Talking with Xinran at the Daunt Books Marylebone Spring Festival 2019 – 14/3/19

I’ll be talking to Xinran about her new book The Promise at the Daunt Books (Marylebone High Street) Spring Festival on 14/3 at 1.30pm…

It goes without saying that it’s a beautiful venue and attendees get a sausage roll courtesy of London’s best butcher, Marylebone’s own The Ginger Pig!! Ticket details here – https://www.dauntbooks.co.uk/product/events/the-promise-love-and-loss-in-modern-china/

Tickets are £7 including mini sausage rolls provided by The Ginger Pig.

Xinran’s acclaimed body of work, encompassing 30 years and hundreds of interviews, has established her as the finest chronicler of Chinese women’s lives. Her new work The Promise focuses on the moving stories of six women from four generations of the Han family, and how much has changed in their differing understanding of sex, emotions and love. In their own words, the life of the heart shines through the generations against a vivid backdrop of war, political turmoil and hardship.

Chatting to Xinran we welcome historian Paul French, whose evocative and gripping accounts of 1930s Peking and Shanghai have delighted readers in his bestselling books Midnight in Peking and City of Devils.

This event is part of the Daunt Books Festival 2019.
The event will start at 13:30 and end at approximately 14:30

Cities Under Occupation – City of Devils Comes to Jewish Books Week 2019, London – 3/3/19

I’m delighted to be talking about City of Devils at this years Jewish Book Week in London on 3/3/19 at Kings Place, up behind King’s Cross Station. It’s a special treat as I’m in conversation with the biographer Anne Sebba whose most recent book, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation, dovetails nicely with mine.

Obviously there are differences between Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Nazi-occupied Paris but the parallels, variations and differing responses to occupation are interesting.

3/3/19 – 3.30pm – Kings Place – tickets – http://jewishbookweek.com/event/city-of-devils-a-shanghai-noir/

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.

The Royal Asiatic Society Journal (China) 2018 is now Available to View online…

The Royal Asiatic Society Journal (China), edited by Julie Chun, is now available to view online. Officially that’s Vol.78, Issue 1, 2018…

So, i hear you ask, what does the issue contain?

Well, the following:

Peter Hibbard on the history of the North China Branch of the RAS;

David Bridgman on Eliza Bridgman and the ‘awakening’ of women;

Andrew Field on an Irish Policeman in Shanghai;

Christian Mueller on the ILO and Republican China;

Lukas Gajdos on a Czechoslovak Founding Father in Harbin;

Evan Taylor on INDUSCO during WW2;

John Van Fleet on enduring myths in China and Japan;

Jimmy Nuo Zhang on Ming and Qing Dragon Marble Reliefs;

Parul Rewal on Hong Hong hawker culture

Edith Yazmin Montes Incin on Mexican Foreign Policy and the PRC;

The Young Scholar Essay – Athena Ru on China’s Script Revolution;

& reviews of Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China and Luise Guest’s Half the Sky;

And, I have to give a quick plug as it’s my blog – there’s a piece by me on Beijing’s ‘most foreign hutong’, Kuei Chia Chang and the foreigners who inhabited it in 1922…

And it’s all here to read and download – http://www.royalasiaticsociety.org.cn/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/RAS.Journal2018.pdf

Why Evelyn Waugh Never Went to China

I am always slightly fascinated by why many famous English writers of the inter-war period never made it to China – Orwell went East of course, but never to China; Graham Greene likewise. Evelyn Waugh, like so many people at the time, had a fascination with China. I have written about one aspect of this in my recent piece for the South China Morning Post Magazine on Mrs. “Tinko” Pawley, her friend Charlie Corkran, & her dog Squishy – how they were captured by Bandits in 1932 Yingkou and how Waugh used his close interest in their case to write a short story…set in Africa! https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2180648/how-chinese-bandits-kidnapping-blond-british

But why did Waugh never go? Well, he nearly did…in 1930. A busy year for Waugh – his second novel Vile Bodies was published and was a well reviewed bestseller; he separated from his wife (also called Evelyn) and converted to Catholicism. He spent the summer in Ireland at Tullynally Castle (the home of the Pakenham family in County Westmeath) with friends including Alastair Graham (one of his “loves” and the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited) and the author Elizabeth Harman (who was to marry Frank Pakenham, seventh earl of Longford). Here Waugh spent his days consulting atlases and the library researching a trip to China and Japan.

