I’m currently reading Phyllis Birnbaum’s biography of the Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita (below) who lived in Paris for many years – Glory in a Line. And this intriguing snippet pops up…
In the summer of 1930 the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, Foujita, Foujita’s wife Youki (actually a French woman) and his nephew Tomonobu, headed out of Paris to tour the Burgundy region. A confirmed Parisian Desnos listed the many things he would miss about the city while away for the summer including the Shanghai Restaurant on rue Cujas. It was a rather fraught summer holiday as Foujita and Youki’s relationship was in a state of collapse and she would end up married to Desnos (with Youki below) soon after.
Rue Cujas is a smallish street in the 5th arr, close to the Sorbonne, and was apparently popular with Chinese students in the city and French students looking for cheap, and apparently quite authentic, Chinese food before the war. I’m afraid I can’t find a photo of it, or any details of its ownership, menu, prices etc. Apologies, my Paris history researching skills are a bit basic! A French restaurant in Shanghai in 1930 and I’m your man; a Chinese restaurant in 1930s Paris and….well….
I do however know that the restaurant was still there in 1965 as it gets a brief mention in the (and anyone who ever Inter-railed back in the day will remember this book) Let’s Go Student Guide to Europe – ‘one of the best straight Chinese restaurants on the left bank’. Sadly no street number is given, but a slightly earlier French guide to Paris says it was at No.9. Street numbers do sometimes gets changed though. Dr Google tells me there is a Chinese restaurant at No.18 today – The Mandarin Sorbonne – could this be the inheritor of the Shanghai’s premises?
Marcel Theroux reviewed City of Devils for the (22 January) TLS – perceptively and with some good criticisms. It’s pay-walled I’m afraid, but i was interested that someone chose the painting Shanghai Footbridge (from the early 1930s) to accompany the review – the painting is by the Taiwanese painter Tan Ting-pho, who taught at the Xinhua Art College in Shanghai from 1929 till about 1933….if you don’t know his work it’s worth a google search….
I’ll be talking about City of Devils, old Shanghai and particularly the Jewish characters and milieu of the book and city at London’s annual Jewish Book Week this Sunday March 3. I’ll be in conversation with the fantastic Anne Sebba…
1930s Shanghai: in the years before the Japanese invaded, the city was a haven for outlaws from all over the world; a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made – and lost.
Award-winning author Paul French offers a spellbinding account of Shanghai’s lawless 1930s, and two of its most notorious criminals who bestrode the city like kings: ‘Lucky’ Jack Riley, an ex-Navy boxing champion; and ‘Dapper’ Joe Farren, a Jewish boy who fled Vienna’s ghetto to establish a chorus line that rivalled Ziegfeld’s.
How fascinating to see that the archives at Sadlers Wells have turned up a letter from Peggy Hookham’s (Dame Margot Fonteyn’s) mum Hilda from their home in Shanghai to the Sadlers Wells Ballet School in London….She of course got accepted….and so her days of ballet school in Tientsin with Madame Tarakanova and then in Shanghai with George Gontcharov were over and the rest is, as they say, history…
Nicole Barnes Intimate Communities looks to be a fascinating study of Republican era healthcare…
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.
Ogden’s ( a Liverpool tobacco firm) original collectable cigarette cards were collected by million of people – the fag firms used them to stiffen the packs and advertise their brands simultaneously. Here, as part of a set showing views of various cities around the world is Tientsin (Tianjin)….
In the London Library I came across a copy of the Sri Lankan Tamil philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book Fourteen Dances of Shiva, published in 1918. This is an interesting copy to find in London as it was published by The Sunwise Turn Company of New York and contains, as you can see below, their stamp.
However the book was then sent to their London agents, Luzac & Co. of Great Russell Street (in Bloomsbury). The Sunwise Turn bookshop and publishing house was run by Mary Mowbray-Clarke in the nineteen-teens and twenties and was a hotbed for modern art, ideas and anarchy. Luzacs & Co were near the British Museum and specialised in importing books from foeign publishers and books on matter Oriental as well as selling the odd antiquity or two. They clearly sold the book to the London Library.
