“The Pagoda Project” by Isaac Duffy an RASBJ online talk
WHAT: “The Pagoda Project” by Isaac Duffy, an RASBJ online talk followed by QA WHEN: June 3, 2020 19:00-20:00 Beijing Standard Time WHERE: Online via Zoom HOW MUCH: Free exclusively for RASBJ members and invitees. If someone you know wants to join RASBJ, ask them to Wechat MembershipRASBJ or go to www.rasbj.org HOW TO BECOME AN RASBJ MEMBER: If you’d like to become an RASBJ member (or, for PRCpassport holders, to become an Associate) please Wechat MembershipRASBJ and send your name, nationality, mobile number and email address plus the annual subscription amount (or, for Associates, the suggestion donation) of RMB 300for those resident in China, RMB 200 for those resident overseas and RMB 100for students. If you join RASBJ by June 1, you’ll receive login details for this event.
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: The pagoda forms an integral component of China’s incredibly rich architectural heritage. Scattered all across the country in many different forms, shapes, and sizes, these evocative structures have a history stretching back 2,500 years. But what actually is a pagoda? And how many of them are left? The answers might surprise you. Isaac Duffy will introduce Chinese pagodas with a brief history and explain his team’s ongoing efforts to create the world’s first online pagoda museum and archive. The team plans to visit, document, and photograph every historic pagoda in China — and is giving RASBJan exclusive sneak preview into “The Pagoda Project” before its upcoming public launch. MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Isaac Duffy is an amateur art historian whose interest lies in heritage protection and conservation. He previously spent a year working in the Western Himalayas on the Matho Monastery Museum Project: helping restore and preserve a 600-year old Buddhist Monastery’s art collection and build an onsite museum. He has now lived in Beijing for two years, during which he has become particularly interested in traditional Chinese architecture.
I recently read Julia Boyd’s excellent study of those foreigners who spent time in Nazi Germany and what they wrote, thought and said – Travellers in the Third Reich. Boyd previously wrote a good book about the foreign colony of Peking –ADance with the Dragon. But Travellers reminded me of Ji Xianlin’s memoir, from which Boyd quotes several times. Ji, a Sanskrit scholar studying for his Phd at Heidelberg University was trapped in Germany by the war and couldn’t get back to China until 1946. On a visit to Berlin sometime in 1942 he sought out a functioning restaurant run by some Chinese from Tianjin:
Ji Xialin, 1952
‘It was like entering a strange world. The room was full of my fellow countrymen, mostly businessmen with gold teeth. I felt that I had arrived in a region of demons, black marketeers and crooks. Chinese students were also there, behaving like their brothers, dealing in the black market and playing mah-jong. Very few were concentrating on their studies. I felt frozen with fear for China’s future.
for anyone interested – I note Robert Bickers’s new book on Swire and Jonathan Kaufman’s forthcoming The Last Kings of Shanghai about the Kadoorie’s and Sassoons…click here
This is an online Zoom lecture by Paul French, it will be linked to his book Murders of Old China.
One country rich in history, 12 unsolved murders. Reopening the archives on China’s long forgotten past.
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.
Access to online lectures
The RASHK hosts online lectures over the Zoom application, downloadable on computer at https://zoom.us/ or smartphone on any app store.
Specific details to access the Zoom calls that we will be using will be circulated via correspondence emails prior to each online lecture.
Admission: free of charge
Booking: If you intend to attend an online lecture, please email membership@royalasiaticsociety.org.hk to let us know in advance.
The RAS Journal is now receiving submissions for the 2020 edition. Authors intending to submit an article must send an abstract or article outline to the editor before 31 May 2020, and completed articles will be due 3 July 2020.
Through the centre of China’s historic capital, Long Peace Street cuts a long, arrow-straight line. It divides the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese emperors, from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite square constructed to glorify a New China under Communist rule. To walk the street is to travel through the story of China’s recent past, wandering among its physical relics and hearing echoes of its dramas. Long Peace Street recounts a journey in modern China, a walk of twenty miles across Beijing offering a very personal encounter with the life of the capital’s streets. At the same time it takes the reader on a journey through the city’s recent history, telling the story of how the present and future of the world’s rising superpower has been shaped by its tumultuous past, from the demise of the last imperial dynasty in 1912 through to the present day.
University of Westminster sinologist Harriet Evans has released her long running investiogation into the Beijing hutong district of Dashalar…click here to buy.
Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing’s “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar-one of the capital city’s poorest neighborhoods and only a stone’s throw from Tian’anmen Square-lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar’s original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents’ assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar’s older denizens as key to understanding Beijing’s recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China’s economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history.
