Holiday Book Ideas from China Bloggers….& some books that might suggest ideas

A post on the Los Angeles Review of Books China blogs site of year end book reviews…it was a tricky one for China books this year with no stand out original offerings (in my humble opinion)…still, it’s that time of year so recommendations must be made! I opted for photography this year as that’s a format that seems to be offering more originality at the moment. I’d add that Katya Knyazeva’s Shanghai Old Town book looks fantastic but I haven’t actually sat down and read it yet so couldn’t include it.

What I did find engrossing this year were a number of books that approached the history of cities from different perspectives, all of which could provide templates for good China history books too I think, so I’ll note them….

Reading Catriona Kelly’s St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past I couldn’t help thinking that Shanghai or Beijing deserve similar books that really get under the skin of the city. Nobody (to my knowledge) has yet done this sort of history for a post-Mao, post-Socialist Chinese city and something as detailed and all encompassing as this would be fantastic. Publishers blurb: Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world’s most alluring cities-a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city’s pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past. In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg’s residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city’s glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place.

Rob Baker’s Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics: A Sideways Look at Twentieth Century London also offers some guidance to how a seemingly random series of mini-histories and stories could reveal more of a city. Shanghai has a myriad of stories (as this blog attempts to show) and pulling them together to show the variety and randomness of urban life makes for great reading. Publishers blurb: Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics explores fascinating stories from London in the twentieth century. From the return to South London of local hero Charlie Chaplin to the protests that blighted the Miss World competition in 1970, the book covers the events and personalities that reflect the glamorous, scandalous, political and subversive place that London was and is today. Learn about, among many other captivating tales, exactly where and how the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean spent their last ever day in London, the grisly murder of Stan the Spiv and the unlikely death of a defrocked girl-crazed priest. A cast of suffragettes, fascists, ‘nancy-boys’, showgirls, prostitutes, terrorists, Nippies and beauty queens features in stories containing a myriad of unexpected tangents and untold facts that cover the width and breadth of the world’s greatest city.

David Burke’s The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists takes one iconic block of flats in North London and dissects a slice of London society just before, during and after the war through the residents. Just about every old building in Shanghai or hutong in Beijing could provide a similar fascinating cornucopia of folk and tell a great story by interweaving them. Publishers blurb: The Isokon building, Lawn Road Flats, in Belsize Park on Hampstead’s lower slopes, is a remarkable building. The first modernist building in Britain to use reinforced concrete in domestic architecture, its construction demanded new building techniques. But the building was as remarkable for those who took up residence there as for the application of revolutionary building techniques. There were 32 Flats in all, and they became a haunt of some of the most prominent Soviet agents working against Britain in the 1930s and 40s, among them Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the group of Cambridge spies who came to be known as the “Magnificent Five” after the Western movie The Magnificent Seven; the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart; and Melita Norwood, the longest-serving Soviet spy in British espionage history. However, it wasn’t only spies who were attracted to the Lawn Road Flats, the Bauhaus exiles Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer; the pre-historian V. Gordon Childe; and the poet (and Bletchley Park intelligence officer) Charles Brasch all made their way there. A number of British artists, sculptors and writers were also drawn to the Flats, among them the sculptor and painter Henry Moore; the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat; and the crime writer Agatha Christie, who wrote her only spy novel N or M? in the Flats. The Isokon building boasted its own restaurant and dining club, where many of the Flats’ most famous residents rubbed shoulders with some of the most dangerous communist spies ever to operate in Britain. Agatha Christie often said that she invented her characters from what she observed going on around her. With the Kuczynskis – probably the most successful family of spies in the history of espionage – in residence, she would have had plenty of material.

Shanghai Chauffeurs and Barbers Fight Slurs on Their Good Name

In 1947 just about everybody in Shanghai went on strike – mill workers of course but also barmen, prosties, taxi-dancers and even chauffeurs. Chauffeurs felt insulted by a Hong Kong movie called Where is Lady? Apparently barbers had recently got so angry at their portrayal in as amorous in another movie, Phony Phoenix, that they trashed a cinema (an activity usually done by Italians or Russians in Shanghai – see here and here respectively). The Union spokesman said they were ready to basically beat up anyone to do with the film!!

So what were these movies that so angered these groups of workers. I can’t find a movie called Where is Lady? but there was a 1947 movie from Hong Kong called Where is the Lady’s Home? that sounds like it might be the one. That was directed by Li Tie and starred Cheung Ying and the beautiful Siu Yin Fei (below) though how exactly this offended chauffeurs I’m not entirely sure.

Phony Phoenix is more commonly known in English as Fake Phoenix – another Hong Kong movie – perhaps the movie poster indicates why the barbers were a bit riled up!

A Little More Shanghai in Winnipeg

I blogged yesterday about the Shanghai Tea Garden in Winnipeg. The restaurant, which featured live music and a Chinese/Western menu, was created in 1935 by the owners of the Shanghai Chop Suey House, who’d obviously made enough money to upgrade to the tea rooms. Here’s their opening announcement (you can click it on it to read the details of everything from their preferred taxi service to ice cream supplier!) and the rather nice logo of the old Chop Suey House….

Winnipeg’s Shanghai Tea Garden offers “Something Different” in 1935

The Shanghai Tea Garden on the corner of King and Pacific in Winnipeg was a big advertiser back in 1935 and looks fairly swank. They seem to have poached the Shanghai Jesters band  and had a “personality girl” (a new term to me)…..

The Mighty Dollar Line President Hoover in Shanghai – August 1937

In August 1937 Japanese planes bombed the Dollar Line ship the President Hoover in Shanghai. But what interests me about this picture is two things. Firstly, just how massive the President Hoover appears when set against the Bund like that (I realise it might be a trick of the angle). We usually see ships photographed from the Bund side with less markers to measure them against. This shot shows the ship dwarfing even the Cathay Hotel and Bank of China buildings. Secondly it’s interesting to see just how far out into the river the pontoons on the Pootung (Pudong) waterfront side stretched out.

J Dyer Ball on Macao on Kindle

Interestingly some or other has decided to republish J Dyer Ball’s early twentieth century writings on Macao (originally published about 1905).

James Dyer Ball (1847–1919) was a sinologist born in Canton. He served in the Hong Kong Civil Service for 35 years, where he held various positions as security officer and chief interpreter. He died in 1919 in Enfield, North London (where I happen to have grown up). He was prolific as a dictionary writer for Cantonese plus all sorts of books on China (his Things Chinese remains a classic) and Macao.

And the Award for Shanghai’s Worst Landlord in 1947 Goes to….

…Well actually we don’t know the landlords name sadly. But imagine Tong Yu-niung’s reaction when he arrived at his clothing store in Shanghai in November 1947 to find eleven empty coffins crowding the aisles. As inflation spiralled into stagflation in Shanghai in 1947 landlords raised rents ridiculous amounts. Tong’s lease was up and his landlord wanted him gone. So, overnight, he had eleven coffins placed in the shop as a final demand – the symbolism is fairly clear I think! Whether this rather nasty eviction notice worked or not I don’t know….

Philippines Airlines to Shanghai, late 1940s

Philippine Air Lines was established in February 1941 and didn’t much chance to get going until services had to be suspended for the duration of the war and the Japanese occupation until 1945. But then they were back with a twice weekly service to Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai from San Francisco…