Posted: September 28th, 2013 | No Comments »
As this is the centenary of the debut of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books (The Mystery of Fu Manchu, the first book in the series, was published in 1913), and as we approach an excellent conference on Fu Manchu in London – Lao She, Limehouse and Yellow Peril in the Heart of Empire (click the link for the full programme and to RSVP) this Friday at Westminster University it seems only fitting to mark the occasion with some stills from the 1967 movie The Vengeance of Fu Manchu which included a little detour to the mean streets of Shanghai….where the actual Badlands bar of foreign wastrels in Shanghai was actually meant to be I do not know (too, too many candidates in old Shanghai) but it was filmed in County Wicklow in Ireland apparently!
Posted: September 27th, 2013 | No Comments »
You could probably find one of these still tucked away and covered in dust on the shelves of a Foreign Languages Bookstore somewhere in China if you search hard enough! This guidebook and map from 1960….incidentally showing that the old spellings were still being used at that time…..
Posted: September 26th, 2013 | No Comments »
Interesting though the exclamation mark is somewhat perplexing and, I suspect, wholly unnecessary – Ming!
The Ming Dynasty (1368 1644) is regarded as one of the most glorious in Chinese history especially in regards to porcelain. Ming denotes the finest and most precious porcelain, which regularly achieves astronomical prices at auctions. The Ming vase is a popular cliche even for those who are not familiar with the history of Chinese ceramics. This publication unveils the Ming myth, by presenting the internationally recognised collection of Chinese ceramics at the Dutch Ceramics Museum Princessehof. It comprises spectacular items of the highest quality, which were created exclusively for the Chinese imperial court. The rich and varied inventory of Chinese export ceramics for the Southeast Asian market, primarily from the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, is presented here in context for the first time. The founding of the Dutch East India Company VOC1602 also finally opened up the European market for Ming porcelain. Most significantly the blue and white Kraak porcelain, which was an exotic decorative luxury in wealthy households and features prominently in Dutch still lifes of that era.
Posted: September 25th, 2013 | No Comments »
This week is, importantly, Banned Books Week which celebrates the freedom to read. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in American in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Scarily books on the list that have been banned after pressure include such society-threatening dangers as Captain Underpants (too rude!), The Kite Runner (gay themes) and (amazingly) Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the book banners holy trinity of sex, violence and religion). You can find out more about banned books here.
However, this blog concerns itself with old China, treaty port China and the lifes and activities of the old foreign community before 1949. So, I’m going to offer a list of books banned by the Shanghai Municipal Police censors in 1940 (the last year they got to ban books before the Japanese invaded the International Settlement). Quite why all these books were banned, seized from Shanghai bookshops and confiscated is a little unclear – sex for sure (more specifically, it’s thought, descriptions of white women having, and enjoying, sex that might have sullied their reputation with the Chinese!) as well as an attempt to force the Settlement’s book stores to ban what was banned in Britain and America (though some of these books were already available after earlier bans in Europe and America).
The following books were noted by undercover cops in Shanghai on sale in Settlement bookstores in the summer of 1940 and seized by
the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Translation Office and the Shanghai Municipal Police in the form of Special Branch (S5)…..
D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
Alexander Kuprin’s Yama: the Pit
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Theodoor van der Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique as well as Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage
(author unknown) Sex Life in France
Ely Culbertson’s The Strange Lives of One Man, a rather racy, for the time, memoir by a contact bridge player and rampant self-publicist. Theodoor van der Velde’s Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage, as well as
Victor Robinson’s Encyclopaedia Sexualis
(Author unknown) The Power to Love.
S5 really hated Lawrence and also seized Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Woman who Rode Away, Aaron’s Rod, The White Peacock, Sons & Lovers, Lovely Lady, The Ladybird and The Lost Girl as well as a collection of Lawrence stories, A Modern Lover.
Personally I’m opting for Yama: The Pit as I’ve never read it – all about prostitutes in Odessa apparently….
Posted: September 24th, 2013 | No Comments »
ISAMU NOGUCHI AND QI BAISHI: BEIJING 1930 – Organized in conjunction with the University of Michigan Museum of Art, this show explores the relationship between Noguchi and the Chinese ink painter Qi Baishi. It will include Noguchi’s brush-and-ink “Peking Scroll Drawings,†made during a stay in Beijing. Sept. 24-Jan. 26, the Noguchi Museum, (718) 204-7088, noguchi.org. Travels to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (Feb. 22-May 25).
PS: I’ll be speaking at the exhibition on October 13th about Peking in 1930…more details to follow or here….
