Silhouettes of Peking Reprinted

Personally I’m very happy to see this old book reprinted – Silhouettes of Peking – as it’s a scan of my original that I picked up in Hong Kong years ago for a bargain price. All I saw was a book with cartoons by the great White Russian artist Sapajou drawing Peking rather than his more usual Shanghai – and the date – 1920 something – early for Sapajou.

I knew nothing of the authors – the marvelously named Count Damien de Martel and Baron Leon Viktorovich de Hoyer – if you’re reading this and you wouldn’t immediately by a book from the 1920s about Peking with cartoons by a White Russian legend like Sapajou and two authors with names as good as that then leave this blog and never darken it with your philistine mouse clicking again!!

So it’s wonderful to see this evocation of a lost Peking available generally again – a nice little aesthetic dipping in early twentieth century Peking. And, I should note, with a foreword from Adam Williams, a man who I know appreciates  the period and the characters.

I’d go so far as to put Silhouettes of Peking up there as one of the most evocative novels of foreign life in Peking alongside Acton’s Peonies and Ponies, Vare’s Maker of Heavenly Trousers, Maugham’s On a Chinese Screen and Bridge’s Peking Picnic as well as slightly later evocations such as Blofeld’s City of Lingering Splendour and Kates’s Years that Were Fat. And that’s an impressive list to belong to. More details after the cover shot:

The dust has cleared from the 1911 revolution and the capital of China has moved south to Nanking. Peking’s diplomatic set – now all but irrelevant – languish in an exotic world suspended somewhere between East and West, between propriety and decadence. Against this backdrop, Jean Maugrais finds himself the target of two married women’s affections. But he longs for something more than the endless frivolities of the “smart set” and yearns to be more than a silhouette, an outsider skimming on the surface of a great civilization he doesn’t fully understand.

Who are D. de Martel, L. de Hoyer, and Sapajou?

Damien de Martel, Count (1878-1940) was a career diplomat. In Peking, he served as Chargé d’Affaires in the 1910s and Foreign Minister in the 1920s. He later served as High Commissioner of French Syria before retiring in 1939 to Paris, where he died the next year.

Léon Viktorovich de Hoyer, Baron (d. 1939) was Russian head of the Russo-Asiatic Bank’s Peking branch, known to his enemies as “intrigue personified”. He was later forced out of Peking by co-author de Martel, moving to Harbin and later Paris. He also authored Meditations on Buddha and Plato and Les Précurseurs.

Georgii Avksentievich “Sapajou” Sapojnikoff (1886-1949) was the best loved cartoonist of old China. A refugee from the Bolshevik revolution, he was a regular political cartoonist for the North-China Daily News and the North China Herald from 1923-1941.