All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A bit of my review in the Mekong Review of Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s new book on HK, Vigil, is up online, but to read it all you’ll need to subscribe which, if you are interested in matters Asia, would be a smart thing to do anyway….
An excellent National Geographic Society map from 1941 indicating exactly what commodities Japan was able to snaffle up as its expansion across the Asia-Pacific region continued…..
A nice shot of the old foyer of the Jardine Matheson building at No.27 the Shanghai Bund . The building is not in bad shape – it’s got a Rolex showroom on the ground floor now for people without much original taste in wristwatches and had an extra floor added in the early 1980s for some bizarre reason….
I recently recorded an episode of the Writer’s Routine podcast (check it out as it has some seriously heavy hitters on there and loads of good interviews). Mine’s perhaps a little different as i’m talking about my Audible Oirignal Murders of Old China, China writing in general, true crime and research methods as well as the specificities of writing for audio.
Click here to listen
In 1938 it was announced that, with the Burma Road still pretty basic, and the old military supply road that ran from Ulan Bator in Mongolia to Kalgan (Zhangjiakou) cut by the Japanese invasion, 1,000,000 labourers were at work on a new military road to unite Nationalist China and Soviet Russia.
According to the map above the new road would run from UB to Lanchow (Lanzhou) in Gansu and then down to Chengtu (Chengdu) in Sichuan. Not sure it ever got finished though as it was ultiamtely the Burma Road that would become China’s major supply line.
Following on from yesterday’s pictures of Port Lymne – here’s a few more…
I blogged some time back about Damian Collins’s biography of Sir Philip Sassoon, Charmed Life: The Phenomenal World of Sir Philip Sassoon. Philip, who died young just before the Second World War, is sadly largely forgotten now but was the most interesting of the section of the Bagdhad/Shanghai Sassoon clan that went to England. Anyway, I recently visited Philip Sassoon’s Kent estate Port Lymne, which is now the wildlife park started by John Aspinal. Anyway, a few photos of the house here…there are more pictures of the house today and back in its 1930s heyday on my instagram feed (oldshanghaipaul).
This came up for auction recently, but i sadly missed it!! Meyer Lansky’s Personal Copy of “Master Kung – The Story of Confucius” by Carl Crow. The book also includes an envelope from The Berkeley-Carteret Hotel in Ashbury Park New Jersey Used By Lansky to take notes (his hobby was words). Plus a leter from the Lansky family authenticating it….
