All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Coming November 2024…. the audiobook of my latest book, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson – available on audible for pre-order now (here) and then on November 14 2024…
An ANZAC Company, Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps badge c. 1932 -35 featuring of course a Kiwi….
Jack Chen’s (or Lao Chen as he was known to the Chinese villagers he lived amongst) A Year in Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Commune During the Cultural Revolution is about a year Chen and his wife spent in the Henan village of Upper Felicity from winter 1969-1970. The book is essentially his diary of that year on the Upper Felicity Collective Farm at this tumultuous time. It is perhaps especially interesting as Chen was the son of the Chinese Trinidadian lawyer and Republican-era Chinese foreign minister Eugene Chen. The book is organized around the four seasons describing the day-to-day life of Chinese peasants and how urban intellectuals were “sent down” to the countryside. Click here to read….
Saw this ad in World of Interiors….
Scotney Castle (now National Trust) at Lamberhurst, Kent, is a house built around 1837-1843 in a previous style by several generations of the Hussey family, and was modernised in the 1950s. The house has extensive ground with excellent views over the Kent Weald, an older castle ruin and a charming walled garden. However, the interior of the house is rather gloomy and not in terrifically good taste. Apparently Thatcher liked to weekend there (a woman on no taste herself) and this rather casts a pall over the place too.
What makes Scotney interesting is that it was once home to Arthur Herbert Hussey who spent significant time in East and Southeast Asia in the early 1900s. For reasons I cannot discern Hussey was granted a Chinese passport in 1906, settled in Singapore and remained there until his death from Blackwater Fever in 1923. Hussey joined the British Army in 1882 and served in both the Boer and the First World Wars, but not the Boxer campaign. When I get some time I’ll have to dig out Hussey’s China connection? Unless anyone can save me the effort?
Anyway, a few Chinese/Chinoiserie items from Scotney on display…
Netgalley UK have chosen my forthcoming book Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot and Thompson – out November 14) as one of their six ‘Featured on NetGalley’ titles from 23rd September – 6th October. So, if you’re a member, get over there… (of course you can always pre-order in all the usual places online or from your local bookstore)…
I don’t think I’ve learnt as much new information from a book about Shanghai for a long time as in Hanchao Lu’s Shanghai Tai Chi (Cambridge University Press)…. so much of interest from the 1950s/1960s (until the Cultural Revolution trashed everything and everyone) from secret dance parties, the old houses people lved in, public toilet grafitti, the end of Fuzhou Lu (once 100 bookstores selling everything imaginable), those who kept their tweeds and resisted the drab Mao suit, those who kept insisting of proper coffee and butter with their toast, who still sat of “decadent” sofas, held banquets at the Pasrk Hotel, kept playing mahjong despite a ban from the no-fun cadres, the 82 restaurants with proper chefs that remained open, and the stats of mid-60s foreigner numbers:
1965: Shanghai’s population was 6mn – foreign population included 25 (UK), 7 (France), 6 (USA), 5 (Germans), 3 (Italians) – not totals for Japanese or Russians (presumably hardly any given WW2 and the Sino-Soviet Split of 1960 that saw the large “Red” Russian population leave en masse). In 1969 there were only a ttoal of 774 visitors to Shanghai – 2 a day! In 1976 Shanghai recorded a total population of 100 foreigners (which seems suspiciously rounded!)
a few little bits I learned language wise from the 1950s/early 1960s:
“laoxiu”– a “decrepit element”
“Mr Three R’s” – people who had a pair of Raybans (often originally from the US military in China); a British Raleigh bicycle, and a Rolleiflex camera
“xiaokai” – “little open” – i.e. children of the rich
“afei” – show-offs
laokele – those with nostalgia for the old Shanghai (kele from “class” or “colour” – as in life was more colourful then)
yangchang kuoshao – a rich dandy in the foreign concessions
Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world’s most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society – from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao’s China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women’s liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai’s streets and back alleyways.