BEST OF CRIME with Paul French

Just in case you ever wondered…..http://off-the-shelfbooks.blogspot.com/2019/07/best-of-crime-with-paul-french.html

Tsundoku #6 – July/August 2019

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….

http://www.asianbooksblog.com/2019/07/tsundoku-6-julyaugust-2019.html

Sound Advice on Shanghai….

Given to Charlie Chan in 1935, but applicable to just about every character in City of Devils I feel….

Cholera in Canton in 1902…

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.

City of Devils now out in paperback in the UK and US…

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….

John Thomson , Foochow and the River Min (1873), Peabody Museum, Salem

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.

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.

London Art Week – The Philippines and South-East Asia: Paintings & Drawings by Eastern & Western Artists, 1800-1950 – Martyn Gregory Gallery, St James’s

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….

Sanzetti – Inter-war Photographer of Shanghai

Last week I blogged about the Skvirsky Photography Studio in 1930s Shanghai – Skvirsky became the most in-demand wedding photographer to both Chinese Shanghai and Shanghailander foreign society, a friend of Sir Victor Sassoon’s and a noted portrait photographer…

Skvirsky Photo Studio, Nanking Road, Shanghai

He also, earlier, worked in partnership with a photographer called Sanzetti, a man I knew, and still know, nothing about. However the phenomenal old Shanghai researcher Katya Knyazeva ferreted out a photograph of him – not great quality, but the only one we have to my knowledge.