David Sassoon’s Bombay Library

I’m in Bombay for Christmas wandering around so expect a few Bombay-related posts, though I promise I’ll try and keep them linked to China somehow. So first off, linking David Sassoon and China is easy obviously – the scion of the Sassoon family who moved from Baghdad to Bombay and eventually established his opium trading empire in Hong Kong and Shanghai leaving subsequent generations of Sassoon’s, including Sir Victor, rather wealthy and largely Shanghai-based.

Any number of buildings around Bombay, and elsewhere in India such as Calcutta, owe their origins to Sassoon, the effective leader of the Indian Jewish community for a long time as well as a wealthy trader.The Library was actually the idea of David’s son Albert and was a joint project financed by the Sassoon family and the Government of the Bombay Residency. It neighbours several excellent buildings on Rampart Row – one now an upmarket department store and the former Army & Navy and the other Elphinstone College. The library is till in use to members who walk past the statue of Sassoon in the lobby to climb up to the reading rooms or to exit through the back to the sanctuary of a rather dry and small, but welcome in such a densely populated area, garden.

The Library building…

the former Army & Navy, still a department store, next door…

The statue of David Sassoon in the lobby – enter from the street to the statue and then the staircases lead up to the reading rooms for members…

The small back garden which is dry, but tranquil and quiet, and borders Elphinstone College.

Imperial Contagions Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia

In the wake of SARS, avian flu and the rest a time to look back on responses to contagions previously seems apt…Imperial Contagions is also a nice title!

David M. Pomfret is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.

Sabres on the Steppes: Danger, Diplomacy and Adventure in the Great Game

I’ve recommended some hard core academic books over the year for China Rhyming readers – weighty tomes that inspire much thought and require a bit of effort. That’s OK – you’re worth it, you’re here so you must be smart (ish). But it’s holiday time, so let’s choose something new and perhaps a little more fun over an egg nog and a packet of chocolate biscuits….Sir John Ure’s (gotta love the unapologetic use of “Sir”) Sabres on the Steppes: Danger, Diplomacy and Adventure in the Great Game. And here’s hoping there’s plent of danger and adventure and not too much diplomacy (boring!!)….

Sir John Ure, former British Ambassador to Cuba, Brazil and Sweden, is the author of, among other travel and historical books, Pilgrimage, In Search of Nomads, The Cossacks and The Trail of Tamerlane. He writes regularly on travel for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, and has served on the council of the Royal Geographical Society and as chariman of the Thomas Cook ‘Travel Book of the Year’ panel. His recreation in Who’s Who is ‘travelling uncomfortably in remote places and writing about it comfortably afterwards’

Old School North Korean Video Games – Drive Pyongyang…in a Pyonghwa

Those good folk at Koryo Tours have come up with a rather good idea for Christmas – a North Korean car racing video game! Actually the  ‘Koryo Tours Pyongyang Racer’ to be exact. Koryo have a DPRK (North Korean) gaming company to develop a racing game that lets you drive around Pyongyang in a locally made Pyonghwa Motors vehicle, see some of the sites and compete for a good race time! Collect fuel along the way, avoid the attentions of Pyongyang’s traffic ladies, and try not to crash into any of the local cars, or the DHL vans! This unique game is currently online exclusively on Koryo Tours’ website (do note that it may take some time to load properly – so do stay patient before starting). This could be the start of a whole new craze!! The fight back against the imperialist tyrants of Apple, XBox and Wii starts here comrades….Click here to start racing….

London’s Vienna Cafe – Where the Talk was often of China

So often when Chinese art and culture was discussed in London – when TS Eliot or Ezra Pound wanted to think about Chinese art or poetry, when the latest discoveries of Aurel Stein had been displayed at the nearby British Museum, when Bloomsbury gathered to talk of Things Eastern….it was to the famous and beautiful Vienna Cafe at 24-28 New Oxford Street that they retired. Just how many translations of Chinese poems, monographs on brushwork or initial findings regarding artifacts were first discussed in these rooms is hard to imagine. It was certainly Pound’s place – he lunched their most days apparently and lived in the area. He mentioned it in one of his Cantos and as well as things Chinese Pound and friends plotted the overthrow of romanticism with the Vorticists who made the Vienna Cafe their primary hang out (see this interesting tour of the locations the Bohemians plotted in)

And so here some interior pictures of the, now sadly long lost (see PS below), but lovely Vienna Cafe…

(PS: a quick note for dedicated Londoners – I’m afraid the site of the Vienna Cafe was lost to the bastard Luftwaffe in the Blitz – the site was replaced in the late 1940s with the impressive St George’s Court, one of the better and more thoughtful London office blocks to arise out of the bomb damage. It was, as many Londoners of a certain age – i.e. my age or thereabouts – will recall the central London HQ of the Ministry of Defence for many decades until they eventually moved out and it was converted to general office use around 2002).

The 2012 Opium References Round-up

I thought it worth mentioning that opium seems to be all over the place these days in popular cutlure. We started the year with the BBC Two adaptation of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which of course starts in an opium den. Julia Lovell’s The Opium War was on the shelves as a mass market paperback while opium books popped up elsewhere too – Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream from Thomas Dormandy, Steven Martin’s Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a Nineteenth Century Addiction, and Jeet Thayil’s excellent Narcopolis being nominated for the Booker short list. Not so much opium on TV except a bit of morphine for a bad leg in BBC America’s Copper, set in New York’s Five Points in the 1860s .

Opium kept popping up in fiction too – Corsican gangsters mixing it up in opium fuelled 1960s Vientiane in Colin Falconer’s Opium – it’s part of a series apparently. Opium again reared its head in nineteenth century Edinburgh as a possible motive for murder (and hinted at Gladstone’s hatred of the drug and trade) in Shadow of the Serpent, the first of David Ashton’s Inspector McLevy detective series. The drug also made an appearance in Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes tale The House of Silk – can you do Victorian Britain now without mentioning opium? Opium as a murder tool, along with lost funds raised in San Francisco for Sun Yat-sen, made a brief appearance in Joe Gores’s fun re-imagining of Sam Spade’s early detecting years and prequel to The Maltese Falcon in Spade and Archer.

Plenty of opium around this year!

Oh dear, the lovely Elizabeth Haverford (Anastasia Griffith) – uptown New York English ice queen of the 1860s – got a taste for the opium…

Cyrus Leroy Baldridge

Following yesterday’s post on the 1940s cover of Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy I follow up with a brief nod to the illustrator of that edition – Cyrus Leroy Baldridge. Baldridge (1889-1977) was an American animator, artist, explorer and adventurer with a most exciting past (the whole story here) who travelled to China after the First World War. In 1921 he published A Chinese album, monotypes by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge in the journal Asia and later  A Turn to the East. Partially his art was considered interesting as he adopted various ideas from Chinese and Japanese artistic styles and had lived and studied with Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo in the 1920s. He also provided sketches for the 1941 Translations from the Chinese by Arthur Waley.

Lao She Rickshaw Boy Cover

Many thanks to Anne Witchard who, inspired by the book covers from Carl Crow I recently posted, sent me this 1940s edition of Lao She’s (or Lau Shaw oddly here) classic Rickshaw Boy. This edition was the Book-of-the-Month selection in the USA sometime in about 1945/1946 just prior to Lao She’s visit to the USA in 1946. The illustrations throughout, including on the cover, were by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge, an interesting character from a wealthy background who combined drawing with exploring (including a trip to China – more on that tomorrow).

It seems only fair as Anne sent me this to return the favour by plugging her excellent new book Lao She in London….