All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
It’s hot in Shanghai and those pictures of horrendously crowded swimming pools in the city make you wonder where exactly old Shanghailanders went for a swim to cool off?
Perhaps the Olympic Swimming Pool? It was on Route Cardinal Mercier (Maoming Road South now), which also had a pool up at the Cercle Sportif too. Nice to be able to swim till midnight and nice that water was changed every other day too!!
Following the RAS Shanghai China Monographs No.1 Lao She in London and No.2 Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai, the third in the series, Andrew Field’s Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist – New Translations and an Appreciation is now available for pre-order (it comes out January 1 2014)….
When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of its demi-monde nightlife. As Andrew David Field argues, Mu Shiying advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May 4 giants Lu Xun and Lao She to even more starkly reveal the alienation of the cosmopolitan-capitalist city of Shanghai, trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism. Each of these five short stories focuses on the author’s key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships of the modern city and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure in Shanghai epitomized by the dance hall and the nightclub. This study places his writings squarely within the framework of Shanghai’s social and cultural nightscapes.
This post is one of those occasional ones that hopes to solicit a little information while offering a very little information! The publication of Robert Edsel’s fascinating book Saving Italy : The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis (or alternatively, and slightly more excitingly, in some places – Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History) reminded me that one of the American officers charged with attempting to rescue and preserve Italy’s great artistic heritage from Nazi looting in World War Two was Fred Hartt. In the book Hartt is described as a specialist in the fine arts (indeed he was) with a specialism in French cathedrals (indeed he did) and also a “repressed homosexual” (no idea about that). He was a key figure among the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) Officers in Tuscany for the Allied Military Government in Italy between 1944 and 1945. He was rather mocked by his fellow officers and art experts apparently and known as the “Tuscany Kid”.
However, Hartt was also a great collector of, and expert on, oriental screens as well, though there is precious little information on this side of his passions compared with a lot of detail regarding his knowledge of the Italian Renaissance. There appears to be bothing on his Oriental interests in his surviving papers and archive at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. So, does anyone know anything?
All this may become more interesting to some as The Monuments Men is about to become a film written, produced and starring George Clooney. Sadly IMDB doesn’t say who is playing Hartt. Apparently Matt Damon (oh well, never mind) and Cate Blenchett (hooray!) are in the film too.
Hartt in Italy in 1945
A little diversion into a bit of Japan Rhyming today with this pre-World War One brochure for the Kanaya Hotel in Nikko which composed 19 black and white collotype views of which two are folding, folding schedule of Fares to Places in the Neighbourhood of Interest. The original brochure came presented in coloured pictorial wrappers with a silk tie. The hotel is still there – see photos below and has a history of lovely art work…
The 1910 brochure
A later hotel luggage label
The Kanaya hot spring hotel as it was…
and as it is today….
An interesting review in the July edition of the Literary Review by Timothy Brook (of the excellent reads The Troubled Empire and Vermeer’s Hat etc) of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century that may not have immediately come to the attention of China Watchers and China Rhymers. Interesting in that the book discusses the global notion of the terrible seventeenth century rather than the Euro-centric approach to its awfulness (30 Years War, etc) that many of us got at school. It might also be interesting to those looking to China’s past as a possible guide to its future and indications of just how fast things can fall apart….
Basically – China at the start of the century was in passably good shape, reasonably well governed and with a strong economy. However, within 30 years it had descended into fratricidal civil war, the fall of Peking to the mob, suicide of the last Ming emperor in 1644 and then the fall of the Ming to the Manchus from outside China’s borders and the shift in dynasties. That ended China’s growth and saw a retreat into isolation till nearly the end of the century and arguably beyond.
Parker’s book looks beyond the immediacy of war, bad governance and rotten emperors to the environment – global cooling, reaching its peak in the seventeenth century and destroying harvests leading to famine with little in the way of a government response, emptied treasuries and reserves, epidemics and sickness the healthcare system couldn’t deal with and, to use today’s terminology, a breakdown in “social harmony”. Throw in natural disasters like earthquakes and a rash of dragon sightings (these days it’s usually UFOs) and it all got too much for the Ming.
So, a useful guide to China’s role in the global economy and its perilous position in the 1600s – as to parallels to today’s natural disasters, healthcare and environmental degradation and any possible dragon sightings, I’ll leave you all to draw your own conclusions on where that leaves “social harmony” and the prospects of regime survival in the twenty first century.
Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and extent. The effects of what historians call the “General Crisis” extended from England to Japan, from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. The Americas, too, did not escape the turbulence of the time.
In this meticulously researched volume, master historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who saw and suffered from the sequence of political, economic, and social crises between 1618 to the late 1680s. Parker also deploys the scientific evidence of climate change during this period. His discoveries revise entirely our understanding of the General Crisis: changes in prevailing weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.
Parker’s demonstration of the link between climate change, war, and catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement. And the implications of his study are equally important: are we adequately prepared—or even preparing—for the catastrophes that climate change brings?
Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at The Ohio State University, and winner of the 2012 Heineken History Prize. Among his many books is The Grand Strategy of Philip II, published by Yale.
A nice new book of images from the collections of the British Museum from Mary Ginsberg – The Art of Influence….
I thought it might interest China Rhyming readers to see the new collection from Olivia von Halle “inspired” (as designers say) by 1920s Shanghai…some pics below and more here.Â
As they say – “Our long-awaited Autumn/Winter 2013 collection launches online today, inspired by the opulent jewel tones and Art Deco prints of Shanghai in the 1920s. The classic Lila and Alba styles return re-imagined in sumptuous new prints and Coco also returns in bold new colours. We are excited to introduce two new kimono-style robes to the collection; the ‘Mimi’ short robe and ‘Queenie’, a full-length robe created from an incredible 10 metres of silk.”
Following on from a previous post about China-related covers from Penguin…here’s a few more…randomly….
