Reminder – Lao She in London Today

Royal Asiatic Society of Suzhou Talk: Western Contributions to the Modern Chinese University System – Sunday, Dec 11, 3pm

Details below of the RAS Suzhou branch’s December event:

The old gate at Soochow University

St Kilda’s Art-Deco Toilets

Apropos of nothing…except that I’ve just been in Melbourne for a week – here’s an art-deco toilet in St Kilda – public toilets have rarely been so delightfully designed!

The Royal Asiatic Society China Book Club does Midnight in Peking – January 16th – But Get in Quick

The RAS in Shanghai is kicking of the new year with a relaunch of their book club and Midnight in Peking is the set text. I’ll be there to talk through the book with the club’s members. If you’re in Shanghai and interested the details are below and a special offer on the book if you’re part of the readers group. BTW: if you’re a reading club and happen to be doing Midnight in Peking (apparently quite a lot of reading groups in Australia and Asia are) let me know and we can always sort out some freebies!!

Do note the 12th December deadline below

RAS BOOKCLUB
SPECIAL OFFER – SPECIAL OFFER – SPECIAL OFFER

MIDNIGHT IN PEKING by PAUL FRENCH published by PENGUIN

Dear Members and Friends

We are very excited to advise you that the new RAS Book Club will start on Monday the 16th of January, 2012 with Paul French leading the discussion with the group on his latest release, Midnight in Peking.

For this special occasion Penguin have offered to supply RAS Members with the book at special discounted price of RMB 170.00 per copy (less 15%) and your copy can be gift wrapped in the Midnight in Peking wrapping paper ready for your Christmas stockings.
A specific Midnight in Peking book mark will be included with the book.

We will expect to receive your order to the RAS Book Club email bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn by the latest Monday the 12th of December, then you can collect and pay for your copies at RAS Lecture on Tuesday the 13th, RAS Film Club on Sunday 18th or the RAS Modern Chinese History Group on Monday the 19th of December.

Some of you will have already heard Paul French talking about Midnight in Peking however this occasion will be different since those of you attending will have read the book and this will give an opportunity to discuss the ‘who done it’ factor, within the book – club discussion.

ORDER FROM: bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
RAS BOOK CLUB – 1ST MEETING MONDAY JANUARY 16TH

MORE ABOUT MIDNIGHT IN PEKING
In 1937, Peking was a city with a healthy appetite for privilege and scandal. Lavish cocktail bars and dingy opium dens abound; corruption, superstition and rumours were par for the course. The exclusive Legation Quarter thrived on gossip, and almost nothing was too shocking for its foreign residents. Meanwhile, Japanese troops had already moved into Manchuria and were poised to move on Peking. The people of the city nervously waited for the axe to fall with parties and drinking and drugs, frantically living out the last days of their indulgent Peking lifestyles.

Ever on edge and with tension peaking, the discovery, one freezing January morning, of a brutally murdered young Englishwoman traumatized the people of Peking. Pamela Werner’s body was found, horrifically mutilated, at the foot of the Fox Tower, an ancient watch tower supposedly haunted by fox spirits. The police investigation that ensued was one of confusion and surprise but not one of answers. A private investigation conducted by Pamela’s father proved more productive but still brought no justice.

When author Paul French came across the story by chance, he was so haunted by a photograph of Pamela that he decided to investigate the circumstances surrounding her unsolved murder. The enquiry took him back to a city full of vice and intrigue where he met a perplexed Chinese police force,a determined ex-Scotland Yard detective and a British Foreign Office more interested in saving face than revealing the truth. He tracked Pamela’s killer through the infamous Peking ‘Badlands’ rife with crime, prostitution and drugs and into the grand foreign Legation Quarter where supposed gentlemen were not so gentle and in doing so he uncovered the truth.

Almost seventy-five years after the murder of Pamela Werner, Paul French finally gives the case the resolution it was denied at the time and in the tradition of the true crime classics White Mischief and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Midnight in Peking transforms a headline gripping murder into an absorbing and emotional exposé, bringing the last days of old Peking to life.

Paul French studied history, economics and Mandarin in London and has an M. Phil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is now based in Shanghai as a business advisor and analyst. He is the author of four works of Asian History including Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from the Opium Wars to Mao and wrote the foreword to Penguin’s Shanghai: A History in Photographs 1842-Today.

Escape the Shanghai Winter….to Bali, to Java Perchance?

Shivering in your old Shanghai property that had the central heating ripped out by Mao in the 1950s? Cursing the old git for deeming everything south of the Yangtze to be heater free? Watching your pathetic little bit of heat from an environmentally wasteful fan slip out through your poorly fitted windows in your newish jerry built Shanghai high-rise as you pay to contribute to global warming and still need extra blankets? Why not get away from it all…to Bali or perhaps Java.

The only slight problem was that this offer was made in the summer of 1940 by a Dutch East Indies-Japanese controlled shipping line – relations with China were already at a war stage and with the rest of us were about to tumble somewhat! Still, think of those palm trees, those sunsets, those lovely comfy ships cabins.

AN IMPRINT OF SPAIN IN CHINA – ABELARDO LAFUENTE SUNDAY 4TH OF DECEMBER

Ha Jin on the Rape of Nanking

I’ll note the ever reliable Chinese author Ha Jin’s new novel Nanjing Requiem which deals with the terrible events in the city in 1937 and has, as its central character, Minnie Vautrin, who was of course a real person and heroine of the Rape of Nanking. As ever cover and blurb below but no review as I get paid elsewhere to do those!

The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.

In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin — an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College—decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save.

With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be no match for the maelstrom of history.

At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant.

The Haunted Beijing Walking Tour

The good folk at CNNGo have posted about the walking tour we devised to accompany my book Midnight in Peking. It takes you round most of the sites that feature in the book and, I must say, CNNGo’s interactive map is rather good! Click here.