Unsurprisingly for a bio by two sci-fi writers The Illuminated man focuses largely on Ballard’s novels and his hyper-surrealism that really redefined British sci-fi in the decades after WW2. The authors cover Ballard’s Shanghai origins and time in Lunghwa Internment Camp.
FYI: here’s my take on the influences of Shanghai on Ballard’s later writing from the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2021 – Ballardian Dystopias in Wartime Shanghai
This portrait of the artist and writer Chiang Yee (Jiang Yi) by Xu Beihong was up for sale last year at Bonham’s in New York. It obviously didn’t sell as now it’s being offered by Bonham’s in Hong Kong (for an asking price of US$41K-57K on April 28th here). Sadly Chiang Yee doesn’t fetch serious prices these days, but Xu Beihong does. He’s much appreciated in the PRC and has his own Xu Beihong Memorial Museum in Beijing (which was closed for “refurbishment” when I tried to visit in late 2025). Xu travelled in Europe extensively in the 1930s and visited London in 1933, where Chiang Yee was living in Belsize Park (you can listen to my BBC Radio 3 doc on Chiang, his friends and London here or read the collection of essays on the subject edited by Da Zhang, Paul Bevan and Anne Witchard, Chiang Yee and his Circle).
Do you remember the days of the Shanghai International Literary Festival at M on the Bund? Literary events at Capital M in Beijing and M on the Fringe in Hong Kong? Heady days!!
Well, this year M is back with the M Festival in the grounds of the historic Abbaye Notre-Dame de Nanteuil in Nanteuil-en-Vallée, southwestern France…. It’ll all be happening on a packed weekend across July 25 and 26 with books, as well as music and (of course) food. Festival passes are priced at just €50 per person for the entire weekend. And here’s the speaker list:
Alan Hollinghurst, Amy Tan, Fuchsia Dunlop, Marie NDaiye, Victor Mallet, Paul French, Anne Sebba, Audrey Sedano, Pauline Dreyfus, Simone Gelin, Tash Aw, Laurent Morin, Pankaj Mishra, Aube Rey Lescure, Yin Myo Su – Misuu, Jean Marc Souvira, Helen Scales…
For more details, tickets, travel details and accommodation click here…
I posted last month (here and here) on the mothballing of a number of longtang in Shanghai – emptied out, boarded up and awaiting…. well, what? the wrecking ball or refurbishment? Across the city this is the case – presumably a halt called as so many property companies in Shanghai have gone bust. Sometimes economic woes are a preservationist’s best friend.
And here another example – a traditional shikumen stone gateway – 里康餘: Li Kang Yu; 29弄: Lane 29 on Shouning Lu (Rue Buissonnet) just east of Xizang Nan Lu (Boulevard de Montigny). Constructed 1935. Cleared and boarded up some years ago and now just seemingly forgotten…. Such “mothballed” shikumen proliferate across Shanghai awaiting their fate…
Welcome to the Palace of Dragons and step into a world of flight, fantasy and magic. DRAGONS at the Royal Pavilion explores the power, beauty and mystery of the world’s most iconic mythical creatures.
Discover the dragons that watch over the Royal Pavilion itself, carved in splendour, glimmering in gold or hiding in unexpected places. Follow the dragons’ footsteps and discover fearsome beasts and elegant symbols of myth and power.
Go on a dragon quest, find dragon eggs and help the baby dragons find their way home. Step into the dragon’s mouth, search for dragons in the mirrors, listen to roaring dragons in the palace halls, relax with a story, and be a Royal Pavilion Dragon Detective.
In the Prince Regent Gallery Fire and Water: Dreaming of Dragons takes you on a journey around the world, revealing how dragons have captured people’s imagination in European and Asian cultures.
I have a few copies of Midnight in Peking in Polish if there are any Poles out there missing Pekinie?? Email me on paul@chinarhyming.com – as ever first come, first served, and sorry but I can’t mail to the USA or PRC.
North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom. For nearly eight decades, it has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking off its Soviet and Chinese sponsors to emerge as the world’s most enigmatic nation–a nuclear-armed state ruled by a dictatorial dynasty unlike any before seen. Underpinning the state is a personality cult more soaked in religiosity than those constructed by Stalin or Mao–one that, unbeknownst to the world, traces its roots back to the Christian fervor of post-Civil War America. In Korean Messiah, Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, takes us deep inside Pyongyang, a city once so dominated by Christianity it was known as the “Jerusalem of the East.” Cheng introduces us to Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary from Madison, Indiana, who would venture into Pyongyang at the turn of the nineteenth century and build a remarkable following–one that would include the very Kim family that today presides over one of the world’s harshest persecutors of the Christian faith. At the center of this story–its messiah–is North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, son of two fervent Christians and progenitor of an ideology known as Kimilsungism, an exercise in idolatry that has elevated him, and his successor son and grandson, to Christlike status, from the humble manger where he was born to the subway seat on which the venerated leader once placed his posterior, cordoned off as if it were a religious relic. Drawing on letters, diaries, and never-before-unearthed archival material that temper and oftentimes contradict the glorious historical record promoted by Kim Il Sung’s legions of hagiographers, Korean Messiah tells the true story of a country shrouded in fictions.
