I always enjoy Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s a great concept pulling together great pieces of writing, verse, commentary etc on selected topics. Their autumn (or fall as they would have it) issue this year is dedicated to the city and, basically, if it doesn’t happen in a city then I’m not that interested in it personally. So an edition to be snapped up and devoured.
It’s packed full of great articles but, as far as China goes, you’ve got Leslie Chang on Dongguan, Du Fu on China c.750, Marco Polo on Kinsai, Ballard on Shanghai and an anonymous writer on Hangzhou c.1230
For the Asia keenies there’s also William Gibson on Singapore, Pico Iyer on Bangkok and Marguerite Duras on Saigon.
I’ll post more details next weekend when it’s closer but the poster is cool (and I’m biased!) so I’m posting it now. My contribution to the Penguin Classics Lunches series in Shanghai and Peking is an attempt to get people reading Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate once more – it’s a scandal how ignored and almost forgotten it’s become by people who otherwise are very well read on Shanghai. It’s a scary thought, but I suspect the reason nobody seems to know Man’s Fate but everyone seems to know JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun is that a movie got a made of the latter and never of the former!! i.e. when people tell you they know Empire of the Sun what they mean is that they’ve seen Spielberg’s film with all his politically correct insertions.
And so on November 19th it’s Malraux resurrection time at M on the Bund and then again on December 3rd at the Bookworm in Peking.
…and you have to admit, for a literary event, the poster is pretty wicked!
This November (sometime later this month), and in plenty of time for Christmas (hint, hint), a new book by me entitled The Old Shanghai A-Z is finally out. The blurb’s below and you can pre-order here with a 10% discount. It’s basically a guide to all the road names in Shanghai pre-1949 across the International Settlement, Frenchtown and the External Roads Area (the Badlands). It’s pretty comprehensive, fact filled with a lot of old Shanghai anecdotes and illustrated with a ton of old ads, postcards and Shanghailander emphemera. It also comes with some old maps of the city too and does, even if I say so myself, make for the perfect Christmas and/or Chinese New Year present for the Shanghailander in your life!!
You can click to read part of the intro and get an idea of just how lavish the design is! – French_046-071-1_sample text
This richly anecdotal guide to every street in Shanghai details many landmarks and stories associated with its best known avenues. A definitive index to the street names of Shanghai, some of which have disappeared or been removed, allows historians, researchers, tourists and the just plain curious to navigate the city in its pre-1949 incarnation, through the former International Settlement, French Concession, and External Roads Area with a detailed map and alphabetical entry for every road.
The book is lavishly illustrated with old advertising, images and postcards of the streets and businesses, the bars and nightclubs, the people and characters of old Shanghai bringing alive the city in its previous heyday as the Pearl of the Orient. The Old Shanghai A-Z should become the standard reference work as well as being an easy-to-use guide for researchers and visitors looking to recapture the glamour and uniqueness of old Shanghai.
A postcard I came across recently of a crowded Soochow Creek from, I think, the Bund end looking up river with the current Suzhou Road (formerly Soochow Road) on the left of the picture. Looks early twentieth century which means several things – firstly, the Creek was a major waterway back then as we all know; 2) it stunk; and 3) take a left off Soochow Road and you hit Kiangse Road (now Jiangxi Road) and The Line,already the premier street of white girl (mostly American) brothels in the Settlement. A sampan home sir?
Wang Genying (also known as Wang Shuxin) -1906-1939 – was an ewarly female hero of the Communist Party of China. That she died in1939, killed by the Japanese in Southern Hebei, means that she is one of those Communist heroes without the taint of the corruption and horrors that the Party would later inflict on China and its people (and continues to obviously) as it degenerated into just another dictatorial clique.
Wang joined the Socialist Youth League in 1924. She worked and organised in the Jardine’s owned EWO Cotton Mills, mostly in Yangtszepoo District (now Yangpu) during the May 30th tumult and indeed that is where her memorial is (though any trace of her former home or anything much in that area is long gone and the area is mostly the Shanghai Tobacco Factory). The monument that lies rather obscurely behind fences and in a car park to a hotel is on the corner of Zhoujiazui Road and Liaoyang Road (formerly Point Road and Liayong Road).
A follow up post after my previous comments on the strangely named (Lady From Shanghai) film version of Sherwood King’s noir novel If I Die Before I Wake. Why did Orson Welles introduce the Shanghai/China angle to the movie and have Rita Hayworth as a kind of returned home Shanghai Lil?
Robin Lung, a documentary film maker from Hawaii who is currently working on a project to restore KUKAN, a colour documentary on China that was filmed from 1939-1940 and was the first American feature length documentary to win an Academy Award in 1941, enlightens me somewhat as to Welles’s China interests (you can find more on Robin’s fascinating project at Facebook – click here).
“Orson Welles wrote a blurb for KUKAN when it came out in 1941 (see poster below), so I’ve had an eye out for his name in connection with China. Actually he does seem to have had a particular interest in China – He traveled with his father to China and Japan in 1930, was a big fan of Chinese magicians and Chinese theater and helped to entertain Madame Chiang Kai Shek when she visited Hollywood in 1943. Also, here is a link to an early 1939 radio broadcast of Orson Welles performing Pearl Buck’s THE PATRIOT.”
Almost 2,000 British Prisoners of War were aboard the Japanese freighter Lisbon Maru when an American submarine torpedoed and sank her in October 1942. This book tells the story of those men, from the fighting in Hong Kong, through the sinking, and for some, to liberation and beyond.
Although never previously studied in any depth, the sinking of the Lisbon Maru was the most costly American on British ‘Friendly Fire’ incident of the Second World War. Of the 4,500 of Hong Kong’s garrison who perished during the war, 1,000 died directly or indirectly from this sinking. From American, British, Hong Kong and Japanese sources, this book reconstructs the fateful voyage of the Lisbon Maru, and the experiences of the captives, the captors, and those on board the submarine that sank her.
The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the ‘Hellships’ that caused the deaths of almost 20,000 Allied Prisoners of War during the Second World War, or the experiences of Allied POWs in Japan.
Tony Banham is a long-term resident of Hong Kong, having arrived in the 1980s. He has been studying the Battle of Hong Kong for well over a decade and has written on the subject, aided in the production of numerous television documentaries, and helped many children of veterans in their researches into their fathers’ war years. His first book on the topic, Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941, was jointly published by Hong Kong University Press and the University of British Columbia Press in 2003.
Shutterbugs and camera addicts congregated on Yuen Ming Yuen Road (Yuanmingyuan Road now) down by the Bund to ogle the latest gadgets from the Eastman Kodak Company – in1940 they marvelled at the new Kodak 35 and the brilliant new ‘Panatomic’ film. Be honest, even hard core Lomography lovers (check out their new Sprocket Rocket which is a thing of great beauty) would have to admit that that Kodak 35 looks cool.
