Posted: October 17th, 2012 | No Comments »
I mentioned the journal The China Critic in my history of foreign journalists in China Through the Looking Glass (only a bargain six quid on amazon.co.uk at the moment!). So good to see that the China Heritage Quarterly has a feature on the old publication (here). There is also an interesting article with a splendid array of pictures from Rudolf Wagner on the foreign press in late Qing/early Republican China (here).
Posted: October 16th, 2012 | No Comments »
I am currently busy going through a shoe box of old China stamps I have after reading the news that some rare Sun Yat-sen stamps sold at auction for US$707,000 in Hong Kong – a world record. Seems the good Dr’s face is printed upside down making them extremely rare and getting them more than double what any SYS stamp has ever sold for before. More about it all here.
Posted: October 16th, 2012 | No Comments »
our first Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai–Hong Kong University Press “China Monograph” is now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk – so ebookers off you go to One-Click!
Posted: October 15th, 2012 | No Comments »
Tuesday 16th October 2012 at 7.00pm – starts 7.30pm prompt
Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road,Shanghai
兴国宾馆 上海市兴国路78å·
JULIA BOYD
A DANCE WITH THE DRAGON
Peking’s foreign community 1860-1949
With its diplomats and dropouts, philosophers, fossil-hunters, writers, explorers, missionaries and refugees, Peking’s foreign community was as exotic as the city itself. Always a magnet for larger-than-life individuals, Peking attracted such personalities as Reginald Johnston (tutor to the last emperor), Bertrand Russell, Wallis Simpson, Edgar Snow, J.D. Rockefeller, Jr., Morrison of The Times and the notorious Sir Edmund Backhouse. The last great capital to remain untouched by the modern world Peking both entranced and horrified its foreign residents whose response was to create their own extraordinary world of parties, picnics and club gossip. Ignoring the poverty outside their gates, they danced, played and squabbled among themselves, oblivious to the great political events unfolding around them that were to shape modern China.
Drawing on a variety of unpublished diaries and letters, Julia Boyd will tell the story of this small band of foreigners and explore life within the walled enclave of the foreign legation quarter. Based on her recent book, A Dance with the Dragon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), Julia’s lecture will draw a dazzling portrait of an eclectic foreign community and of China itself, one that is essential in understanding China and its attitude to foreigners today.
Julia Boyd is the author of Hannah Riddell, An Englishwoman in Japan and The Excellent Doctor Blackwell, a life of the first woman physician. A former governor of the English-Speaking Union, Julia is married to John Boyd who was posted twice to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and is a former British Ambassador to Japan. They then spent ten years in Cambridge when John was Master of Churchill College and now live in London.
ENTRANCE: RMB 80 (RAS members) and RMB 130 (non-members). Â
Includes one drink: 150ml glass of red or white wine / draft beer / soft drink / tea or coffee.
Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Weekender.
PRIORITY BOOKING for Members until 13th October 2012.
MEMBERSHIP applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
RAS MONOGRAPHS – Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. 100 rmb each
RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
Posted: October 15th, 2012 | No Comments »
I’ve noted the Shanghai childhood of the great artist Peter Max previously. But I read that he recently visited Shanghai in search of his old nanny and visited his old childhood haunts on Hongkou and the former Jewish ghetto. Details on his visit, reminiscences of old Shanghai and thoughts on the city today here.
Posted: October 15th, 2012 | No Comments »
Beijing Postcards up there in, eeerr, Beijing always do a nice calendar (as well as having many other delights for the old China fan in their store (postcards, books, maps etc) – do check out their website. Their calendar for 2013 is now available apparently and looks like another great one – “The Story of Tiananmen”, it’s all images of Tiananmen Square from days gone by (though ot perhaps a certain day in June 1989 I expect!).
Tiananmen Calendar 2013 seems just perfect. Because what is more important to the national holiday than the Tiananmen Gate itself? In our second limited edition calendar of the year we explore the fascinating story of the Tiananmen Gate in order to find out how it became the single most important piece of architecture in Modern China.
