All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Another example of a beautiful photo album (for more on old photo albums use the search engine on the blog) – this one a Japanese lacquer Shibayama (a mosaic inlay technique) album with a bird motif, c.1900 showing photo albums were works of art too…
Pauline Yu’s Chinese Songs in a French Key: How Judith Gautier’s Book of Jade Introduced Europe to Chinese Poetry (Columbia University Press)….
In early 1867, a book of poems stunned the French literary world. Titled The Book of Jade, it featured Chinese calligraphy and named ancient Chinese poets as sources, leaving readers uncertain whether the collection was a translation or a French author’s invention. Though the book was published under a pseudonym, the author was quickly recognized as Judith Gautier, the young daughter of a prominent writer. Resembling neither contemporary French verse nor any conventional translation of the day, The Book of Jade opened the eyes of readers throughout Europe to classical Chinese poetry.
Chinese Songs in a French Key tells the extraordinary story of the birth, rebirth, and rich afterlife of The Book of Jade. Pauline Yu traces the research and creative process behind the book, including Gautier’s collaboration with a Chinese refugee known as Tin-Tun-Ling. She shows, through juxtapositions with original Chinese texts, how Gautier’s imaginative strategies conveyed core elements of Chinese poetry to a European audience. Yu explores how the work’s influence reverberated across French letters, Anglo-American modernist poetry, and the international history of translation. The story also unfolds within Gautier’s network of luminaries—such as Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, and John Singer Sargent—and against the backdrop of France’s “discovery” of China through scholarship and plunder. Drawing attention to Gautier’s audacity and accomplishments, this deeply researched and elegantly written book provides new perspectives on the surprising routes cultural transmission can take.
Here’s Wallis by the lido at the American Legation in with Eddie Mills. She met Mills, an American for the Salt Gabelle (tax agency) in Peking, Tientsin in December 1924. He helped her with her luggage on the train to Peking. He also gave her a useful piece of advice gleaned from his years living in China, ‘The trick about living in China is to recognise the inconvenient as the normal.’
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
A little Substack “Special” on some of my work related to 1945 and the end of WW2 in China, Hong Kong and Macao, as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day…click here to read…
A watercolor entitled Two Chinese Gentleman of the Chinese Labour Corps by the prolific Great War artist William Orpen, c.1918. Orpen, an Irish artist and Slade graduate, painted 138 images of the war in all which he donated to the British government. They are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. Note the initials “CLC” on the left hand side man’s hatband.
A copy of Donald Mennie’s China: North and South published in the 1920s by AS Watson – yes, the chemist chain! There’s a reason for that see below. Mennie is best known for his book of photographs The Pageant of Peking published earlier but this is a beautiful collection too.
Here his bio from Historical Photographs of China’s website…..
Donald MENNIE (唐纳德·曼尼) was born in Golspie, Sutherland, Scotland on 9 March 1875 and arrived in China c.1899. His atmospheric, classically composed photographs, are in the Pictorialist style, well suited to publication in souvenir photobooks. Mennie became Managing Director of the pharmacy A.S. Watson and Co., in Shanghai. During the 1920s, he published his photographs in China by Land and Water; The Pageant of Peking; Glimpses of China; China, North and South; Picturesque China and The Grandeur of the Gorges. Mennie’s photographs illustrated My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard by Elizabeth Cooper (Frederick A. Stokes, 1914) and The Great River: The story of a voyage on the Yangtze Kiang by Gretchen Fitkin (North-China Daily News & Herald, 1922). Mennie was interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, Shanghai by the Japanese military in March 1943. He died in a Shanghai sanatorium while interned on 10 January 1944. See also Wikipedia
A kind review of my book Her Lotus Year from the Shanghailander himself Hugues Martin direct from Frenchtown…. click here to read….
For anyone in Shanghai the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai branch is organising a museum tour of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum – September 20…..Click here for more details
