Let’s End 2014 With a Good News Story….the partial reprieve of Saigon’s Grands Magasins Charner

As usual it was not a great year for architectural preservation in Asia – Beijing and Shanghai carried on pulling down perfectly restorable buildings to create car parks and shopping centres and this is the year we can add Burma to the list of devastation cities – Rangoon’s colonial architecture looks to be (I think it’s fair to say) in grave peril. We had a few wins in places like Bombay and Taipei but a few losses in places like Pondicherry and Keelung and plenty of “uncerrtains” across the region from Manila to Kashgar.

But here’s some good news – I blogged recently on plans to destroy the old Grands Magasins Charner department store building in Saigon, a fine relic of French colonial architecture. Despite the usual coalition of property developers and the communist party wanting to destroy the building (with the usual slogans of progress, profit, leaving the past behind etc etc) there was a pretty decent public campaign to save at least part of the building.

And so it has been announced that the Ho Chi Minh City mayor’s office has approved a proposal to preserve parts of the Saigon Tax Trade Centre that had slated to be torn down to make way for a 40-story skyscraper.According to the proposal, made by the city’s architecture department, the developer of the new building is to preserve the main lobby, the grand staircase and bronze railings as well as the tiled lobby mosaic. As for the building’s exterior, the developer will have to preserve the ornate overhangs that shade the sidewalks.There’s more details here from the Vietnamese newspapers…but I’m calling this a victory for preservation at the end of 2014 and a hopefully good sign for 2015….

A banister contour at the Saigon Tax Trade Center carved in the shape of the Coq Gaulois (the Gallic Rooster).

When Marlene Played Tokyo

Oh, if there was ever a new year’s eve night out to be had!! Strangely, I didn’t know Marlene Dietrich, of Shanghai Express fame (at least on this blog which has done any number of posts on Dietrich as Shanghai Lily!!), gave concerts in Tokyo – but she did in 1974…and here’s the playbill…..

One Turbulent Year – China 1975

Peter Peverelli’s memoir of his year in China, One Turbulent Year, is a fascinating read. Of course ex-pat memoirs (Carl Crow, JB Powell, Hallett Abend, Frances Wood and a few others excepted) are not normally noteworthy, but it was 1975! Peverelli has posted excerpts from the book on his blog too…

Pondicherry – Some Bad Losses and Lessons to Learn

An interesting article in The Hindu from Annie Philip on the state of Pondicherry (Puducherry), once the major town of the French Indian territory. For some time Pondicherry was seen as a good example of preservation and heritage conservation in India and across Asia, but the truth appears somewhat less enthusiastic sadly. According to the article many buildings have been lost through neglect and despite a UNESCO award. Worst of all perhaps the iconic French-era Mairie, or Hotel de Ville (Town Hall) Building on a rain-hit afternoon in November this year. It’s a sad story though may be encouraging citizen activism with the formation of ‘People for Pondicherry’s Heritage’. The article is well worth a read. And so, remembering the old Mairie of Pondicherry….

When originally constructed

Until recently…

and now gutted…

and broken…

Through old Shanghai with a cat detective – The Cat with the Telltale Tattoo

Nathaniel Scobie’s new graphic novel, The Cat with the Telltale Tattoo, features a Shanghai Municipal copper who’s a cat, Constable Khang, solving crimes in old Shanghai. It’s influenced by Tin Tin and, perhaps, Lao She’s Cat Country too I guess. It looks fun anyway and there’s an interview with the artist/author here. This seems to be the only place to get the book.

Maurice Dekobra Finds the East in Pigalle

A few weeks ago I blogged about the French writer Maurice Dekobra and his novel Macao: L’enfer du jeu. Dekobra was unknown to me until recently, but now, having read a bunch of his books I think of him as a sort of French version of Arnold Bennett with a bit of Somerset Maugham thrown in. Dekobra spent some time in China and around the Far East and wrote a number of books set in the East, though most of his work was set in his native France. However, traces of the East constantly appear in his French-set novels. Here’s a passage from his novel Midnight on the Place Pigalle (hard not like a writer who uses Midnight in his title!) published in 1932 and concerning a young man who has been thoroughly corrupted by being introduced to sex and the cabaret culture of Pigalle in Paris in the 1920s…

‘True, I have had a liaison with a little English dancer named Molly. She had a friend, and they insisted on my smoking opium. After Molly, I had an affaire with the wife of a banker who was addicted to flagellation. She initiated me by degrees in anima vili to the theories of Sacher Masoch…and the last month or so I tried cocaine with a literary lady, who consumed two dessertspoonfuls a week, and who handed me over to the tender care of a little Annamite, newly arrived from Saigon.’

Antoine Blanchard’s Place Pigalle

The China Rhyming Annual Round Up of Popular Culture Opium References – 2014

Another year, another round up of references to opium in popular culture (see the 2013 and 2012 roundups for previous dope in popular culture).

Tommy’s off the dope it seems – no wonder he’s getting a bit violent with those Sabini boys

Lucy Worsley’s BBC series A Very British Murder, on the history of popular fascination and books about murder in Britain, kicked off with the presenter in Thomas de Quincey’s old place in Grassmere, in the lovely Lake District, showing us his opium paraphernalia. In Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner we also found out that the artist partook of a drop of laudanum for his ailments. Elsewhere on TV series 2 of Peaky Blinders was excellent, but Tommy Sheridan appears instantly cured of his series 1 opium addiction and Birmingham Chinatown didn’t feature again – still, this time round, we got swells tooting coke in a Sabini-family-run London 1920s nightclub, so all was not lost! (and see my post on tooting ‘Tokyo” in 1920s London here). Showtime and Sky’s Penny Dreadful did not disappoint and had us in a candlelit East End opium den within the first fifteen minutes of episode 1 and poor sweet Brona Croft (Billie Piper) on the laudanum later!! At the theatre Lynn Nottage’s play Intimate Apparel played in the UK to good reviews. Centred around a seamstress in 1905 New York, she ends up married to an opium addict.

Penny Dreadful’s Sir Malcolm Murray steps into a Limehouse dope den

In books London historian and novelist Peter Ackroyd had some mentions of Limehouse as a slum in the 1960s and as a rookery of opium dens back in the day in Three Brothers while Laura Wilson’s DI Stratton had a morphine murder during World War Two London on his hands in An Empty Death. Robert Edric’s The Monster’s Lament saw good old Aleister Crowley on a little dope in war-time London (and make a couple of mentions of his Shanghai sojourn too). According to The Monster’s Lament Crowley’s preferred tipple was ten grains of opium taken with brandy! Opium also makes a small appearance in Adrian McKinty’s interesting The Sun is God, a tru-ish story of a murderous German cult living on the Kaiser’s far flung Pacific island colonies at the start of the twentieth century. Somewhat of a curiosity from McKinty (who usually does more modern noirs about Northern Ireland and Irish-New York), but a fascinating tale all the same. Sarah Waters hinted at 1920s London cocaine party goings on in The Paying Guests, and Lawrence Osborne had a washed up English gambling addict sucking the pipe for relief on Lamma Island in his excellent The Ballad of a Small Player. And, last but never, ever least, the excellent James Ellroy opted to include a few opium den scenes in just pre-war 2 LA in Perfidia, 

A Christmas Card from Shanghai – 1945

Posted this last year….but it’s worth a second outing….

Many thanks to an old time Shanghailander, Bill Savadove, who sent me this card originally sent in 1945 from Shanghai by the United States Navy wishing the folks back home a “melly klisimas”…..