A Chinese Odyssey Online to Listen or Download

My BBC Radio 3 documentary A Chinese Odyssey is now available online to listen or download…

BTW: Here’s the Radio Times review…

A Few Posts Related to my BBC Radio 3 Doc – A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London – Xiao Qian’s Etching of a Tormented Age

Hired in August 1941 George Orwell was organising talks for the BBC’s Indian and Eastern Services. Orwell was keen to read Xiao Qian’s study of contemporary Chinese literature, Etching of a Tormented Age…

Xiao Chen’s book was published in the P.E.N. Books series (by George Allen & Unwin), the organisation founded in 1921 in London to promote and protect writers. With the repeated PEN logo design to cover. Orwell was keen to read Etching of a Tormented Age after beiung recommeneded the book by his colleague at the BBC Eastern Service William Empson (see my previous post) and Qian’s friend the novelist E M Forster. The two had met at the Tagore Memorial Meeting organised by the PEN Club in 1941.

A Few Posts Related to my BBC Radio 3 Doc – A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London – William Empson & Chiang Yee

Sadly time constraints meant that I edited out the small piece I had in my BBC Radio 3 documentary A Chinese Odyssey on the poet (who had been in China prior to WW2 teaching) William Empson. Orwell casts a long shadow at the BBC Eastern Service during the War and Empson gets a little forgotten. Anyway, just to show that he was in touch with the NW3 Chinese intellectuals, here’s a letter from Empson to Chiang Yee in 1944 arranging a talk. Chiang Yee at the time was in Edinburgh arranging an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery……

A Few Posts Related to my BBC Radio 3 Doc – A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London – The 1943 Artists Aid for China Exhibition

Here, from the archives, a promotional flyer for the Artists Aid China Exhibition in 1943….

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A Few Posts Related to my BBC Radio 3 Doc – A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London – Chiang Yee’s Personalised Note Paper…

I was recently in the BBC Written Archives at Caversham and came across some letters from the artist and author Chiang Yee (‘The Silent Traveller’) and his friend the playwrite Hsiung Shih-I. What is interesting here, and what I had never seen before was that Chiang Yee produced personalised notepaper, painted with flower motifs and each individual sheet was different and individually hand-painted. Chiang clearly produced some for his friend Hsiung and used some himself. Below are several examples of this beautiful paper….

Listen Again: A Chinese Odyssey – Artists, Poets & Exiles in Interwar London

My BBC Radio 3 documentary on Chiang Yee, Hsiung Shih-I, Dymia Hsiung and others living in Belsize Park, NW3 during the 1930s and early war years, A Chinese Odyssey is now available to listen to online…click here

On the Edge – Caroline Humphrey & Franck Bille on the Sino-Russian Borderlands….

I recenlty did an author Q&A with Caroline Humphrey and Franck Bille on their new book On the Edge: LIfe Along the Russian-Chinese Border for the China-Britain Business Council’s magazine, Focus…may be of interest to some ChinaRhyming readers…click here

The SS Fatshan Hong Kong-Macao Ferry – Love is a Many Splendored Thing

I happened to watch once again the 1955 movie of Han Suyin’s famous novel Love is a Many Splendored Thing – Jennifer Jones as the Han Suyin character and William Holden as ‘Mark Eliot’, her American foreign correspondent love interest (in reality of course it was the Peking-born journalist and son of George Morrison ‘…of China’ fame, Ian – who did die covering the Korean War). Anyhow, being involved in matters Macao history at the moment, this time around i particularly noticed the Fatshan appears briefly.

The Fatshan famously started out in the 1930s as a Hong Kong-Canton ferry, was seized by the Japanese and eventually, in 1971 tragically sunk off Lantau Island with a terrible loss of life. And, in the 1950s, was plying the Hong Kong-Macao ferry route. Love is a Many Splendored Thing is set in 1949, though filmed in 1955.

Anyway, here she is in the movie…