A copy of Donald Mennie’s China: North and South published in the 1920s by AS Watson – yes, the chemist chain! There’s a reason for that see below. Mennie is best known for his book of photographs The Pageant of Peking published earlier but this is a beautiful collection too.
Here his bio from Historical Photographs of China’s website…..
Donald MENNIE (唐纳德·曼尼) was born in Golspie, Sutherland, Scotland on 9 March 1875 and arrived in China c.1899. His atmospheric, classically composed photographs, are in the Pictorialist style, well suited to publication in souvenir photobooks. Mennie became Managing Director of the pharmacy A.S. Watson and Co., in Shanghai. During the 1920s, he published his photographs in China by Land and Water; The Pageant of Peking; Glimpses of China; China, North and South; Picturesque China and The Grandeur of the Gorges. Mennie’s photographs illustrated My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard by Elizabeth Cooper (Frederick A. Stokes, 1914) and The Great River: The story of a voyage on the Yangtze Kiang by Gretchen Fitkin (North-China Daily News & Herald, 1922). Mennie was interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, Shanghai by the Japanese military in March 1943. He died in a Shanghai sanatorium while interned on 10 January 1944. See also Wikipedia
For anyone in Shanghai the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai branch is organising a museum tour of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum – September 20…..Click here for more details
A sale on September 16 at Bonhams in New York from the estate of Chiang Yee which includes some very interesting items including work by Zhang Daqian, Zheng Shanxi, Yang Zhiguang, Sun Zhongwei, Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu and others as well as Chiang Yee himself (you can see everything up for sale here)…
Xi Beihong (1895-1953) Portrait of Chiang Yee (1903-1977), 1933 (the year he arrived in London)
Chiang Yee, original drawing from his children’s book Chin-Pao and the Giant Pandas, 1939
Finally (after about 100 TV viewings) got to see Shanghai Express on the big screen at NFT1 at the BFI. I’m sure that being with a large crowd made the comic lines land better and a giant screen helped me see details – that erroneous Guinness advert (they never sold it in Shanghai), the great ticket office, the fabulous dining car von Sternberg should have made more of… – and costumes (Marlene’s of course but also Anna May Wong’s fab luggage). And the movie was introduced by Anna May’s latest biographer Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll, over for the BFI’s Anna May Wong season all this month….details here…
Andrew Lownie’s new deep dive on the perfidy, corruption and general dodginess of Price Andrew, Duke of York – Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (William Collins) naturally has to have a China angle among his many dubious shenanigans as “trade envoy”. Of course the story of Andrew, flying on UK taxpayer money to shill for Bernie Ecclestone – “F1 Supremo” – in Shanghai as he sought to screw as much out of Shanghai as possible needs to be told – and it does by me and others….
Travelling over the river to Battersea Power Station and the new Battersea Bookshop was also fun… and as part of Women in Translation Month. A great evening was had talking about Tie Ning’s My Sister’s Red Shirt (Sinoist Books) with Annelise Finegan, Academic Director & Clinical Associate Professor of Translation at NYU School of Professional Studies….
And a trip across to Northern Ireland and Bangor, near Belfast, for the Open House Festival was one of the most chilled and relaxed weekends at a festival for a long time….
