All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Am I just seeing Chinoiserie everywhere I look? Can’t quite make up my mind about this phone box seen at the Tunbridge Wells Cricket Club ground…but it’s sweet anyway….
…and now just how nice is the lobby of the Many Glacier Hotel in Montana….the hotel opened in 1915 though I can’t date this postcard I’m afraid. The lobby still exists so if anyone from the hotel reading this would like to recreate the Chinese lanterns theme and invite me I’ll be there!!
The car for any self-respecting Shanghailander in 1934? – the Dodge 6 of course, purchased from China Motors (see a picture of their beautiful showroom here) on the Bubbling Well Road.
And some info for the petrol heads among you:
“For the 1934 model year, Dodges were heavier, longer and had more powerful engines than their predecessors. The basic Dodge, the DR “DeLuxe” series, had a 117-inch wheelbase, while the larger, more expensive DS “DeLuxe Special” series rode on a longer 121-inch wheelbase; both models have large teardrop-shaped headlamp nacelles, styled hood louvers and skirted fenders.”
A new history of the American Military Mission in China from William Grieve…
This book is an overview of America’s first effort in military aid to a foreign sovereign nation at a time when Europe was engaged in open warfare and Asia was undergoing a series of military confrontations. Most of the world was convinced that global conflagration was inevitable. The work offers an insight into the impact of war in Burma, a backwater of World War II, but examines events that result when great powers expend treasure and blood to further their own goals. The goals may be to obtain natural resources on strategically important geography, defend and retain colonial holdings, or maintain power and prestige. The author examines disagreements among China, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Japanese Empire. This plays out as confrontations within and among several departments and individuals within the Roosevelt administration and the same dialogue and disagreement among our allies in the Asian region. The book shows the evolution of aid provision to another country and changing expectations as new information arises.
After enlisted duty as a combat engineer, William G. Grieve received a direct commission to the United States Marine Corps and retired as a colonel with 30 years of service. He has taught university level courses in Chinese culture, military history and American Diplomatic history at the university level and at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College.
Another year almost over and those opium references keep on popping up in the popular media…
Nasty old mill Cheshire owner Samuel Greg reached for the laudanum as he made them kids work overtime in The Mill!
The movie version of Kerouac’s On the Road (better than expected) noted the desire to head “East†and do some opium, while the excellent Mr Selfridge (about Harry Gordon Selfridge’s rather louche life and London department store) also had a few opium references from the Edwardian West End. Sky’s adaptation of Bulgakov’s Young Doctor’s Notebook, with Daniel Radcliffe and Don Draper from Mad Men, showed the older Bulgakov as a heroin addict – in real life he wasn’t, but it added a little druggie opiates spice to the show. Series 2 began with the roles reversed and the Mad Men guy cleaned up and Daniel Radcliffe now on the dope (yes, Harry Potter does opium!!). A real literary dope fiend was Wilkie Collins and Andrew Lycett’s biography of him – A Life of Sensation – had plenty to say about the author’s life of dope and rampant sex with our old favourites – “fallen women”! Collins pops up inthe movie The Invisible Woman, about Dickens and his lady friends, but not doing the dope sadly.
Tom Hollander as Wilkie Collins in The Invisible Woman
As expected the brilliant series 1 of Ripper Street from the BBC had opium and laudanum all over the place from the slums and whorehouses of Whitechapel to the swanky boudoirs of the City. Series 2 opened with a bang – and plenty of opium – down in Chinatown (Pure as the Driven Snow…) and went Limehouse-tastic-opium-crazy!!
