London – A Queer Orientalism: Sex, Power and Cultural Difference in the ‘Memoirs’ of Sir Edmund Backhouse – 20th June

I know from previous posts on the recent new edition of Decadence Mandchoue that a lot of you like old Sir Edmund Backhouse so this event at Birkbeck College in London may be of interest…

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

A Queer Orientalism: Sex, Power and Cultural Difference in the ‘Memoirs’ of Sir Edmund Backhouse
20th  June 6pm – 8pm Room B06 Birkbeck Main Building
Speaker: Morris Kaplan (BIH Visiting Fellow)
“A Queer Orientalism” traces the intersections among sex, power and cultural difference in the memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. Born in 1873, Backhouse lived in China from 1898 until his death in 1944; he co-authored two important, controversial studies of Chinese politics during and after the Boxer Rebellion. His two book-length manuscripts, “The Dead Past” and “Manchu Decadence,” tell the story of erotic and political adventures in fin du siecle Europe and in Beijing during the last decade of the Manchu dynasty. He places himself near the center of the court of the Dowager Empress during the years 1989-1908 and claims extensive interaction with her and with her most important advisors. Backhouse is virulently anti-British and positions himself as an anti-imperialist. Very learned in Chinese history and culture, he attempts to appropriate an indigenous tradition of same-sex love while holding onto a certain erotic privilege as a “foreign devil”. More fantasy than history, Backhouse’s “memoirs” display vicissitudes of desire and cultural interaction in a distinctively queer and oriental(ist) context.

First come first served – no registration.
Co-sponsored by BiGS

Julia Eisner, Manager

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

T:  (0) 20 7631 6612

E:  j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk

“The Marvellous Chinese Conjurer” Chung Ling Soo in 1915

A while back in 2010 I posted a few times on the then famous magician Chung Ling Soo and recommended Jim Steinmeyer’s biography of him too. The interesting thing about Chung Ling Soo is that he was one of the most famous magicians of his day – originally an American called Bill Robinson he became Chung Ling Soo and passed himself of as Chinese, complete with robes, pigtail and interpreter (gibberish to English!) and made a mint doing magic tricks. All went well till 1918 when, at the Wood Green Empire, he did his famous bullet catching trick (complete with Boxer storyline and effects), it went wrong and he was shot dead on stage! Robinson went to great lengths not to be revealed as a white man, though it was known among the magician and music hall fraternities it was not widely known by his audience. He was so convincing to many (who probably had not, to be fair, had a lot of contact with Chinese people) that one woman who became infatuated with him rejected him as uninteresting when he appeared to her as a white guy in a suit!

Anyway, Chung Ling Soo is seen in posters and advertising ephemera from his shows – all highly stylised – and there are some photos but only one tiny bit of newsreel footage. It shows Robinson/Chung in London welcoming back heroes of the trenches from the war in 1915 and performing a benefit concert for them. It’s only 15 seconds long and on Youtube. I’ve screengrabbed a couple of stills below so you can decide for yourself whether he was convincing or not…

China Visual Festival – London – June 22-July 6

If you’re in London and find the concept of all sport utterly dreary (as you should) then this visual festival related to China might be of interest. You never know with these things of course but the idea of looking at “aftershock” of the Olympics and what the notions of “speed” in China might have done to bulldozer. However, the Shanghai 1930s version of Sweet Charity (scroll down to the bottom) sounds interesting…

Rise in Chinois Splendour at Marshall & Snelgrove’s

I popped into the Museum of London the other day – hadn’t been since school!! It’s still a great museum and the new recreation of a Pleasure Garden is superb. Anyway, of course it’s the China-related stuff that catches my eye. Lovely to see they have a a Chinese styled panel that once adorned the sumptuous left (elevator to those who must) at the Marshall and Snelgrove department store in the 1930s. Marshal and Snelgrove (the original M&S!!) was on Oxford Street and the panel remained until 1974. It’s available as a greeting card by the way. No details of the artist though I’m afraid.

