In May 2021, Wong Chung-Wai left Hong Kong with his family to begin a new life in the UK. During the six months prior to their departure he had wandered the city alone using his camera to create an imprint of those things he could not take with him. Now available from Gost Books here
Wong Chung-Wai is a Photographer and Filmmaker. He studied Digital Visual Design and has worked in the film industry for more than 15 years as a production manager, location manager and scriptwriter. In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Emerging Artist Award in the Lucie Scholarship Program. His work has been featured in It’s Nice That, Creative Boom, F-STOP Magazine, Noice Magazine and Abridged Magazine.
I happened to take Richard Hughes’s Hong Kong: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time (1988) off the shelf the other day. A great cover, an interesting read. But I’m indebted to Stephen Hutcheon (who follows me on instagram as Lewgus – I am oldshanghaipaul by the way and do feel free to follow for old China images every day) who informs me that the gentleman swinging for a six there in the excellent cover photo is the late Cathay Pacific pilot Captain Charles “Chic” Eather.
Eather was himself an author – a lot more on that and his ife here
Anyway, worth putting out there for any future historians coming across the superb photo on the cover of Hughes’s book.
Reprinted in the “Junkman”, GRG Worcester, formerly of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, in his magesterial study The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze (1971)… Feel free to sing along….
Last week I blogged about how a picture in Jan Morris’s 1988 book Hong Konghas me wondering. There is Dick Hughes (the model for le Carre’s Old Craw in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Fleming’s Dikko Henderson in the Bond novels). With him was a man who pops up in many photos of Hong Kong and, I think, most famously in the David Llyod shot of the view from the toilets at the old HK FCC at Sutherland House (now demolished – though made famous as a scene inThe Honourable Schoolboy. See the post for more here….
So thanks to Geoff Wade in Canberra who spotted that it is the prolific author and journalist David Bonavia, former writer on China, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Correspondent with The Times(London) and author, among many other books of The Chinese: A Portrait(1980). I should have known this as I constantly refer to his great study of the Warlords.
The original Chinese-language edition of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara (1976) was incredibly popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and throughout China, with the author representing a very different type of Chinese woman. Book 30 on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf….click here
One of the most impressive and eye-catching exhibits at the British Museum’s China’s Hidden Century exhibition is a stunning straw farmer’s coat from the mid-nineteenth century made from palm- and rice-fibres, a cape composed of folding layers of straw. To display it the British Museum conservation team individually cleaned the thousands of straw stalks that make the cape waterproof.
It took me a while to remmeber where I had seen such straw capes in a more contemporary setting but then I remembered – this picture of 1940s (I think) rickshaw pullers lined up and awaiting fares in Macao on a rainy day…
An original English letter written in February 1943 by “Huryozyokokyoku” (sic), the Delegate for Japan of the International Red Cross Committee in Yokohama. The typed document details the disposition of undelivered mails for Prisoners of War broken down by destination incl 180,000 undelivered mails to Malaya, 8,100 to Burma, 7,500 to Shanghai etc…
An interesting couple of things about the London Library copy Chiang Yee’s The Silent Traveller in London (published by Country Life books in 1938 in the UK). At some point this copy has been rebound but, in a nice touch, the binders have taken some of the original cloth cover with the title and Chiang Yee’s name in Chinese calligraphy and added it to the front. The original inside cover pages decorated with Chiang’s sketches of London ducks and pigeons remains too.
This copy was presented to the Library in October 1940 by FA Kirkpatrick. I think this is the historian Frederick Alexander Kirkpatrick (1861-1953) author of a number of books specialising in nineteenth century history, South America and a history of the Spanish conquistadores.
The current rebound copy with original cloth calligraphy panel
An original 1938 edition of The Silent Traveller in London