The calendar is available from their Beijing shop or you can order online at their website
For those fascinated by Tiananmen Beijing Postcards are also speaking at the Beijing Bookworm on October 9th
Posted: October 14th, 2012 | No Comments »
Julia Boyd – A Dance with the Dragon
Sunday, October 14, 2012
2pm
Julia Boyd comes to the Bookworm in Suzhou to regale attendees at the next session of the Royal Asiatic Society-Suzhou with tales of Peking’s foreign community between the world wars. Julia is author of A Dance with the Dragon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). With its diplomats and dropouts, philosophers, fossil-hunters, writers, explorers, missionaries and refugees, Peking’s foreign community was as exotic as the city itself. Peking was the last great capital to remain untouched by the modern world. Th capital both entranced and horrified its foreign residents, whose response was to create their own extraordinary world of parties, picnics and club gossip. Ignoring the poverty outside their gates, they danced, played and squabbled among themselves, oblivious to the great political events unfolding around them that were to shape modern China.
At the Suzhou Bookworm: tell your taxi driver the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
Â
Or, take the subway to the Lindun Lu stop in downtown Suzhou and take a 10 minute ride by pedicab or five-minute taxi ride to the Bookworm. It’s a fifteen minute walk due south from the Lindun Lu subway station: Gongyuan Lu (across from the old Sofitel Hotel – now Marco Polo), cross Shi Zi Jie to Wu Que Qiao. The Bookworm will be on your left at the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
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30 rmb for students; 50 rmb for members; 90 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer. For more information or membership applications, contact Bill Dodson at  bdodson88@gmail.com.
Lao She in London
Sunday, November 18, 2012
2pm
In November Anne Witchard comes to Suzhou to discuss one of China’s greatest modern writers, Lao She. Anne is author of Lao She in London. 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 1924-1929 have largely been overlooked. 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.Â
At the Suzhou Bookworm: tell your taxi driver the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
Â
Or, take the subway to the Lindun Lu stop in downtown Suzhou and take a 10 minute ride by pedicab or five-minute taxi ride to the Bookworm. It’s a fifteen minute walk due south from the Lindun Lu subway station: Gongyuan Lu (across from the old Sofitel Hotel – now Marco Polo), cross Shi Zi Jie to Wu Que Qiao. The Bookworm will be on your left at the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.
Â
30 rmb for students; 50 rmb for members; 90 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer. For more information or membership applications, contact Bill Dodson at  bdodson88@gmail.com.
The Royal Asiatic Society-Suzhou notes with great regret the loss of a tremendous supporter and active member of the chapter, Michelle Blumenthal. Michelle was instrumental in providing the Suzhou RAS chapter with a pipeline of great speakers. She took ill mid-summer with pneumonia-like symptoms, and passed away on August 18, 2012. Â She is missed.
Posted: October 13th, 2012 | No Comments »
Sometimes book titles flash up before my eyes and I just know that I’m going to buy them and so, probably, are a lot of regular China Rhyming readers – I suggest that Eric Jay Dolin’s When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs and Money During the Age of Sail is one such – I mean, come on – China, a cuppa, some drugs and sailing the high seas – how can I note immediately hit “add to basket”
Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships.
Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and bêche-de-mer–a rare sea cucumber delicacy–might have catalyzed America’s emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions that the reverberations can still be felt today. Peopled with fascinating characters–from the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings–this page-turning saga of pirates and politicians, coolies and concubines becomes a must-read for any fan of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower or Mark Kurlansky’s Cod. Two maps, and 16 pages of color and 83 black-and-white illustrations.
About the Author
Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and also won a number of awards, including the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History and the twenty-third annual L. Byrne Waterman Award, given by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, for outstanding contributions to whaling research and history. His most recent book is Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade (W. W. Norton, July 2010), a national bestseller, was chosen by New West, The Seattle Times, and The Rocky Mountain Land Library as one of the top non-fiction books of 2010. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.
