Alexander Graham – A Most Interesting Governor

January 2012  244 pp.  36 b/w illus.

Paperback ISBN 978-988-8083-85-5  HK$180 / US$25.00

“A lively, witty, candid and invaluable guide to understanding the mentality of colonial administration at its highest levels. Like all long-serving colonial governors Grantham was treated almost as a demi-god in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, and it was only when he had his toes trodden on in a crowded railway carriage while on leave in England that he was powerfully reminded of how ordinary he really was.” — Steve Tsang, author of A Modern History of Hong Kong

- By Alexander Grantham (葛量洪), one of the most important Hong Kong colonial governors whose decade was a very eventful one — postwar reconstruction, 1949 revolution, huge increase in population and industrialization.

– An important first-hand account of the workings of Britain’s colonial system; also contains vivid anecdotes about life behind the scenes in Government House.

- A very readable, personal informal memoir — quite humorous in places.

Sir Alexander Grantham began his career in the British colonial service as a cadet in Hong Kong in 1922. He served in Bermuda, Jamaica and Nigeria, and as Governor of Fiji before returning to Hong Kong as Governor in 1947 until his retirement in 1957.

Advance Warning – Adelaide Writers’ Week This March

I’ll be at Adelaide Writers’ Week this March along with tons of other folk – it’s a stunningly good list, part of the wider Adelaide Festival and I’m glad I get to be there for all of it. Here’s some links, I’ll highlight my stuff closer to the date –

Adelaide Writers’ Week

My major session – rather grandly titled as The China Hand: Paul French (but don’t worry I’ll be talking about books and other people not me and Nick Jose is moderating to stop me doing precisely that!)

Shanghai Policeman Back on the Shelves

EW Peters’s classic account of being a Shanghai copper, Shanghai Policeman, in the 1930s is now reprinted thanks to Earnshaw Books. Shanghai Policeman is a problematic book – Peters is a highly complicated and conflicted character who’s actions and motives are often strange and not always fully explained satisfactorily in the book. Still, it is an interesting mix of kidnappers, robbers, the Shanghai riot squad, beggar boats and English blokes get themselves into some messes in Shanghai (usually female related as ever). The book also sheds a lot of light on Shanghai’s old Eastern District, what is now Yangpu, an area that remains terra incognito to 99.9% of foreigners who ever come to China these days but used to be well known to the older Shanghailanders. There’s a new introduction by Robert Bickers too, so well worth picking up.

Some More Chinois Poetry…Pound on So-Shu via Li Po

My new year’s blogging resolution was to include more poetry on this blog – poetry with a Chinoiserie feel. I’ve posted a couple of Vachel Lindsay Chinois poems already (here and here) and today some of the great Ezra Pound. Pound had a long love affair with all things Oriental, Chinese and Chinoiserie and, of course, if a highly problematic character politically and ideologically. His early career in London saw him fascinated by Japan and China and become a translator, encouraged by he great Harriet Monroe.

This poem, entitled Ancient Wisdom, rather cosmic appeared (perhaps not first, but it’s where I first came across it) in the second (and last) edition of Blast, the short-lived but fascinating journal of the Vorticists produced ostensibly by Wyndham Lewis.This edition and poem appeared in 1915 and was entitled the “War Issue” and was hard hitting regarding the mechanised carnage in France at the time. The poem was later included in Pound’s collection Lustra, published a year after Blast (2) in 1916.

So-shu was the Japanese form of Chuang Chou (Tzu), a Chinese Taoist philosopher. This is Pound’s version of a Li Po poem about Chuang Tzu – Arthur Cooper, Li Po’s great translator also translated several versions of this poem. I’ve included Cooper’s translation below out of interest. Pound seems, to me, lighter and more concise but probably (and I’ve not checked the original) Cooper was more accurate to Li Po – but then Cooper was primarily a translator and Pound primarily a poet so perhaps not totally unexpected. So first Pound:

So-shu dreamed,
And having dreamed that he was a bird, a bee, and a butterfly,
He was uncertain why he should try to feel like anything else,
Hence his contentment.

— Ezra Pound

and now Cooper:

Did Chuang Chou dream

he was the butterfly

or the buterfly

that it was Chuang Chou?

In one body’s

metamorphoses

All is present

infinite virtue!

