All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Hong Kong University Press was at the 2023 Beijing Book Fair and among their offerings was the new translation of my biography of Carl Crow (here in English) now published by Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press in Chinese (links at bottom of post)
For sale on Douban here
And Dangdang here
Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:00 – Frontline Club, Paddington
Mark O’Neill’s latest book, Out Of Ireland, describes his search, through more than 40 years of international postings, to find and explore his own Irish roots. The journey takes him from England to Scotland, three years in Belfast during the Troubles and, since 1978, in China, Hong Kong and Japan. He found the small town in Manchuria where his grandfather served as a missionary for 45 years: the Columban Sister doctor who cured Hong Kong of tuberculosis: and the replica of the Titanic being built in Sichuan. The last chapter describes the migration the other way – Chinese settling in Ireland, including Dublin Mayor Hazel Chu and a shipyard worker from Shenyang who learns Gaelic and moves to Ireland to practice his new language.
Mark was born in London, England and educated at Marlborough College and New College, Oxford. He worked in Washington D.C., Manchester and Belfast before moving to Asia in 1978. He has lived here ever since. After a long journalistic career, in 2006 he turned to writing books and has completed 12 so far in English. Seven have been translated into traditional Chinese and three into simplified Chinese. He speaks French, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese and lives in Hong Kong with his wife.
Mark joins Lynne O’Donnell (columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author) at 7pm on June 30 to talk about his journey.
More details and Tickets here
Yin Yuan’s Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East (Bucknell University Press) looks intreresting….
What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.
Join for an online book discussion of Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning with author Edward Weech.
Thomas Manning (1772-1840) was one of England’s first scholars of Chinese. In his youth, Manning was a brilliant mathematician at Cambridge, and befriended Romantic authors such as Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Inspired by the French Revolution to search for new ideas to shape society, Manning turned not to the English countryside or poetic imagination like other English Romantics, but to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. China being poorly understood within Britain, Manning arrived in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1807 to try and learn Chinese, hoping eventually to explore the interior of the country, which was closed to Europeans. He joined the Amherst Embassy to Peking in 1816, and undertook a trek through the Himalayas to Lhasa, capital of Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama; while his travels also saw him face-to-face with Napoleon, detained as a prisoner of war, and shipwrecked in the Java Sea. This talk will explore how Manning’s extraordinary story helps us re-interpret English Romanticism, and understand the significance of China within British culture at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
register here…
Sheila Myoshi Jager’s The Other Great Game (Harvard University Press) is a welcome addition to the Korean history shelf…
In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.
When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.
A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.
Follwing the panoramas of Hong Kong yesterday taken by members of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the 1890s here are two pictures they also took when visiting Peking… c.1896…
Several panoramas of Hong Kong harbour from both sides taken by members of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the 1890s…
My thanks to Meaghan Walsh Gerard of Savannah, Georgia for sending me this lovely Kodak snap of Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road).
The photo paper dates it as 1930s and it is titled on the reverse, as you can see – a worthwhile US$2.98 and so kind of her to send it to me.
BTW: Meaghan is a prolific and excellent book and film reviewer (which I think is how we first met ages ago) – her website is here. But I must thank her massively and repeatedly for helping me access the Harry Hervey archives at the Georgia State Historical Society when a combination of a) the archive imminently closing for some time for major building works and b) covid prevented me from getting over there in person.
In case you don’t know Hervey was a Charleston and Savannah inhabitant who was obsessed with Asia and ‘the Orient’. He wrote a number of exotic novels before even visiting. In the 1920s he then did a couple of extensive tours of Japan/Korea/Hong Kong/Macao and mainland China, as well as South East Asia and French Indochina. I reproduced some of his travel writing in my first China Revisited reprint (with Blacksmith Books) – Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Herveys 1920s Hong Kong, Macao & Canton Sojourns.
But most importantly Hervey wrote the original treatment for the movie Shanghai Express and sold it to Josef von Sternberg – cue Marlene, Anna May and one of the best movies ever. I dug that out of the Stanford Archives and then found that Hervey’s own archives were also at the Georgia State Historical Society including letters and a bunch of obscurely publoshed, or totally unpublished, but really very interesting, short stories featuring Peking. Meaghan got those for me and I wrote about them in a chapter of my collection Destination Peking – Harry Hervey’s Peking of the Imagination.
So once again – thank you Meaghan…