All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
It’s hard not to see a little Chinese influence in Josep Lluis Sert’s 1950 design for the Foundation Maeght’s gallery in the south of France…
My Long Read in the SCMP Magazine last weekend on Mrs. “Tinko†Pawley, her friend Charlie Corkran, & her dog Squishy – how they were captured by Bandits in 1932 Yingkou, captured the world’s imagination & survived a rather surreal kidnapping experience…click here…https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2180648/how-chinese-bandits-kidnapping-blond-british
I actually visited the very early art-deco Tuschinski summer before last but only found these photos when upgrading phones recently. The theatre was completed in 1921 with many Chinoiserie touches. It was designed by the architect Hijman Louis De Jong but named after Abraham Icek Tuschinski who commissioned it. It is a definite blending of other styles too, such as Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, the Dutch Amsterdam School of architecture and touches of Chinoiserie.
Marlene Dietrich wears many costumes in her 1935 movie The Devil is a Woman, directed by Josef von Sternberg from a screenplay by no lesser a writer than John Dos Passos….but I’d never seen these publicity shots for the movie of her in a furisode (formal style) kimono with crane motifs before. The slightly earlier image for Picture Play magazine of Marlene similarly in a kimono was by Martha Sawyer, an American artist and illustrator who became known as “the illustrator of Asiatic lore”…
As ever this week every year…a very happy 114th birthday to Anna May Wong….
William Stevenson (1924-2013) was a British-born Canadian author and journalist who visited China a number of times and, in 1959, published The Yellow Wind: An Excursion in and Around Red China with a Traveller in the Yellow Wind (London: Cassell, 1959). These are some portraits of Yunnan people Stevenson included in the book….
A new bride
A child hawker eating a bowl of rice, Kunming
Fishermen
Farmers
Paris’s Chinatown was l’Ilot Chalon. It became home to various Chinese settling in the French capital – sailors, travellers, students as well as having its numbers boosted by the Chinese men who came to work for the French as labourers during the First World War. It apparently became quite thriving but was completely demolished for various extensions to the Gare de Lyon railway station. I read years ago that in 1988 a plaque was erected by city officials commemorating the former Chinatown but I’ve never found it – if it’s still there? However, one Chinese restaurant, the Village de Lyon, bravely soldiers on on what is left of the Rue de Chalon by the side of the station.
I was reminded of the area again recently in Paris and reading Jean-Paul Clebert’s Paris Vagabond (1954) where tramping around the post-war city he briefly notes the I’Ilot Chalon and the Chinese there – “…around the Gare de Lyon where the Chinese hold fish fights…’ Clebert, it has to be said, is not always the most reliable narrator, but interesting nonetheless…
The good people at Penguin China have reprinted a fancy edition of my Penguin Special Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking, basically a series of tales and back stories about various characters in Midnight in Peking…
