All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
All the books in the earlier Penguin China and World War One Series with work by me, Frances Wood, Robert Bickers, Anne Witchard, Mark O’Neil and Jonathan Fenby….available at douban and other online outlets and bookstores in China…
If you’ve got a problem with your Philco wireless (founded as Helios Electric Company, renamed Philadelphia Storage Battery Company), or any American-made radio then China Philco Corp can help down on the Avenue Eddy (Chungcheng East Road), now Yan’an East Road…
The Shanghai Herald was never a major newspaper in the city – never with as wide a circulation as the North-China Daily News, China Press or the Evening Mercury. But, it did publish regularly, a couple of editions a day, had offices on the Avenue Eddy (Yanan East Road) down on what was known as “Newspaper Row” and, for a while, ran a German language supplement. It was obviously keen to solicit classified ads….
One of the Old Shanghai ‘inside baseball’ team here – Wilkinson, Heywood & Clark Ltd, purveyors of British varnish, paints and enamels. The firm had been around since 1896 based on the Caledonian Road in North London and with a factory up in Bootle. Being on the Callie, up behind Kings X and Euston, it’s perhaps not surprising that supplying paint to the railway industry was a big part of their business.
The ad at the bottom indicates that the firm had supplied the British Empire with paint for quite some time and so a Shanghai branch is no surprise either. And so here they are on Kiukiang Road (Jiujiang Lu) in Shanghai and the Alexandra Building (completed 1904; demolished 1952 – see below) in Hong Kong.
As you may know i write a fortnightly column for CrimeReads on crime writing in various cities and countries. If they may be of interest to China Rhyming readers i post them….so here’s one on Ulan Batar and Mongolia….
For Chinese readers Hong Kong’s Ming Pao are doing a few excerpts & some book giveaways of my Destination Peking from Blacksmith Books (which will appear in a Chinese edition next year i expect) – click here
Here’s the logo Lane Crawford Department Store (which originally opened in Shanghai in 1872) used throughout the 1930s – exceptionally clean and clear. Below a pic of the store on Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road)….
I won’t say too much about Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya as it’s been reviewed everywhere. I don ‘t think the Old Shanghai Hand or China Hand will find much to argue with on his details and his descriptions of Shanghai and Mukden (Shenyang) are all excellent. One word of warning – read the book, don’t listen to the audio book which Macintyre reads himself – it’s the most mangled Chinese ever and completely unlistenable to anyone familiar with the language.
One thing i was particularly happy to see in the book was Macintyre drawing the linkages between Agnes Smedley, Sonya and the former head of Mi5, then a lowly tobacco company employee, Roger Hollis. I think (see the essay in my book Destination Shanghai) that if you look even casually at Hollis’s time in 1920s Shanghai it’s clear he was recruited by Soviet Intelligence and that, to me anyway, indicates he was probably ‘the fifth man’ alongside the Cambridge spies. Macintyre doesn’t quite go that far, but he leans in that direction. The smoking gun that can prove Hollis was a Soviet spy remains to be found – presumably somewhere in Moscow.
