All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Great to find new examples of Shanghai’s non-stop embracing of the modern back before 1949. Radio rickshaws are a new one on me – apparently appearing in 1934. I have no pictures of such a wireless equipped rickshaw and the article doesn’t really explain, but i like the idea…
Peking Noir tells the life story of Shura Giraldi, a Russian émigré to China in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. But the known facts of Shura’s story were incomplete, which is where drama can fill in the gaps.
Historian Paul French and Dramatist Sarah Wooley explain how they worked together with producer Sasha Yevtushenko to create the Audio drama/documentary Peking Noir.
click here to read
Listen to Peking Noir now on BBC Sounds
The 16th Annual China Fest is a terrific program of free lectures and film screenings, including FINDING KUKAN. Presented by the University of Richmond, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art and Rose Chen, this year’s virtual format allows anyone to participate no matter where you’re located. Check it out! And don’t forget to register for the Director’s Talk on February 4th for more insight into the film.
Anyone wanting to order books online, help local booksellers & avoid Amazon pretty much all my stuff is on Bookshop.org here
Carl Crow always maintained that Chinese consumers wouldn’t buy imported cigarettes, their own brands and local tobacco was considered good quality enough (an enduring tradition) compared to Virginia. Still Wills, the UK tobacco firm, did import the Capstan brand to Shanghai, presumably mostly for Shanghailander Brits….Here though the ad was placed in a Chinese language magazine in the early 1930s…
Regular advertisers in a variety of Shanghai media The (Chinese owned) Graphic Art Printing Company took a different tack in 1937 after the Japanese attack on Shanghai – a quite straight forward message….
An interesting book about how we look at Singapore history Raffles Renounced from Singapore’s Ethos Books….
Drawing upon a wealth of historical documentation, including speeches, newspaper articles, petitions and songs, “Merdeka / ç¨ç«‹ /சà¯à®¤à®¨à¯à®¤à®¿à®°à®®à¯â€ confronts us with questions about our colonial past and how it still echoes through our present and into our future. Written by Alfian Sa’at in collaboration with Neo Hai Bin, this provocative and moving new play examines how our history and humanity have been shaped – and shattered – by the forces of colonialism.
Why did independent Singapore celebrate two hundred years of its founding as a British colony in 2019? What does Merdeka mean for Singaporeans? And what are the possibilities of doing decolonial history in Singapore? Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History presents essays by historians, literary scholars and artists which grapple with these questions. The volume also reproduces some of the source material used in the play Merdeka / ç¨ç«‹ / சà¯à®¤à®¨à¯à®¤à®¿à®°à®®à¯ (Wild Rice, 2019). Taken together, the book shows how the contradictions of independent nationhood haunt Singaporeans’ collective and personal stories about Merdeka. It points to the need for a Merdeka history: an open and fearless culture of historical reckoning that not only untangles us from colonial narratives, but proposes emancipatory possibilities.
About the Editors
Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His plays with Wild Rice include Hotel (with Marcia Vanderstraaten), The Asian Boys Trilogy, Cooling-Off Day, The Optic Trilogy, Homesick and Merdeka / ç¨ç«‹ / சà¯à®¤à®¨à¯à®¤à®¿à®°à®®à¯ (with Neo Hai Bin). He was the winner of the Golden Point Award for Poetry and the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature in 2001. His publications include Collected Plays One, Two, and Three; poetry collections One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript; and short-story collections Corridor and Malay Sketches.
Faris Joraimi is pursuing his BA(Hons) in History at the Yale-NUS College. His research interests lie in the narrative traditions, cultural politics and intellectual history of the Malay world. He hopes to pursue graduate studies and explore ways in which texts and their materiality reflect broader processes of exchange, circulation and consumption in the early modern Nusantara. He has written for a number of platforms, including s/pores, Mynah Magazine, New Naratif, Karyawan, Passage, Budi Kritik and 天下 (Commonwealth Magazine, Taiwan).
Sai Siew Min is a Taipei-based Singaporean historian who researches Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia with a focus on imperial formation in Southeast Asia, the cultural politics of colonialism and nationalism, language, race and Chineseness. She is a founder member of the s/pores collective. Her essays on historiography in Singapore have appeared online in s/pores: new directions in Singapore Studies. Her academic writings have appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She is also co-editor of the book Reassessing Chinese Indonesians: History, Religion and Belonging.
Contributors
Alfian Sa’at • Neo Hai Bin • Hong Lysa • Huang Jianli • Sai Siew Min • Faris Joraimi • Azhar Ibrahim • Nicholas Lua • Jimmy Ong • Joanne Leow
An early heads up for this event with the Royal Asiatic Society Beijing which, given that it’s all old Peking and Jeremiah Jenne is moderating, will book out fairly quick. So some advance notice….Also there’s a coupon code for a discount on the book from Blacksmith, available free of P&P to mainland China if you wish to read it before the event…
WHAT: “Destination Peking: Revisiting the ‘Foreign Colony’â€, an RASBJ Zoom talk by Paul French, moderated by Jeremiah Jenne and followed by QA
WHEN: Feb. 24, 2021 Wednesday 7:00-8:00 PM Beijing Standard Time
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: New York Times bestselling author Paul French (Midnight in Peking, City of Devils) returns to the Chinese capital to tell 18 true stories of fascinating people who visited the city in the first half of the 20th century. From the ultra-wealthy Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton and her husband the Prince Mdivani, to the poor “American girl†Mona Monteith, who worked in the city as a prostitute; from socialite Wallis Simpson and novelist JP Marquand, who held court on the rooftop of the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, to Hollywood screenwriter Harry Hervey, who sought inspiration walking atop the Tartar Wall; from Edgar and Helen Foster Snow – Peking’s ‘It’ couple of 1935 – to Martha Sawyers, who did so much to aid China against Japan in World War II; Nazis and Bolsheviks; artists and bank robbers. Destination Peking brings a lost era back to life. And, following on from his previous collection of essays Destination Shanghai, French asks the major question behind so many of these sojourners decisions to remain – why Peking?
TO BUY THE BOOK: There’s a discount for members of RAS in Beijing and RAS China in Shanghai who wish to buy the book from Hong Kong and have it delivered free to mainland China. Use coupon code RB21 at checkout on www.blacksmithbooks.com to get 10% off Destination Peking, with free delivery. Online payment options include credit cards, Paypal, Alipay and Wechat Pay.
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul French lived and worked in China for many years. He has written a number of books, including a history of foreign correspondents in China and a biography of the legendary Shanghai adman, journalist and adventurer Carl Crow. His true crime book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime, and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. His Kirkus-starred book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir focuses on the dancehalls, casinos and cabarets of wartime Shanghai. Both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils are being adapted for film and TV. He occasionally works in audio drama with recent productions including Peking Noir for BBC Radio 3, and the twelve-part Audible Original, Murders of Old China. His 2020 researched-novella about the Jewish refugees who left Shanghai for Macao during World War Two, Strangers on the Praia, is currently being developed as a Sino-Australian co-produced movie from his own script.
HOW MUCH: This event is free and exclusively for members of the RASBJ and other RAS branches. If you know someone who wants to join the RASBJ in order to attend this talk, please ask them to sign up via our website at https://rasbj.org/membership/ at least 48 hours before the event.