Posted: September 23rd, 2013 | No Comments »
One of my occasional posts on old Chinese restaurants in London. In 1922 the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was spending some time in London. He attended a part given by the wireless genius Marconi. A few days later he visited a Chinese restaurant in the city – sadly we don’t know which one. Bartok had some rather odd views of Chinese food, as he wrote on a postcard (of Westminster Abbey by the way) to his 11-year-old son (also Bela) in 1922 and quoted in Malcolm Gillies’s Bartok in Britain…
26 March 1922, London
Â
My concert was the day before yesterday. Afterwards, someone took me to have supper – just imagine with whom – the famous Marconi, who was throwing a big party in a hotel. (It was only completely by chance that I dropped in there.) There were all kinds of good things there: oysters, fish, game stuffed with goose liver, champagne, real cognac. But you would have stayed hungry! Still, the day before yesterday I was taken to a Chinese restaurant. Of course I wanted to order dog and cat meat (if it is going to be Chinese, then let it really be Chinese), but there was nothing like that on the menu. But I still ate some rather curious things. Horses have already completely disappeared from the streets here; just once in a while you see one or two harnessed to a carriage. Bye-bye – and kisses,
Â
Your Father
Posted: September 22nd, 2013 | No Comments »
Jeremy Clarke’s The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History…..
The Chinese Catholic Church traces its living roots back to the late sixteenth century and its historical roots back even further, to the Yuan dynasty. This book explores paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the communities that produced them over several centuries. It argues for the emergence of distinctly Chinese Catholic identities as artistic representations of the Virgin Mary, at different times and in different places, absorbed and in turn influenced representations of Chinese figures from Guanyin to the Empress Dowager. At other times indigenous styles have been diluted by Western influences—following the influx of European missionaries in the nineteenth century, for example, or with globalization in recent years. The book engages with history, theology and art, and draws on imagery and archival photographs that have been largely neglected. As a study of the social and cultural histories of communities that have survived over many centuries, this book offers a new view of Catholicism in China—one that sees its history as more than simply a cycle of persecution and resistance.
Fr. Jeremy Clarke, SJ, is an Australian Province Jesuit teaching as an assistant professor in the History Department of Boston College. He is also a school visitor in the Australian Center for China in the World at the Australian National University, Canberra.
“In this path-breaking work the author asks, ‘How are Chinese Catholic identities expressed through images?’ In answering this, he skilfully interweaves the different ways in which the Virgin Mary has been depicted in Chinese iconography with the changing circumstances of the local church, China’s tumultuous history, and how this relates to broader ecclesiastical, cultural and international developments. Anyone interested in religion, modern China, or cultural exchange, should read this book.â€
—Richard Rigby, Executive Director of The China Institute, Australian National University
Posted: September 21st, 2013 | No Comments »
Well this is one of those slightly obscure posts because the venue is fictional. I happened to be reading Compton Mackenzie’s 1912 novel Carnival and a rather interesting place, fictional I think sadly, popped up. Carnival is, as one publishers blurb explains:
The moving romance of dancer Jenny Pearl: a story which helped establish Mackenzie among the foremost novelists of his generation. Jenny Pearl, a dancer, falls in love with Maurice Avery, a young dilettante who leaves her when she refuses to become his mistress. Despairingly, she falls into a loveless marriage with Trewhella, a Cornish farmer who becomes insanely jealous when Avery reappears on the scene…Vivid, moving and ultimately tragic, CARNIVAL was first published in 1912 to wide critical acclaim, helping to establish Mackenzie as one of the foremost British novelists of his generation. It has since been filmed three times and adapted for the stage and as an opera.
At one point young Jenny is walking out with Maurice in central London. Maurice decides he needs a cup of decent coffee and, in these wonderfully pre-Starbucks/Costa days, as they’re in Soho Square suggests a coffee shop venue to Jenny (who dances at the wonderfully named Orient Palace of Varieties on Piccadilly*), who’s a bit bemused:
“…where’s this unnatural tea-shop?”
“Just here”
“It Looks like the Exhibition”
It was a dim coffee-shop hung with rugs and gongs. The smoke of many cigarettes and joss-sticks had steeped the gloom with Arabian airs.
“It is in a way a caravanserai,” said Maurice.
“A What?” said Jenny.
“A caravanserai – a Turkish pub, if you like it better.”
“You and I are seeing life today.”
“I like my coffee freshly ground,” Maurice explained.
“Well, I like tea.”
“The tea’s very good here. It’s China.”
“But I think China tea’s terrible. More like burnt water than tea.”
“I’m afraid you don’t appreciate the East,” he said.
“No I don’t if it means China tea.”
“I wish I could take you away with me to Japan. We’d sit under a magnolia and you should have a kiss for every petal that fell.”
“That sounds rather nice.”
*=there was a music hall called the Oriental Palace of Varieties, established by the Dan Leno Company in 1896 but it was south of the river in Camberwell (below).
