Xu Zhimo in Cambridge – Between the Ears: Saying Goodbye Again and Again

A very urgent post as this radio documentary on the Cambridge days of China’s great modern poet Xu Zhimo is only up on the BBC site for one more day. Cambridge was of course vital to Xu’s work, it was where he discovered the Romantic poets such as Keats and Shelley, the French and the Symbolists – he translated much of it while they inspired his own Chinese language poetry and work as a founder of the Crescent Moon Society.

Click here to listen – blurb below as ever – sorry for late notice!

“Quietly I leave, as quietly as I came here.”

Each year thousands of Chinese tourists visit Cambridge, not to see the usual sites, but to pay homage to a poem they all had to learn by heart in school – Xu Zhimo’s ‘Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again’. Few non-Chinese speakers will have heard of it.

“Saying Goodbye again and again” takes a sonic journey along the River Cam capturing the voices of teachers, students, tourists, punt chauffeurs, a tour guide, a translator and experts on early 20th century Chinese poetry. Also visiting Cambridge are two poets from two very different backgrounds – Sean Street and Xin Zeng – who muse on the life of Xu Zhimo and explore the hidden depths of a poem which used ideas from the English romantics to help break the strict rules of classical Chinese poetry.

Daily Telegraph – A brief history of dead Britons in China

Here’s a link to a quick piece I wrote for the Daily Telegraph linking Pamela Werner to Neil Heywood with a few other Britons who met their end in China over the decades….

The Guardian’s Top 10 books set in Hong Kong

A list appeared in the Guardian of their top ten books set in Hong Kong. Not a bad list though misses possibly a few newer titles such as Francesca’s Brill’s The Harbour. The most obvious missing book is Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong which has consistently sold well in Hong Kong bookshops and is now available in a lovely re-issue from Penguin with its original cover art. But maybe Guardian types are a bit squeamish about Suzie Wong? I’m not sold on Gweilo, a little too advanced recall and knowingness for a young boy I feel about that one. I’ll go for most of the others though personally I find Han Suyin a bit tiresome. On the other hand I do like Jane Gardam’s The Man in the Wooden Hat (and Old Filth), both of which are very much in the same vein as Theroux’s Hong Kong book.

One More Odd China Reference – The Irish Men of China

Talking of strange references between China and elsewhere, invariably England but not exclusively, here’s a corker from the Reverend G Smith who produced a volume in 1847 entitled A narrative of an exploratory visit to each of the consular cities of China, and to the islands of Hong Kong and Chusan, on behalf of the Church Missionary Society, in the years 1844, 1845, 1846. Long winded? the Rev Smith – never!! And on his trip he observed that Shanghai was a second Liverpool (well, actually not that odd and with good reasoning so not included) but the poor Fujianese being compared to the Irish – I say “poor” on the grounds that I’m thinking the Rev didn’t have that great an opinion of the Irish. And so he declared of Shanghai:

 “Shanghai is a second Liverpool, in the extent of its commerce and in the various races of people attracted thither by gain. Whole streets are tenanted by the men of Fokeen [Fujian] – the Irishmen of china – men of ardent, impetuous, and enterprising minds, but turbulent and irascible withal.”

Smith is actually one of the more interesting of that odd breed, the missionary. He did learn Chinese well enough to sermonise in the language and travelled extensively in China and forged a strong base in Hong Kong. Later in Japan, India and Australia he worked among the migrant Chinese communities in those countries.

More Dodgy Foreigners in Shanghai…Traitors From Birmingham Some of Them!!

At the end of last year I did a post about Shanghai in popular culture and how any reference to old Shanghai was a way of indicating extreme dodginess in a character in a novel or on TV. The classic example, which continues regularly, is, of course, that old tart Wallis Simpson and her Shanghai days (all that talk of the “Shanghai Grip” etc etc) but others abound, often in fiction, as a way of indicating suspicion and a bad and/or murky past. Last year ITV’s Marple changed an Agatha Christie Plot (Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?) to include a suspect having a dodgy Shanghai past while the author Elizabeth Wilson has done it twice now – once for a man and once for a woman, both with dodgy Shanghai pasts (in her novels War Damage and The Girl in Berlin respectively).

But it seems this tendency to use Shanghai to indicate previous dodginess goes back much further. Recently I have had (the very pleasurable) occasion to reread W. Somerset Maugham’s series of World War One spy stories Ashenden: Or the British Agent – superb stuff published in 1928 and based on Maugham’s own experiences during WW1 in Switzerland as an agent of British Intelligence. It’s basically the book that everyone who writes great spy books ever since has cited – Ambler, Le Carre, Furst…

In one story our hero Ashenden is sent to unmask a British subject spying for the Germans!! Maugham lists the villainous past offenses of the man – one Grantley Caypor – to let you know how thoroughly bad he is and that condemn him as a thorough cad:

1) born in Birmingham;

2) married a German woman;

3) became a journalist;

4) went to Shanghai where, “he got into trouble for attempting to get money on false pretenses and was sentenced to a short term of imprisonment.”;

5) and so naturally, with all those blots on his past he became a traitor and a spy for the German High Command while Our Boys fought gallantly in the trenches of France!!

Oh yes, Shanghai’s dodgy foreigners are not a new phenomenon!!

Midnight in Peking Comes to the Royal Asiatic Society in London – Friday 6th July

Chinese Flappers go Ice Sledding….in the 1920s

Terrific picture here 1926 of extremely fashionable, and presumably quite wealthy and westernised, Chinese on a sled ferry in Peking….

The Penguin Podcast: Urban Tales featuring Paul French, Dubliners and Greg Baxter

Not often I get put right next to James Joyce!! But I am in this Penguin podcast which includes me on Midnight in Peking, Greg Baxter’s new novel and an extract from the new issue of Mr Joyce’s Dubliners. Click here.