Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent and a cigarette in her hand.
But in her will she left her niece an intricately carved Chinese box. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager caught up by war, and forced to flee elegant Vienna for Shanghai. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. In conversation with Endless Flight author Keiron Pim.
My latest long read for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine – How Disney’s Flying Tigers logo became a symbol of China’s fight against Japan during World War II…. Japan’s control of the skies over China during World War II was ended by volunteer allied fighter pilots in planes that bore a feisty feline logo made by Disney. Click here to read…
Two paintings by Sessie Hayakawa (1889-1973) Japanese actor and the first Asian hollywood star as well as French Resistance activist & watercolourist – Kites & Paysage Automnal Abore (Autumnal Wood Landscape)….
In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are killed. At the very onset of the atrocities, the Danish supervisor at a cement plant just outside the city, 26-year-old Bernhard Arp Sindberg, opens the factory gates and welcomes in 10,000 Chinese civilians to safety, beyond the reach of the blood-thirsty Japanese. He becomes an Asian equivalent of Oskar Schindler, the savior of Jews in the European Holocaust.
This biography follows Sindberg from his childhood in the old Viking city of Aarhus and on his first adventures as a sailor and a Foreign Legionnaire to the dramatic 104 days as a rescuer of thousands of helpless men, women, and children in the darkest hour of the Sino-Japanese War. It describes how after his remarkable achievement, he receded back into obscurity, spending decades more at sea and becoming a naturalized American citizen, before dying of old age in Los Angeles in 1983, completely unrecognized. In this respect, too, there is an obvious parallel with Schindler, who only attained posthumous fame.
The book sets the record straight by providing the first complete account of Sindberg’s life in English, based on archival sources hitherto unutilized by any historian as well as interviews with surviving relatives. What emerges is the surprising tale of a person who was average in every respect but rose to the occasion when faced with unimaginable brutality, discovering an inner strength and courage that transformed him into one of the great humanitarian figures of the 20th century and an inspiration for our modern age, demonstrating that the determined actions of one person―any person―can make a huge difference.
A series of paintings that recently came up for auction attributed to Canton artist Sunqua (Chinese, c.1830-1870). Sometimes referred to in western writing as ‘the Chinese Hogarth’ and you can see why from these social studies below….
I’m going to start gradually migrating content from this blog to my substack as Notes & then launching a new newsletter in March with more in-depth articles on old China, new books as well as film/TV/audio info too – please subscribe – https://substack.com/@paulfrench1?r=4ire&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=edit-profile
The ”Hong Kong Heritage” podcast (click here) with Annemarie Evans: Best-selling author Paul French tells of vagabonding Harry A. Franck in southern China.
Harry A. Franck was an American traveller and writer – vagabonding, roving and roaming his way across large chunks of the world. Best-selling author Paul French joins me to talk about Franck’s book “Roving Through Southern China” – which was published in 1925 – and tells of Hong Kong in the immediate aftermath of the tumultuous Seamen’s Strike of 1922; of Macau and the Portuguese military unrest; and on to Canton – where new roads, housing, shops and businesses reflect a modernizing world.
Paul French has annotated and abridged four books by writers and missionaries to southern China from the 1880s to 1920s in a collection called “China Revisited” published by Blacksmith Books
