Julia Lovell on “The Uses of Foreigners in Communist China” – 9/5/14 – UCL, London

Dr Julia Lovell

Birkbeck, University of London

 

 

 

“The Uses of Foreigners in Communist China”

Friday 9 May 2014 at 5.30pm

 

Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre

University College London

Julia Lovell is senior lecturer in modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of three books on modern China, most recently The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011), which won the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize. Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature), Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars, Zhang Ailing’s Lust, Caution and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. She is currently working on a global history of Maoism, and on a new, abridged translation of Journey to the West.

Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race

Chinese Looks covers everything from Yellow Face to qipaos….

Last Chance – North Korea – Threat or Bluster? – Paul French & John Everard – May 7 – Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival

North Korea – Threat or Bluster?

Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival

John Everard – Only Beautiful Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea
Paul French – North Korea – State of Paranoia
With Charles Scanlon – the BBC’s East Asia Editor

North Korea is a country that continues to make headlines – arousing curiosity and fear in equal measure.  Former British diplomat in Pyongyang John Everard and East Asia expert French share their experiences in the country and address important questions about its uncertain future.

John Everard was the British Ambassador in North Korea from 2006 to 2008. While there he dealt with issues such as the 2006 missile and nuclear tests, North Korea’s food shortages, economic problems, and its complex politics. From 2010-11 he was a Pantech Fellow at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Reseach Centre, where he conducted research and participated in major international conferences on North Korea.  From 2011-12 he was coordinator of the UN Panel of Experts on sanctions against North Korea.  His distinguished career with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office covered 30 years, spanned four continents, and included other politically sensitive posts such as Ambassador to Belarus and Ambassador to Uruguay. His experiences in North Korea are chronicled in his book Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea.

Paul French has lived and worked in China for many years. He is a widely published analyst and commentator, contributing to the China Economic Review, the East Asia Forum Quarterly, Foreign Policy, the Asian Wall Street Journal and other publications.  He is the author of Midnight in Peking and the series editor of Zed Books’ Asian Arguments series and the Royal Asiatic Society-Hong Kong University Press China Monographs.

They will be speaking to Charles Scanlon, BBC’s East Asia Editor. He was BBC Korea correspondent from 1994-97 and Japan and Korea correspondent from 2000-07.

7 May 2014 18:45

Asia House

63 New Cavendish St London, W1G 7LP

Booking – click here

Peeling Back the Years: Chinese Wallpaper at Woburn Abbey

The discovery of eighteenth century Chinese wallpaper buy conservators at Woburn Abbey is now the subject of an exhibition…Peeling Back the Years. The exhibition covers Woburn’s two distinct periods of Chinoiserie in both the house and garden. The recently discovered mid-18^th century wallpaper fragments in the family, private and State apartments were amongst the earliest Chinese wallpapers made for the European market, and have not been seen since these rooms were redecorated in the late-18^th/early-19^th centuries.  The second wave of Chinoiserie decoration in the early-19^th century shows how taste and designs changed.

More on the long lost wallpaper here

Chinese white male pheasant on a rock amongst tree peonies; detail from Chinese wallpaper, 1752

Some French Yellow Peril Literature – Robert-Dumas’s The Lead Idol

I’ve blogged here about Yellow Peril fiction before, mostly British, but here’s a French Yellow Peril genre shocker that’s been largely forgotten but that does show how long running the genre was. Charles Robert-Dumas’s 1935 novel L’idole de Plomb (The Lead Idol) concerns a Mongolian who just happens to be a Bolshevik agent, a thug and a political fanatic. His specialty is slicing open the bellies of his adversaries in Paris hotel rooms. He’s ruthlessly stealing French military secrets to sell to the Germans and just happens to also be a chemist and inventor of a vapour (miasmic yellow clouds of death images invoked here!) called (presciently given 1990s drug culture) “Ecstasy 136”. It’s a neat little chemical as it can either kill the entire population of Paris or work as an aphrodisiac on any woman he chooses. Fortunately he hs a weakness – beautiful French women – and one, a French agent, manages to blow his brains out before he can destroy Paris. Yellow Peril and gas often go together in the genre – silent, deadly, fiendish and recently used to terrifying effect in the trenches of World War One.

L’idole de Plomb is a pretty rubbish novel, even by the pretty low standards of the genre but it apparently shifted 27,000 copies in 1935 France, but then it did have some tits on the cover!

When Dylan Thomas Dreamed of China

‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ It’s the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth, a favourite poet of mine ever since I was given a copy of Under Milk Wood as a young lad. I didn’t think I’d be able to work Thomas into this blog but it turns out that, as a boy, as a boy, in Swansea he did dream of China….

RAS Shanghai 4/5/14 – walking tour of Architect Paul Veysseyre’s Historic Art Deco Buildings

  RAS WEEKENDER

SPENCER DODINGTON will lead a walking tour of

Architect Paul Veysseyre’s Historic Art Deco Buildings.

 

1:30pm (2pm start) – 4pm

The Chinese Emperor’s Train in Suffolk? Yes, Sebald was pulling our leg

Back in July 2011 I blogged about the writer WG Sebald, who in his masterpiece of travel writing The Rings of Saturn tells of a train, once belonging to the Guangxu emperor, that had been brought home and ran on a small line in Suffolk – the full story from Sebald here and some film of the old train concerned here. Well, apparently it’s a bogus tale. A regular China Rhymer contacted me to inform that Ransome and Rapiers, the manufacturers of the train, never exported any trains to China and that they never made any trains that would fit Chinese rail gauges – so that’s that lovely tale blown out of the water. Ho hum….

But here anyway is an undated picture of the Chinese Imperial train all decked out and running on the small line that followed the Tartar Wall around Peking (which I’ve blogged about here, way back in 2008)