Francis Wann has gathered together his relative Wen Su’s papers to create this treasure trove…. from Earnshaw Books
On February 7, 1906, a male infant was born in Beijing, and the court official Wen Su was called upon to choose a name for him. He chose the name Pu Yi, and also, according to one version of the story, personally placed the boy on the Dragon throne in 1908, just three years before the Qing Dynasty fell. Wen Su was one of the top imperial officials right at the end of the China’s long dynastic history, and he remained for decades afterwards the most loyal of all the courtiers around the dethroned emperor. He was also an accomplished poet and calligrapher and maintained a long correspondence with his sons and with others that is here collected and published for the first time.
A series of lantern slides of China tourist sites and views (some of which are easily identifiable and some not) produced by The Photo Bureau of 34 Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) for sale to tourists who wanted to entertain their friends, Women’s Institute, church groups, schools or whatever back home to a lantern slide show. I’m afraid I don’t have a date for these.
#34 Nanking Road was obviously the Photo Bureau on the ground floor and offered furnished rooms for let on the floors above. The company advertised itself as ‘Makers of Coloured Lantern Slides, Enlargements, Cinema, Amateur Developing and Printing’. The business was owned by a Mr Vandenburgh with Mr Wong as Manager and a Mr Woo as the Chief Artist. The earliest reference I have for them being in business is the mid-1920s. Before that, around the time of the First World War, #34 appears to have been a wine merchants run by a Mr JW Gande who had been in China since the 1880s. Before Gande, in the 1890s and till the early twentieth century the store was owned by a Mr Schlichting, a general merchant whose business was called Sing Tong in Shanghainese I believe, and who lived over the store with his wife.
Anyway, here’s a random selection of lantern slides from The Photo Bureau…
The poster and first still are out for Edward Berger’s adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s Macao-set Ballad of a Small Player novel...with Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton, Fala Chen, Alex Jennings – and just about all filmed on location in Macao…
Pages from the original 55 Days at Peking (1963) A3 Brochure used to promote the movie – the Peking scenes were of course filmed at Las Matas, outside Madrid!!….
The Edinburgh International Book Festival was, as ever, a blast. The spiegeltent amazing, audiences terrific with loads of questions, the Waterstones Edinburgh book tent selling loads (both by me and to me!!), the festival grounds terrific, the city itself both buzzing and majestic as ever. Got to see authors I admire including Javier Cercas, Geoff Dyer, Calum McSorley and others. Thanks to Isabel Hilton who moderated so charmingly as well as Jenny Niven and her team for making 2025 another amazing Edinburgh International Book Festival….
As a past contributor to The Shanghai Literary Review it’s very annoying to read of the problems they are having with their institutional partners Duke Kunshan University’s Humanities Research Center (HRC)…. Read the details here and let’s hope Duke Kunshan sort this out….
“Tea and WWII History at old the Peking Hotel” features a brief tour of the hotel’s historic areas and RAS Shanghai librarian Sven Serrano telling war stories war stories over tea, coffee, or a cocktail.
Aug. 22, Friday, 4:00-6:00 PM Beijing Time
Beijing NUO Hotel (the one-time Peking Hotel) #33 Chang’An Boulevard, Block B, Writer’s Bar
Start with a brief tour of the hotel’s historic areas; this fabled venue will bear witness to Beijing’s official Sept. 3 military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII. Sven Serrano’s talk will focus on that conflict, especially the December 1944 air faid on Japanese-occupied Hankow by the US 14th Air Force. This raid was the first use of incendiary bombs on a population center; such weapons were unleashed after March 1945 on Japanese cities, resulting in massive destruction. The Hankow raid caused over 40,000 estimated Chinese civilian deaths; coverage of the story was muted in Allied press accounts. The US generals involved in this episode were Joseph Stilwell, Clayton Bissell, Curtis LeMay and, most importantly, AVG founder and 14th Air Force commander Claire Lee Chennault.
Sven Serrano has been the Librarian for RAS Shanghai since 2014, and is the custodian for the Longhua Civilian Assembly Center historic site in Shanghai (the setting for the film “Empire of the Sun”). A Californian with an MA from San Francisco State University, he’s been a history teacher based in Shanghai since 2008, Sign up to attend at https://rasbj.org/
I thought I’d make a point that has been rattling round my head for a while. Just finished Our Dear Friends in Moscow about the consolidation of the Putin era and how opponents, liberals and the media responded – including those who had known the darker days of the latter Soviet Union and the chaotic Yeltsin era. The authors now live in London.
Our Dear Friends joins a number of other insider accounts – including the posthumous Navalny diaries, other memoirs (especially those of the late Anna Politkovskaya) and the works of Pomerantsov explaining the surreal propaganda of Putin as well as the very clever novel of Putin’s inner circle from Da Empoli that has been a must-read in UK literary circles this year.
My point, apart from how good and insightful many of these titles are, is that they seem to me to be a form of analysis and insider accounts those of us following China exist almost totally without. Dissident works have been relatively few, sometimes good (Ma Jian etc) often disappointing (with the few dissidents writing slumping into religion or right wing ideologies). As far as the inner circles are concerned we lack anything useful either in fiction or non/fiction.
Of course we continue to get a slew of China books – academic, business, analysis from outsiders, informed (McGregor on the Party etc) or less informed (Navarro etc) but nothing that really takes us deep inside and zero from those who really participated in various ways like Pomerantsov or Soldatov and Boragon’s book here.
If anyone can think of anything do let me know? In Chinese or English – what am I missing that explains China like these books and others explain Russia?