RAS Suzhou – 17th June – Escaping Under Enemy Gunfire without Your Wooden Leg is the Pits

Sunday, June 17, 2012

2pm

Suzhou Bookworm

The one-legged Admiral Chan Chak left behind his wooden leg when he had to swim for his life in a barrage of gunfire to escape the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong on Christmas 1941. He and sixty British companions made their way overland across enemy lines in China’s interior to eventual freedom. Tim Luard relates this unbelievable trek in his Suzhou Bookworm talk about his book, “Escape from Hong Kong: Admiral Chan Chak’s Christmas Day Dash, 1941”.

Tim Luard graduated in Chinese at Edinburgh University in 1973 and spent the next seven years in Hong Kong, working as a freelance journalist.  Highlights of his 23-year career at the BBC included covering the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square during a two-year stint as Beijing Correspondent for the World Service and making a 6-part radio series on the history of Hong Kong to mark the handover.

Tim and his wife Alison — whose father Colin McEwan was a member of Admiral Chan’s party — retraced the escapers’ 80-mile route to Huizhou on foot in 2009 and put together an exhibition on the escape which is showing till the end of 2012 at the Hong Kong Coastal Defense Museum.

At the Suzhou Bookworm: tell your taxi driver the intersection of Wu Que Qiao and Shi Quan Jie.

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.

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.

A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – 1923 Lady Bikers in Turkmenistan

Can’t say whether or not this book – A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – is any good (though it did get picked as a Summer Read by The Missoulian newspaper, as did Midnight in Peking):

It is 1923 and Evangeline English, keen lady cyclist, arrives with her sister Lizzie at the ancient Silk Route city of Kashgar to help establish a Christian mission. Lizzie is in thrall to their forceful and unyielding leader Millicent, but Eva’s motivations for leaving her bourgeois life back at home are less clear-cut. As they attempt to navigate their new home and are met with resistance and calamity, Eva commences work on her book, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar…In present-day London another story is beginning. Frieda, a young woman adrift in her own life, opens her front door one night to find a man sleeping on the landing. In the morning he is gone, leaving on the wall an exquisite drawing of a long-tailed bird and a line of Arabic script. Tayeb, who has fled to England from Yemen, has arrived on Frieda’s doorstep just as she learns that she is the next-of-kin to a dead woman she has never heard of: a woman whose abandoned flat contains many surprises – among them an ill-tempered owl. The two wanderers begin an unlikely friendship as their worlds collide, and they embark on a journey that is as great, and as unexpected, as Eva’s. A stunning debut peopled by unforgettable characters, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar is an extraordinary story of inheritance and the search for belonging in a fractured and globalised world.m

Historic Hotels in China

Talking of hotel luggage labels yesterday, I recently got asked by a media organisation to come up with some historic hotels in China…but then they didn’t use it, so you lot get it…and a more deserving group you are too…

1) The Jinjiang Hotel – Shanghai

The Jinjiang Hotel, once the gorgeous Cathay Apartments in the old French Concession. Most famously though where President Nixon and his team stayed in 1972 when they arrived to break the Cold War ice and sign the “Shanghai Communiqué”. The Chinese even built a special hall for the signing next door to the hotel. The Jinjiang’s management claim Nixon said the hotel was the best he ever stayed in…but then we know Tricky Dicky had a flexible relationship with the truth!

2) The Pujiang Hotel – Shanghai

The former Astor House Hotel had a lot of famous guests over the decades and now likes to claim Zhou En-lai, Mao’s right-hand-man and the Premier of the PRC, as a long stay guest. Though it’s contentious, as Zhou was not a normal guest seeing the sites but rather hiding out in the Astor in 1927 as outside he was being hunted down as a Communist agitator. The urbane Zhou and his wife posed as tourists, dressed in western clothes and conversed only in English or French so that nobody would realise he was, at the time, the most wanted man in Shanghai with a price on his head.

3) The Peking Hotel – Beijing

It’s hard to believe but before June 1989 CNN was little known outside the USA. Then the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush the student protestors and CNN was right there with cameras rolling. Veteran journalists John Holliman and Bernard Shaw were in the thick of it. CNN’s Beijing correspondent at the time Mike Chinoy maintains that CNN’s coverage of the massacre, while the tram were based in the Peking Hotel, ” put CNN on the map”. The balconies of the Beijing Hotel were where most of the footage of the Square was shot from including AP’s Jeff Widener and his iconic picture of a lone man with two shopping bags who stopped a tank. Tiananmen was just the latest event witnessed by guests at the former Grand Hôtel de Pékin built as the capital’s grandest lodging house in 1917.

