“The Story of the Epic 16th-Century’s Contest for the Spice Trade”, an online talk by British historian Roger Crowley co-hosted by the Yale Center Beijing and RASBJ. Free for RASBJ members
8-9 PM Beijing Time, Thursday 9th October on Zoom. Attendees will be emailed login details fo the talk in a reminder 24 hours before the event.
British historian Roger Crowley will present an online talk on his book, Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World” (Yale University Press, 2024). Drawing on vivid eyewitness accounts of adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters, he will show how this struggle shaped the modern world and remade the global economy for centuries to follow. This event is co-hosted by the Yale Center Beijing and the RASBJ.
Roger Crowley is a British historian and a graduate of Cambridge University. He is the author of six bestselling books on maritime and global history — including1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, Empires of the Sea, and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas— which have been translated into many languages.
HOW MUCH: For RASBJ members, registration is free as a membership benefit. If you’re a non-member (or a lapsed member) but wish to become an RASBJ member in order to join the event, please sign up at https://rasbj.org/membership or scan the QR code on the poster below.
Members of the Yale community in Beijing should sign up directly via YCB
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: RASBJ members should click “Register” or “I will attend” and follow the instructions. After successful registration you’ll receive a confirmation email. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder. Successful registrants will be emailed the login link and other details 24 hours before the event. Please check your spam folder to ensure you see all RASBJ emails.
Who really concocted the slanderous “China Dossier” purportedly detailing Wallis’s bad behaviour, criminality and sexual loucheness in Shanghai in 1924? I’d bet on Harry Steptoe, then head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in Shanghai for much of the 1920s and 1930s. More Mr Bean than Mr Bond in many descriptions, but loyal to a fault….
In the spring of 1938 Britain’s Air Ministry sent its deputy head of intelligence, Wing Commander Fred Wigglesworth to China to review British intelligence in the region. From Shanghai he reported back: ‘Both at Hong Kong and at Shanghai I was asked by many if I knew “Steptoe”. No, who was he? Oh, he’s the head of the secret service organisation at Shanghai – he’s the arch-spy-everyone in China knows who and what “Steptoe” is!’ Steptoe’s cover at Shanghai was Vice-Consul with an office in the consular building on the Bund.
thanks for anyone who made an effort on behalf of The Shanghai Literary Review and their battle with Duke Kunshan University.
From TSLR:
After 52 days of silence, our printer informed us that Duke Kunshan University has quietly paid in full for the previously canceled print run of Issue 9.
This is a victory for our contributors. It’s also a victory for editorial integrity and independence. While DKU’s Humanities Research Center had withdrawn support and breached their written commitment, this payment settles their obligation in full. It also marks the end of our relationship with the institution.
We are moving forward independently—true to our roots. No further funding will come from DKU. Editorial revisions have already been made to remove DKU branding and contributions from the issue. Our work continues, but without compromise.
We’re deeply grateful to our community and contributors who stood by us, donated, reached out, or simply refused to look away. Your support kept this alive.
Some advance notice of a few events in Asia this month – literary Repulse Bay, bookish Lantau, Roguish Britcham Macao as well as my column for Macau Closer and a Q&A with ChinaFile… click here to read
Three photographs of the Hong Kong typhoon of 1906 time stamped 09:15, 09:30 and 09:45am showing the progression of the typhoon that day. The 1906 Hong Kong typhoon (they didn’t name them back then was a tropical cyclone that hit Hong Kong on 18 September 1906. The natural disaster caused property damage exceeding a million pounds and took the lives of around 15,000 people.
I know a lot of you have been published by The Shanghai Literary Review in the past – i know i have. They helped many find a voice, find an audience, move on to better and bigger things.
Well, now TSLR NEEDS YOU!! They’re being broken financially and morally by Duke Kunshan University, whose commitments and promises they are not only breaking but refuse to even communicate. The result of this could be that TSLR goes to the wall and a new generation of Shanghai writers have one less significant outlet through which to get their voices heard.
They helped us – the Shanghai and wider writing community – now it’s time to return the favour and help them pressure Duke Kunshan to honour their commitments – get on insta, FB, and especially Linked In, and let Duke Kunshan know what you think of their shabby behaviour and that you support TSLR and Shanghai writing…
Recently I read Xiaolu Guo’s Ishmaelle Call Me Ishmalle, a retelling or re-imaging of Melville’s Moby Dick with a female lens and some more China angles. It prompted a discussion on whether the Chinese ever really got into whaling. I still don’t really know the answer to that, but recently I came across these photos of a whaler in the Yellow Sea off Manchuria – c.1930 – and what was termed the ‘Whale Dissecting Stations’, also pictured below.
There’s a little bit of information with the photographs. The whaling season opened in April-May when traditionally whales appeared in the Yellow Sea, especially around Haiyang Island on the southeastern part of the Shandong peninsula. There were the whaling stations and the 800 ton whaling vessels. It was a migratory business apparently with the whales arriving and then the whale workers at sea and on land. Ships returning with whales would blast their horns and the crews would run from their lodgings to the Dissecting Stations. A typical Yellow Sea whale could be completely dissected within an hour – entrails removed, meat processed, bones sawn off.
It was recorded that tea houses, lodging houses and bordellos followed them for the season and the atmosphere on the island was ‘riotous’ as men were paid per whale dissection and the ship crews came ashore after a successful hunt.
Issue 9 will print and ship in October 2025
