Jonathan Chatwin’s Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China is out this month from Manchester University Press. It’s a great read as Chatwin flaneurs down Beijing’s Chang’an Street.
“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.”
My monthly column for Asian Books Blog – Tsundoku – is now up for the summer months….a round up of new and interesting Asia-themed fiction and non-fiction….
In March 1902 the American newspapers were advising against travel to Canton (Guangzhou) due to a severe cholera outbreak in the city and surrounding countryside. It was actually a pandemic that seems to have begun in India and then led to a rapid spread of the infection south-eastwards and eastwards. It reached Burma and Malaya in 1901 by 1902 was spreading over most parts of the Far East as far as China and Manchuria, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.
The paperback edition of City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir is now out in the US and UK from Picador and Riverrun (Quercus) respectively. In the bookshops, airports and train stations just in time for going on your holiday and needing a good read….
if you’re in or passing through Salem, Massachusetts, John Thomson’s album, Foochow and the River Min (1873), will be on view at Peabody Essex Museum until May 2020. From 1870 to 1871, the Scottish-born photographer traveled 160 miles up the Min River to photograph the area in and around Fuzhou. Thomson’s stunning photographs of China are some of the earliest to circulate abroad in books and periodicals. Of the original 46 copies of this album, only ten are left in the world. PEM holds two of them.
A Small Temple at Ku-Shan, 1870-1871
This intimate exhibition features more than 40 striking landscapes, city views and portrait studies that Thomson captured as he traveled in the southeastern Fujian province. Photographs by contemporary artist Luo Dan, who was inspired by Thomson to undertake a similar journey in southwestern China, complement the presentation.
Apologies for being a bit late but, as part of London Art Week 2019, the Martyn Gregory Gallery in St James’s has an exhibition till July 5 of Philippines and South-East Asia: Paintings & Drawings by Eastern & Western Artists, 1800-1950….
