All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
The fabulously named Walk-Over Shoes of Shanghai that, in the 1930s, sold footwear on the Nanking Road (Nanjing West Road). However, the store had been there since at least 1921. Maybe Americans know this but Walk-Over shoes is actually an American brand that goes back to 1758 (here’s their website)
Regular readers of China Rhyming will know that I occasionally post images featuring Chinese paraols…(just put ‘parasols’ in the blog’s search engine). He is one from a field hospital in France in 1917 in WW1. The patients have been supplied with donated parasols…
James Carter’s new book on Shanghai, Champions Day, is out this week…
A triptych of a single day revealing the history and foreshadowing the future of a complex and cosmopolitan city in a world at war.12 November 1941: war and revolution are in the air. At the Shanghai Race Club, the elite prepare their best horses and most nimble jockeys for the annual Champions Day races. Across the city and amid tight security, others celebrated the birth of Sun Yat-Sen in a new centre which challenged European imperialism. Thousands more Shanghai residents attended the funeral of China’s wealthiest woman. But the biggest crowd gathered at the track; no one knew it, but Champions Day heralded the end of European Shanghai. Through this snapshot of the day’s events, the rich and complex history that led to them and a cast of characters as diverse as the city itself, James Carter provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of a time and a place that still speaks to relations between China and the West today.
Myself and some others talking North Korean art in the Nikkei Asian Weekly….click here…
The people at Noiser podcasts have out together a Real Dictators podcast which includes both Mao and Kimx3 in the DPRK – apparently i’m in there talking North Korea. Available at Apple podcasts, Spotify and the million other places people download podcasts now…
Next Thursday (18/6/20) I’ll be talking with Mei Zhang of WildChina about my Audible Original Murders of Old China – 12 murders, 12 reinvestigations…all welcome….
In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire concludes that early East Asian Cold War history needs to be studied within the framework of post-imperial history. Japan’s surrender did not mean that the Japanese and former imperial subjects would immediately disavow imperial ideology. The end of the Japanese empire unleashed unprecedented destruction and violence on the periphery. Lives were destroyed; names of cities altered; collaborationist regimes which for over a decade dominated vast populations melted into the air as policeman, bureaucrats, soldiers, and technocrats offered their services as nationalists, revolutionaries or communists. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. In the chaos of the new order, legal anarchy, revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments stalked the postcolonial lands of northeast Asia, intensifying bloody civil wars in societies radicalized by total war, militarization, and mass mobilization. Kushner and Levidis’s volume follows these processes as imperial violence reordered demographics and borders, and involved massive political, economic, and social dislocation as well as stubborn continuities. From the hunt for ‘traitors’ in Korea and China to the brutal suppression of the Taiwanese by the Chinese Nationalist government in the long-forgotten February 28 Incident, the research shows how the empire’s end acted as a catalyst for renewed attempts at state-building. From the imperial edge to the metropole, investigations shed light on how prewar imperial values endured during postwar Japanese rearmament and in party politics. Nevertheless, many Japanese actively tried to make amends for wartime transgressions and rebuild Japan’s posture in East Asia by cultivating religious and cultural connections.
Paul A. Van Dyke’s new book, Whampoa and the Canton Trade: Life and Death in a Chinese Port, 1700 – 1842, authoritatively corrects misconceptions about how the Qing government treated foreigners when it controlled all trade in the Guangzhou port. Van Dyke reappraises the role of Whampoa in the system – a port twenty kilometres away from Guangzhou – and reassesses the government’s attitude towards foreigners, which was much more accommodating than previous research suggested. In fact, Van Dyke shows that foreigners were not bound by local laws and were given freedom of movement around Whampoa and Canton to the extent that they were treated with leniency even when found in off-limit places. Whampoa and the Canton Trade recounts the lives of seamen who travelled half-way around the globe at great risk and lived through a historic period that would become the framework for subsequent encounters between China and the rest of the world. Were it not for the exchanges between the major powers and the Qing empire, the world – as we know it – would be a rather different place. Hence, Van Dyke’s command of data mining shows that Whampoa was a key pillar in the Canton System and, thus, in the making of the modern world economy.
