All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Lauren Walden’s Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai focusing on China’s interwar surrealists now in English from Hong Kong University Press & still in French as Le surréalisme de Paris à Shanghai from Institut Giacometti….
Pamela Werner, 1917–8/1/1937, Peking, China…
The first days of the new year of 1925 were to be when Wallis finally checked out of the Grand Hotel de Pekin & went to stay with her old friend Kitty Rogers in her sumptuous courtyard on Shih-Chia Hutong. At the Grand Hotel everything you could desire was on the upper floors after the lobby reception – Helen Burton’s Camel’s Bell boutique, the suites, the rooftop dance floor overlooking the Forbidden City, and the top floor dining room (here photographed in the 1920s by the American photographer John D Zumbrun who had a thriving studio in the Legation Quarter).
Jack Brown in China: A Story of the Russo-Japanese War by Herbert Strang (also published as Brown of Moukden), 1933 is a Young Adult book if its time – so fairly jingoistic and usually about fairly recent events – ‘imperial fiction’ as it’s known – and with a plucky Brit at the centre. It’s on Gutenberg here if you fancy it. And the story is somewhat intriguing – set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Ivan Ivanovitch to his Russian acquaintances) Brown is an Englishman living in Moukden (Mukden aka Shenyang). Jack becomes entangled in the unfair fate of his Chinese friend, Wang Shih, wrongfully punished by a corrupt judge. Some of the descriptions of the war-torn landscape are fairly good and the opening chapters contain some descriptive detail of early 1900s Shenyang (though how accurate this is remains debatable as neither author ever visited to my knowledge).
This book was a return to the Russo-Japanese War for Strang who had previously written, just the year before, Kobo: A story of the Russo-Japanese War (1905). Herbert Strang was a pseudonym used by George Herbert Ely (1866–1958) and Charles James L’Estrange (1867–1947), co-editors in the Juveniles Department of Oxford University Press from 1907 until 1939, and the authors of several dozen adventure stories for boys and the Little Stories of Great Lives series (about a dozen titles – Nelson, Drake, Napoleon etc)…
William Hopkyn Rees – Chinaeg A Chineaid (1907) is a particularly interesting missionary account of China as it is published in Welsh. Now obviously this presents some problems to non-Welsh speakers but is a curiosity for sure.
Accrdoign to the Welsh Dictionary of Biography – “Hopkyn Rees (1859-1924) was born at Cwmavon, Glamorganshire. He entered Bala Independent College, 1877, and was minister of Llechryd and Ffynnon-bedr from 1881 to 1883, when he sailed for the North China, L.M.S., mission field. He married Margaret Charlotte Harrison of Coed-poeth, and settled at Chi Chou in 1888, where he had founded a station. He weathered the difficulties of the 1900 rebellion, and was decorated with the ‘ Blue Ribbon ‘ and given rank of Mandarin for services of pacification. He was transferred to the Peking United Theological College and the Language School for Missionaries, appointed to the Board of Revisers of the Old Testament Scriptures in Mandarin, and to the Shanghai staff of the Christian Literature for China Society. In 1915 he was elected associate secretary, with Timothy Richard, and in 1916 general secretary, of the Christian Literature Society for China, and a member of the editorial board of the Chinese Recorder in 1919. He resigned in 1921 owing to ill health, and was given the chair of Chinese in the University of London. He published China a’r Chineaid, 1906, Griffith John o China, 1901, in Welsh, and Jonathan Lees of Tientsin and How to Study Chinese, 1918, both in English. He died in London 4 August 1924.”
But there is more to Hopkyns Rees – Re-reading Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London (HKUP) Witchard notes:
“It was in the summer of 1924 that Lao She received the offer of a five-year teaching appointment in London. One of the English teachers at Yenching was the Reverend Robert Kenneth Evans (1880–1925). Evans’ father-in-law was a Welsh missionary and linguist, W. Hopkyn Rees (1859–1924), who had weathered the Boxer rebellion and was now retired from the LMS to a chair of Chinese at the University of London (1921–24). Evans had been informally supervising the Gangwashi church but was home from China in December 1922 after suffering ‘a serious nervous breakdown’.
