Rachel Silberstein’s new book looks fascinating. Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women’s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women’s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an array of visually compelling clothing and accessories neglected by traditional histories of Chinese dress, examining these products’ potential to illuminate issues of gender and identity. In the late Qing, the expansion of production systems and market economies transformed the Chinese fashion system, widening access to fashionable techniques, materials, and imagery. Challenging the conventional production model, in which women embroidered items at home, Silberstein sets fashion within a process of commercialization that created networks of urban guilds, commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave rise to new trends influenced by performance and prints, and they offered women opportunities to participate in fashion and contribute to local economies and cultures. Rachel Silberstein draws on vernacular and commercial sources, rather than on the official and imperial texts prevalent in Chinese dress history, to demonstrate that in these fascinating objects-regulated by market desires, rather than imperial edict-fashion formed at the intersection of commerce and culture.
I think when we recall the Japanese occupations of Tientsin (Tianjin) and Peking in July 1937 we think of them as reasonably non-destructive. Certainly, after some fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge (Luguochao) and environs central Peking suffered very little damage. I had assumed a similar occupation of Tientsin. However, this photograph from the time indicates that there was some destructive bombing and artillery. I’m afraid i don’t know what this building was but it appears to have been a reasonably large and substantial structure completely gutted…
I’m doing an online workshop for the Singapore Book Council later this month Based on a True Story: Writing Compelling Literary Non-Fiction. Anyone can sign up – i hope you do. But there’s some free tix if you’re fast at Kinokuniya books store’s Singapore instagram account…if you’re fast!
I reviewed Jonathan Kaufman’s Last Kings of Shanghai – tracking the dual fortunes of the Sassoon and Kadoorie clans in Shanghai and beyond – for the South China Morning Post – click here.
A short documentary on Rewi Alley from Andy Boreham that dodges a few elephants in the room (presumably as the director is involved in Chinese state media), but is an interesting watch all the same…Click
From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely regarded as stolen from their countries of origin, and demands for their repatriation grow louder by the day. In The Compensations of Plunder, Justin M. Jacobs brings to light the historical context of the exodus of cultural treasures from northwestern China. Based on a close analysis of previously neglected archives in English, French, and Chinese, Jacobs finds that many local elites in China acquiesced to the removal of art and antiquities abroad, understanding their trade as currency for a cosmopolitan elite. In the decades after the 1911 Revolution, however, these antiquities went from being “diplomatic capital†to disputed icons of the emerging nation-state. A new generation of Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of archaeologists, erasing all memory of the pragmatic barter relationship that once existed in China. Recovering the voices of those local officials, scholars, and laborers who shaped the global trade in antiquities, The Compensations of Plunder brings historical grounding to a highly contentious topic in modern Chinese history and informs heated debates over cultural restitution throughout the world.
In this talk, Paul Bevan will introduce his new book ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’ – An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age. Loosely based around one year, 1934 – “The Year of the Magazine” – the book explores a montage of ideas, images and sounds that were current in the transcultural melting pot that was Shanghai during the Chinese Jazz Age. An introduction and discussion will be moderated by Andrew Field, author of Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954. Paul Bevan (@Sinobevan) has taught modern Chinese literature, history and visual culture at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the School of Oriental and African Studies. His primary research interests concern the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Period (1912–1949), particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. His research on artists George Grosz, Frans Masereel, and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom worked for Vanity Fair, has resulted in extensive research on both Chinese and Western pictorial magazines. Paul’s first book A Modern Miscellany – Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926–1938, (Leiden: Brill, 2015), was hailed as “a major contribution to modern Chinese studies.”
If you have any problems signing up online, just send the RAS an email at bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn and they’ll will add you to the list.