However Alastair Graham had been working for the Foreign Office in Cairo where he had met some Abyssinian (Ethiopian) princes. The tales of them, their attire and country fascinated Waugh. When he heard that a new emperor was to be crowned in Addis Ababa that November (Ras Tafari, thence Emperor Haile Sellasie) he immediately dropped all thought of China, got an accreditation from the Times and headed for Africa. His dispatches from Abyssinia are collected in the Penguin Modern Classic, Remote People…

And so China never got the Waugh treatment…

Le Drame de Shanghai, 1938

Some artwork from GW Pabst’s French movie Le Drame de Shanghai – which i have sadly never seen…but sort of know I would like….

Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai History Club – Segregation, violence and prosperity in Chinatown New York – 13/2/19

Entrance fee: Members: Free  Non-Members: 50 RMB
Venue: Garden Books325 Changle Rd（长乐路325号）

to register – https://ras-china.eventbank.cn/event/20665/register/?pk_campaign=All%20RAS&pk_cid=23208&pk_kwd=23208&pk_medium=event-campaign

M Literary Residency – Shanghai – 2019-2020

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Chinese Paper Lanterns For Sale in Cloth Fair, London, 1912

The picture below is of Mrs. Flora Jackson, who was the listed proprietor of Jackson’s Newsagents (& Provisions Store) at no.22 Cloth Fair (just by the junction to Red Lion Passage – now sadly demolished) in Smithfield, City of London. It is March 1912 and she has, as you can see, a display of Chinese lanterns in her window…

Now, this image comes from a wonderful book of old London photographs – Panorama’s of Lost London, by Philip Davies (Transatlantic Press, 2011). The images are mostly from the London Metropolitan Archive. The caption to the photo (provided, I assume, by Davies, reads: ’20 Cloth Fair and entrance to Red Lion Passage looking west, 26 March 1912 – Note the patriotic paper lanterns for sale in the shop window…’ Incidentally it is the Kelly’s Post Office London Directory of 1911 that tells me Flora Jackson was at no.22 – but no matter. It’s the lanterns we’re interested in….

Now this reference to ‘patriotic lanterns’ intrigued me. Chinese paper lanterns were imported into England in quite large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The vogue for them had really got going in 1887 at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations as towns and villages across the land hung Chinese lanterns out to celebrate (see my post of that – https://chinarhyming.com/2013/11/25/the-1887-jubilee-perhaps-a-highpoint-in-chinese-lanterns/

By the turn of the century and after World War One garden parties, tea dances, street parties and decorated homes all often featured these Chinese paper lanterns which were, I believe, quite inexpensive, decorative and pleasingly exotic. (see here for Chinese lanterns at the dances at the Metropole Hotel in London in 1926 – https://chinarhyming.com/2013/10/20/chinese-lanterns-dancing-all-night-at-the-metropole-in-1926/

1912 though has no particular patriotic connotation in England. Nor do the lanterns appear to be particularly aimed at any sort of British patriotism. Of course it is the first year of the establishment of the Chinese Republic, but do we really think that Jackson’s Newsagents of Cloth Fair was celebrating the end of the Qing Dynasty and the creation of Dr Sun’s Republic? Possibly?

I might venture that it appears as if a makeshift Chinese-style shrine has been created in the display too. I checked the records in case that window wasn’t Mrs Jackson’s, but a Chinese curio store next door – it was her window. And so I have a few possibles:

1. Mrs Jackson simply sold Chinese paper lanterns and either she, or the sales rep, created the window display?…
2. Mrs Jackson had a Chinese husband? If anyone has access to ancestry.com they might like to check that out…
3. Mrs Jackson saw a sales opportunity around Chinese New Year – however, that was late January in 1922 (year of the Dog, by the way) so (if the book’s label of March is correct) she’s carrying on the theme a bit long…
4. Mrs Jackson really did want to celebrate the establishment of the Chinese Republic and created a window display to mark that momentous event.

I would, of course, welcome any thoughts or ideas?

Finally, looking through the archives I found this shot of Mrs. Jackson’s shop that shows you her front window that is cut off in the picture above…this one was taken by Edward Yates, two years earlier in 1910 and shows the provisions part of her store and clearly that her shop was no.22 .