Another great study of Hong Kong from Patricia O’Sullivan and Blacksmith Books…
Kwan Lai-chun was sick of being made to feel second-class by her husband’s concubine; sick of her mother-in-law’s endless carping about the money she spent; sick of the whole family really. Late one sticky, humid night something snapped in her – and she grabbed the meat chopper. Within minutes, three people were dead: the concubine with over 70 gashes, many of them to the bone.Kwan was found guilty and became the second and last woman in Hong Kong to suffer the death penalty. But behind her story, and those of the city’s other female murderers, lie complex webs of relationships and jealousies, poverty and despair. Taking the first 100 years of Hong Kong’s colonial history, this book unravels the lives of women – Chinese and Westerners alike – who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Hong Kong’s female prison population was a tiny fraction of that in America, but there are still plenty of tales from its women kidnappers, fraudsters, bomb-makers, thieves and cruel mistresses.
The 20th edition of Hong Kong International Literary Festival has kicked off, and from today until November 15 will presents 76 live and online events featuring over 150 writers and speakers from around the world.
Big names include Paul French, Kevin Kwan, Shannon Lee, Colum McCann, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sebastian Barry, David Frum, Chan Koonchung, Chan Ho-Kei, Christina Lamb, William Dalrymple, Marilyn Chin and Mary Jean Chan. You can find the full writer and speaker list right here.
A Festival Pass with access to 52 online events is HK$500 (or HK$350 for students) and will include talks, readings, panel discussions and more. With a flexible format, timing and pricing, this year’s festival offers something for everyone, and is a great chance to hear world-famous authors and discover emerging voices. Events will be in English, Cantonese or Mandarin.
Tim Harper’s Underground Asia is a great history of Asia’s spies and revolutionaries…
The end of Europe’s empires has so often been seen as a story of high politics and warfare. In Tim Harper’s remarkable new book the narrative is very different: it shows how empires were fundamentally undermined from below. Using the new technology of cheap printing presses, global travel and the widespread use of French and English, young radicals from across Asia were able to communicate in ways simply not available before. These clandestine networks stretched to the heart of the imperial metropolises: to London, to Paris, to the Americas, but also increasingly to Moscow.
They created a secret global network which was for decades engaged in bitter fighting with imperial police forces. They gathered in the great hubs of Asia – Calcutta, Singapore, Batavia, Hanoi, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong – and plotted with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism, the end of the colonial regimes. Many were caught and killed or imprisoned, but others would go on to rule their newly independent countries.
Drawing on an amazing array of new sources, Underground Asia turns upside-down our understanding of twentieth-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, assassinations and conspiracies, as young Asians made their own plans for their future.
A long form piece by me in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on those Russian emigre dancers, choerographers and ballet teachers who came to Shanghai, launched a craze for ballet, and taught a new generation of Shanghailander and Shanghainese ballerinas to dance that created ripples throughout the global ballet world….
I’ve blogged before about Alan Geoffrey Yates (aka Carter Brown), an English-born, Australian pulp writer who wrote in numerous genres under numerous non-de-plumes. He was the author of the 1962 pulp novel Hong Kong Caper (which isn’t that bad). What I hadn’t realised, till i read Michael Callahan’s piece on the recently deceased Shere Hite in Air Mail this week, was that the author and ‘sexologist’ Shere Hite was the model for so many Carter Brown covers drawn by the famous pulp artist Robert McGinnis. And I reckon, looking at those covers again in light of this information, that Hite was the insirpation for this cover for Hong Kong Caper.
A few days ago i mentioned a new publication, A Belgian passage to China (1870-1920) : Belgian-Chinese historical relations(1870-1930), based on personal documents and pictures of François Nuyens and Philippe & Adolphe Spruyt. David Leffman (author of the exccellent The Mercenary Mandarin) wrote to recommend a book i’m afraid to say i was not familiar with – Anne Splingaerd Megowan’s The Belgian Mandarin that came out in 2008….
There was nothing ordinary about Paul Splingaerd´s life after he left Brussels for China in 1865. Paul’s adventures over the 41 years he spent in his adopted land read more like fiction than fact, but he really did exist. His great-granddaughter relates the story of his youth, his travels throughout the “Middle Kingdom” with explorer/geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, his years as a fur trader in Mongolia, and his fourteen years in China’s far west after being made a mandarin by legendary viceroy Li Hongzhang. On behalf of his native Belgium, Paul negotiated the rights to build the major railroad between Beijing to Hankou. For this service, Leopold II knighted him a “Chevalier de l”Ordre de la Couronne.” Reading about Paul´s life and activities during a pivotal period of China´s history can provide insights into her post-Opium War interaction with the West, and offer an understanding of what is happening in the dynamic China of the twenty-first century.
Ronald G. Knapp, Terry E. Miller, and Liu Jie. Photography by A. Chester Ong, Terry E. Miller, Ronald G. Knapp, and Others
China’s Covered Bridges: Architecture over Water is the first book in English to examine comprehensively one of the three great covered bridge traditions in the world. Based on decades of observation and ten years of intensive field research throughout China, this book illuminates countless covered bridges that have never been presented in a Western language.
Terry E. Miller, Ronald G. Knapp, and A. Chester Ong, whose America’s Covered Bridges: Practical Crossings, Nostalgic Icons, broke new ground, have joined here with Liu Jie, China’s leading timber covered bridge scholar. This team has traveled in areas rarely visited by others to document a living tradition whose roots go deep into Chinese history.
Long before professional engineers analyzed bridge structure mechanically, early builders in China, as in North America and Europe, solved the daunting problem of spanning deep ravines and wild rivers to facilitate the flow of pedestrians, animals, and vehicles. Their collective, yet independent, efforts represent the triumph of ingenuity and common sense.
Although there has been no census of covered bridges, and it is impossible to calculate how many existed in the past in China, some 3,000 remain, far more than found elsewhere in the world. Wooden trusses as understood in the West were not a component of China’s bridge-building traditions. Instead, covered corridors were situated atop either a masonry base or, more significantly, supported by an ingenious assemblage of timbers.
China’s Covered Bridges highlights covered bridges with a timber sub-structure, including both a variety of cantilevered forms and extraordinary “woven arch/woven arch-beam†types that until the until the last quarter of the 20th century were believed to have died out more than a millennium earlier.
The story of China’s covered bridges is fascinating not only in terms of technological achievement, social functioning, and aesthetic identity. Each covered bridge in China, whether still standing or long gone, has a story to tell about the nature of rural and urban life.
Thoroughly researched with a text of over 70,000 words and profusely illustrated with more than 600 historic and contemporary photographs, this book features the work of master photographer A. Chester Ong and is supplemented by photographs by the authors.
Like America’s Covered Bridges, China’s Covered Bridges is written in an accessible style that will satisfy not only those with general interests but also those with more specialized knowledge.
