All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Bill Lascher talking wartime Chungking to The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong and the original China FCC inspired by the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (available now Blacksmith Books, Bookazine & elsewhere and with a foreword by me!)…click here to watch…
How Maoism Was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949-1965 (Oxford University Press) from Aaron William Mo (Editor) Associate Professor of Chinese Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History Jennifer (Associate Professor of Chinese History (Editor)…
How Maoism Was Made focuses on the history of the early years in China after 1949, featuring new scholarship by academics across Europe and North America. The field of early PRC history has been transformed by the unprecedented accessibility of archives from the 1990s to the early 2010s. Sixteen contributors show how the revolutionary system was built and maintained by the efforts of non-elite actors, including scientists, farmers, designers, artists, cadres, and ordinary citizens. By abandoning the Cold War political work of vilifying or celebrating Chinese communism, How Maoism Was Made aims to render the history of the Maoist system comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike, by viewing it through the lens of people who made it. Chinese communism is revealed to be a set of beliefs and practices that inspired millions of people to (re-)build their country and find a new life within it, at times with tragic consequences.
Hugh Casson’s Red Lacquer Days: An illustrated Journal Describing a Visit to Peking
Interesting photographs of Winifred Jackson (I think from Kent) and other British women in post-war occupied Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). BCOF supported the American government in Japan and included British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand personnel between 1946 and 1952. Despite the dominance of the Americans (in reality and certainly culturally) the BCOF was about 25% of the post-war occupation foreign forces presence. They were involved in demilitarisation and the destruction of surplus war materiel. BCOF HQ was at Kure Port near Hiroshima…
Perckhammer (1895–1965) was a Tyrolean photographer best known for his Chinese nudes (now rather controversial) and Peking street scenes. He had been a Japanese prisoner or war captured in Tsingtao (Qingdao) in World War One. Both his Chinese nudes (mostly taken in Macao brothels) and Peking scenes books appeared in 1928. He moved to Berlin in the 1930s and was a photographer with the Waffen SS!
A heads up if you’re planning your summer road trips – I’ll be at the Felixstowe Book Festival 2025 on June 26th – a rather lovely spot….
If one place perhaps symbolizing the history of Macao it is Ponte Cais #16 at the junction of Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro and Inner Harbour in Santo António parish. At the moment the area is something of a construction site and the architectural abomination that is the Macao Sofitel is next door and overshadowing sadly.
This is originally where both indentured labourers and opium were sent from. In 1948 it was upgraded from a wooden wharf into a cement wharf and was for some time the main terminal for passengers from Hong Kong and Macau until 1962 when it became a cargo-only terminal after the relocation of the Hong Kong – Macao Ferry Terminal.
My latest column for Macau Closer magazine (the March-April issue) on Roger Hobbs’s 2015 thriller Vanishing Games….. the book is mostly set in Macau and moves along apace… here the book’s blurb…
A lifetime ago I had a mentor, Angela. She taught me how to be a criminal, how to run a heist.
And now, six years after she vanished and left me high and dry on a job in Kuala Lumpur, she’s sent me an SOS.
Or at least I think it’s her. If it is, then I’ve got to go. I owe her that much.
So soon I’ll be on a plane to Macau, either to see a friend or walk into a trap. Or both.
But that’s the way I like it. Sometimes the only thing that makes me happy is risking my life.
