Another plug for an event I’m moderating in Peking soon:
Beijing International Literary Festival 2010
North Korea
One country – several very different ways to portray it. Join graphic narrative artist Guy Delisle, reporter Barbara Demick with Paul French moderating as they discuss their work on the hermit kingdom in very different books including Delisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang and Demick’s recently published Nothing to Envy.
Date: Friday 12th March
Time: 6pm
Venue: The Beijing Bookworm, Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
The moral of this story (or at least one of several) – don’t let anyone tell you preservation orders in Shanghai on old buildings mean shit – they don’t. They didn’t at the White Horse Inn last year when it came down, nor the old Shanghai Rowing Club building on Suzhou Creek and they have once again proved worthless at the former home of JG Ballard on the corner of Panyu Road and Xinhua Road (formerly Colombia Road and Amherst Avenue). It’s worth noting that even if Ballard’s later work as a writer means nothing in Shanghai the house and grounds were a good example of the sort of grand structures erected in the Western Roads Area in the 1920s/1930s.
I have nothing to add to Malcolm Moore’s piece in the Daily Telegraph, accompanied by a short video (here). Another tragedy to add to an ever lengthening list in Shanghai of wanton destruction.
A final post from Paris and I can’t take my leave without noting one stunning and favourite piece of art-deco architecture in the city that looks to be in good shape – the Grand Rex cinema. The Grand Rex at No.1 Boulevard Poissoniere is simply stunning. Opening in 1932 it once had a seating capacity of 2,750,an art deco exterior and a baroque interior. Parisians flocked to see films and concerts until the Germans took it over during the war to show their Nazi bastards propaganda films.If you’ve got time you can do a quick tour – personally I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie.
Another post from Paris – a quick note as I happened to pass the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales. This, I assume is the successor to theÉcole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, founded in in Paris in 1795, that trained a stunning future generation of French Sinologists including the great (but infamously arrogant) inter-war Sinologist and survivor of the Boxer’s siege of Peking in 1900 Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) who, among other things, catalogued the wonders of the cave-temples of Dunhuang and Henri Maspero (1882-1945) who revealed much of the history of Daoism in China. By the 1850s just about every major continental European university had an Asian or oriental studies department and this movement was to gain pace in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the interests of empire largely overrode mere academic curiosity. However, as far as I know Paris was among the first, if not the first, to have a full department and institute.
As I’ve posted a lot about London’s original Chinatown, Limehouse, in the past (just put Limehouse in the search box to see these) it seems only fair to note Paris’s original Chinatown too. Paris now has two Chinatowns – one in the 13th arrondisement near the Place d’Italie and a later one that has emerged around Belleville in the northeast of the city.
But the original Chinatown was l’Ilot Chalon. It became home to various Chinese settling in the French capital – sailors, travellers, students as well as having its numbers boosted by the Chinese men who came to work for the French as labourers during the First World War. It apparently became quite thriving but was completely demolished for various extensions tothe Gare de Lyon railway station. I have read that in 1988 a plaque was erected by city officials commemorating the former Chinatown but I couldn’t find it if it’s still there. However, one Chinese restaurant, the Village de Lyon, bravely soldiers on on what is left of the Rue de Chalon by the side of the station.
I know Paris quite well and having been visiting fairly regularly since a lad. However, the area around the Parc Monceau is not a district I know much at all (see yesterday’s post). One, rather splendid but rather un-Parisian building I’d never strolled past before understandably caught my eye so I’ve dug around on it a bit – the CT Loo Gallery at 48 Rue de Courcelles. It’s a quite amazing pagoda-inspired structure (though designed by a French architect) as you can see. Inside are Chinois style ceilings, a moon gate and a gallery carved with eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian wood. It was apparently founded in 1926 by Ching-Tsai Loo, a collector of Chinese origin and was Paris’s first major private collection of Asian art supplying museums of Asian art in Europe and America. The public can pop in and see parts of the house and collections of furniture and works of Chinese art as well as sculptures and art objects from Japan, Thailand, Burma and Tibet as well as China.
Ah Paris – not a bad spot at all. Trekked over a few weeks ago for a visit and to see the Parc Monceau as despite repeated visits to the City of Lights had never been there before and of course there was a reason to go. So best to post these now before it becomes part of the dim and distant past.
Phillippe d’Orléans, the Duke of Chartres, built the privateParc Monceau in Paris in the 1770s. The artist, Louis de Carmontelle, and a Scottish gardener who moved to Paris Thomas Blaikie, were ordered to create a garden of dreams with fake Gothic ruins that included, as well as a pagoda, a Tartar tent, Egyptian pyramid and a Roman temple. After the French Revolution when the Duke lost his head to Madame Guillotine, the Parc became public property and all Parisians could enjoy the pagoda and its assorted follies. Sadly the pagoda and the Tartar tent appear to have long gone though a couple of bridges, some sculptures and a pyramid thing are still there – not quite the Chinoiserie delight I’d imagined but a perfectly pleasant Paris park all the same and once famous for its Chinois.
I’m a Jake Arnott fan – his excellent near history look at the 1960s underworld of London – The Long Firm – is one of the best and most atmospheric books about that period ever written. I figured he was in that groove what with the also great He Kills Coppersand other stuff. But for his latest outing, The Devil’s Paintbrush (the nickname of the amazingly effective Maxim gun) we get a near history tour of the Edwardian underworld of Paris in the company of two of the legends of the early part of the new century – the occultist Aleister Crowley and the wonderfully rendered hero and then embarassement of Empire Sir Hector MacDonald – Fighting Mac and a literary recreation of their actual meeting briefly in Paris when Crowley was at his most occult and Fighting Mac spiralling downwards in disgrace.
Those that know their Empire history know that Fighting Mac had it all – hero of numerous camapigns including during the Boer War and Sudan. Crowley basically built his own cult based on the occult, magic and sex. Crowley was an embarassement from the start for his excesses while Fighting Mac became the pin up of the Empire builders only to slump into infamy after being involved compromisingly with some rather young local boys while in Ceylon. Fighting Mac shot himself rather than stand court martial.
I was a little nervous at Arnott changing periods but by the second half of the book he warms up and gives us just as good a slice of the dodgy and weird of the Edwardian period as he’s done in the past of the Swinging Sixties.
As someone who divides his time pretty evenly writing about China now and China back then this seemed like a place to throw all the interesting bits that fall through the cracks somehow and never get used anywhere else. It's basically the stuff that doesn't get used in my writing about modern China or in the books I do about old China — i.e. probably of little interest to anyone but me and therefore ideally suited to an obscure blog up a dark cul-de-sac of the Internet. I'm also adding the odd 'Deviation Posting' about non-China stuff that interests me — Paul French
