All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
In 1923 the National Geographic tried to demonstrate the length of the Great Wall in terms American readers could understand – from the coast at Philly, Pennsylvania to west of Topeka, Kansas, with a branch down to Little Rock, Arkansas ….
This painting is entitled Junks in Harbour and is by the Scottish artist Dr Robert Cecil Robertson (1890-1942). Robertson and his wife, the artist Eleanor Moore Robertson, moved to Shanghai where he worked as a bacteriologist between 1925 and 1937. Though not noted on the painting or otherwise obvious it seems we can assume this is Shanghai in the 1920s…
Kim Suk-young’s Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance (Stanford University Press)….
North Korea may be known as the world’s most secluded society, but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in 2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That number has grown tremendously in just over a decade, with over 7 million registered as of 2022. This expansion took place amid extreme economic hardship and the ensuing possibilities of destabilization. Against this social and political backdrop, Millennial North Korea traces how the rapidly expanding media networks in North Korea impact their millennial generation, especially their perspective on the outside world.
Suk-Young Kim argues that millennials in North Korea play a crucial role in exposing the increasing tension between the state and its people, between risktakers who dare to transgress strict social rules and compliant citizens accustomed to the state’s centralized governance, and between thriving entrepreneurs and those left out of the growing market economy. Combining a close reading of North Korean state media with original interviews with defectors, Kim explores how the tensions between millennial North Korea and North Korean millennials leads to a more nuanced understanding of a fractured and fragmented society that has been frequently perceived as an unchanging, monolithic entity.
My new long-read at the South China Morning Post weekend magazine – An 1880s Sino-Russian Gold Rush – Tales from old Zheltuga: the rise & equally abrupt fall of the lawless C19th self-declared republic of the hopeful, the gold dreamers & the lost on the Russo-China frontier…Click here
Book #54 on the Sinica Podcast Substack Ultimate China Bookshelf – the first of 3 Maoist-era village memoirs – the once incredibly influential William Hinton’s Fanshen (1966)….click here
Weekend find – a very strange book published in 1897 and written by a very strange looking chap….
Yesterday I posted a portrait of a British military officer in Hong Kong, Francis Festing, from about 1945-1949. The most striking thing about the portrait was the hardwood carved frame. I think the frame was from a company called Tai Loong.
These fairly average Chinese pictures showing various seasons below, dated from the 1930s, are also in hardwood carved frames. These ornate hardwood frames are identified as being made by Tai Loong Furniture and Picture Frame Makers of 873-875 Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing Xi Lu), Tel 35694, Shanghai. I think Tai Loong also produced silk screens and in the late 1940s I think moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong.
An interesting portrait – especially for the frame – of Sir Francis Festing (1902-1976) by Claude Harrison (1922-2009). Festing was a senior British Army Officer who was the Commander of British Forces in Hong Kong from 1945-46, and 1949. It is believed to have been it painted around this time. The frame is large Chinese hardwood carved around the outside with dragons and bats.
Harrison was from Lancashire, trained at Preston College of Art and Liverpool College of Art before service with the Royal Air Force service in India, Burma and China in World War Two. He most likely painted this portrait towards then end of that service in Asia. Afterwards he studied at the Royal College of Art.
