All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A sale on September 16 at Bonhams in New York from the estate of Chiang Yee which includes some very interesting items including work by Zhang Daqian, Zheng Shanxi, Yang Zhiguang, Sun Zhongwei, Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu and others as well as Chiang Yee himself (you can see everything up for sale here)…
Finally (after about 100 TV viewings) got to see Shanghai Express on the big screen at NFT1 at the BFI. I’m sure that being with a large crowd made the comic lines land better and a giant screen helped me see details – that erroneous Guinness advert (they never sold it in Shanghai), the great ticket office, the fabulous dining car von Sternberg should have made more of… – and costumes (Marlene’s of course but also Anna May Wong’s fab luggage). And the movie was introduced by Anna May’s latest biographer Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll, over for the BFI’s Anna May Wong season all this month….details here…
Andrew Lownie’s new deep dive on the perfidy, corruption and general dodginess of Price Andrew, Duke of York – Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (William Collins) naturally has to have a China angle among his many dubious shenanigans as “trade envoy”. Of course the story of Andrew, flying on UK taxpayer money to shill for Bernie Ecclestone – “F1 Supremo” – in Shanghai as he sought to screw as much out of Shanghai as possible needs to be told – and it does by me and others….
A Q&A I did with Pascale Massot, author of China’s Vulnerability Paradox: How the World’s Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets (OUP) for ChinaFile – Pascale’s book intrigued me and struck me as one of the most original and challenging takes on China’s relationship wih commodities…click here to read…
I spend most of my time at a desk or in the library, in China or London researching… but August was a great time to get out and about….
The Edinburgh International Book Festival was, as ever, a blast. Thanks to Isabel Hilton who moderated so charmingly as well as Jenny Niven and her team for making 2025 another amazing Edinburgh International Book Festival….
Travelling over the river to Battersea Power Station and the new Battersea Bookshop was also fun… and as part of Women in Translation Month. A great evening was had talking about Tie Ning’s My Sister’s Red Shirt (Sinoist Books) with Annelise Finegan, Academic Director & Clinical Associate Professor of Translation at NYU School of Professional Studies….
And a trip across to Northern Ireland and Bangor, near Belfast, for the Open House Festival was one of the most chilled and relaxed weekends at a festival for a long time….
As a past contributor to The Shanghai Literary Review it’s very annoying to read of the problems they are having with their institutional partners Duke Kunshan University’s Humanities Research Center (HRC)…. Read the details here and let’s hope Duke Kunshan sort this out….
(as of publication – September 1 – this matter has not been resolved leaving the people who give up their time to run TSLR considerably out of pocket and the future of the journal in some doubt – a shabby effort by Duke Kunshan all round).
As of last weekend TSLR confirmed that Duke Kunshan had still not responded to any correspondence on why they had failed to pay the promised monies. TSLR said: ‘Failing DKU coming to their senses, it appears that we’ll have to pay for the material that has been printed already (but cannot be used) as well as a reprint of the entire issue (thousands of dollars in total).’
You can help TSLR by donating a small amount to help them stay afloat here…
An interview (not under caution I hasten to add!…) with former Hong Kong detective Toby Bull who presents a series called China Noir. We discuss my books Midnight in Peking and City of Devils, the different approaches to crime and law enforcement in old Peking, Shanghai and Hong Kong… and whether Macao’s historic reputation as a crime and sin city is deserved or not…. click here to watch…
Film historian Xin Peng and Anna May Wong biographer are all involved in this terrific season running from early September for a month at the BFI on the Southbank….there’s a lot of movies, some old TV and talks – here’s all the details
