Here’s all my Crime and the City columns uploaded to www.crimereads.com in 2019 – all available on http://crimereads.com – just use the search function or look under ‘reading lists’
Travel planning? here’s all my Crime & the City columns published on Crime Reads in 2019: Taipei, Naples, New Orleans, Jo’Burg, Helsinki, Bucharest, Montreal, Kingston, French Riviera, Athens, Oxford, Algiers, Dubai, Bali, Buenos Aires, KL, Madrid, the Hamptons, Budapest, Rangoon/Yangon, Berlin, Havana, New Delhi, Alaska…
My South China Morning Post Magazine article on the old Legation Quarter Christmases of old is also available online as well as in the mag (see below)…
Weekend reading sorted….well kinda….one of the nice things that happens to me is that i get sent early copies of a few China-related books for review or recommendation. So here’s three i’ve read recently that you’ll all want in 2020. Jeff Wasserstrom’s Vigil (which i’ve reviewed for the next issue of the excellent Mekong Review ) will weigh in as the first rough draft of history on the Hong Kong protests – it’s a good, succinct look at the long historical run up to the tumult of 2019.
Jonathan Kaufman’s Last Kings of Shanghai is a retelling (which has been done before of course) of the Sassoon dynasty and also the (less written about) the Kadoorie family.
China TV watchers will know Zhou Meisen from his In the Name of the People tv show in 2017 – oft called ‘China’s House of Cards’ (well, sort of, a bit) – this is the book version in translation from Alain Charles Publishing (worthy of noting as they’re quickly becoming a force in Chinese translations all gratefully received by readers i think)….all out first half of 2020….
a fascinating study coming out in January 2020 from Hong Kong University Press…
This groundbreaking volume critically examines
how writers in Japanese-occupied northeast China
negotiated political and artistic freedom while
engaging their craft amidst an increasing atmosphere
of violent conflict and foreign control. The allegedly
multiethnic utopian new state of Manchukuo
(1932–1945) created by supporters of imperial
Japan was intended to corral the creative energies of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians, and Mongols . Yet, the twin poles of utopian promise and resistance to a contested state pulled these intellectuals into competing loyalties, selective engagement, or even exile and death—surpassing neat paradigms of collaboration or resistance . In a semicolony wrapped in the utopian vision of racial inclusion, their literary works articulating national ideals and even the norms of everyday life subtly reflected the complexities and contradictions of the era .
Scholars from China, Korea, Japan, and North
America investigate cultural production under
imperial Japan’s occupation of Manchukuo . They
reveal how literature and literary production more
generally can serve as a penetrating lens into forgotten
histories and the lives of ordinary people confronted
with difficult political exigencies. Highlights of the
text include transnational perspectives by leading
researchers in the field and a memoir by one of
Manchukuo’s last living writers .
The old Imperial Hotel in Tientsin (Tianjin) is far less well remembered than the more famous (and still standing) Astor…but deserves to be remembered…
Highly recommended read for any Beijing Heads out there…Anthony Clark’s China Gothic…
As China struggled to redefine itself
at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and
material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is
evident in the twin biographies of North China’s leading Catholic bishop
of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837-1905), and the Beitang cathedral,
epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations
that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under
Favier’s supervision, the cathedral-and Favier-miraculously survived a
two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French
Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon-shaped gargoyles,
marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and
other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of
Sino-Western interaction. Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from
the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the
United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in
introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device
was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in
China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier’s biography is a lens
through which to examine Western missionaries’ role in colonial
endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in
which they lived and worked.
