I’ve blogged before about the well maintained cluster of art deco apartments and shops at 190-204 and 210-212 Prince Edward Road West. I’ve also written about this areas modernist and art deco traditions for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine (here) and I also include 190-204 and 210-212 Prince Edward Road West on my Voicemap walking tour of art deco Kowloon.
But I’d also like to mention the smaller art deco building further towards Mongkok East at 179 Prince Edward Road West by the junction with Nullah Road. It too has been quite well maintained with the restored façade in front of a 20-storey rear extension and the creation of a boutique hotel (Hotel 1936).
Given the similarity in style between the two buuildings quite close to each other I think we can assume 179 was, like 190-204 and 210-212 Price Edward Road West a project of the Franco-Belgian developer Crédit Foncier d’Extrême-Orient, who also built St Teresa’s Church nearby.
The building fronting onto Nullah Road with the new extension behind
Like the larger art deco buildings on Prince Edward Road it features street level retail space and arcading
Also with balcony and window art deco stylings and flourish
Writing Home: Selected World War II Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler (State University of New York Press) contains a large number of utterly fascinating letters from China. These are all letters written by Leslie Fiedler to his wife Margaret from May 1944 to December 1945 while he was stationed around Asia and in China as an intelligence officer during World War II.
The letters in Writing Home offer a glimpse into a crucially formative period in the life of Leslie A. Fiedler, one of the greatest literary critics and American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Written to his wife and two sons between May 1944 and December 1945, while he was serving as a cryptologist and translator for the Office of Naval Intelligence, they contain firsthand accounts of his experiences in various locations in the Pacific Theater, including Hawai’i, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Guam, and China. Constrained by Navy censors from writing directly about his work as an intelligence officer, he writes, instead, on a variety of themes, events, places, and war situations, including the ethical contradictions between a war fought for and in the name of freedom on the one hand and the oppression of indigenous Hawai’ians and prisoners of war on the other. He also questions the mainstream, European-centered view of the war and provides new insights into the role of Jewish servicemen in World War II. Finally, the letters document the beginning of the formation of American intellectual life in the years preceding the Cold War, forcing us to rethink certain premises of American exceptionalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Taken together, they offer a unique and fascinating immersion into history through the eyes of one of the makers of post–World War II American literary culture.
A couple of curiosities up for auction, a scroll painting with a little mystery we can soon solve I reckon (sorry not really my period) – “Late 20th Century, Landscape with Mountains, a Boy and Ox, Ink and wash on paper, Signed ‘Li ?’ Any ideas on the artist?
The painting was given to Mrs Thatcher on her trip to China in 1982 after a visit to the Beijing Fine Art Academy. Her estate has just put it up for sale.
Hu Shuan’an (1916-1988), Roaring Tiger Scroll, give to Thatcher by the Chinese. The Thatcher archive records though are not sure if she got this one in 1979 from Premier Hua Guofeng on his visit to London or in 1982 after her visit to the Beijing Art Academy. Anyway, they’ve put it up for sale….
An early 20th century Chinese white metal two handled rectangular tea tray, by Luen Wo of Shanghai, with engraved presentation inscription, ‘Presented to Captain John Whittle by the undersigned China Navigation Cos. Chinese Pilots on his retirement from China, April, 1911’. Whittle had been a Captain with Swire’s China Navigation since at least the 1880s, most notably commanding the well known China coastal passenger and cargo steamer Tamsui.
WHAT: Author Paul French introduces “The World of the Peking Aesthetes” during a small-group RASBJ dinner in the former residence of Peking opera star Mei Lanfang
WHEN: Monday, Oct 27, 2025, from 7:00-8:45 PM Beijing Time. Doors open at 6:45 PM.
WHERE: Qingyun Huai 49 Yan Laofangu Master Ji (or “Banquet 1949”), Qingyun 23 Artistic Center, Neiyuan, Dongcheng (青云淮四九宴老饭骨大师技)
Between the world wars Peking was home to many long-term sojourner aesthetes, European, American and Japanese men and women sensitive to art and beauty. Writers, artists, translators and scholars, though often dilettantes, and occasionally fabulators and frauds. They were invariably of the “lost generation”, often gay, the men independently wealthy and the women newly independent of bad and boring marriages. They made hutongs and former temples their homes, they cultivated their appreciation of Chinese art, style and opera. They wrote, painted and collected. Their fabulous friends visited. They made alliances and close friendships with like-minded Chinese. And they recorded their experiences in memoirs, novels, plays and letters. They were the Peking Aesthetes.
I’ve posted this sketch of Wallis Simpson before – Wallis Simpson Serving Cocktails, London, 20 November 1936, a Cecil Beaton gouache featuring Wallis signature China-inspired chignon hairstyle and Mainbocher interpretation of a qipao. But I hadn’t realised it was owned by the fashion designer Dries Van Noten.
He has apparently loaned it to the new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World (on until January 26 2026) so we can now all see the original.
If you’re interested and in Hong Kong places are strictly limited but you can try via inquiries@lrc.com.hk
“This October New York Times bestselling author and regular South China Morning Post weekend magazine contributor Paul French joins us for a conversation about books, Chinese history and telling lost stories. French has explored modern Chinese history through different genres and forms of writing to reach wide audiences worldwide. His work includes the awarding-winning true crime Midnight in Peking set in 1930s China, while City of Devils revisits the wild and crazy nightlife of wartime Shanghai, His latest book, Her Lotus Year, explores the scandalous 12 months (1924/1925) Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, spent in Hong Kong and China. We’ll talk about finding stories, recovering the forgotten and weaving their lives into China’s grand narrative to make compelling reads.”
Corrine Lamb’s (nominative determinism?) study of Chinese manners and dining etiquette first published in 1935 by Henri Vetch of the Peking Bookshop in the lobby of the Grand Hotel de Pekin (Chang’an Jie). Complemented by a selection of Chinese proverbs, line drawings (by long time Peking based American illustrator John Kirk Sewall) and photographs. Chapters deal with the convention of Chinese food, wine, ingredients, and how to order a meal. In addition, the book features a selection of recipes gathered by the author over twenty years of hospitality at the tables of princes, peasants, generals, and innkeepers.
