“The past decade has time and again underlined the prescience of Leta Hong Fincher’s Leftover Women. This groundbreaking book made a powerful case for how state propaganda and cultural norms combined to exclude Chinese women from the wealth creation springing from the country’s rapid economic development. In this new version, Hong Fincher illustrates how women are beginning to fight back, and the obstacles lined up against them. This book is more relevant than ever to anyone who wants to understand China – read it and rage.” ―Lousia Lim, Author of Indelible City, and The People’s Republic of Amnesia
Just a quick post to say that all my books, plus the China Revisited series are on sale at Livraria Portuguesa in Macao….so, if you’re in Macao, pay a visit….
Having had a sneak peak at an early draft of Scott Seligman’s Murder in Manchuria – now available for pre-order….out October (here on Amazon UK and Amazon US) from Potomac Books (available direct from them here)…
In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s “Wild East”—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspé, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation.
Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scott D. Seligman recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus—and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.
The story of the distinguished writer Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) and her affair with Julian Bell (1908-1937) is well known, involving Virginia Woolf and a more recent lawsuit in China. Her husband Chen Yuan (1898-1970) neglected by Shuhua, has also been neglected by historians but the recent publication of some of his diaries reveals much about the man, his family and his devotion to culture. He spent the period 1943-1946 in England, trying to set up a Sino-British Cultural Centre before he was appointed to represent China in UNESCO. His diaries present an extraordinarily detailed account of wartime London, with his almost daily visits to the theatre, sleep disturbed by nightly V-bombs and endless meetings with everyone from J.B. Priestley to Arthur Waley and Harold Laski.
This family had resided in a traditional Beijing mansion, two courtyards of which were restored to become today’s Shijia Hutong Museum. Located at #24 Shijia Hutong, it’s well worth a visit, featuring displays, photographs, material objects and detailed bilingual captions about prominent individuals and entities linked to this historic hutong.
Frances Wood studied Chinese at Cambridge and at Beida (Peking University). She was curator of the Chinese collections in the British Library for 30 years with a special interest in Dunhuang manuscripts.
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SH Peplow and M Barker’s Hong Kong Around and About, first published by the Commercial Press (a long standing and still existing press in Hong Kong – its history here) and then republished in a second edition in 1931 by the charmingly named Ye Olde Printerie, Ltd. of Hong Kong (more on that fascinating publisher later in another post). The first edition had a tan cover, the second a green one. Peplow and Barker designed the book as a guide for new arrivals to the colony – a lot of short entries of life, sights, customs etc and with a fold-in map of Hong Kong (all for a quite expensive at the time HK$5). Peplow was a Hong Kong colonial official of long standing (fully the land bailiff in 1927 and district officer in 1930 for the Southern District of the New Territories) while Barker, I think, was something of an expert on Chinese village life and traditions.
An illustration by Bernard Leach (1887-1979) was a potter, art teacher and writer born in Hong Kong. He attended the Slade in London studying under the legendary Frank Brangwyn. he became particularlu interested in Japan, taught there, mixed with Tokyo art circles. This illustration of the Qianmen (Chienmen) Gate in Peking is dated 1918 (by the auction house) but may possibly be earlier, perhaps as early as 1913. Leach was a friend and admirer of the German art critic Alfred Westhap, who was living in Peking from 1913 and who Leach may well have visited. Leach left Asia for England in 1920 and didn’t return to Asia till 1934, so that helps date the illustration.