Lao She had not begun classes at Yenching until September 1923, so he could not have been taught by Evans but their paths certainly would have crossed at the church during 1922. Back in London, Evans was teaching at London University’s School of Oriental Studies. When Hopkyn Rees was looking for a candidate for an assistant lectureship in Mandarin he sought out Lao She on Evans’ recommendation. Kitted out in his Western suit and with a second-class boat ticket, paid for with a loan from the LMS, Lao She embarked from Shanghai on the SS Devanha to Harwich. He was met by Reverend Evans at London’s Cannon Street station on 14 September 1924.”
In his novel of 1920s London, Mr Ma and Son, he writes:
“The Reverend Ely was an old missionary who’d spread the Word for twenty years in China. He knew everything there was to know about China …”
Lao She’s characterisation of the Rev Ely depicts the attitudes of missionaries like Hopkyn Rees…
Some proof Wallis was still living at 4 Shih Chia (Shijia) Hutong, Peking in July 1925 (with Herman & Kitty Rogers). She needed a 1yr extension on her passport from the US Legation. Of course forms had to be filled out, signed & stamped…
Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale Chair (2007) is at Hastings Contemporary till end of March….
From urban studies of China to the country’s crime fiction scene, male idols to Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, up in the hills of Dali to the craziness of China’s online world – we had it covered in the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine this year with 12 author Q&As…
January – Zongyuan Zoe Liu opted to tackle a big, and very important, subject in her new book – Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press).
February – American academic Jeff Kinkley likes to read detective fiction set in China, indeed he’s read pretty much every China-related detective novel written in English and he reckons they tell us a lot about contemporary China. So he brought together his thoughts in China Mysteries: Crime Novels From China’s Others (University of Hawaii Press) and also provided us with a definitive reading list of China-set crime novels.
March – Since the late 1970s, China has undergone perhaps the most sweeping process of urbanization ever witnessed. Richard Hu looks at the changes in China’s cities since 2010 and dares to make some bold predictions about the future in his book Reinventing the Chinese City (Columbia University Press).
April – Anne Stevenson-Yang moved to Beijing in 1993 to work for the US-China Business Council. In the next quarter century she became one of the best-known foreigners in China starting businesses in publishing, software and online media. Now her books Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy and a collection of short stories Hello, Kitty (both published by Bui Jones Books, 2024) look back on her experiences.
May – Assistant Professor of International History at the LSE’s Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s new book Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press) may focus on the US experience trading with China but there is much for the UK to learn too.
June – In The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future (Bloomsbury Asian Arguments, 2024) Jonathan Chatwin travels 3,000 miles in the footsteps of Deng’s legendary “southern tour”, pursuing the stories of his journey and examining its legacies in the country today.
July – Ralph Jennings lived for seven years in Beijing and more than that in Taipei. He’s worked as a news editor with the state-owned China Daily, an advice columnist for the 21st Century weekly in Beijing and a reporter for numerous international media outlets including Reuters. All this is condensed into his helpful new book 50 Pieces of Advice on China (Earnshaw Books).
August – Former diplomat and prolific author Kerry Brown, currently Professor of Chinese Studies at Kings College London’s Lau Institute, has just published The Great Reversal (Yale University Press). Brown takes as his starting point that while modern China has a narrative of its relationship with Britain, while he argues that Britons don’t seem to have a similar understanding of our relationship with China.
September – Veteran journalist Michael Sheridan took a deep dive into China’s leader in his biography Xi, The Red Emperor, looking at his relationship with his father, the Cultural Revolution, the battle with Bo Xilai for the soul of the Party and then brings his rule right up to date examining China (and Xi’s) controversial Zero-Covid policies, his poor relations with the West, new relationship with Putin’s Russia and his highly debatable economic policies.
October – Alec Ash left a comfortable urban life in Beijing for the remote southwest of China and Dali in 2020, just before Covid hit. In the mountains he met those fleeing Chinese urban life, careers and the demands of society for, hopefully, something simpler and fulfilling. He thought he might be more fulfilled too. In The Mountains are High Ash deep dives the Dali community and tells a very different experience of Covid from those in the big cities.
November – Liu Lizhu takes a close look at China’s e-commerce explosion in Click to Boom. Just how did the world’s largest e-commerce market become a digital path to development with Liu, assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
December – and we finished off the year with Chinese Male Idols and Branding in Chinese Luxury by Amanda Sikarskie, Peng Liu and Lan Lan. Amazingly male idols sell more lipstick, eyebrow pencil and handbags to women customers in China than female celebrities.