Spent the weekend at the Beijing International Literary Festival – which gets better and better each year. I can report that Guy Delisle was one of the nicest guys I ever met, Barbara Demick was fascinating, Jonathan Fenby had some great old China anecdotes as ever, Mike Meyer laid bare the hutongs of Peking, Louise Welsh was a dream and I got introduced to the work of Zoe Strachan and Alberto Ruy Sanchez and became an instant fan of both. Meanwhile I rediscovered a taste for live poetry after going rather cold on it thanks to storming sets from UK dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah and the manic slam poetry of Steve Connell.
And then a wonderful thing happened – it snowed in mid-March (OK, not so wonderful from a climate change point of view perhaps). Now some cities suit snow and some don’t (London, for instance). Peking always looks great when the snow falls – somehow it just takes on a special charm. Here’s Wu Dao Ying Hutong near the Yonghegong Temple on Sunday at about midday.
A roadblock of events this coming week. I’m on the road round the China festivals with Jonathan Fenby talking about China between the wars and current reassessments of the Republican period – if you’re in Peking or Suzhou pop along why don’t you.
Beijing International Literary Festival 2010
Patriotic Warlords, Big Eared Gangsters & Dancing All Night: China Between the Wars
Last weekend at the Beijing International Literary Festival a bunch of presumably horny little devils got together to talk about the sexual antics of the court and assorted foreigners in the dying days of the Qing Dynasty in Peking. Derek Sandhaus (who’s just edited and put out a new edition of Backhouse and Bland’s China Under the Empress Dowager), Linda Jaivin (who’s spicy novelisation of that dirty old sod Morrison of Peking’s lust life came out last year) and Lijia Zhang (who just likes talking about sex I think) all got together and discussed the shenanigans in the Forbidden City, Morrison’s untameable libido and Backhouse’s racy tome.
Missed it? so did I sadly, but someone recorded it and stuck it up on the web so you can listen to it here.
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 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
Last weekend at the Beijing International Literary Festival a bunch of presumably horny little devils got together to talk about the sexual antics of the court and assorted foreigners in the dying days of the Qing Dynasty in Peking. Derek Sandhaus (who’s just edited and put out a new edition of Backhouse and Bland’s 
