All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
An interview in Macao News with Bill Lascher about Mel Jacoby’s time in pre-war Macao (and a little bit about my part in the journey to print!) and the collection of Mel’s photos of China, Macao and Asia in the 1930s and World War Two – A Danger Shared (Blacksmith Books). Click here to read….
China Revisited is a series of extracted reprints of mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century Western impressions of Hong Kong, Macao and China. The series comprises excerpts from travelogues or memoirs written by missionaries, diplomats, military personnel, journalists, tourists and temporary sojourners. I publish them with Blacksmith Books in Hong Kong and add introductions and annotations throughout…
Save 20% by buying this bundle which includes the following items in the series. Please click on their titles below to read full details.
1 x Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey’s 1920s Hong Kong, Macao and Canton Sojourns
1 x Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878/1879
1 x LING-NAM: Hong Kong, Canton and Hainan Island in the 1880s
Now available – China Revisited #5….
Charles Halcombe served for much of the 1880s and 1890s with China’s Imperial Maritime Customs Service. His career included sojourns in both Canton and Hong Kong. Halcombe long harboured dreams of becoming a journalist. Unusually he married a Chinese woman, Liang Ah Ghan, the daughter of a Chefoo merchant during his stay. His seven-year career in China, his writing ambitions and his marriage all strongly inform his impressions and the retelling of his experiences.
In these excerpts from The Mystic Flowery Land we join Halcombe arriving by sampan at Hong Kong’s old Pedder’s Wharf before accompanying him on an extended literary stroll along Queen’s Road. With him we enter the “rum-mills” and Chinese theatres, meet the Sing-Song girls, indigent Europeans, and inveterate gamblers of the colony. On Hollywood Road Halcombe explores the fascinating Man-Mo Temple. In Canton Halcombe investigates the riverine life of the city – the infamous “flower boats”, the working river and coastal steamers, the numerous temples to the sea Gods.
But it is perhaps Halcombe’s description of the terrible bubonic plague that hit Hong Kong in 1894 that stands out to the reader today as both shocking in its tragedy and pertinent to our own times.
Available from Blacksmith Books, Bookazine and elsewhere…..
James DJ Brown’s Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst)…..
Richard Sorge is one of history’s most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle- crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo during the 1930s and gathered intelligence credited with changing the course of the Second World War. It is an intriguing tale; but Sorge’s spy ring was just one chapter in a much longer history of Russian and Soviet espionage in and against Japan.
Cracking the Crab tells the extraordinary full story of Russian intrigue targeting Japan, from first encounters in the eighteenth century to the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945. Colourful episodes include Gojong, King of Korea, being smuggled into the Russian legation dressed as a woman in 1896; the 1927 ‘Tanaka Memorial’, an infamous forgery purporting to be Japan’s hidden plan for world domination; and the secret intelligence of ‘Nero’, a Soviet agent supplying invaluable insight into Japanese strategy during the Second World War.
From Russians murdered in broad daylight in Meiji Tokyo to Soviet honey traps and ‘white magic’ at the Battle of Nomonhan, this is a landmark history of the covert struggle between two great powers of the modern age.
In Beijing?? This Sunday July 27th WildChina Travel is running the Midnight in Peking Walking Tour through the major sites of my book about the 1937 murder of Pamela Werner – the Fox Tower, Armour Factory Alley, the hutongs of the old Peking Badlands and the Legation Quarter, all finishing at the former Grand Hotel de Pekin.
A set of British Museum Chinese Porcelain of the Ming Dynasty Postcards, 1920s
The old Lakeview Hotel in Hangchow (Hangzhou) is somewhat mysterious. There is a Lakeview Hotel in Hangzhou today, perhaps built (in 1986 and refurbished in 2005) on the site of the old one. Below you’ll see a postcard of the view from the Lakeview and a newspaper advert for the hotel. I have also posted before about a marvellous brochure the hotel produced in 1937 (here). But I’ve never seen an actual photo of the hotel, if anyone happens to have one? All the usual things Hangzhou still offers – though I’m not sure what happened to the artesian well!! Manager Ginarn Lao remains a total mystery too!
