The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking – an excerpt

My short new e-book The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking is out now and it’s just US$3.99 in the USA (here) and 0.99p in the UK (here). And here, courtesy of Penguin Australia’s web site, is the opening introduction to The Badlands so you can get a free taste and a little sample of the great graphics, courtesy of Jason Pym, below. BTW: a limited edition hardback of the book (the lovely cover below) is out now in China, Australia and Hong Kong while the e-book is available in Oz and will be available in UK, USA and everywhere else in May…

Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence

Interesting new book out from Gloria Davies on Lu Xun….good review from Jonathan Mirsky in June’s Literary Review…

Widely recognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the voice of a nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in stature and influence. Gloria Davies’s portrait now gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place. In Davies’s vivid rendering, we encounter a writer passionately engaged with the heady arguments and intrigues of a country on the eve of revolution. She traces political tensions in Lu Xun’s works which reflect the larger conflict in modern Chinese thought between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses. During the last phase of Lu Xun’s career, the so-called “years on the left,” we see how fiercely he defended a literature in which the people would speak for themselves, and we come to understand why Lu Xun continues to inspire the debates shaping China today. Although Lu Xun was never a Communist, his legacy was fully enlisted to support the Party in the decades following his death. Far from the apologist of political violence portrayed by Maoist interpreters, however, Lu Xun emerges here as an energetic opponent of despotism, a humanist for whom empathy, not ideological zeal, was the key to achieving revolutionary ends. Limned with precision and insight, Lu Xun’s Revolution is a major contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of this foundational figure.

References to Chinese Lanterns in Western Literature

Chinese lanterns were quite the thing in the late Victorian and Edwardian period in England it seems. They pop up as nice props on TV shows (movie wise Chinese lanterns in 1890s Paris pop up to liven up George’s garret in Bel Ami, which was otherwise a snooze-fest) but I’ve been coming across a few references in literature recently (not including that Charles Dickens at his home at Gads Hill in Kent would hang Chinese lanterns in the conservatory and apparently sit around of an evening admiring them). Here’s a couple, but if anyone has any others do let me know please?

George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) has a scene with poor Trilby herself and her gang of artist acolytes celebrating Christmas in Paris in some Bohemian poverty but with some lovely decorations – “And suddenly the studio, which had been so silent, dark, and dull, with Taffy and Little Billee sitting hopeless and despondent round the stove, became a scene of the noisiest, busiest, and cheerfullest animation. The three big lamps were lit, and all the Chinese lanterns”.

And then GK Chesterton’s tale of wild anarchists threatening London, The Man Who Was Thursday – Chesterton has the invented Lodon suburb of Saffron Park which he describes in some details: “More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit.” Those lanterns keep returning, “He thought of all the human things in his story—of the Chinese lanterns in Saffron Park, of the girl’s red hair in the garden, of the honest, beer-swilling sailors down by the dock, of his loyal companions standing by.”

The might DH Lawrence had a few Chinese lanterns around – in Women in Love Chinese lanterns appear decorated with crabs and seaweed as well as flights of storks etc with Ursula and Gudrun having different lanterns with different symbolism.

Movado Watches on the Nanking Road

I’ve noticed a lot of watch dealers in Shanghai selling Movado watches lately and, of course, they’re nothing new. Here’s an ad for Movado and their distributor Boyes, Bassett & Co on the Nanking Road (Nanjing Road) featuring a lovely little travel clock, the “Pullman”….

RAS Shanghai – The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England – David Porter – 18/6/13

Advance notice of what should be an excellent RAS Shanghai event…

The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England – David Porter

Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period’s experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. In the recent book from which this talk is adapted, David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, he develops new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism.

David Porter teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as Faculty Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies. A graduate of Cornell, Cambridge, and Stanford Universities, he is the author of two books exploring English and European responses to Chinese culture in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, was published by Stanford in 2001. The second, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth Century England, came out with Cambridge in 2010. He is currently working on a new book comparing the literary cultures of China and England during the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Best Book on Foreigners in China?

Got asked that question the other day in an interview so thought I’d share….it is, of course, Harold Acton’s Peonies and Ponies, which is long overdue a new reprint in case anyone with publishing power is reading this….

When in Doubt – Say UB

Friday night and time for a beer…Jardine’s house brew UB was the choice of many a Shanghailander….

Photography in China – a new book

A new book from Claire Roberts and from the excellent publishers Reaktion….

Photography and China is the first overview of the subject to be published in English, providing a comprehensive account of this previously neglected relationship. Spanning the period from the inception of photography until the present, the book foregrounds Chinese photographers and subjects, and draws on works in museum, archival and private collections across China, the USA, Europe and Australia. Taking a thematic approach to her historical survey, Claire Roberts brings together commercial, art and documentary photography, locating the images within the broader context of Chinese history. With a constant focus on the images, and the studios or individuals that created them, Roberts describes the long tradition of Chinese artistic culture into which photography was at first absorbed, and which it subsequently expanded. She recounts the stories of practitioners who were agents in that process of change, both from China and overseas, and examines the different purposes for which they used photography, be they commercial, political or artistic. Featuring a strong narrative and numerous striking images, many unfamiliar to a Western audience, Photography and China will appeal to all those with an interest in China, photography, Chinese art and visual culture, or twentieth-century history and society. The book will also be relevant to a general audience, as well as students, scholars, photographers, curators and collectors.