Junk at Full Sail

As it Sunday and a day of rest simply a picture today…a beautiful Chinese junk at full sail…

Making Cheongsams in the 1930s – The Street of Eternal Happiness: The Tailor

Respect to Rob Schmitz at American Public Media’s Marketplace radio show. He’s doing a series of progammes on different aspects of Shanghai Changle Lu (formerly Rue Bourgeat) and this one features a 94 year old cheongsam maker on the street who began making beautiful dresses in 1934 in the same building at No.217. Remarkable Rob found him – listen here

Visiting the Grave of ETC Werner in Ramsgate

I am mightily gratified that a number of readers of Midnight in Peking have decided that Pamela’s father ETC Werner, who sought desperately for justice for his daughter’s murder in the face of lies, hidden truths and diplomatic obstinacy, should be better remembered. Werner was forced to eventually return to England after the Communist takeover of Peking and died in February 1954 being buried in Ramsgate Cemetery in Kent. I’m afraid to say that I have yet to make it to Ramsgate to see his grave and pay homage, though fully intend to the next time I’m in England. Still, some people have visited and recorded his place of burial, updating the information using my book on the highly useful findagrave.com website – see here. This site now also records that Werner’s wife Gladys Nina Werner (nee Ravenshaw) and Pamela are both buried in the former British Cemetery in Peking (concerted over these days with the Second Ring Road I’m afraid). My thanks to Ash Montagu for doing that.

The entrance to Ramsgate Cemetery

The Chapel of Rest at Ramsgate

Shanghai – M Literary Salon: Pankaj Mishra: From the Ruins of Empire – 21/10/12

This Sunday at M on the Bund in Shanghai –

M Literary Salon: Pankaj Mishra-From the Ruins of Empire

In conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom

RMB 75, includes a drink

More details here

Join us for a discussion with the author of one of the year’s most talked-about books, From the Ruins of Empire. Mishra tells the story of the fall and remaking of Asia, through a group of remarkable thinkers who created a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas – ideas that today lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood. These thinkers created the ideas which in turn were to doom the new empires and which lie behind the powerful Asian nations of the 21^st century. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, co-editor of Chinese Characters: Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land and professor of modern Chinese history, moderates.

Pankaj Mishra writes principally for the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. He is the author of Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, The Romantics, An End to Suffering and Temptations of the West.

MP Shiel’s The Purple Cloud Reissued

I’ll note briefly the Penguin Classics reissuing of MP Sheil’s The Purple Cloud, his “last man standing” novel. Shiel was one of the early Yellow Peril writers first publishing books and stories with Asian villains in the late 1890s that inspired the likes of Sax Rohmer and his Fu-Manchu, though The Purple Cloud is now his best remembered work and considered an early sci-fi genre piece. There are several scenes in China in the book, including a description of the docks at Tientsin.

Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai now on Kindle…

Our second Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai–Hong Kong University Press “China Monograph” is now available on Amazon in Kindle form…Go Kindlers….

The Warlord and The Engineer The Mukden Tiger – Zhang Zuolin – The Danish Weapons Advisor – Sunday 21/10/12

An interesting event in Beijing from the people behind Beijing Postcards and Simon Rom Gjore at The Hutong:

Join us on Sunday October 21st for a unique peek into the life and times of the mightiest warlord in China during the chaotic 1920s, as well as expat life in the capital of Northeast China, Shenyang.

Robert Christensen, a Dane, went to Mukden (present day Shenyang) in 1922 accompanying the Manchurian Warlord Zhang Zuolin’s biggest ever order of weapons machinery. Shortly after, he was hired by Zhang to build up the largest arsenal in all of China and consequently had the chance to document, in Kodak stills and silent film footage, the life and death of the short, hot-tempered former bandit who ruled Manchuria as his own.

Restless Empire

Another history of China – this one Restless Empire (the touchy Chi-Comms won’t like that title!) by (the oddly named – geddit!) Odd Arne Westad starts in 1750 and goes through to, well, “today” the publishers say. Details and blurb as ever….

Tracing China’s course from the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty to today’s People’s Republic, Restless Empire shows how the country’s worldview has evolved. It explains how Chinese attitudes have been determined by both receptiveness and resistance to outside influence and presents the preoccupations that have set its foreign-relations agenda.

Within two decades China is likely to depose the United States as the world’s largest economy. By then the country expects to have eradicated poverty among its population of more than one and a half billion, and established itself as the world’s technological powerhouse. Meanwhile, some – especially its neighbours – are afraid that China will strengthen its military might in order to bend others to its will.

A new form of Chinese nationalism is rising. Many Chinese are angry about perceived past injustices and fear a loss of identity to commercial forces and foreign influences. So, will China’s attraction to world society dwindle, or will China continue to engage? Will it attempt to recreate a Sino-centric international order in Eastern Asia, or pursue a more harmonious diplomatic route? And can it overcome its lack of democracy and transparency, or are these characteristics hard-wired into the Chinese system? Whatever the case, we ignore China’s international history at our peril.

Odd Arne Westad is one of the world’s foremost experts on both the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history, having won the Bancroft Prize, the Michael Harrington Award and the Akira Iriye International History Book Award for his seminal book The Global Cold War. A Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, he is also co-director of LSE IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy.