All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
#4 – The Chinese negotiators at Versailles drank tea and ate the finest home made macarons….
During the long negotiating sessions the Chinese drank endless cups of tea provided at all the conference’s sessions, and ate superbly dainty macarons supplied by the Quai d’Orsay’s excellent kitchens.
#3 – The Chinese Delegation kept the hotel bar open late every night singing….
So many of the Chinese delegation to Versailles were graduates of American universities that at night the Hotel Lutetia’s bar swelled with informal alumni meetings and rousing renditionsof Columbia University songs among old boys of both Chinese and American descent.
#2 – Every night the secretaries of the China delegation shredded their trash….
When they’d finished with internal documents the Chinese secretaries working out of the Lutetia Hotel had to tear the waste paper into tiny scraps; it was assumed Japanese spies went through the Lutetia’s rubbish nightly in search of information. More details in Betrayal in Paris (Amazon UK, Amazon US)
Ten shameless plugs for my new Penguin China Special in their World War One series Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution (ongoing – details of all the titles here) though hopefully with a little useful factoid attached daily….
#1 – The Chinese Delegation Stayed at the Hotel Lutetia in Paris….
The bulk of China’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference stayed from January to June 1919 at the Hotel Lutetia. Situated on the boulevard Raspail in the heart of Paris’s Left Bank, the Lutetia, in the Saint-Germain-des-PreÌs area of the smart sixth arrondissement, was an inspired choice. It was certainly one of the more commodious delegation HQs in Paris. Completed just nine years earlier, the hotel was supremely modern, the city’s first art-nouveau hotel.Â
I blogged recently on the excellent book from Timothy Brooks’s Mr Selden’s Map of China – you can now see the map, till June, at Hong Kong’s Maritime Museum…
In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London business lawyer, political activist, former convict, MP, and the city’s first Orientalist scholar. Largely ignored, it remained in the bowels of the library, until called up by an inquisitive reader. When Timothy Brook saw it in 2009, he realized that the Selden Map was “a puzzle that had to be solvedâ€: an exceptional artefact so unsettlingly modern-looking it could almost be a forgery. But it was genuine,
In the winter of 2012-13 BICC collaborated with Dr Weipin Tsai (Royal Holloway University of London), and Professor Hans van de Ven (Cambridge) on a project to restore the decrepit gravestone of Sir Robert Hart and Hester, Lady Hart. The Harts are buried in Bisham, near Marlow, yards from the bank of the River Thames. The initiative culminated in a rededication ceremony held in the churchyard on a cold February day in 2013.
A new 31 minute film, ‘For China and the World’, documents this process, and explores the story and legacy of Robert Hart, who for six decades led China’s Imperial Maritime Customs service. With narration by Tim Pigott-Smith.
Robert Bickers may well walk away with best China title for 2014 with Getting Stuck in for Shanghai: Putting the Kibosh on the Kaiser from the Bund I reckon.
