Maurice Collis, Cixi and Barnett Freedman

I’d never seen this cover for Maurice Collis’s biography of Cixi, The Motherly and Auspicious. If you don’t know the prolific Burma and China Hand Collis there’s a few posts on him on China Rhyming (use the search box opposite). As we’re talking covers this one is by the British artist and designer Barnett Freedman. This edition first published by Faber and Faber in 1943. Freedman went on to do more covers for Faber and Collis. Collis had seen Freedman’s work and specifically requested him to design his book jackets. Here’s the Kirkus Review for the book published in the the USA in 1944.

Becoming Inspector Chen – Let’s Go Back to the Start of his Career

I’m sure many China Rhyming readers enjoy Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series of detective novels set in 1990s and slightly later Shanghai. His new book, Becoming Inspector Chen, is a prequal heading back to the era of reform under Deng Xiaoping, when the Shanghai Police Bureau recruited educated young men like Chen….

Destination Peking Goes Audio

All this week Destination Peking will be Book of the Week on RTHK3’s Morning Brew radio show. Monday to Thursday with stories about Wallis Simspon, Robert Byron, Barbara Hutton and how the movie Shanghai Express came about. Every day at some time between 11-12 noon, on the RTHK3 Morning Brew Facebook page and they’ll be archived on the RTHK podcast site later. Click here to listen to the first in the series – Wallis Simspon and the Grand Hotel de Pekin (1924).

Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960

Elizabeth LaCouture’s new book on Tientsin – Dwelling in the World – is a must read for anyone interested in the city…

By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world’s most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house.

Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin’s urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today’s middle-class real estate boom.

Elizabeth LaCouture is the founding director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Hong Kong, where she is an assistant professor of gender studies and history.

Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China

Y Yvon Wang’s Reinventing Licentiousness looks very interesting.

Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives―ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures―to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world.

Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed “proper” sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang’s social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.

Refrigeration in old Shanghai

There’s a whole bunch of interesting thesis to be written about the history of refrigeration in old Shanghai and how it miraculously changed life in the city in the summer months. In the old days – basically until the early 1930s it was ice and then electricity driven aircon and refrigeration.

Polar Star was a major refrigeration company in Shanghai with a factory and showroom up on Chang Ping Lu near Suzhou Creek.

Old China Podcasts

Just a note to say that a number of my recent audio projects that free and easily downloadable are now gathered together on this website – see the home page ‘Old China Podcasts’ or click here. The selection includes my BBC Radio 3 docu-drama Peking Noir, an adaptation of my novella Strangers on the Praia, some selections from my collection Destination Shanghai and some of my contributions to the China Stories podcast feed.

A bit of high concept from Yaron Studios of the Nanking Road in 1947

A bit of a high concept approach in1947 from the Yaron Studios advetising agency of Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road). The company is perhaps best for its design of The Shanghai Pocket Guide For Servicemen issued to US troops stationed in Shanghai after 1945 – below….