On March 31 1943 the Artists Aid China Exhibition opened in a badly bombed London’s . It was one of the largest and most interesting displays of Chinese art in London during the war years and, of course, all aimed at raising money to support China’s war effort against Japan.
The exhibiton was held at Hertford House on Manchester Square and included 700 works of art, objets d’art, sculpture and paintings including several Chiang Yee watercolours. Chiang also gave a talk about the works in the exhibiton on the BBC. There were some donations from private collections including a rose quartz figurine (below) lent by Queen Mary (as in Mary of Teck and then Queen following the accession of her husband King George V), and a carved jade bowl from Edwina Mountbatten.
The new Royal Asiatic Society China Journal 2020 Journal is here – John Man on Mongolia, William Lindsay on the Great Wall, Katya Knyazeva on Russian Shanghai, Gabor Holch on Trebitsch Lincoln, me on China’s WW2 Great Red Super Highway & much more…do see the RAS China website here
I’ll put up a complete table of contents and how to get this week….
I’ve written several posts previously about the Chinese Embassy at Portland Place – as the site of Sun Yat-sen’s kidnapping and Mai Mai Sze’s memories of the place as a girl during the First World War….Now the embassy is preparing to vacate the Portland Place location (though apparently retaining it) and moving to the Royal Mint near Tower Bridge on the edge of the City of London but actually within the East End borough of Tower Hamlets. A few concerns – Royal Mint is a historic building and who knows what changes will be approved, or what changes will happen without any approval being sought anyway? However the immediate problem, for the PRC, is that the embassy will be in a London borough with a sizeable Muslim community, many of whom are not too happy about China’s treatent of the Uyghurs….Once lockdown is over demos are apparently planned.
Vaccination is in the news again for obvious reasons. Here’s the vaccination certificate for a Polish national from 1946 – he’d already wisely had his plague and cholera shots and was back for smallpox. He lived up on Point Road (Zhoujiazui Road) up in northern Hongkou. A wise and healthy looking chap – when the time comes get your shots!!
Regular readers know i like a parasol picture (just put ‘parasol’ in the search engine and get loads!). Here’s some parasols in the old wartime capital of Chongqing shortly after the defeat of Japan….
The old Shanghai event i did at Hong Kong International Literary Festival this month with James Carter is now up on line and with Chinese sub-titles – just click here and the password is 20SHANGHAI52. It’s up there till the end of the month only…
The Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel reupped my old piece on Jack London’s sojourn to the Russo-Japanese War – so here it is again if you missed it and might find it interesting…click here
