consequential and enigmatic borderlands.
It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to “revive” their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to “Europe,” building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil’s Cathedral to woo tourists.
Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.
