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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Posted: October 12th, 2012 | No Comments »
Hong Kong International Literary Festival
Friday, 12 October 2012
Murder, Mystery & Mayhem
20:00 – 21:00
Club Lusitano
Tarquin Hall and Paul French are both in the murder business. A much-travelled writer and journalist, Tarquin Hall has written three crime novels featuring Vish Puri, India’s Most Private Investigator. Based in Shanghai, Paul French writes extensively about China past and present. His novel Midnight in Peking tells the true story of the previously unsolved murder of a British teenager in 1937. They talk about murder and the mystery writer’s craft. It isn’t elementary.
Participants: Tarquin Hall, Paul French
General Ticket Price: $150.00
To book – click here
Posted: October 11th, 2012 | No Comments »
The novelist Dennis Wheatley keeps popping into my consciousness recently for odd reasons -he pops up as an inventive British intelligence officer dreaming up a wide variety of schemes to outwit the Nazis in Joshua Levine’s Operation Fortitude: The True Story of the Spy Operation of WW2 That Saved D-Day (which is a great read) while I happen to be embarking on a new project led by an editor with Wheatley interests and then Anne Witchard of the University of Westminster and Lao She in London fame recommended Phil Baker’s biography of Wheatley The Devil is a Gentleman.
In 1954 Wheatley published The Island Where Time Stands Still in his Gregory Sallust series of novels. There’s a China connection so worth a mention and well done to Anne Witchard too for collecting a selection of great covers for the book reflecting quite a few artists and designers Orientalist obsessions!:
On a pleasure cruise on the South Seas, Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust’s yacht hits a coral reef and sinks in minutes. Only one survivor is washed to the safety of the shore: Gregory Sallust.But this is no ordinary Pacific island. When Gregory regains consciousness he finds himself among a community of Chinese, ruled by descendents of the ancient Imperial House. Within days the throne becomes vacant, and Gregory joins an expedition to find the true heir – a hazardous search that takes him deep into the forbiddon heart of China itself.
Posted: October 11th, 2012 | No Comments »
For tickets see www.festival.org.hk…
Posted: October 11th, 2012 | No Comments »
A new book (actually a reissue) in the RAS Hong Kong series, Sheila Hamilton’s Watching over Hong Kong: Private Policing 1841-1941. Blurb and cover as ever below:
“Watching Over Hong Kong is a welcome addition to the historical literature, plugging an important gap and providing a comprehensive and impressive account of the emergence of private security in Hong Kong. Sheilah Hamilton has undertaken some striking historical research and presents her findings in a highly readable and engaging style. The book will be compelling reading for anyone studying or with an interest in security, policing or the history of Hong Kong.” — Dr. Mark Button, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of PortsmouthÂ
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- Traces the colourful and often complex history of private policing in Hong Kong during the first century of the territory’s development under British rule.
– Demonstrates how the foundation stones of today’s structure of public-private policing in Hong Kong were laid down.
- Will appeal to historians, sociologists as well as police officers, security managers employed in different areas of commerce and firms providing security products.Â
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Sheilah E. Hamilton is a forensic scientist and fire investigator who has worked closely with the territory’s public police and private security sectors for more than forty years.
Posted: October 10th, 2012 | 10 Comments »
I recently received a nice review in the newsletter of the Peking American School alumni. You’d have to be a fair age (to be fair!) by now to be an old boy or girl of the PAS so it’s great their magazine is still going. The review was good – ‘you have to read this book!’ (I’m not going to argue with that), however the historian of all things treaty port schools Steve Upton added a little bit of extra info. I knew that Pamela Werner (the murder victim in my book Midnight in Peking) had briefly attended the PAS and then later left and was unable to return meaning she was enrolled in the Tientsin Grammar School. However, Mr Upton has additional information:
Pamela did attend PAS for one year 1927 (when she would have been about 8) and did appear in a school play, The Forest Ring. The PAS magazine, Dragon, covered the production, which is all about bear cubs being taken and mama bear looking for them. The Fairy Queen can help but needs a mortal child who believes in fairies. Pamela appeared as an attendant to the Fairy Queen in the production staged by their teacher Miss Reynolds.
Sadly no pushy parents with video recorders in those days to tape the whole thing but I bet it was a great night out!
Pamela Werner as a young girl a few years before she appeared in The Forest Ring at the Peking American School
