In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country.
The roots of China’s tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China’s coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state.
This book offers an intimate portrait of early twentieth-century Harbin, a city in Manchuria where Russian colonialists, and later refugees from the Revolution, met with Chinese migrants. The deep social and intellectual fissures between the Russian and Chinese worlds were matched by a multitude of small efforts to cross the divide as the city underwent a wide range of social and political changes.
Using surviving letters, archival photographs, and rare publications, this book also tells the personal story of a forgotten city resident, Baron Roger Budberg, a physician who, being neither Russian nor Chinese, nevertheless stood at the very centre of the cross-cultural divide in Harbin. The biography of an important city, fleshing out its place in the global history of East-West contacts and twentieth-century diasporas, this book is also the history of an individual life and an original experiment in historical writing.
Just saw this photo the other day, which is on display at Shijia Hutong Museum in Beijing. It’s George Bernard (GB) Shaw on the step of his somewhat unique writing hut at his home Shaw’s Corner in Hertfordshire, just outside London. With him is the Chinese novelist Gu Yuxiu (left) and Professor and author Chen Xiying (Yuan Chen, husband of Ling Shuhua). They had arrived in England in 1945 and a visit to Shaw was de rigueur for visiting Chinese intellectuals. I’m sure they admired Shaw’s hut, which you can still see as Shaw’s Corner, and the writing hut, are now maintained by the National Trust. What made the hut sort of unique was that it was mounted on a revolving mechanism so that as he worked, Shaw could follow the sun throughout the day. Tucked away behind trees, this is the place where many of his plays were written.
The China-Britain Business Council magazine Focus gathered together some of the author Q&As I’ve written up this year for a useful end of year reading list…..click here
I’ve posted previously on Shanghai furniture maker (and after 1949 Hong Kong based) JL George (click here and here). One thing that interests me and, perhaps, makes us think slightly differently of inter-war Shanghai is the early 1920s, early 1930s JL George official stamp. It hopefully makes us think a little bit more about the longer term influences of European modernism on Shanghai and helps challenge the cult of the art-deco in Shanghai.
What I refer to as Shanghai’s ‘cult of art-deco’ is the tendancy by commentators to refer to everything – architecture as well as furniture and interiors – as art-deco. This accentuates the idea of Shanghai as an art-deco city but minimises the broader, and longer trends of colonial-comprador, classical, neo-classicial, modernist, streamline-moderne as well as Mock Tudor, Queene Anne, Moorish, Mediterranean etc alongside unique Shanghai forms of the shikumen and lilong.
The JL George stamp below, to be found on all their pieces of Shanghai-made furniture specifically mentions ‘Chinese Beaux-Arts Carving’. You won’t come across this a lot on the plethora of blog posts, magazine articles and books on Shanghai, due largely to the Cult of Art-Deco that has latterly pervaded the city. What the JL George stamp shows is that earlier and longer running modernist trends were also important in Shanghai and show a longer and deeper trend of modernism in the treaty port.
A good chance to have a tour round the building, just behind the Bund, that was completed in 1933 as the home of the Royal Asiatic Society North China branch – a lecture hall, extensive library and fascinating Natural History Museum. It is now, after a long time of falling into disrepair, the home of the Rockbund Museum.
RAS Art Focus – Places & Spaces: Art in Shanghai – Rockbund Art Museum
The city of Shanghai currently offers a wide array of art museums with exhibitions featuring works by globally renowned artists and collections from some of the most prestigious art institutions in the world. Using our own city as a case study, the RAS Art Focus 2021-22 curated series Places & Spaces: Art in Shanghai aims to explore the phenomenon of museum culture in Shanghai. Each month, Art Historian and Critic Julie Chun will take us to museums, both big and small, to understand the pluralist facets of art institutions with unique opportunities to hear from museum directors, curators and artists.
The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) holds a special place in Shanghai history as the former Royal Asiatic Society building that housed a lecture hall, a library and a natural history museum. Julie Chun who has been researching the evolving changes pertaining to the RAS China and the building that the Society once occupied on 20 Huqiu Lu, will provide the context of how the Society was established and the circumstances that led to the completion in 1933 of the Society’s architecture that eventually became the RAM in 2010.
Oranda Hou, the Senior Development Manager of RAM, will discuss the building’s most recent renovations and highlight how historical preservation was respected while the necessary modifications required to meet contemporary needs of the museum were achieved. This will be followed by a tour of the Swiss conceptual artist John Armleder’s solo exhibition guided by Billy Tang, the Senior Curator of RAM.
