Posted: December 14th, 2012 | No Comments »
Arrested Development: China’s History of Invention and the Future of Innovation
Sunday, December 16, 2012
7pm
Suzhou Bookworm
Bill Dodson discusses China’s history of invention, when and why it all stopped – and if it will ever restart again.
 
Bill is the author most recently of  China Fast Forward: The Technologies, Green Industries and Innovations Driving the Mainland’s Future (Wiley, August 2012), and of China Inside Out: 10 Irreversible Trends Re-shaping China and Its Relationship with the World (Wiley, 2011). He writes the Energy and Environment column for the China Economic Review.
Posted: December 13th, 2012 | No Comments »
I listened to a very interesting talk at the weekend by David Porter on Chinoiserie in 18th Century England. Porter is a professor at the University of Michigan who specialises in the problem of how to think China and England together in the eighteenth century and early modern period. He is the author of a number of books including Ideographia: The Chinese Cypher in Early Modern Europe and, more recently, Comparative Early Modernities 1100-1800. Anyway during his talk he noted a book worth reading that I had not heard of but sounds fascinating – Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking by Michael Keevak – detail below as ever. Sounds like an interesting book recommended by an interesting academic.
In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.
From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase “yellow peril” at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.
Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.
Posted: December 12th, 2012 | No Comments »
Despite myself and others believing that things may have been improving as regards heritage and preservation in Hong Kong – it appears not. The HK SAR government admitted a policy failure following its decision to give up on a plan to save the historic Ho Tung Gardens on The Peak. It has also bowed to public pressure and abandoned a scheme to redevelop the west wing of the former government headquarters in Central. the government claims the public doesn’t want to spend tax money on renovation and preservation.
the Ho Tung mansion and gardens were built in 1927 by the well known comprador family. It will be replaced with housing units! The heritage authorities called the mansion a “rare history building” and “probably the earliest surviving example, of Chinese renaissance architecture in Hong Kong”. Now it’s going
The South China Morning Post on the debacle here
Ho Tung Gardens and mansion in the foreground left
Posted: December 11th, 2012 | No Comments »
Back in March 2011 I blogged about the older buildings remaining at Nanjing University (here). Last weekend I heard Edward Denison speak on architecture in China at the University of Westminster China in Britain conference and he noted that these buildings were designed by the architects Murphy and Dana (the red star I presume was added later!) – I didn’t know that.
So maybe take another look and read a history of Henry Murphy here who was responsible for many stand out buildings in Shanghai and across China.
Posted: December 10th, 2012 | No Comments »
…I just thought I’d pop this cover up as we were on the subject – it’s interesting as it includes two things of note – 1) a sample of the lovely top to bottom trademark Sapajou signature and 2) that this edition was published by Cleveland-based The World Publishing Company, a firm that specialised in printing bibles and dictionaries. In the mid-1930s the firm’s publishing activities expanded into producing inexpensive editions of good literature for sale in drugstores and dime stores as well as in existing bookstores.
Posted: December 9th, 2012 | No Comments »
In amongst the long list of great reads produced by Carl Crow (and if you don’t know who he was then shame on you and buy my biography of him) was a book entitled My Friends, the Chinese. The book, published originally in 1938 shortly after Crow had been forced to leave Shanghai after the start of the war with Japan, was titled The Chinese are Like That in America. Crow’s great friend, the White Russian cartoonist Sapajou, provided the cartoons (as he did for Crow’s classic Four Hundred Million Customers). However, I have never seen this cover (brought to my attention by Deborah McFarlane – many thanks – and on sale on ebay for US$75 and rising). The artwork for the cover does not appear to be Sapajou in style though I rather like the typeface. Worth a quick post I thought…
Posted: December 8th, 2012 | No Comments »
I feel Elizabeth Sinn’s Pacific Crossing is worth a plug…
“During the second half of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong provided a transpacific outreach for enterprising Cantonese to leapfrog the region, the first Great Leap in the Chinese people’s passage to the new world. Elizabeth Sinn’s scholarly study tells the story of how the colony became the pivot in modern Chinese migrations. Her book traces the myriad ways that made Hong Kong not only a major trading center but also the indispensable second home for diasporic Chinese. This is an excellent work of history that tells a compelling story.” — Wang Gungwu, Chairman, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore  Â
Â
-Â Charts the rise of Chinese Gold Mountain firms engaged in all kinds of transpacific trade.
-Â Challenges the traditional view that the Chinese migration was primarily a “coolie trade”, and foregrounds Hong Kong’s vital and multiple connections with California after the gold rush.
-Â Shows how the political, legal, economic and social infrastructure enabled early colonial Hong Kong to develop into a space of flow for people, goods, capital, ideas and information.Â
Â
Posted: December 6th, 2012 | No Comments »
I have a small e-book out in Australia, New Zealand, China and Hong Kong – there’s also a limited edition about if you pop into a Dymocks in Hong Kong or the Bookworm in Beijing (and some other places including online here in Oz). It’s called The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking and includes the back stories of a lot of the witnesses that appeared briefly in Midnight in Peking – more details, pictures, maps and stories from the old Peking Badlands.
Here’s a link to a WSJ feature on the book…it’ll be out as an e-book in America and Europe/UK next March.
