‘Control your soul’s desire for freedom’ – Shanghai Party drone. ‘In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom’ Shanghai-born JG Ballard When a city and a writer were eternally made for each other!
Shanghai-born Ballard is so instructive as to how you get to sealed apartment blocks ridiculously called silly names like ‘Rich Paradise’ or ‘Evergreen Forest’ and drones saying ‘control the soul’s desire for freedom’ repeatedly across the city. He was so far ahead of us all and it came from growing up on Xinhua Lu…a little audio for the locked down…
Ballardian Dystopias in Wartime Shanghai – JG Ballard’s Hidden Shanghai
Regular readers will know I am interested in the various foreign artists (largely women) who worked, or at least sojourned, in Nothern China, Korea and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. Examples include Americans Helen Hyde, Lilian May Miller and Bertha Lum (see an essay on her in my collection Destination Peking), along with Scottish artists Elizabeth Keith and Anna Hotchkins. I have written a little more extensively on the Peking-based British artist Katharine Jowett in the South China Morning Post. Though many skecthed and did oil and water colours, most worked in wood and lino cuts as most shared interest in shin-hanga, or the“new prints” movement in Japanese art.
Anyway, a visit to the National Trust property Standen near East Grinstead, West Sussex. James and Margaret Beale chose this idyllic location with views across the Sussex countryside for their rural retreat in the 1890s. Designed by Philip Webb, the house is one of the finest examples of Arts and Crafts workmanship, with William Morris & Co. interiors. The Beale’s were also, as so many of the Arts and Crafts people were, on Japanese art and objects, as well as Japanoiserie. The house has many works of Japanese art on show, most probably largely collected on a trip the Beale’s made to Japan in 1907. Others probably came from London galleries and the heavily Japanese-influenced Liberty’s department store. There is a very good essay on the subject of Japanese art by the Conservation and Interpretation Assistant intern at Standen in 2015.
But here’s my theory on one interesting work. The house is also full of work by the Margaret LC Beale (not the Magaret Beale who owned the house), a British artist, notable as a painter of seascapes and marine craft, who worked in both oils and watercolours. All of these paintings are labelled ‘Margaret Beale’. But this one is different…
Obviously the image is of Japan, probably Yokohama where the Standen owning Beale’s visited and labelled “Maggie Beale”. However, it is in a distinctly different style to the works by Margaret Beale and, I believe, this one is by the Margaret Beale who owned Standen and labelled “Maggie Beale” to differentiate from Margaret Beale. At least that’s my theory. And it’s quite a nice piece too….
All the Penguin in WW1 series is now available in translation – essays by Mark O’Neill, Frances Wood, Robert Bickers, Jonathan Fenby, Anne Witchard & me (Paul French)…
A new exhibition at the Freud Museum London explores Sigmund Freud’s relationship to China, Chinese culture and the Chinese objects and books in his collection.
Collecting antiquities was one of Sigmund Freud’s greatest passions. Late in life he increasingly began to acquire Chinese pieces, to add to the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman objects which make up the majority of his collection. Though they were smaller in number, his Chinese pieces were among the most treasured items Freud owned.
Sigmund Freud’s engagement with China also took other forms. Although he did not read widely about China, he still made ideas about the Chinese language central to his understanding of the interpretation of dreams. And he owned and loved pets of the dog breed known as ‘Chows’, to whom he gave names with a distinct ‘Chinese’ flavour.
In his lifetime Freud’s ideas had a considerable impact in China. His works began to be read and discussed there from around 1913, and several Chinese translations of his works appeared in his lifetime.
The exhibition dives into Sigmund Freud’s own work – and psychoanalysis as a whole – in the context of Chinese art, history and culture.
Back in 2019 I blogged on why Evelyn Waugh never got round to visiting China – long story short, he got invited to Abyssinia for the coronation of Haile Selasse in 1930. Abyssinia then became the basis for his satirical novel Black Mischief (1932) set in the fictional African country of Azania. Later he wrote a short story, Incident in Azania, which was based on a (then) famous kidnapping in China Waugh became obsessed with. I’ve written about that here. And so, eventually, I got around to reading Black Mischief (which I might have done years ago but have completely forgotten) and he has a small comic anecdote regarding China when discussing a list of people who entered the diplomatic service of their country despite being completely unsuited to the task (and not, it has to be said, untypical of many British diplomats still parceled off to Beijing)…It is a paragraph worthy of Acton’s Peonies and Ponies…
‘His Britannic Majesty’s minister (to Azania), Sir Samson Courteney, was a man of singular personal charm and wide culture whose comparative ill-success in diplomatic life was attributable rather to inattention than to incapacity. As a very young man he had great things predicted of him. He had passed his examinations with a series of papers of outstanding brilliance; he had powerful family connections in the Foreign Office; but almost from the outset of his career it became apparent that he would disappoint expectations. As third secretary at Peking he devoted himself, to the exclusion of all other interests, to the construction of a cardboard model of the Summer Palace…’
Join David Peace for the paperback publication of Tokyo Redux, the final book in his Tokyo Trilogy. Shifting across three twentieth-century time periods, Peace’s audacious conclusion to his Tokyo trilogy crafts a labyrinthine mystery entwined in an evocative social history of postwar Japan.
David Peace – named in 2003 as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of eleven novels including the Red Riding Quartet, adapted for television by Channel Four in 2009, GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2013.
An interesting anecdote from John Stericker’s memoir A Tear for the Dragon (1958) regarding the economy of Tsingtao (Qingdao) and Chefoo (Yantai). I’ll let him tell it. He is referring to the time around World War One and just after as the Japanese took control of Tsingtao from the Germans and, in Europe, flappers emerged and saloon cars became common…
‘…men’s fashions, even more than those of women, affected the poor people of this part of the China coast because most of the straw-braid that to make up the ubiquitous straw boater of the Edwardian era came form Tsingtao and Chefoo. As millions of men began to discard the boater for the felt hat, or no hat at all, the straw-braid trade faded out of existence. Again, as the automobile progressed from being a wind-blown open vehicle propelled by a petol engine, and developed into an almost draught-proof saloon, so did the populatiry of hair-nets begin to fade. Their fate was further sealed by the introduction of the Etopn crop, the bob, and the shingle. Prior to that time, in every dingy cottage and home, Chinese women and children, applying their numble fingers, and drawing from their own tresses, were tying millions of knots in hair nets.’
wheat fields in Shandong c.1910
transporting stalks on a German-built road, Shandong 1910
Though Deborah Cohen’s Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is not specifically about China, the war in Asia, the attacks on China do get a bunch of mentions plus, most interestingly a host of characters who at one time or another interacted, visited or commented upon China do feature.
VIncent Sheean, John and Francis Gunther, Raina and Bill Prohme, Red Knickerbocker, the ill-fated Gareth Jones gets a mention as does Emily Hahn. Nothing really new about them and not focussing on their China experiences (if you want more of that see my book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao) but Cohen does nicely put them in context as a group sharing their lives and experiences and has room to talk about their non-China lives in much more detail than I was able to.
They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night.
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson: a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism.
In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini who sought to persuade them of fascism’s inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them, seeking American allies against British imperialism. Churchill, for his part, saw them as his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler. They grabbed front pages across the world, causing Goebbels to rage about ‘international liars and counterfeiters.’
Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another set of records – equally incredible. In their private lives, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean and Thompson committed themselves to the cause of freedom: fiercely and with all its hazards. They argued about love, war, sex, death and everything in between, and they wrote it all down. The fault lines that ran through a crumbling world, they would find, ran through their own marriages and friendships, too.
Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt to live through up close.
