WHAT: RASBJ online event featuring author Thomas Bird about his first book, “Harmony Express”, with moderator Dr. Jeremiah Jenne
WHEN: Wednesday March 20, 7pm-8pm (Beijing time) on Zoom
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Author Thomas Bird introduces his book about exploring China by train, “Harmony Express”, in conversation with Dr. Jeremiah Jenne. Weaving Chinese history into his travelogue, the author couples the story of China’s long journey to modernity with the development of the national railway network. He investigates the impact of railway imperialism a century ago when China’s railways lagged sorely behind the rest of the world and considers Beijing’s obsession with catching up as represented by its fleet of sleek, fast Harmony-branded trains.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: A numbe of years ago, Bird’s rock band had just split up, he’d left his job as the Shenzhen editor of a lifestyle magazine and his girlfriend had disappeared from his life. He was poised to make a muse of China Railways. A year morphed into several as Bird whizzed from high-tech Shenzhen to colonial Xiamen at speed; “flew” into Shanghai aboard a Maglev; chugged through rural Sichuan Province aboard an old steam locomotive. Putting the people he meets front and center, Bird delivers a portrait of an era undergoing breakneck change.
HOW MUCH: This online event is free for members of RASBJ; RMB 50 for members of partner RAS branches; RMB 100 for non-members.
You may find payment via Alipay easier than via Wechat, You can also pay by credit card. We hope to “see” you there!
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: No later than noon on 18th March, please click “Register” or “I will Attend” and follow the instructions. After successful registration and payment, you will receive a confirmation email. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder.
Members of partner RAS Branches: Please register 72 hours in advance to allow time for membership verification. You’ll receive three emails from us: the first confirming receipt of your registration request, the second requesting payment, and the third confirming receipt of your payment. Please check your spam folder to ensure you see all RASBJ emails.
I was just rereading Osbert Sitwell’s 1939 travelogue Escape With Me!: An Oriental Sketchbook (where he visits French Indochina and Peking) and noticed that the photographs in the book (with one exception) are by Thomas Handforth. Sitwell was a guest of Harold Acton’s while in Peking and dedicates his book, to Acton and Laurence Sickman (as well as McDonald, the former British Ambassador who rpesumably did some introductions) while noting photos by Handforth (who I’ve blogged about before). For anyone researching the gay ex-pat scene in Peking between the wars here’s one nucleus of it (Sitwell published in 1939 but was in Peking in 1934) . Handforth, from Tacoma, is perhaps best remembered for his illustrated children’s book Mei Li (1939). Here are his photos….
Contortionist at the Tien Chiao Temple Fair, Peking
This book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation of Anti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.
Following his Ibis trilogy on the Canton Trade Amitav Ghosh has written Smoke and Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories (John Murray).
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, The Ibis Trilogy, ten years ago, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.
Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in the making of our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
The Japanese-born American actor Tetsu Komai (1894-1970) takes a smoke down in Limehouse in the 1933 Sherlock Holmes movie A Study in Scarlet – Komai emigrated to the US in 1907, lived in Seattle, was interned at the Gila River Camp in Arizona in WW2. He appeared in 50 movies….
This week on my resurrected Ultimate China Bookshelf, the beloved modern novel Fortress Besieged《围城》 by Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书 (钱锺书, Ch’ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998). Now exclusively on Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica Substack.
Hollywood costume designer Walter Plunkett’s design for a dress to be worn by Anna May Wong in A Study in Scarlet (1933) – it didn’t get made in the end (B-movie budget was tight & Wong doesn’t appear on screen that much ultimately).
