The Long Legacy of Rugger Buggers on the Whangpoo – A History of the Shanghai Rugby Club

Shanghailander and rugger-bugger Simon Drakeford is working on a history of the Shanghai Rugby Club from the early days of the International Settlement through to 1949 – am ambitious project indeed. I believe he’s working it up into a full length book but there’s a fairly long and interesting article here in That’s Shanghai. Simon seems to have omitted the chapter on how since time immemorial rugger buggers have insisted on being obnoxious, drinking too much, showing off their misogyny shamelessly while being a bit too tactile with each other for most ordinary blokes liking and generally being twats who seem to have no idea how much they annoy everyone else who has no interest in a silly shaped ball – I have high hopes of that chapter!

Looking forward to the full book at some point.

Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory

Been hearing good things about Gail Hershatter’s new book The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. I don’t review on this site but there’s a good piece on the book on The China Beat web site here. And so, as usual, below the cover and the publishers blurb.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

The Old Orient Museum – Worth a Browse

Came across this site while browsing around the interweb the other day…The Old Orient Museum – with a lot of great old China advertising posters reproduced and with details in many cases. Rather absorbing.

How We Got So Close to a Graham Greene China Book…But Not Quite – Part 3

And here’s an interesting little side line to the “why Graham Greene never wrote a China” story too – Greene did get as far as enrolling to learn Chinese in the expectation that Greene was to be sent to China by his employers British American Tobacco.

Anne Witchard from Westminster University reminded me of an anecdote she heard from Bristol University’s Robert Bickers that Greene attended classes at the School of Oriental Studies (SOS) at London University (no SOAS) in Chinese in the academic year 1924-25. Apparently the class was taught by none other than the great Chinese modern writer Lao She. Anne tells me that Robert Bickers cites Norman Sherry’s Life of Graham Greene Vol 1 pp 194-210 as his source. Amazing that Greene met Lao She and vice versa. Not sure how good Greene’s Chinese got – not so good I suspect.

This post also allows me to do a very early plug for Anne’s own forthcoming book in the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai-Hong Kong University Press China Monographs series (following her great study of Thomas Burke, Limehouse and Chinoiserie), due in 2012, on Lao She’s time in London and the influences of British modernism upon him. More to follow on that project.

Lao She around the time he was setting Graham Greene homework!!

We await the chance to buy Greene’s well thumbed flashcards at auction!

Xinhai – China Heritage Quarterly – No. 27, September 2011

As I’ve been adding a few Xinhai posts I’d thought I’d note the new issue of the China Heritage Quarterly that highlights writing and research on Xinhai. Click here.

And, of course, I hope you haven’t missed Jackie Chan being patriotic, saving China and building harmony in 1911!! Now there’s history for you!

How We Got So Close to a Graham Greene China Book…But Not Quite – Part 2

The major reason we never got a Greene China book was that he never spent any time in China – and so it never became part of “Greeneland”. What a potentially great book we never got – imagine a Greene book on China that was as insightful as The Quiet American was regarding Indo-China or The Comedians on Haiti or The Power and the Glory on Latin America. But Greene never went to China despite having absorbed books on China (see previous post) as a boy and written a short play on China that he later binned (see previous post).

However, he very nearly did go to China in a major way. In Greene’s autobiography of his early life, A Sort of Life, the author recalls that at 21 he briefly took up a post with British American Tobacco who promised him a post in China. However, it never materialised and, demoralised at not getting to go to China, Greene left BAT and went to work at the Nottingham Journal, thereby beginning a life as a journalist and writer. What great ad copy BAT might have had in China though!

Xinhai – Dr Sun Up Again in Tiananmen Square

The up/down, up/down and not really all around of Sun Yat-Sen’s portrait in Tiananmen Square takes another twist as, as we approach the 100th anniversary of the Double Ten, the good doctor is up again (he was briefly before back in April but then got taken down again – see here). But there’s controversy of course over his legacy – here granddaughter Lily Sui-Fong Sun wades in. Sad to say China’s professors and supposed intellectuals have been all but silent on the anniversary preferring to witter on about the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party (I’m standing by my line that the Commies are celebrating their 90th birthday for the same reason my now departed Nan did – they know there’s little chance of reaching 100, so have your cake now while you’re still around to eat it!!).

What would the Doctor have made of it all? And while they’re moving portraits around the Square they can feel free to take away the Mao one if they like.

How We Got So Close to a Graham Greene China Book…But Not Quite – Part 1

A while back I speculated on why the great Graham Greene never wrote a book on China – his subject range was so great that it’s hard to imagine China didn’t peak his interest at any point when everywhere from Haiti to Sierra Leone; Vienna to Brighton did – not forgetting of course his Asian masterpiece The Quiet American. In his early career Greene did attempt a play about China (as I noted) but it appears to be lost to posterity. But recently reading Greene’s early memoir of his youth and adolescence, A Sort of Life, he makes two references to his early interest and encounters with China that are worth noting. So first today, the book that first piqued the boy Graham into being fascinated by China.

According to Greene it was Captain Charles Gilson’s The Lost Column – a book, published in 1909, I’m rather ashamed to say I haven’t read. It is all about the Boxer Rebellion, the sieges of Tientsin and Peking and Admiral Seymour’s relief forces. Plenty of daring-do apparently as you might expect but also some local characters including a Mr Wang and the more interesting sounding Jugatai the Tartar.It was a best seller in its day and very popular with young English lads being groomed for Empire.

I’m afraid I don’t know much about Gilson except he wrote quite prolifically for Boy’s Own and Boy’s Adventure type annuals and publications and wrote a number of other novels dealing with Russia and the Orient (The Scarlet Hand for instance is described as an “Oriental tale”). A search on Google will reveal a whole range of titles produced by Gilson with intriguing adventurous titles through to the 1920s. It seems that Gilson did know his China – indeed it seems he did serve with the British portion of the post-Boxer Eight Power Allied Army in Peking and Tientsin. The Lost Column opens on Meadows Road in Tientsin (now Tai’an Dao). There’s plenty of Yellow Peril language though Gilson seems to suggest that the Old China Hands were complacent to miss the rise of the Boxers.

Whatever, the book captivated the young Greene and set him off thinking about China…more tomorrow on his China dreams.