4) The Astor House Hotel – Tianjin

Not many know that the regal Astor on the banks of the Hai River in the heart of the former British Concession of Tientsin was the favourite hotel of a young American mining engineer by the name of Herbert Hoover who later became the 31^st President of the United States. In reality the Hoover’s only stayed in the Astor for a few weeks in 1899 but that hasn’t stopped the hotel opening a “Hoover Suite” and intimating he was President when he stayed there – not quite, Hoover wouldn’t be the Commander-in-Chief for another 30 years. Still, he did pick up a little Chinese and reportedly used it in the White House when he wanted a private conversation with his wife.

5) The Cathay Hotel – Shanghai

Sir Victor Sassoon’s impressive Bund-side hotel was home to many famous visitors. But here’s an unlikely pairing to demonstrate the hotel’s range! Just a year after the hotel opened in 1930 Noel Coward arrived from Singapore with a terrible bout of the flu. Confined to bed, Coward busied himself writing what would become his most famous play, Private Lives. By way of contrast, during the Cultural Revolution, or as it’s now officially known “the ten years of madness”, the Cathay became the base for Madame Mao and the notorious Gang of Four. Proletarian revolutionaries they may have been but they knew a stylish hotel when they saw one!

6) The White Swan Hotel – Guangzhou

The White Swan stands majestically upon Shamian Island, the spit of land where foreigners were first allowed to settle and trade in Canton, now Guangzhou. It was one of China’s first five star hotels and is also home to one of the greatest urban legends of modern China – the Queen’s mobile throne! When Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1986 she was the first British monarch to set foot on Chinese soil and she stayed at the White Swan. However, a legend was born that every Chinese person believed at the time – the tale that the Queen brought her own toilet to China and that it accompanied her everywhere to allow her to avoid using a Chinese loo. True or false? Buckingham Palace will not confirm or deny, but it doesn’t matter as everyone believes in the legend of the Queen’s mobile throne.

7) The Yamato Hotel Mukden – Shenyang

Yamato were a Japanese-built hotel chain in northern China known for their modernist architecture and sumptuousness. No wonder then that the Yamato Mukden, now the Liaoning Hotel Shenyang, was a favourite of Mao Tse-Tung and Den Xiaoping when on business up north. It’s a palace of a hotel so perhaps fit for supreme leaders enjoying the Mandate of Heaven…and close to the railway station where Mao’s personal and private train carriage could wait for him. Incidentally, the Yamato Hotel in Dalian (now the Dalian Hotel) was the favourite out-of-office meeting place for the former mayor, the now slightly more well-known Bo Xilai!!

8) The Peninsula – Hong Kong

The grand old lady of Kowloon, overlooking the harbour and facing The Peak opposite and, once, right next to the railway station where the trains arrived from Canton (in case you’re wondering why Hong Kong’s grandest hotel is Kowloon-side). Depending on your style choose your Peninsula hero – W. Somerset Maugham staying here in the “finest hotel east of Suez” drinking gin Martinis; James Bond in The Man With the Golden Gun using the hotel’s fleet of Rolls Royce’s or; Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) arriving on the hotel’s rooftop helipad in The Dark Knight.

9) The Lucky Holiday Hotel – Chongqing

Technically called the Nanshan Lijing Guest House, but better known as the Lucky Holiday Hotel. Secluded villas with views of the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing below. Scenic for sure…but lucky? Perhaps not, as this previously rather obscure hotel was where British businessman Neil Heywood died, allegedly murdered, in November 2011 kicking off China’s most notorious and mysterious political scandal for decades. Don’t expect any plaques or a confessional tell-tale sessions from the management – they’re denying everything and anything!

Old China Luggage Labels

Hugues Martin has some lovely old luggage labels from Chinese hotels on his Shanghailander blog – worth checking out….

I’ll add this one for the old Imperial Hotel in the Peking Legation Quarter…