– Arthur Cooper

Pound – looking every bit as a radical poet should

Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China

James Palmer featured on this blog a few years ago for his great book The Bloody White Baron about Baron Ungen von Sternberg, the White Russian General who marauded across Mongolia. It was a rip roaring read about one of the twentieth century’s true nutters!! So, great to see his new book has finally hit the shelves – Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes – about the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake. He’ll be in Shanghai and Suzhou at the Royal Asiatic Society in March apparently.

When an earthquake of historic magnitude leveled the industrial city of Tangshan in the summer of 1976, killing more than a half-million people, China was already gripped by widespread social unrest. As Mao lay on his deathbed, the public mourned the death of popular premier Zhou Enlai. Anger toward the powerful Communist Party officials in the Gang of Four, which had tried to suppress grieving for Zhou, was already potent; when the government failed to respond swiftly to the Tangshan disaster, popular resistance to the Cultural Revolution reached a boiling point.

In Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes, acclaimed historian James Palmer tells the startling story of the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history, when Mao perished, a city crumbled, and a new China was born.

Comparing China – the Bizarre and the Silly – a new entry

A few years ago when I was writing my history of foreign journalists in China, Through the Looking Glass (hard copy or very competitively priced Kindle edition) I gathered together a series of rather odd comparisons of China by visitors to places back home that struck me as slightly silly, but fun. Perhaps one day I’ll get enough to do something with, but until then here’s a new one I came across recently and the others below from the great and the good for your delectation:

The great and usually erudite and brilliant W Somerset Maugham wrote:

‘…the bamboo, the Chinese bamboo, transformed by some magic of the mist, look just like the hops of Kentish field’

indeed!! But compared to the below perhaps not so odd:

• The American comedian Will Rogers compared the countryside around Harbin to Nebraska when he visited in the early 1930s.
• In the 1870s Jules Verne compared Hong Kong to a town in Kent or Surrey
• In 1933 Peter Fleming toured China and compared Chengde to Windsor
• He then compared Peking with Oxford for some reason!
• Later in 1938 Auden and Isherwood described the countryside around Guangzhou as reminiscent of the Severn Valley
• And then during his stay in China during the Second World War the (yet to be at the time) famous Sinologist Joseph Needham compared Fuzhou to Clapham and, perhaps most bizzarely, wartime Chongqing to Torquay!

And so…here’s Clapham in case you thought yourself transported via this photograph to Fuzhou with Joseph Needham!!

Help the Shanghai International Red Cross this New Year

Nowadays in China The Red Cross and other major charities may look a bit dodgy – government controlled GONGOs seemingly full of self serving corrupt officials and secretaries with a love of using donations to buy LV bags.But the Red Cross has a long history in China and Shanghai – here’s an appeal for donations from around the late 1930s targeting Chinese and foreign refugees in Shanghai faced with the imminence of a very cold winter.

How About an Orientalist Wireless?

I’ve plugged the great Megan Abbott on this site before and her great Californian noir books. I just happened to be reading her novelisation of the 1931 LA Trunk Case Murders, Bury Me Deep. It’s a cracking read and well worth the effort. However, she has a throwaway line about someone having a top of the range “RCA Victor Electrola with swank Oriental trimmings” – well I had to know if such a wireless had ever existed. And it did – a Chinoiserie radio!!! Limited Edition too!! Here’s the details from an old wireless enthusiasts site:

RCA,GE and Westinghouse were in a partnership running Victor since early-1929. Actually two companies were formed to run Victor, (AudioVision Appliance and Radio-Victor.) In late 1929, RCA-Victor was formed to consolidate everything into one company. In 1930, an Anti-trust suit was filed against the group which broke-up the longtime partnership (cross-licensing arrangement) and essentially put RCA in sole ownership of RCA-Victor. Due to the Depression, expensive machines were no longer a saleable item, so RCA-Victor utilized left-over cabinets from the previous year’s most expensive model, the 9-56 Automatic Electrola-Radiola, ($1750 selling price in 1929) and replaced the 9-56’s problem prone Radiola 64 and notorious automatic changer with the reliable ten-tube Microsynchronous TRF receiver and a simple manual turntable. Standing 65″ tall, the Chinese Chippendale cabinet is decorated with oriental motifs in red, black and gold lacquer. Walnut veneer panels with black, gold and green lacquer trim are used on the exterior. With the doors closed, ten filigree bronze hinges and the filigree bronze door-pull escutcheons are visible. Selling for a mere $595, only 245 of these behemoths were produced.

You can keep your wanky iPods, I’ll have one of these please