WHAT: RASBJ members-only online discussion featuring award-winning author Paul French, who’ll talk about his new audiobook “Murders of Old China” followed by Q&A. WHEN: March 20, Friday, 7:00-8:00 PM China time WHERE: Online via Zoom. RASBJ members have received details via email. HOW MUCH: Free and available to RASBJ members worldwide. If you aren’t an RASBJ member but wish to be, please befriend on Wechat our Treasurer John Olbrich at johnobeijing and send him your name, nationality, mobile number and email address plus the annual subscription amount (RMB 300 for those resident in China, RMB 200 for those resident overseas, and RMB 100 for students). HOW TO ACCESS THE AUDIOBOOK: This Audible Original is downloadable in China and available HERE. Audible subscribers can use a credit. Non-subscribers can sign up with Audible and get this book free, along with a one-month free trial period (your subscription is cancellable any time after the trial).
MORE ABOUT “MURDERS OF OLD CHINA”: Revenge, Passion, Greed, Racism, Corruption….12 unsolved murders. All reinvestigated. Startling new evidence revealed a century later… Why did a remote police station, built to combat pirates, find itself at the centre of a murder-suicide after a constable went on the rampage? How did Chinese gangsters avoid conviction after serving a deadly dinner to Frenchtown’s elite? And why is the Foreign Office still withholding a key document to solving a murder that took place in the Gobi desert in 1935? By delving deep into 12 of China’s most fascinating murder cases, Murders of Old China delivers a fast-paced journey through China’s early 20th-century history – including its criminal underbelly. Uncovering previously unknown connections and exposing the lies, Paul French queries the verdict of some of China’s most controversial cases, interweaving true crime with China’s chaotic and complicated history of foreign occupation and Chinese rival factions.
This picture was labelled at the Yuanping Police Station in Peiping (Peking) following shelling the Japanese in August 1937…anyone know their old Peking police stations better than me and know where this one was?
Here is Phyllis Harrop with her two friends, Mrs Ho Leung (Left) and Mrs Lambert Gok-Chin. Phyllis was rather interesting and intrepid – more on her here from David Bellis’s Gwulo site. I’m afraid I don’t know annythign about Mrs Lambert Gok-chin or Leung? I’d also love to know what the ‘N’ on Mrs Gok-chin bag stands for?
A groundbreaking volume by Annika Culver and Norman Smith that 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.
Carl Crow, the great Amerian ad man in Shanghai and writer on China between the world wars claimed that the clamour of foreign manufacturers to make a killing in the China market was such that even when Shanghai was hit by a cholera outbreak in 1923 causing many foreigners to send their families home and evacuate the city for a time the advertising business continued to boom. Real estate prices collapsed along Nanking Road and vacant shops littered the city as businesses went bankrupt, clubs found that members couldn’t afford to renew their subscriptions and the stock market went into a tailspin, but still everyone advertised and still Carl Crow Inc prospered.
You may, or may not, know that i write the fortnightly Crime and the City column for the excellent Crime Reads web site (here). It’s not always Asia obviously but this fortnight’s column on Saigon may be of interest to China Rhyming readers…
David Bellis’s (aka Gwulo) exellent photo book series on old Hong Kong continues in a third volume – this one concentrating on Hong Kong’s maritime and nautical history…more on the book and author here
Aldrich Bay, more commonly known today as Shau Kei Wan, on the north side of Hong Kong Island in 1902. It is just one image from David Bellis’ new book Old Hong Kong Photos and The Tales They Tell, Volume 3. Photo: Gwulo
