Anna May Wong…Happy Birthday

As ever this week every year…a very happy 114th birthday to Anna May Wong….

William Stevenson’s Portraits of Yunnan, 1959

William  Stevenson (1924-2013) was a British-born Canadian author and journalist who visited China a number of times and, in 1959, published The Yellow Wind: An Excursion in and Around Red China with a Traveller in the Yellow Wind (London: Cassell, 1959). These are some portraits of Yunnan people Stevenson included in the book….

A new bride

A child hawker eating a bowl of rice, Kunming

Fishermen

Farmers

Chinese Fish Fighting in 1950s Paris

Paris’s Chinatown was l’Ilot Chalon. It became home to various Chinese settling in the French capital – sailors, travellers, students as well as having its numbers boosted by the Chinese men who came to work for the French as labourers during the First World War. It apparently became quite thriving but was completely demolished for various extensions to the Gare de Lyon railway station. I read years ago that in 1988 a plaque was erected by city officials commemorating the former Chinatown but I’ve never found it – if it’s still there? However, one Chinese restaurant, the Village de Lyon, bravely soldiers on on what is left of the Rue de Chalon by the side of the station.

I was reminded of the area again recently in Paris and reading Jean-Paul Clebert’s Paris Vagabond (1954) where tramping around the post-war city he briefly notes the I’Ilot Chalon and the Chinese there – “…around the Gare de Lyon where the Chinese hold fish fights…’ Clebert, it has to be said, is not always the most reliable narrator, but interesting nonetheless…

New Fancy Edition of Badlands Available Now

The good people at Penguin China have reprinted a fancy edition of my Penguin Special Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking, basically a series of tales and back stories about various characters in Midnight in Peking…

Sin Jelly Belly of Weihaiwei

Joy Packer was a journalist, writer, radio broadcaster and keen traveller. She was also a “China bird”, the wife of a Royal Navy officer stationed with the Far Eastern Station, based usually either in Hong Kong or Weihaiwei (Weihai). Her autobiography Pack and Follow (1953) has many amusing and interesting China- and Asia-related stories including that of Sin Jelly Belly…

Sin Jelly Belly was, in the 1930s, was Weihaiwei’s naval outfitter. He was apparently an excellent tailor able to run up perfect fitting naval officers uniforms in a matter of hours. His son Jelly Belly Junior inherited both the business and his fathers large stomach.

The only problem was that (being trustworthy naval officers) they would leave their tailor a cheque which he would cash with his bank in Weihaiwei – when the London bank saw a payment required to a Mr Jelly Belly they were often rather suspicious of a fraud.

Opium References in Popular Culture, the 2018 List

I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for a few years now (2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012) – just how opium keeps fascinating us…

The (frankly not that good) Limehouse Golem saw George Gissing in an East End opium den which was better than the script. ITV’s dire Maigret in Montmarte saw the Parisian detective confronted with a dead countess who’d been a hefty morphine addict prompting some opium references. Also I didn’t much got for the BBC’s Christie adaptation this year – Ordeal by Innocence – by some tincture of opium made an appearance. I only caught up on it this year, but the Frankenstein Chronicles begins with a chase involving opium smugglers on the River Thames.

Is that opium I smell Monsieur Inspector?

In non-fiction Daniel Smith’s The Ardlamont Mystery: The Real-Life Story Behind the Creation of Sherlock Holmes, as an aside, retold the famous Victorian murder of Elizabeth Chantrelle in 1878 whose fiendish French husband killer her by adding opium to her food.

In fiction opium popped up in the second Babylon Berlin novel from Walter Kutscher (I mentioned the first one last year), The Silent Death and the third, Goldstein. It also briefly in Thomas Mullens’s Lightening Men, the second in his excellent Boggs & Smith novels of the first black cops in Atlanta after WW2. Abir Mukherjee’s Captain Sam Wyndham in his third outing in Smoke and Ashes, set in India in 1921 is still battling a serious addiction to opium that he must keep secret from his superiors in the Calcutta police force. Shanghai opium dens got a fleeting mention in Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach and there’s mention of a Nazi morphine smuggling ring in Chris Petit’s second Schelgel & Morgen wartime Germany series Pale Horse Riding.

Of course I might well have missed some, so let me know….

A Chinoiserie Bedroom in 1938 – for $49….

Carroll’s Furniture Company of Georgia (which may still be going in some form?) offered complete rooms in 1938 for US$49, on tick – that’s about US$850 today. I’m not sure if that’s a bargain or not but, honestly, it’s better than IKEA. Zoom in on the US$49 bedroom, top right, and it looks like it might be a tad Chinoiserie too – check that bed marquetry…..

Just for a Change – Some Non-China Christmas Murder Mysteries

As Christmas is coming….

My round-up of “Golden Age” 1930s crime reads for Christmas – click here

and some first editions….