New Restoration of Orson Welles’s 1947 Lady From Shanghai

An apparently excellent restored print of the Orson Welles movie Lady From Shanghai was shown recently as part of the London Film Festival. Ever since it’s release people have scratched their heads as to why Shanghai? The place is never mentioned in the movie. Well, I blogged about that a few years ago about this – The Lady From Shanghai…Who Wasn’t…But Was… – and the mentions of Chefoo and Macao in the movie that may ring a little hollow on modern ears. There’s also an interesting article on the back story of the film and the odd time that was had by all filming it from The Guardian.

RAS Beijing – Autumn Afternoon at the Courtyard Museum, Shijia Hutong – 19/10/13

Great to see that the new Beijing chapter of the Royal Asiatic Society is now up and running….would be good to see all interested folk in Beijing getting along….

On Saturday 19 Oct 2013, from 3:00–5:00 PM, please join us at 24 Shijia Hutong, an historic hutong just north of Jinbao Jie, for our inaugural gathering of RAS Beijing members and friends.RASBJ’s first social get-together takes place in a traditional-style courtyard complex restored by the Prince’s Charities Foundation (China). Many thanks to the Foundation and to Mattthew Hu, manager of the courtyard restoration project,who have graciously invited us to this unique venue. Matthew will show us around the Museum, explain the restoration project and describe how it now functions as a community centre for the neighborhood, which in decades past had hosted many figures from Beijing’s dramatic and literary circles.This is also an excellent opportunity for participants to learn about the Royal Asiatic Society Beijing’s exciting programs, and to become a member. Afternoon tea, mulled wine and autumn confections will be served. Booking required; please see www.rasbj.org for more details or email enquiries@rasbj.org

Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854−1949

Catherine Ladds’s Empire Careers looks fascinating…

This is the first book-length study of the 11,000 foreign nationals who worked for the Chinese Customs Service between 1854 and1949, exploring how their lives and careers were shaped by imperial ideologies, networks and structures. In doing so it highlights the vast range of people – British and non-British, elite and non-elite – for whom the empire world spoke of opportunity. Empire careers considers the professional triumphs and tribulations of the foreign staff, their social activities, their private and family lives, and how all of these factors were influenced by the changing political context in China and abroad. Contrary to the common assumption that China was merely an ‘outpost’ of empire, exploration of the Customs’ cosmopolitan personnel encourages us to see China as a place where multiple imperial trajectories converged, overlapped and competed.

Catherine Ladds is Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University

Travelling Day – Time for the Return of Dr. Fu Manchu

Travelling today back to London – but remembering it’s the centenary of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, here’s a London related image….

Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine

I’ve posted before on the story of HMS Poseidon and its sinking off the China coast in 1931. Excellent to see Steven Schwankert’s long awaited book on both the sinking, the sub, the men who crewed her and his hunt for the wreck and any trace of her in China is now out. More details and an interview with the author here from the WSJ‘s China Real Time Report…

Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine

Steven R. Schwankert

Arnold Bennett’s Trip to New York’s Chinatown in 1912

I just finished a swift book tour through the Mid-West and New York and found myself walking through New York’s Chinatown. As it happened I’d brought along a copy of Your United States: Impressions of a First Visit, a series of vignettes written by the English writer Arnold Bennett, penned while he was on a book tour of the States roughly a century ago, in 1912. It’s a slim but entertaining volume with some funny observations on American hotels, restaurants, sports and telephone obsessions. Bennett too visited Chinatown…it was then, as now, a major tourist attraction….

“We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in its streets. I had suspected that Chinatown was largely a show for tourists. When I asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked convincingness – except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist…

And it was a proud moment when in an inconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chinese actor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder (and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American legitimate wives of wealthy Chinamen, sitting gorgeous, with the quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad when one of the ladies defied the detective (guiding Bennett through Chinatown) by abruptly swishing down her blind.”

China & Literature Laureates: Past & Imagined Wins in the Los Angeles Review of Books

The folk at the Los Angeles Review of Books thought it a good idea to have a look at issues around Chinese literature, the Nobel Prize and various reputations. I have to admit an interest as I contributed an essay on Lao She (who never won and probably wasn’t that bothered about it), Untidy Endings.

There’s also Julia Lovell on Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, Brendan O’Kane on Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged and Charles W. Hayford on Pearl S. Buck.

All worth a read…

TS Eliot and his Chinese Jar

Really shoehorning here but as I was in St Louis, home town of TS Eliot, I thought I’d see if he had any Chinese references I’d overlooked before. Of course Eliot was generally complimentary of Ezra Pound’s Chinese poetry translations declaring him the “inventor” of Chinese poetry as we know it today (today being 1928). However, this is the only slight reference I could find to aything Chinese in Eliot…in fact to a Chinese jar from his Four Quartets from the 1940s:

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts
Not that only, but the co-existence
Or say that the end precedes the beginning
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end
And all is always now. Words strain
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation
The crying shadow in the funeral dance
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera