The FT on Preserving Shanghai’s architectural heritage

An excellent video piece from Patti Waldemeir of the FT that hopefully indicates a sea change among some on preservation and puts to rest the old canard about old places being beyond repair and refurbishment unless of course they are deliberately vandalised into slums….(see my previous posts on “slums by intent” here and here).

Anna May Wong Bio out in Chinese Now

I reported last year how I had a small hand in nudging Hong Kong University Press into reprinting Graham Hodges’s biography of Anna May Wong – From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend. But I’m also very happy to see that HKUP have published it in a Chinese edition too. Anna May’s relationship with China, Chinese audiences and the KMT government was not always easy – the government felt she sometimes negatively portrayed China and the Chinese though, generally, audiences loved her. This biography does cover her 1936 visit to China which raised all these issues. Anyway, the Chinese edition has a different cover and, as regular readers of this blog will know, we never miss a chance to stick up a picture of Anna May Wong…

From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain

Stacey Pierson’s From Object to Concept is a lovely book and worth a plug…

Ming porcelain is among the world’s finest cultural treasures. From ordinary household items to refined vessels for imperial use, porcelain became a dynamic force in domestic consumption in China and a valuable commodity in the export trade. In the modern era, it has reached unprecedented heights in art auctions and other avenues of global commerce.

This book examines the impact of consumption on porcelain of the Ming period and its transformation into a foreign cultural icon. The book begins with an examination of ways in which porcelain was appreciated in Ming China, followed by a discussion of encounters with Ming porcelain in several global regions including Europe and the Americas. The book also looks at the invention of the phrase and concept of ‘the Ming vase’ in English-speaking cultures, and concludes with a history of the transformation of Ming porcelain into works of art.

Stacey Pierson is a senior lecturer in the History of Chinese Ceramics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

“The book has an impressive historical scope, from the 14th to the 21st century. Secondly, it ranges over a variety of interesting topics relevant to the history of a famous commodity—in addition to discussing the economic production, social use, and reception of Ming porcelain throughout the world, it has a novel and often amusing account on the treatment of Ming porcelain in modern popular UK and US culture. It presents an extensive coverage of recent English-language work on Chinese porcelain, and attempts to put the study of Ming, and by extension Chinese, porcelain in a wider conceptual framework, that of transcultural shifts in the use and meaning of art objects.” — Joseph P. McDermott, University of Cambridge

Adelaide Writers’ Week – 1-17th March – Down Under

I’ll be at the Adelaide Writers’ Week chairing a bunch of panels and having some discussions…for readers of this blog the following events may be of interest. If you’re in town do come and say hello.

March 4 – 9.30am – The Fishing Fleet – Celebrated biographer Anne de Courcy is arguably best known for Snowden and The Biography and Diana Mosley. She is also the author of Debs At War: 1939 – 1945 How Wartime Changed Their Lives and 1939: The Last Season. Most recently she has published The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj – a fascinating account of the young women sent out from England in search of a husband. Join her in conversation with Paul French.

March 5 – 5pm – The Future of Asia-Pacific – Since the Bali bombings Indonesia has turned from holiday destination to potentially sinister outpost. China’s monster economy is seen as our saviour. Immigrants from Asia continue to arrive, and our politicians continue to bicker. This panel brings together novelist Andrea Hirata, economist Loretta Napoleoni and writer Tim Southphommasane for a conversation about the relationships between the Pacific nations – including our own. Moderated by Paul French.

March 6 – 12pm – The Raj – In The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj Anne de Courcy recreates the decadent and sometimes quite difficult world of English women living in India. In The Unforgiving Minute, Harry Ricketts writes an intimate portrait of Rudyard Kipling, that complicated chronicler of life in India under the British. Join these two eminent biographers for a look back at English Colonial history. Moderated by Paul French.

March 6 – 5pm – Maonomics – Italian economist, journalist and political analyst, Loretta Napoleoni, has written about terrorism, piracy, Eastern Europe’s sex trade, China’s ‘online sweat shops’, new economics, environmental issues and social media. Her new book, Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists explores both the successes of the beginnings of the collapse of capitalism and what she calls China’s ‘peaceful economic revolution’. Join her in conversation with Paul French.

A Final Reminder – Recovering Lost Jewish Lives in China: Yiddish Tears on the Bubbling Well Road – This Thursday – Hong Kong

Recovering Lost Jewish Lives in China: Yiddish Tears on the Bubbling Well Road

Paul French (Midnight in Peking, The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking)

We are pleased to host a talk by author Paul French, who participated in the recent Hong Kong International Literary Festival where he presented his novel “Midnight in Old Peking”. While researching for this book, French came across some interesting stories, quite unrelated to his subject, which he felt deserved to be told. 

Hardoon, Sassoon, Kadoorie, Ezra… all familiar names whose histories are well documented, but what of those less dramatic Jewish lives, what of those Jews in China who remained largely anonymous or lived on the fringes, in the margins or among the underbelly?

This talk will focus on those Jews in China, lost but perhaps glimpsed in new research, including where they danced all night in the 1940s Shanghai Ghetto; how Eliza Shapera was trafficked from a Bessarabian shtetl to a Shanghai bordello — and then murdered; how Mr. Kahn ended up in the Russian-Jewish slum of Yang-I-Hutung in Peking; how Joe Farren ran away from Vienna’s Jewish ghetto, nearly became Shanghai’s biggest gangster and married Shanghai’s “Josephine Baker”; and why grown men cried when Lily Flohr (above) sang in Yiddish on the Bubbling Well Road.

Join us to hear Paul’s account of this fascinating part of our collective history.

Please note that visitors to the JCC are required to register at the Reception desk upon arrival.

Should you have any last-minute questions about the lecture, please call April on 9078-6155.

RAS SHANGHAI BOOK CLUB – Lao She in London – Monday March 11th 2013

The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss:

LAO SHE IN LONDON

by Anne Witchard

Published by HK University Press

August 2012, 
188 pages

Copies of the book will be available at RAS events prior to this meeting. You may also obtain a copy of the book by contacting the RAS Book Club (see below).

Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS Members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, or glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Member applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

RSVP: bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.

‘London is blacker than lacquer’

Lao She remains revered as one of China’s great modern writers. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. However, the four years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924 and 1929 have largely been overlooked. Dr Anne Witchard, a specialist in the modernist milieu of London between the wars, reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce. Lao She arrived from his native Peking to the whirl of London’s West End scene—Bloomsburyites, Vorticists, avant-gardists of every stripe, Ezra Pound and the cabaret at the Cave of The Golden Calf. Immersed in the West End 1920s world of risqué flappers, the tabloid sensation of England’s ‘most infamous Chinaman Brilliant Chang’ and Anna May Wong’s scandalous film Piccadilly, simultaneously Lao She spent time in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse. Out of his experiences came his great novel of London Chinese life and tribulations—Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). However, as Witchard reveals, Lao She’s London years affected his writing and ultimately the course of Chinese modernism in far more profound ways.

THE AUTHOR (who will be in attendance)

Anne Witchard is a lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate Publishing, 2009) and co-editor with Lawrence Phillips of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum, 2010).

JOP Bland’s Recent Events and Present Policies in China, 1912

A lovely old copy of JOP Bland’s Recent Events and Present Policies in China, published by Lippincott of Philadelphia in 1912. The original included a folding map too…

A Short Poem from 1914 – Old China

A short and sweet, and rather dated, poem today – unattributed I’m afraid but first published in Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, on April 1, 1914.

Old China

Little Wun-lee’s father, Nang-Poo,

Let her do just what she wanted to do;

Made her processions with peacocky banners

In the most regal and lavish of manners.

Little Wun-lee’s father, Nang-Poo,

Was a magician who lived at Foo-choo.

Now if you possess a magician of cunning

Nothing you want should be out of the running.

Little Wun-lee had all sorts of things—

Fly-away carpets and vanishing-rings,

Djinn as her footmen, and gem-spraying fountains,

And lovely snow-leopards from ghost-haunted mountains.

Little Wun-lee, combing her hair,

Saw a blue butterfly float through the air—

Saw a blue butterfly flicker and settle

On an azalea’s rosy pink petal.

Little Wun-lee said: “By the Mings,

That for your fly-away carpets and rings!

Peacocks and palanquins? Powers and dominions?

I’ll have a pair of blue butterfly’s pinions!”

“Little Wun-lee,” answered Nang Poo,

“That’s the one trick no magician can do;

Never did wizard of land, air or water

Magic blue wings on a little white daughter.”

Little Wun-lee, dainty and dear,

Cried for a day and a week and a year—

Cried till she died of a Thwarted Ambition,

And nobody cared but Nang-Poo, the magician.

Little Wun-lee, little Wun-lee,

He buried her ‘neath the azalea tree;

And the burnished blue butterflies flicker and hover,

And the rosy pink petals fall lightly above her.