A telescope from Voigtlander & Sohn, a long-established company within the optics and photographic industry, headquartered in Braunschweig, that recently came up for auction. And so a rabbit hole…..! It was originally sold by Chas J Gaupp of Hong Kong, of who more below….
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Chas. J Gaupp were a long-established Watch Makers, Opticians, Chronometers & Jewellers in Hong Kong – basically anything optical, lens or such like.
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Here’s a great photo of Queens Road Looking West which includes their store and is by the great John Thomson. The building in the foreground is the Victoria Exchange, and next to it is Chas. J. Gaupp & Co (#54-56). The old Oriental Bank building is underneath and behind the trees opposite. The lanterns and decorations were to celebrate the visit to Hong Kong of H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh in 1869.
I believe they had a branch in Singapore too. Around 1904 they moved their store to Chater Road. They also made chronometers, which were especially important prior to the establishment of the Hong Kong Observatory…
UK citizens will be able to travel visa-free to China for trips under 30 days. The change brings the UK in line with countries including France, Germany, Italy, Australia and Japan.
The fragrant and charming Mongkok Flower Market is defined by its streets of low-rise, traditional street-level shops, just by some stunning art-deco on Prince Edward Road West. It’s a delightful, bustling local market.
So, of course, Hong Kong’s ever-meddling, rarely-improving, Urban Renewal Authority (URA) wishes to trash it with one of its invariably horrid “redevelopment plans”. Where you can still see small flourishing businesses, cafes, human scale life, they see yet more malls, bland indoor markets and fake canals. What a disaster, if it happens.
But for now at least you can wander the market, admire the shophouses and see the adjacent art-deco apartment buildings on my VoiceMap walking tour of Kowloon’s art deco treasures and hidden local gems….click here….
I’ll be zooming in to the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club book group February 2 (7pm HK time) to discuss my book Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson. If you are a member of the Hong Kong FCC then let the administration office now and they’ll add you to the group’s Whats-app to access either the evening at the FCC. If you are in Hong Kong and would like to join the FCC Book Group, either for this event or for others too, email me (paul@chinarhyming.com) and let me know….there are ways!!
The stories about the end of newsstands in China is very sad – I’ve always enjoyed browsing them for new magazines and regional media. Here’s a couple of photos – a Beijing news kiosk in 2002 and a mobile bicycle newsstand in Kunming, 2004….
Right alongside the modernist artists, architects and sculptors who lived in interwar Belsize Park was George Orwell…
In 1934 Orwell had already published Down and Out in Paris and London and his first novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, as well as a memoir, Burmese Days. He then moved to Hampstead and got a job as a part-time assistant in Booklovers’ Corner, a
second-hand bookshop in South End Green run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. Today that bookshop is a Gail’s Bakery though a plaque has been erected as well as a sculpture of Orwell on the front of the building. He worked there for fifteen
months until the end of January 1936 with many of his experiences as a bookseller appearing in his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Deep in the snowy forests of Northeast Asia roams the majestic and revered Amur tigers, more popularly known as ‘The Siberian Tiger’. But in the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred of these graceful animals remained in their home of the Amur River basin. As the Soviet Union fell, catastrophe arrived, with poaching and logging taking a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.
Taking us on a journey through remote frozen landscapes, globally renowned conservationist Jonathan Slaght charts the incredible story of how Russian scientists and American conservationists came together to save these magnificent, solitary creatures. He retraces their steps to show how this dedicated, fearless coalition laid the foundations of new tiger research across Asia, transforming public opinion around tigers from something to be feared and hunted, to creatures we must protect.
Today, tigers occupy 7% of the lands they did 100 years ago, disappearing in the wild from Bali to Iran. In the ongoing global crisis of species destruction, Slaght shows us that the revival of the Amur tiger can bring us hope for the future: a model for how to live alongside, and revive, the natural world.
Behold the Taikoo Club Bowling Championship Cup, 1921, crafted in Chinese silver, with a 90 hallmark of the silversmith Wang Hing, who had shops in Hong Kong (Zetland House, 10 Queen’s Road), Canton and Shanghai, on the base. The cup was warded by D Templeton Esq. to John Russell. Templeton worked for Taikoo Sugar in Hong Kong and was probably Scottish as he’s recorded as a member of the St Andrew’s Society in Hong Kong.
