A post on the Chinese objects at Petworth House (now managed by the Nation al Trust), West Sussex, built in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset. The houses contains a treasure trove of European art as well as some Chinese and Japanese objects. The Chinese items on display are as below….
A pair of Chinese vases decorated with sprays of flowers, c.1650-1700
Several large Chinese vases from the Kangxi Period c.1662-1772
A pair of Chinese vases c.1650-1700 with flower/bird motifs & a oviform jar with copper-red decoration c.1736-1796 atop a 17th century lacquer cabinet.
A pair of Chinese vases with blue glaze and bird motifs atop a 17th century lacquerware cabinet
A selection of Chinese blue & white vases atop a 17th century lacquer-ware cabinet, all on English made stands
Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers (Atlantic Books) is as carefully and engagingly written as you’d expect. Acting as a coda to his River Townyears in Fuling as much as looking at the frustrations of Xi-land and Zero Covid. He’s always thoughtful and always an interesting (and what i think is said less when he’s talked about, as he’s mostly talked about over that side of the Atlantic) and very American eye on China.
More than twenty years after teaching English to China’s first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler’s twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties – members of China’s “Reform generation” – and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China’s incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.
In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler’s students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student – an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler’s new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China’s boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme ‘meritocracy’ at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him a first-hand view of raising a child in China.
In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what’s happened to the country, where it’s going, and what we can learn from it. At a time when relations between the UK and China fracture, Other Rivers is a tremendous, indeed an essential gift, a work of enormous human empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up, using as a measuring stick this most universally relatable set of experiences. As both a window onto China and a distant mirror onto our own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.
Two pictures of a Chinese newspaper’s composing room from the late 1920s “hot type” days. The compositors reputedly walked three miles to typeset a single page! Quite mind-boggling!! The pictures were taken for National Geographic by Paul Hutchinson c.1927.
My obsession with John le Carre’s HK-set The Honourable Schoolboy (1975), Smiley, Old Craw, Doc di Salis, Gerry Westerby, Liese et al knows no bounds. Fortunately The Le Carre Cast has given me two episodes to work though my infatuation – Part 1 dropped today – click here to listen…Part 2 in a fortnight….
In 1923 the National Geographic tried to demonstrate the length of the Great Wall in terms American readers could understand – from the coast at Philly, Pennsylvania to west of Topeka, Kansas, with a branch down to Little Rock, Arkansas ….
This painting is entitled Junks in Harbour and is by the Scottish artist Dr Robert Cecil Robertson (1890-1942). Robertson and his wife, the artist Eleanor Moore Robertson, moved to Shanghai where he worked as a bacteriologist between 1925 and 1937. Though not noted on the painting or otherwise obvious it seems we can assume this is Shanghai in the 1920s…
North Korea may be known as the world’s most secluded society, but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in 2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That number has grown tremendously in just over a decade, with over 7 million registered as of 2022. This expansion took place amid extreme economic hardship and the ensuing possibilities of destabilization. Against this social and political backdrop, Millennial North Korea traces how the rapidly expanding media networks in North Korea impact their millennial generation, especially their perspective on the outside world.
Suk-Young Kim argues that millennials in North Korea play a crucial role in exposing the increasing tension between the state and its people, between risktakers who dare to transgress strict social rules and compliant citizens accustomed to the state’s centralized governance, and between thriving entrepreneurs and those left out of the growing market economy. Combining a close reading of North Korean state media with original interviews with defectors, Kim explores how the tensions between millennial North Korea and North Korean millennials leads to a more nuanced understanding of a fractured and fragmented society that has been frequently perceived as an unchanging, monolithic entity.
