Who Needs Lonely Planet? The Traveller Brings You the “dos & don’ts” of China Travel, 1932

Essentials…I’m sure you’ll agree…click to enlarge

Peking Dust, a poem by Wade Oliver, 1934

A short poem published in 1934….

Peking Dust

Of camphor wood and carved jade

The shy wings of this song are made.

*

Over the grey walls of Peking

They swoop and dart and soar and sing,

*

Leaving behind the dusty fret

Of hands that toil, and hearts that sweat

*

Their crimson drops of living blood

To carve from lifeless stone and wood

The lean flesh of their livelihood.

*

Wade Oliver

Though published in American newspapers in 1934 the poem’s origins may be earlier as, from what I can glean online, Oliver was at his most prolific in the 1920s and early 1930s. Poetry Quarterly magazine described Oliver as an ‘authentic’ whose work had a ‘high level of lyricism and imagery’.

I’m not sure if Oliver ever wrote another poem about China but he was seemingly favoured as a contributor to Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry. Monroe’s interest in China combined with her professional relationships with Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound on Chinese poetry have been well documented and noted before on this blog via the work of various academics including Anne Witchard of Westminster University.

Talking Bloody Saturday, WW2 in China, Peak China Book & What I Haven’t Read & Watched with the Los Angeles Review of Books

Apologies in advance for self promotion – A link to an interview with me in the Los Angeles Review of Books talking about Bloody Saturday 1937, China and World War Two, and (perhaps of less interest – what I’m reading, like, don’t like and have never got round to reading/watching)….

‘Shanghai is an unsanitary and congested city’, the Menasha Rotary Club, 1932

Seems not everyone who went to Shanghai in the 1930s loved it – this from 1932 and a report to the Rotary Club in Menasha, Wisconsin from Robert Stough of the Wisconsin Tissue Mills. Perhaps not surprising that a tissue salesman should find a city unsanitary – just talking up business really! It doesn’t sound like a very informative meeting – let’s hope they called it a night and hit the pub quickly!!

Charles Boyer and Loretta Young in 1935’s Shanghai – the Artwork

!935 saw the release of Shanghai with Charles Boyer, as a Shanghai financier, and Loretta Young as the love interest. To promote the film the studio released some specially commission artwork to the newspapers…

Room 302, The Astor House Hotel, Shanghai

Last week I blogged about the sad tale of Marshal Smith Hairston who, distraught at the loss of a child, committed suicide in room 302 of Shanghai’s Astor House Hotel in July 1936…courtesy of a China Rhyming regular reader, here is room 302 at the Astor – I can’t be sure they haven’t played around with the room numbers since 1936 but anyway…

Information on the Official Midnight in Peking Walking Tour with Bespoke Beijing

Presenting Bespoke’s First Regular Public Tour: Midnight in Peking*

Bespoke may be known for its private tours, but sometimes we create one that’s such a smash hit we just have to share it with as many people as possible.
So we’re pleased to announce that our evening walking tour based on Paul French’s international bestselling murder mystery ‘Midnight in Peking‘ will now run as a regular public tour on the last Saturday of every month here in Beijing.

That means the next tour will take place on July 29th.
Tickets cost 388RMB per person.

Ticket details here

& Bespoke Beijing here

James Hadley Chase’s A Coffin From Hong Kong, 1962

Chase was a British author that, starting just before World War Two, began publishing pulp novels in the American hard-bitten style a la Hammett, Chandler and Cain. George Orwell thought him coldhearted and a worrying sign of both creeping Americanism and the commecialisation of crime in his 1944 essay Raffles and Miss Blandish. China Rhymers though with a taste for pulp crime novels might find his 1962 novel A Coffin from Hong Kong fun – it begins and ends in Pasadena but the bulk of the novel is set in late 1950s Hong Kong. And quite a good description of the city it is too – seedy hotels, Wan Chai bars, 3-class ferries, neon-lit Kowloon, refugees from Red China sleeping on the street corners, the old Repulse Bay Hotel and Lantau Island back in the day. There’s also a trip to Kowloon Walled City, some grizzled old Scottish colonial cops, landing at Kai Tak and a few good dinners along the way. All-in-all a pretty good speed read. Don’t let the covers put you off!!