ETC Werner’s Myths and Legends of China now out as a Kindle

Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner’s Myths and Legends of China is a classic and now reissued as a kindle. Of course ETC Werner was the diplomat-scholar father of Pamela Werner and features heavily in my book Midnight in Peking. However, I’ve been amazed going round talking about that book at how many older China hands know Werner’s work well and how his book is still seen as a major text in this field, despite being published in the 1920s. Here by all manner of creatures fabulous and mythological and the tales that spawned them – including those pesky fox spirits….

The chief literary sources of Chinese myths are the Li tai shên hsien t’ung chien, in thirty-two volumes, the Shên hsien lieh chuan, in eight volumes, the Fêng shên yen i, in eight volumes, and the Sou shên chi, in ten volumes. In writing the following pages I have translated or paraphrased largely from these works. I have also consulted and at times quoted from the excellent volumes on Chinese Superstitions by Père Henri Doré, comprised in the valuable series Variétés Sinologiques, published by the Catholic Mission Press at Shanghai. The native works contained in the Ssŭ K’u Ch’üan Shu, one of the few public libraries in Peking, have proved useful for purposes of reference. My heartiest thanks are due to my good friend Mr Mu Hsüeh-hsün, a scholar of wide learning and generous disposition, for having kindly allowed me to use his very large and useful library of Chinese books. The late Dr G.E. Morrison also, until he sold it to a Japanese baron, was good enough to let me consult his extensive collection of foreign works relating to China whenever I wished, but owing to the fact that so very little work has been done in Chinese mythology by Western writers I found it better in dealing with this subject to go direct to the original Chinese texts. I am indebted to Professor H.A. Giles, and to his publishers, Messrs Kelly and Walsh, Shanghai, for permission to reprint from Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio the fox legends given in Chapter XV.

L’Orphelin de la Chine at the Comedie Francaise, 1755

The Jesuit-educated Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694 1778), read all the travel literature about China he could find, mostly the Jesuit reports, and reputedly kept a picture of Confucius on his library wall. The rationality he perceived in China appealed to him immensely. Voltaire rewrote the Chinese classic Orphan of the Zhao Family as L’Orphelin de la Chine after he declared that the original story revealed how reason and intellect inevitably triumph over ignorance and barbarity. The Comedie Francaise published the five act play in 1755 and also perofrmed the play for the first time there in August of that year. Of course Voltaire was commenting on the Enlightenment and the Catholic Church more than China. In the play the oraphan, who is in fact the royal heir, is entrusted to an official Voltaire named Zamti. Here then is the Comedie Francaise’s Zamti from 1755…..

Van Vechten, Making Taste, Spotting Talent and His Portraits of Prominent Chinese

The photographer Carl Van Vechten is very much in the air again at the moment thanks to a new biography The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America by Edward White. Van Vechten, a man who knew just about everyone and mixed in cosmopolitan, multi-racial Bohemian circles in the inter-war years, is long overdue a major bio. Van Vechten was a great champion of people that interested him (Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes etc) and an inveterate salon attendee. As a photographer he shot pretty much anyone who was anyone in New York. Of course Van Vechten took some pictures of well known and celebrity Chinese at the time – most famously he took a clutch of pictures of Anna May Wong (several below), Mai Mai Sze (the artist daughter of the Chinese diplomat Alfred Sze – see my post on her here) and China’s great man of letters and style Lin Yutang….

Anna May Wong as Turandot in 1937

 and Anna May Wong again

And Anna May Wong in what became a quite scandalous androgynous portrait from 1932

Mai Mai Sze

Lin Yutang

Promoting Somerset Maugham in 1954

The Companion Book Club (a major British book club at the time) decided to republish a series of W Somerset Maugham’s novels in 1954. Of course his classic novel of Hong Kong and China, The Painted Veil, was included as was a still of Garbo playing Katrin in the 1934 film version….

Jan Maclure’s Escape to Chungking

Below is the cover and a colour illustration from the author Jan Maclure’s Escape to Chungking, published by the Oxford University Press in 1942. This is an interesting book as little is known about the author yet it was widely read at the time of publication and was what would now be called a Young Adult “YA” book – this copy was given to my aunt (then a teenager) shortly after the war. The book deals with the fall (then very recent) of Singapore and Malaya to the Japanese – the book is dedicated to “Friends who have not yet got out”. A 14 year old boy carries secrets across war torn Asia from Japan to Chungking (China’s war time capital) and the detail is rather good. The book has a variety of black and white illustrations (by Jack Matthews) and one colour print at the start (shown below).

Maclure herself remains a mystery with no other published books credited to that name and “Jan” may be a pseudonym so we can’t even be sure of the author’s gender. OUP, rather sloppily, have apparently destroyed their records from that period!

And that’s all I know….(though Owen Dudley Edwards’s British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War has more details)

Remembering Jack London’s Oriental War on the LARB Blog

A piece by me on Jack London’s coverage of the Russo-Japanese War a hundred and ten years ago….click here

Jack London (left, with cap and fag) with the Japanese in Korea, 1904

Remembering Macao in the 1960s

After yesterdays postcard of an American hotel’s version of Macao in the 1960s, here’s the real thing – before it went boom!!

Macao Dining Style in 1960s Texas

Stay at the Sheraton in Dallas, Texas in the 1960s and an evening meal in the Macao Room was yours for a reservation. The rather uninteresting hotel was built in 1959 (though was a rather modern structure then)

who wouldn’t want dinner in the Macao room?

Where this was in the building I don’t know. According to the hotel’s website they have one restaurant now called The Kitchen Table. I’ll leave it up to you choose which you feel had more style and sophistication….

Who would want dinner in The Kitchen Table!!