Liang Hong’s China in One Village (translated by Emily Goedde) came out in June but i missed it – which would be a mistake if you do too….
After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Henan Province. What she found was an extended family riven by the seismic changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang’s by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame.
For many months, Liang walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives—especially her irascible, unforgettable father—and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. Across China, many saw in Liang’s riveting interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own lives, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village.
Suzhou became an important hub of Islamic intellectual culture in the Chinese context when Muslim soldiers, merchants, officials and interpreters arrived alongside the Yuan dynasty armies, and again when the 16th century scholars Zhang Zhong and Zhou Shiqi translated scriptures from Persian to Chinese. The city boasted 10 mosques in the early 20th century, and one remains in operation today. In this talk, Dr Alessandra Cappelletti uses the mosque to reconstruct the identity of Muslim cultural ‘otherness’ and assess how a lack of collective memory and socio-cultural transmission has affected the city’s Islamic communities.
Dr Alessandra Cappelletti is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of International Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University in Suzhou. She has a double PhD from the Oriental University of Naples and Minzu University of China in Beijing.
Sheridan’s new book sheds perhaps new light on the PRC-UK-HK relationship and especially Percy Craddock’s role…
The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West.
The story sweeps the reader from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the 19th century to the age of globalisation and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It ends with the battle for democracy on the city’s streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party.
How did it come to this? We learn from private papers that Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to handle China and put her trust in an adviser who was torn between duty and pride. The deal they made with Beijing did not last.
The Chinese side of this history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many new to the foreign reader, revealing how the party’s iron will and negotiating tactics crushed its opponents. Yet the voices of Hong Kong people – eloquent, smart and bold – speak out here for ideals that refuse to die.
Sheridan’s book tells how Hong Kong opened the way for the People’s Republic as it reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raises fundamental questions about progress, identity and freedom. It is critical reading for all who study, trade or deal with China.
Talking of Swanson’s apparent taste for things Chinese the other day, this 1922 portrait of her by Karl Strauss always makes me think of Liangbatou, the Manchu female headress/headwear styles and the background porthole (metalwork or bamboo? I can’t quite tell) perhaps adds to that feeling….
The image is from when Swanson was filming Her Gilded Cage (1922), a silent drama about a dancer seeking love and fame from Paris cabarets to New York society. The film is sadly ‘lost’ but the few remaining still indicate a fairly heavy ‘Orientalist’ touch (see below). IT didn’t get great reviews i’m afraid – more of a fashion show than a movie (like that’s a bad thing!).
HER GILDED CAGE, 1922.
Gloria Swanson in Her Gilded Cage, directed by Sam Wood, 1922
Very nice to see the Destination Peking walking tour get under way – aesthetes, authors, scholars and scoundrels. It’s all been set up by Bespoke Beijing and is hosted by the historian and guide Jeremiah Jenne of Beijing on Foot. There’s plenty of hutongs, history and some exercise but, fear not, it all ends at the former Grand Hotel de Peking (now the Nuo Hotel Beijing) on Chang’an Dajie with a cocktail – Harold Acton’s receipt for the Gloom Chaser, the hottest cocktail in 1936 Peking as featured in Acton’s novel Peonies and Ponies (Harold’s receipe here). If you’re intested in when the next tour is taking place contact Bespoke Beijing. If you can’t get to Beijing (i.e. pretty much everyone who isn’t already there!), the book of course is available online, at good bookshops and from the publisher Blacksmith Books.
Nothing to say here – though if anyone knows the brand that’s be excellent to know – but finding Madame Chiang’s (Soong Mayling) sunglasses, as worn here in Chongqing in 1940, very cool….
The 1A trolleybus would have been one of the most interesting rides in old Shanghai – from the Garden Bridge, along the Bund, up Nanjing Road, Bubbling Well Road, Yu Yuen Road to Keswick Road by Jessfield Park (so, Garden Bridge – Bund – Nanjing East Road – Nanjing West Road – Yuyuan Road – Kaixuan Road by Zhongshan Park)…