About the Exhibition:“Again, Just Again” is a celebration of John Armleder’s five decades of work inspired by his inter-disciplinary practice. The exhibition features display of new and existing paintings, ready-mades, works on paper, site-specific works and archival material. With each floor of the museum, the spaces inside and outside of the exhibition halls have been transformed through a unique scenography assembled to guide the audience through a choreography of unexpected encounters and visual experiences.
*To respect COVID restrictions, this event will be limited to 20 on a first come, first sign up basis with prepayment made to the RAS Treasurer. Those confirmed and attending are required to bring a face mask and green health code. Thank you for your understanding.
Sunday, 21st November 20212:45 pm registration3:00 pm to 5:00 pmSpeakers: Julie Chun, Oranda Hou and Billy Tang
Some good writing and a good way to support the Mekong Review…Hong Kong: Reports from the ProtestFeaturing reports and essays from Antony Dapiran, Lok Man Law, Richard Heydarian, Michael Vatikiotis, Kong Tsung-gan, Paul French, Abby Seiff, Leung Rachel Ka Yin and more.
Hong Kong, 2019—millions of people with hard hats and umbrellas poured out of their shoebox apartments and office towers onto the streets of Asia’s financial capital. At stake was their freedom and what they saw as an attempt by communist China to take over their city. On the other side of the barricades, more than 30,000 police officers, supported by armed sympathisers, were determined to quell the uprising. The stage was set for one of the most dramatic civil conflicts of the decade.These essays and book reviews, published in Mekong Review between June 2019 and February 2020, document a city in open rebellion.
WHAT: “Historian Arne Westad on James Earl of Elgin: An Imperial Life,” in conversation with Jeremiah Jenne, followed by Q&A — a RASBJ online event WHEN: Nov. 17, Wednesday, 8:00-9:00 PM Beijing Time (online)
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: This online event is free and exclusively for members of RASBJ and RAS branches. If you know someone who wants to join the RASBJ to attend this talk, please ask them to sign up at https://rasbj.org/membership/ at least 48 hours before the event.
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: In the middle part of the nineteenth century, the ideas and practices of empire went through fundamental reconfigurations. Still built on the old imperial processes of subjugation and exploitation, the new imperialism also carried an ideology of reform, improvement, and order, not unlike those presented to working-class subjects of empire in Europe. The new vehicles for managing and expanding empire were reactions against anti-imperial resistance as well as pressure from humanitarian ideals. At the core were struggles over concepts of race, development, and capital that would help undo almost all empires in the century that followed. As the most influential, and probably also the most powerful, empire in the mid nineteenth century, Britain relied on its military forces and an extensive imperial civil service to serve its purposes. James Bruce (1811-1863), the eighth Earl of Elgin, may serve as an epitome of the imperial agent in his era: Governor of Jamaica and Canada, emissary in China and Japan, and Vice-Roy of India, Elgin became the quintessential troubleshooter for the British empire as it was immersed by dissension and rebellions. His life allows us to explore dimensions of imperial rule in the mid nineteenth century at their peak and their nadir.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Odd Arne Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he teaches in the history department and the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs. Previously, he was the S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the Kennedy School of Government. He is an expert on contemporary international history and the eastern Asian region. Westad has been named one of the LSDP Top 100 Global Thinkers, mainly for his work on linking policymaking to an understanding of history. At Yale, Professor Westad teaches courses on global and international history, on global power shifts, and China’s role in world affairs.
Professor Westad won the Bancroft Prize for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. The book, which has been translated into fifteen languages, also won a number of other awards. Westad is also the general editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War and the author of the Penguin History of the World (now in its 6th edition). Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, was released in the US and UK in 2012 and made two Top 100 lists for that year. The book won the prestigious Bernard Schwartz Book Award from the Asia Society, awarded annually for outstanding contributions to the understanding of contemporary Asia or U.S.-Asia relations.
His most recent book, The Cold War: A World History, was published in 2017 by Basic Books in the United States and Penguin in the UK. A new history of the global conflict between capitalism and Communism since the late 19th century, it provides the larger context for how today’s international affairs came into being.
MORE ABOUT THE MODERATOR: Jeremiah is a writer and historian based in Beijing since 2002. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and taught Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History for over 15 years. His essays and articles on China have appeared in The Economist, South China Morning Post, and numerous other publications. Jeremiah is the proprietor of Beijing by Foot, which organizes historic walking tours of Beijing’s most famous sites and less-traveled byways, and leads workshops on history, culture, and cultural adaptation for students, embassies, companies, and community groups. Along with David Moser, Jeremiah is also the co-host of the podcast Barbarians at the Gate.
