All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Gene Tierney would have been a hundred this week – here she is in Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941) – background art by the Chinese-American actor-artist Keye Luke (which i’ve blogged about before here)…
Amid a Covid shutdown and a collapsing economy—and the arrival of our November–January issue—something profound is happening in Thailand. Many people, led by students, some only in high school, have started questioning the monarchy and demanding change. This issue also includes my review of Lawrence Osborne’s new novel The Glass Kingdom…
All 8 of my Destination Shanghai podcasts for RTHK3 are now online and downloadable for free here…Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford, Warner Oland, Lily Flohr, Elly Widler, Penelope Fitzgerald, Florence Broadhurst, Irene West, Langston Hughes & Terese Rudolph…
“Stories on the margins are good,†says bestselling author Paul French. In his latest book, the novella “Strangers on the Praia,” he tells the story of young Jewish women who fled Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Portuguese Macau, a city that represented for them one thing: hope.
A Q&A with me by Alex Smith on Strangers on the Praia, Macao and WW2 as well as writing about liminal characters in this week’s SupChina….Click here
Since the enactment of America’s first race-based immigration policy, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, New York’s diasporic Chinese have applied a transnational architecture to create spaces in which Chinese American society and identity were formed. Building Identity explores cultural representation in the built environment of New York’s Chinatown, beginning with the adaptation of the Hong Kong shophouse typology to New York during the era of exclusion (1882-1943), fundamentally shaping Chinatown’s commercial economy. Sino-American alliance in the Second World War ended exclusion, creating a demand for housing and ushering in the parallel architectural efforts of the Chinatown Building Project (1946-60) and the China Village Plan (1950-58), two visions for representing “authentic†Chinese culture through modern mainland Chinese architectural precedent. Responding temporally to each change in immigration law, Chinatown architecture functions as a material negotiation tactic, paradoxically highlighting cultural difference as a means of fostering socio-political acceptance.
Architectural historian Kerri Culhane’s experience spans twenty years of professional historic preservation and planning practice, ranging from restoration of individual buildings to landscape-scale planning and sustainable development projects.
In 2015, she curated the exhibition Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1900-1968 (Museum of Chinese in America, New York City), which examined life and career of the first Chinese American professional architect to practice in New York’s Chinatown.
Kerri holds an Architectural History MA with a focus on historic preservation and planning from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an Ecological Planning and Design MS from the Conway School, integrating her interests in the built environment and cultural landscape.
Zoom link
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96841199366?pwd=Rm8yMW9RSVl0YkEyOE9LRk5kcEowQT09Â (passcode:Â BSAPHD)
Another in my occasional series of Chinese parasol pictures – here a studio portrait of Liang Caizhu, Chinese singer, dancer and film star, with an Art Deco parasol, in Shanghai ,1936, taken by the Ling Far Studio.
| Exploring the legacy of the Hungarian architects in the former International Settlement in Shanghai [Members-only event] |
| 15 November, 13:00–15:30 | Speaker: LÃvia Szentmártoni The Royal Asiatic Society China, in collaboration with the Consulate General of Hungary in Shanghai, is pleased to present the architectural heritage of Hungarian architects in Shanghai in the 1920–30s, through a guided walk around the former International Settlement. The walk will be led by LÃvia Szentmártoni, the Consul for Culture and Education of the Consulate General of Hungary in Shanghai. On this guided walk, we will visit some of the stunning buildings in Huangpu District designed by László Hudec, Károly (Charles Henry) Gonda and the lesser known János Komor, which are part of Shanghai’s 20th century architectural heritage, and hear some of the amazing stories behind their production. This event is free for RAS members. Meeting place will be provided to confirmed attendees prior to the event. Please allow for 2½ hours for this walk. Please note: This event is for RAS members only. Membership will be available at the event. You can also sign up for membership online here. Planned tour-schedule: Park Hotel (Hudec) Sun Sun Department Store (Gonda) Christian Literature Society Building / China Baptist Publication Building (Hudec) Capitol Building / Theatre (Gonda) Mitsubishi Bank (Komor) Bank of Communications (Gonda) Union Building of the Joint Savings Society (Hudec) Bank of East Asia (Gonda) LÃvia Szentmártoni is the Consul for Culture and Education at the Consulate General of Hungary in Shanghai since 2014. She is the former Director of Confucius Institute at University of Szeged and former Program Director of Confucius Institute at Eötvös Loránd University. Before starting her career as a diplomat, she gave lectures on Chinese etiquette and protocol in many institutions, offices and forums (Ministry for National Economy; Bank of China, Budapest; 11th International Protocol Congress; Immigration Office; MFB Invest Ltd. etc.). Ms. Szentmártoni is an enthusiastic promoter of Hungary and Hungarian culture. In her spare time she loves doing research on Hungarians – living and working in Shanghai at the beginning of the 20th century – who greatly contributed to the development and success of Shanghai. By 2019 she had edited two books on the two famous Hungarian architects László Hudec and Károly Gonda, whose works remain hallmarks of Shanghai to the present day. The albums were published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary / Consulate General of Hungary in Shanghai with the strong support of many Chinese and Hungarian bureaus, offices, institutions and individuals. |
Bill Hayton’s new book The Invention of China looks fascinating….
China’s current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but “China” as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.
In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems-the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea-were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic’s reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago-but continues to motivate and direct policy today.