American printmaker Dorsey Potter Tyson (1891-1969) was born in Maryland, though her work seems to have appealed most to English art buyers. She has been called an ‘armchair orientalist’, as her work often favoured Asian themes though she spent no time there.
This particular work is called Peking Cart. It is dated 1930 and was sold as one of an edition of 100 prints by a London gallery. It was probably copied from a postcard or another image and tells us little except that such ‘Oriental’ prints had a certain popularity in interwar Britain.
Lovely to see the just published paperback edition of Vaudine England’s excellent history of Hong Kong, Fortune’s Bazaar(Corsair Books) Daunt Books, Marylebone High Street….
The Beatles gave two concerts at the Princess Theatre at 130 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui on 9 June 1964. The support act was The Maori Hi-Five (who have not gone to such historical fame sadly but deserve a pic)
A selection of pages from photographer Herbert G Ponting’sFuji San, issued in Tokyo, by popular photo books publisher K Ogawa in 1905, The book featured 25 black & white plates from Ponting of Mount Fuji viewed from different locations and seasons, each image captioned in English and Japanese. The book was distributed by Kelly Walsh of Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. Ponting took the photos while in Japan covering the 1905/1906 Russo-Japanese War.
TG Purvis (1861–1933) – HMS Petersfield off Hong Kong – a Hunt-class minesweeper of the Aberdare sub-class built for the Royal Navy during World War I. She was not finished in time to participate in the First World War. Re-commissioned at Hong Kong on 23 February 1925 for service on the China Station as an admiral’s yacht.
New arrival at the London Library – Hanchao Lu’s Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Beijing Ruled in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press) – looks fascinating
Juli Min will speak about her dazzling and ambitious debut novel, Shanghailanders, that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.
2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang—handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man—is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.
As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city’s waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min’s hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.
Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.
Please note that Shanghailanders is not yet available in hard copy in China. Electronic copies may be purchased via the publisher’s website: https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/shanghailanders
Harriet Low herself chose the title Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life, for her journals. They chart her amazement at leaving Salem, Massachusetts, for Macao, a Portuguese colony off the China coast. Perhaps no greater contrast was imaginable in 1829. Harriet lived the constricted lifestyle of the foreign merchants’ wives, forced by the Chinese to live in Macao while their husbands traded tea and opium in Canton; balls, operas and picnics; Chinese customs and Catholic processions; true friendship and false; romance or religion are all reflected in the pages of her journal.