Additionally, Channel 4’s dark (and I mean dark – half the time I was watching myself reflected in the plasma screen!) The Mill had a mill owner coughing up his guts and reaching for the laudanum. Less entertaining the really rather awful ITV drama Murder on the Home Front had a suspect die during the Blitz in “a Soho opium den” – highly unlikely such a thing existed in that part of town or anywhere much in the 1940s.
opium and laudanum flowed aplenty in old Whitechapel
But perhaps best was Cillian Murphy as 1920s Great War vet and gang leader Thomas Shelby in the brilliant BBC2 show Peaky Blinders smoking opium in his Brummie slum to forget the horrors of the trenches! A great show and a great opium moment.
smoking dope and running the baddest gang in Birmingham
More seriously Jeremy Paxman’s Empire series for the BBC didn’t duck ‘the opium as engine of empire in the Far East’ and was a nice brief overview of the British mud trade. He even got in the gag about the Jardine’s building in Hong Kong being the House of a Thousand Arseholes! Paxman went on in 2013 to grow a beard and allow himself to discuss Cheryl Cole’s bottom tatt on Newsnight – so he may well have been reaching for the pipe at times! Serious opium reading was provided by Ashley Wright’s Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia and several new editions of de Qincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater appeared too.
Cambridge students doing drugs!! Surely not…
Opium popped up in popular fiction too as usual – Imogen Robertson’s fourth novel in her Harrier Westerman series, The Paris Winter, took us back to Belle Epoque Paris where secret opium addictions were a major theme while Benjamin Black’s (aka John Banville) second Quirke mystery (admittedly came out a couple of years ago, but I only just read it) The Silver Swan saw Dublin pathologist Quirke finding opium-based morphine ampoules all over 1950s Dublin – the BBC has filmed all the books in the series so we’ll see if this reference gets to the small screen soon.There’s also plenty of opium smoking in Weimar Germany in Marek Krajewski’s Eberhard Mock series, especially Death in Breslau, if you like your dope tinged with some pre-Nazi era decadence. David Downing’s new Jack McColl WW1 era spy series started with Jack of Spies and took us into a Shanghai opium den in 1913 while Charles Palliser’s Rustication had a young man in 1863 hooked on dope and sexual desire being booted out of Cambridge in some tasty Victoriana tales.
And, of course, Paul French’s Midnight in Peking (who on earth is he!!) featured opium dens in 1930s Peking with even more coming in his short e-book delving deeper into The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking.
And finally, while wandering around France this summer, down in the Catalan region, a lovely bar of opium soap was procured!!
(and do let me know if I missed anything?)
Expert on all things train Christian Wolmar tackles the Trans-Siberian in To the Edge of the World…
It is the world’s longest railway line. But it is so much more than that, too. The Trans-Siberian stretches nearly 6,000 miles between Moscow and Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast and was the most ambitious railway project in the nineteenth century. A journey on the railway evokes a romantic roam through the Russian steppes, but also reminds travellers of the vastness of our world and hints at the hardships that were endured in its construction.
Christian Wolmar expertly tells the story of the Trans-Siberian railway from its conception and construction under Tsar Alexander III, to the northern extension ordered by Brezhnev and its current success as a vital artery. He also explores the crucial role the line played in both the Russian Civil War -Trotsky famously used an armoured carriage as his command post – and the Second World War, during which the railway saved the country from certain defeat. Like the author’s previous railway histories, it focuses on the personalities, as well as the political and economic events, that lay behind one of the most extraordinary engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century.
A slightly smaller edition of Midnight in Peking with a new cover is now available in Hong Kong and Asia, just in time for Christmas!….Dymocks, Bookazine and all good bookshops in Hong Kong now have it in stock…
On the eve of World War Two The Paradise Club on London’s Regent Street was quite the place to go with a great cabaret and the resident dancing girls, “The Paradise Adorables”. This Pathe newsreel shows the club in action in 1939: girls, the band (Arthur Roseberry and his Swingtette), impersonators and magic acts for the revue “Going Out on the Town”. Many thanks to Rob Baker of the fantastic London history website Another Nickel in the Machine for posting this photo of the Adorables in a number obviously inspired by a sailors bar presumably in old Shanghai or San Francisco – tarts, booze and Chinese food. You’ll note a little Chinoiserie costuming in the back in black and a nice Chinese menu of sorts – chow mein, cold pork, rice and tea with (God love ’em for their spelling) that rather unknown Chinese dish in England, “Shop Suey”.
