All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
An addition to my occasional series of various people with Chinese parasols. Here Gertrude Stein with the ‘modern poet’ Archibald Craig at Stein’s summer retirement home at Belley, eastern France in 1928…
I’ve always been interested in the oft-forgotten French treaty port of Kwangchow-wan (now Guangzhouwan) in Guangdong province. It wasn’t very large and was never home to more than 200,000 people but did have a sort of capital – Fort Bayard and some French institutions – the Governor’s house, some catholic missionaires, a Sino-French school etc. Japan occupied the territory in 1943 as part of its wider takeover of all French Indo-China.
What recently interested me was discovering that Kwangchow-wan had a pavilion at the 1906 Exposition Coloniale in Marseille.
The Kwangchow-wan pavilion (below) was close to the other pavilions of Indo-China – Laos, Cambodia, etc…Compared to the other exhibits Kwangshow-wan’s was quite small…but still in attendance. Today the city – either as Kwangchow-wan or Guangzhouwan is pretty much forgotten – a backwater now as its was then.
Tickets now available for world premier of Hello Gold Mountain, an original composition by Wu Fei for chamber orchestra, inspired by real stories of Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai from Europe before and during World War II.
HELLO GOLD MOUNTAIN is an original composition by Wu Fei for chamber orchestra, performed by chatterbird ensemble, featuring Wu Fei on guzheng and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz (Silk Road Ensemble) on oud — the traditional Chinese and Jewish plucked string instruments respectively.
The work is inspired by real stories of Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai from Europe before and during World War II, and built lives in China.
Visit our website, Hello Gold Mountain, to learn more about the project.
Purchase a Preferred Ticket to receive seating in a reserved seating area, as well as access to a pre-concert cocktail hour with one free beverage (beer or wine).
The premiere of Hello Gold Mountain is made possible by the MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support for the project comes from the Danielle Rose Paikin Foundation and the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Arts Build Communities grant.
Sat, February 23, 2019
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM CST
Ingram Hall
Children’s Way
Nashville, TN 37212
United States
ITS Travel was running ads for all manner of holidays to China in 1980…
It’s hard not to see a little Chinese influence in Josep Lluis Sert’s 1950 design for the Foundation Maeght’s gallery in the south of France…
My Long Read in the SCMP Magazine last weekend on Mrs. “Tinko†Pawley, her friend Charlie Corkran, & her dog Squishy – how they were captured by Bandits in 1932 Yingkou, captured the world’s imagination & survived a rather surreal kidnapping experience…click here…https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2180648/how-chinese-bandits-kidnapping-blond-british
I actually visited the very early art-deco Tuschinski summer before last but only found these photos when upgrading phones recently. The theatre was completed in 1921 with many Chinoiserie touches. It was designed by the architect Hijman Louis De Jong but named after Abraham Icek Tuschinski who commissioned it. It is a definite blending of other styles too, such as Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, the Dutch Amsterdam School of architecture and touches of Chinoiserie.
Marlene Dietrich wears many costumes in her 1935 movie The Devil is a Woman, directed by Josef von Sternberg from a screenplay by no lesser a writer than John Dos Passos….but I’d never seen these publicity shots for the movie of her in a furisode (formal style) kimono with crane motifs before. The slightly earlier image for Picture Play magazine of Marlene similarly in a kimono was by Martha Sawyer, an American artist and illustrator who became known as “the illustrator of Asiatic lore”…
