All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
An article by me for the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel on JG Ballard’s upbringing in Shanghai, what he saw, thought and how it fed into the later novels and memoirs he gave us…click here to read….
Here’s a short trailer for Destination Peking, out in Hong Kong and China this week (or online by post until covid recedes and books can be sent around the world in bulk again)….
The second book in my Destination series, Destination Peking is out later this month. Here’s the table of contents to whet your apetitite…
by Jeremiah Jenne
WHAT: “BLEEDING HEARTS: The Tianjin Massacre of 1870â€, by Jeremiah Jenne (Livestreamed via Zoom as well as in-person)
WHEN: Wednesday Jan. 13, 2021 online from 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM Beijing Standard Time. (In-person attendees may arrive at 7:00 PM)
WHERE:Â The Courtyard Institute, #28 Zhonglao Hutong, Beijing
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: In 1870, tales of kidnapping and sorcery swirled around the city of Tianjin. The local magistrate wanted to investigate the charges of witchcraft being made against a group of Catholic nuns. The head of the mission, a French soldier turned priest, vowed to protect the Faith. France’s consul in Tianjin insisted the missionaries were protected from prosecution by treaties signed with the Chinese government. In the middle was a hapless Manchu official unable to keep the peace. On June 21, 1870, the city of Tianjin exploded into a day of rage and violence which shocked the world and revealed the perilous position of foreign missionaries in 19th century China. Writer and historian Jeremiah Jenne uses newly available archival materials from France and China to bring this story of magic and violence to life in a special presentation for the Royal Asiatic Society of Beijing.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Jeremiah Jenne is a writer and history teacher based in Beijing since 2002. He has taught Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History for over 14 years and has written on China for publications including The Economist, Radio China, South China Morning Post, the Journal of Asian Studies, and The World of Chinese. He is  frequently asked to speak or lead workshops on Chinese history, culture, and cultural adaptation to schools, organizations, and company groups from around the world, including RASBJ. Jeremiah is the proprietor of Beijing by Foot, which does research on Old Peking, hosts educational programs, and organizes historic walking tours of Beijing’s most famous sites and less-traveled byways.
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, please ask them to sign up at least 48 hours before the event via our website at https://rasbj.org/membership/ Â
HOW TO JOIN THIS EVENT IN PERSON: Email events@rasbj.org . Seating will be limited.
Annemarie Evans, the presenter of RTHK3’s Hong Kong Heritage show, asked me to talk about the sadly departed John Le Carre and his masterpiece of Asian espionage The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). Naturally delighted to…the people, the places and the history….click here (it’s the Boxing Day edition)…
Apologies for not being as prolific this year as i should have been – viruses and all that. I did manage to publish my audiobook Murders of Old China with Audible this time last year; i managed to get my researched novella on WW2, Jewish refugees and Macao, Strangers on the Praia, out (available here and online bookstores – and bookstores if you’re in Hong Kong or China). Briliantly the podcast of Strangers with RTHK3 in Hong Kong was nominated for a New York Radio Festivals Award for best audiobook – Emma Thompson won for something or other but it was nice to be a finalist. Also, a lot went on behind the scenes that will hopefully soon see the light of day.
I can tell you that book #2 in the Destination…. series, Destination Peking, is out early next year in Asia and everywhere by the spring (feel free to preorder) and my 2 hour true crime docudrama Peking Noir (with a full cast!) is on BBC Radio 3 on January 10th at 7.30pm (UK time) and afterwards at some point on the BBC Sounds app. So more old China coming at you from the getgo of 2021….
In the meantime, here’s Peking Union Medical College in the 1930s and in the snow …
Cangbai Wangs new book, Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas, looks interesting…
Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas is the first book to analyse the recent upsurge in museums on Chinese diasporas in China. Examining heritage-making beyond the nation state, the book provides a much-needed, critical examination of China’s engagement with its diasporic communities.
Drawing on fieldwork in more than ten museums, as well as interviews with museum practitioners and archival study, Wang offers a timely analysis of the complex ways in which Chinese diasporas are represented in the museum space of China, the ancestral homeland. Arguing that diasporic heritage is highly ambivalent and introducing a diasporic perspective to the study of cultural heritage, this book opens up a new avenue of inquiry into the study and management of cultural heritage in China and beyond. Most importantly, perhaps, Wang sheds new light on the dynamic between China and Chinese diasporas through the lens of the museum.
Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas takes a transnational perspective that will draw attention to the under-researched connections between heritage, mobility and meaning in a global context. As such, this cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to scholars and students working in the museum and heritage studies fields, as well as those studying Asia, China, migration and diaspora, anthropology, history and culture.
David Cornwell, aka John Le Carre, the master of the spy novel, died this week. There are a thousand obituaries of Le Carré online, but perhaps it is worth the Mekong Review remembering the author’s writing on Asia. For those obsessed with South East Asia Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy, published in 1977, is without doubt the most engrossing espionage novel of the region. For Le Carre fans it is the novel in which his greatest character George Smiley begins to rebuild an effective British intelligence service in the wake of the unravelling of “the Service†following the revelation of a senior Soviet mole in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). The Honourable Schoolboy moves between Hong Kong, Vientiane, and London.
When most obituarists remember Le Carré they recall him as the master of the London ‘Circus’ and the Cold War battlefield of Berlin. However, The Honourable Schoolboy is Le Carre’s masterful Asian novel. Most recall Le Carré’s time with MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service, in post-war west Germany. However, The Honourable Schoolboy reaches back to Le Carre’s early years with the domestic British Security Service, MI5, in the 1950s.
In amongst all the legends of Le Carre’s time in Germany it is worth remembering that his first job with British Intelligence was investigating Chinese industrial espionage against the UK. In the 1950s the People’s Republic of China used overseas students for industrial espionage. Le Carré was tasked with investigating mainland Chinese, as well as Hong Kong, Singaporean and Malaysian students a suspects – all ethnic-Chinese students were deemed vulnerable.
Le Carre was astonished to find that MI5’s China experts were mostly retired missionaries with rather austere views on China and the Chinese, and rather imperfect language skills. It got him thinking about an Asian novel.
Le Carre first arrived in Hong Kong in the spring of 1974. In the colony he spent time in the fabled FCC (then in Sutherland House on Chater Road and not its current location on Lower Albert Road) a spoke to plenty of Old China Hands and several hacks who had been spending time in Phnom Penh. He spent a little time in Cambodia being shot at by Khmer Rouge snipers and met the American pilots who had flown for Guomindang opium for Air America. Time was spent back in Hong Kong, at the FCC with old China Hands who had begun their careers in wartime Chongqing and Shanghai, and further trips to Laos.
Out of all this came The Honourable Schoolboy, a masterpiece of writing about Cold War Asia that begins in Hong Kong:
‘Perhaps a more realistic point of departure is a certain typhoon Saturday in mid-1974, three o clock in the afternoon, when Hong Kong lay battened down waiting for the next onslaught. In the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a score of journalists, mainly from the former British colonies of Australian, Canadian, American – fooled and drank in a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero. Thirteen floors below them, the old trams and double deckers were caked in the mud-brown sweat of building dust and smuts from the chimney-stacks in Kowloon. The tiny ponds outside the highrise hotels prickled with slow, subversive rain. And in the mens room, which provided the club’s best view of the harbour, young Luke the Californian was ducking his face into the handbasin, washing the blood from his mouth.
Later the novel moves to Vientiane, a city little remembered in literature but encapsulated in The Honourable Schoolboy as a den of espionage and intrigue centred on the Constellation dive:
‘The bar was of concrete, two foot deep, so that if need arose it could do duty as a bomb shelter or firing position. Each night, in the mournful dining room attached to it, one old colon ate and drank fastidiously, a napkin tucked into his collar. Jerry Westerby sat reading at another table. They were the only diners, ever, and they never spoke. In the streets the Pathet Lao not long down from the hills walked righteously in pairs, wearing Maoist caps and tunics, and avoiding the glances of the girls. They had commandeered the corner villas, and the villas along the road to the airport. They had camped in immaculate tents which peeked over the walls of overgrown gardens.
John Le Carré will doubtless be remembered mostly for his novels of the European Cold War – East and West Berlin, the treacheries of the London “Circusâ€, the machinations of the Soviets. But he also wrote one blistering good book about Asia, one that has never been matched in the espionage genre of the region since “The Honourable Schoolboy. If you haven’t read it then do so today. If you have, then reread it. It remains one of Le Carre’s best.