All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
My latest column for Macau Closer magazine on representations of the place in popular culture – this issue the 1956 movie Flight to Hong Kong (here on Youtube) which is full of post war fears of global crime syndicates and tropes about Macao’s oh so sinful ways, but does feature the cool Mama Lin’s nightclub/casino and the antihero gangster has a cool hilltop art-deco home….click here to read…
A couple of years back I wrote an article for the annual Royal Asiatic Society China Journal on the old Peking Club in the Legation Quarter – Trouble at the Peking Club in 1896. The Club has always interested me as it was a focus for the (male) movers and shakers of the Legation Quarter. Anyway, I knew that lots of people went there (it was reportedly quite tomb like, a bit dark, London gentleman’s club in style) to keep up with their correspondence. But I’d never seen their headed paper – well, here’s an example…(courtesy of the letter writing of Reginald Johnston on the 22nd of April 1924)….and the envelope’s postage mark too…
Continuing my theme of looking at photo albums as well as at photos. This is a beautiful cloth Japanese photo album, purchased somewhere in Japan around 1937. However, it has a dark history as it was the album of a member of the Japanese Naval Landing Party that invaded Shanghai that year and contained photos of victorious Japanese soldiers and the wreckage and carnage they caused in the Chinese quarters of northern Shanghai….
A few images of the Grand Hotel de Pekin, Wallis’ rather sumptuous December 1924 digs on the Avenue of Eternal Peace (Chang’an Dajie). Note the original facade. Also a later photo that shows the trams running along Chang’an – this service began in late 1924 about the time Wallis arrived (& later ripped out sadly). Another view showing empty land opposite which would be about where the Chang’an Club is now and one form the 1950s showing the new streetlighting along Chang’an and period cars…
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
Another example of a beautiful photo album (for more on old photo albums use the search engine on the blog) – this one a Japanese lacquer Shibayama (a mosaic inlay technique) album with a bird motif, c.1900 showing photo albums were works of art too…
Pauline Yu’s Chinese Songs in a French Key: How Judith Gautier’s Book of Jade Introduced Europe to Chinese Poetry (Columbia University Press)….
In early 1867, a book of poems stunned the French literary world. Titled The Book of Jade, it featured Chinese calligraphy and named ancient Chinese poets as sources, leaving readers uncertain whether the collection was a translation or a French author’s invention. Though the book was published under a pseudonym, the author was quickly recognized as Judith Gautier, the young daughter of a prominent writer. Resembling neither contemporary French verse nor any conventional translation of the day, The Book of Jade opened the eyes of readers throughout Europe to classical Chinese poetry.
Chinese Songs in a French Key tells the extraordinary story of the birth, rebirth, and rich afterlife of The Book of Jade. Pauline Yu traces the research and creative process behind the book, including Gautier’s collaboration with a Chinese refugee known as Tin-Tun-Ling. She shows, through juxtapositions with original Chinese texts, how Gautier’s imaginative strategies conveyed core elements of Chinese poetry to a European audience. Yu explores how the work’s influence reverberated across French letters, Anglo-American modernist poetry, and the international history of translation. The story also unfolds within Gautier’s network of luminaries—such as Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, and John Singer Sargent—and against the backdrop of France’s “discovery” of China through scholarship and plunder. Drawing attention to Gautier’s audacity and accomplishments, this deeply researched and elegantly written book provides new perspectives on the surprising routes cultural transmission can take.
Here’s Wallis by the lido at the American Legation in with Eddie Mills. She met Mills, an American for the Salt Gabelle (tax agency) in Peking, Tientsin in December 1924. He helped her with her luggage on the train to Peking. He also gave her a useful piece of advice gleaned from his years living in China, ‘The trick about living in China is to recognise the inconvenient as the normal.’
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
A little Substack “Special” on some of my work related to 1945 and the end of WW2 in China, Hong Kong and Macao, as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day…click here to read…
