All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Netgalley UK have chosen my forthcoming book Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot and Thompson – out November 14) as one of their six ‘Featured on NetGalley’ titles from 23rd September – 6th October. So, if you’re a member, get over there… (of course you can always pre-order in all the usual places online or from your local bookstore)…
I don’t think I’ve learnt as much new information from a book about Shanghai for a long time as in Hanchao Lu’s Shanghai Tai Chi (Cambridge University Press)…. so much of interest from the 1950s/1960s (until the Cultural Revolution trashed everything and everyone) from secret dance parties, the old houses people lved in, public toilet grafitti, the end of Fuzhou Lu (once 100 bookstores selling everything imaginable), those who kept their tweeds and resisted the drab Mao suit, those who kept insisting of proper coffee and butter with their toast, who still sat of “decadent” sofas, held banquets at the Pasrk Hotel, kept playing mahjong despite a ban from the no-fun cadres, the 82 restaurants with proper chefs that remained open, and the stats of mid-60s foreigner numbers:
1965: Shanghai’s population was 6mn – foreign population included 25 (UK), 7 (France), 6 (USA), 5 (Germans), 3 (Italians) – not totals for Japanese or Russians (presumably hardly any given WW2 and the Sino-Soviet Split of 1960 that saw the large “Red” Russian population leave en masse). In 1969 there were only a ttoal of 774 visitors to Shanghai – 2 a day! In 1976 Shanghai recorded a total population of 100 foreigners (which seems suspiciously rounded!)
a few little bits I learned language wise from the 1950s/early 1960s:
“laoxiu”– a “decrepit element”
“Mr Three R’s” – people who had a pair of Raybans (often originally from the US military in China); a British Raleigh bicycle, and a Rolleiflex camera
“xiaokai” – “little open” – i.e. children of the rich
“afei” – show-offs
laokele – those with nostalgia for the old Shanghai (kele from “class” or “colour” – as in life was more colourful then)
yangchang kuoshao – a rich dandy in the foreign concessions
Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world’s most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society – from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao’s China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women’s liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai’s streets and back alleyways.
A post on the Chinese objects at Petworth House (now managed by the Nation al Trust), West Sussex, built in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset. The houses contains a treasure trove of European art as well as some Chinese and Japanese objects. The Chinese items on display are as below….
A pair of Chinese vases c.1650-1700 with flower/bird motifs & a oviform jar with copper-red decoration c.1736-1796 atop a 17th century lacquer cabinet.
Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers (Atlantic Books) is as carefully and engagingly written as you’d expect. Acting as a coda to his River Town years in Fuling as much as looking at the frustrations of Xi-land and Zero Covid. He’s always thoughtful and always an interesting (and what i think is said less when he’s talked about, as he’s mostly talked about over that side of the Atlantic) and very American eye on China.
More than twenty years after teaching English to China’s first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler’s twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties – members of China’s “Reform generation” – and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China’s incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.
In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler’s students were the first of their families to enrol in higher education, sons and daughters of subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student – an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler’s new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China’s boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme ‘meritocracy’ at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him a first-hand view of raising a child in China.
In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what’s happened to the country, where it’s going, and what we can learn from it. At a time when relations between the UK and China fracture, Other Rivers is a tremendous, indeed an essential gift, a work of enormous human empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up, using as a measuring stick this most universally relatable set of experiences. As both a window onto China and a distant mirror onto our own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.
Two pictures of a Chinese newspaper’s composing room from the late 1920s “hot type” days. The compositors reputedly walked three miles to typeset a single page! Quite mind-boggling!! The pictures were taken for National Geographic by Paul Hutchinson c.1927.
My obsession with John le Carre’s HK-set The Honourable Schoolboy (1975), Smiley, Old Craw, Doc di Salis, Gerry Westerby, Liese et al knows no bounds. Fortunately The Le Carre Cast has given me two episodes to work though my infatuation – Part 1 dropped today – click here to listen…Part 2 in a fortnight….
Colonial Saigon with shade of Greene, Ambler and Simenon – Bede Scott’s Too Far From Antibes re-released by Penguin South East Asia with a new cover and a blurb from me – Definitely one of the best novels of 2022 – here’s my review in the South China Morning Post.…
In 1923 the National Geographic tried to demonstrate the length of the Great Wall in terms American readers could understand – from the coast at Philly, Pennsylvania to west of Topeka, Kansas, with a branch down to Little Rock, Arkansas ….
