RTHK3 now has 4 podcasts recorded by me some time back on old Shanghai – Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford hit the ‘hai in 1929 to sell some movie equipment and it nearly went badly wrong; then Warner Oland/Charlie Chan was mobbed on the Bund in 1936 when he visited; a Cathay Hotel showgirl’s 1937 war that led her from Shanghai to Manila to Hong Kong and back to the Bund; & finally Penelope Fitzgerald has a package holiday in 1970s Shanghai….click here to listen….
REDISCOVERING BEIJING: THE WESTERN HILLS OF THE OLD DAYS
AN RASBJ ONLINE TALK BY MATTHEW HU XINYU
WHAT: Temples, gardens and tombs of the Western Hills,
evoking a bygone era, are introduced by cultural heritage preservation
expert Matthew Hu Xinyu, followed by QA. WHEN: May 8, Friday,19:00-20:00 Beijing Standard Time WHERE:Online via Zoom HOW MUCH: Free and accessible exclusively to RASBJ members and RAS affiliates worldwide. If you know someone who wishes to join the RASBJ please ask them to Wechat JohnOlbrich at johnobeijing. See www.rasbj.org for details. HOW TO BECOME AN RASBJ MEMBER:If you’d
like to become an RASBJ member (or, for PRC passport-holders, to become
an Associate) please befriend Treasurer John Olbrich on Wechat at johnobeijing and
send him your name, nationality, mobile number and email address plus
the annual subscription amount (or, for Associates, the suggested
donation) of RMB 300 for those resident in China, RMB 200 for those
resident overseas and RMB 100 for students. If you join RASBJ by May 6, you’ll receive login details for this event.
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: For two months, Beijing’s hutongs
and museums were closed due to the pandemic, yet a number of imperial
parks in the Western Hills remained open. During successive dynasties,
many imperial palaces, gardens, private residences, temples and tombs
were built among the Western Hills, and that tradition continued during
the first three decades of the Republican era. Matthew Hu Xinyu made use
of the opportunity created by Covid-19 to re-visit this often
overlooked area. From Tan Zhe Si, the oldest temple in Beijing, to the
garden of French doctor Jean Jerome August Bussiere to the family tomb
of the Republic of China’s first foreign minister, these rediscovered
sites inspired Hu to delve into their history, dating back to the Jin
Dynasty, and to bring to life the relics which we can still see today. MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Matthew Hu, or Hu Xinyu 胡新宇,
was born and raised in Beijing; he is the China Representative of the
Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts and co-founder of The
Courtyard Institute. He has a keen interest in the history and mystery
of China, and in the world as a context and contrast. Previously he
worked as a travel professional with Wild China, and was deeply involved
with the Shijia Hutong Museum in Beijing. He’s been active in the field
of Chinese cultural heritage preservation since 2006 and says he’ll
continue to pursue that calling “perhaps for my lifetime.â€
A generally kind and interesting review of my book Destination Shanghai in Cha Journal…and to answer the reviewer’s question – book 2 – Destination Peking is coming out around Christmas this year….
It’s hard to imagine a less promising founding for even a humble bookstore, let alone a literary/cultural institution, than the beginnings of the Uchiyama Bookstore (内山书店), launched in Shanghai in 1917. Uchiyama KanzÅ was a young troublemaker and elementary school dropout. And a Japanese language bookstore in Shanghai, in the era of 1919, didn’t exactly seem promising. Yet by 1927, when Lu Xun first visited, the Uchiyama Bookstore had already become an institution in east Asian literary modernism. From that time until Lu Xun’s death in 1936, he spent virtually every day at the bookstore, where he had a designated chair and presided over literary discussions with some of the region’s literary giants. Uchiyama KanzÅ saved Lu Xun from the murderous clutches of the Guomindang on more than one occasion.
Join RAS members and friends for a look at this wildly improbable bookstore, based on the essay “A Wildly Improbable Bookstore” in the 2019 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China. We’ll have plenty of images of the store and the era.
Time: 7 May 19:00 (China time)
About the speaker:Aside from his role at the Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, John Van Fleet spends his hobby hours investigating interesting, often less explored and considered aspects of the history of China and Japan, their current relationship between and potential for the two Asian powers, leveraging his ten years of residency in Japan (1991 – 2000) and in China from then until now. His first book, Tales of Old Tokyo, was published in 2015, while he’s developing his second ‘project’ Quarreling Cousins: China and Japan from Antiquity to 2020, in stages – this talk and the essay in the 2019 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China are one of those stages.
If you want to know you’ll need to read the current journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China – now online here…
In the early 1930s London and New York bookshops actively advertised the latest adventure stories written by the pseudonymous author “Bokâ€. No details of Bok’s background, author photos or obvious clues were given to the writer’s real identity. Bok’s novels were all set in China, most featured piracy, smuggling and organised crime along the southern Chinese coast, Hong Kong and Macao. The advertising and book blurbs often played directly into the tropes of the “Yellow Peril†genre established in the preceding few decades by writers such as Sax Rohmer, M.P. Shiel, Herbert Ashbury and others. Yet, Bok’s books were seemingly well researched and appeared to be a form of narrative non-fiction with details that indicated the author had indeed spent significant time on the China Coast. Who was Bok?
I’ll be talking about my Audible Original Murders of Old China this Tuesday as part of the Bespoke Beijing Speaker Series – There will be 12 murders, 12 reinvestigations and plenty of skulduggery in early twentieth century China. All welcome – details here, or as below…
This year’s festival of Jewish cilutre, hisytory and society in China – Limmud China – is online. The full programme is here – my own session on Sunday is about my forthcoming novella Strangers on the Praia which deals with the Jewish refugee community in Macao during WW2…do zoom in if you can…Details of my session here…
Strangers on the Praia – a novella coming out in May, dealing with the niche story of the few, mostly younger Jews women, who moved on from Shanghai to Macao – neutral in WW2 as a Portuguese colony – in the hope that it might be a way back to sanctuary in the UK or US via Lisbon. Macao was essentially the ‘Casablanca of the Far East’. Ultimately there were no boats from Macao to Lisbon – though several Jewish refugees did get to Free China via the French treaty port of Kwangchowan near the border with Indo-China and from there to Kunming and then to British India.
Bio: Paul French is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Midnight in Peking and City of Devils. Both now being adapted for TV. Now, in his new novella published in May, Strangers on the Praia, French weaves together the true stories of those Jewish refugees who moved on from Shanghai to seek a possible route to freedom via the neutral Portuguese colony of Macao, “the Casablanca of the Orientâ€. The delicately balanced neutral enclave became their wartime refuge. Strangers on the Praia relates the story of one young Jewish woman’s struggle for freedom that would prove ultimately an act of brave resistance.
Slightly late, but good all the same, to see that the latest (2019) issue of the Royal Asiatic Society China’s journal is now Available to read online with the lead article by our very own Anne Witchard on  Huang Zunxian, China’s pioneer modernist. Also featuring great articles on old Shanghai and Chinese cultural history by Paul French, Katya Knyazeva, Dong Wang, Inez Low and Duncan Hewitt…. click here to read….
My own two contributions concern the Peking and Tientsin poetry of Margaret Mackprang Mackay and the mystery of who was the author “Bok”?
