China Rhyming

Portraying North Korea – Beijing International Literary Festival 2010

Paul French — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:51:46 +0000

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

Price: RMB50

Tickets and more details: http://www.beijingbookworm.com/schedule2010.php

JG Ballard’s Childhood Home Gutted

Paul French — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:12:38 +0000

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 Few Posts from Paris 5 – The Grand Rex

Paul French — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:06:33 +0000

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.

A Few Posts from Paris 4 – Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

Paul French — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:19:25 +0000

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 the École 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.

A Few Posts from Paris 3 – Paris’s Original Chinatown

Paul French — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:48:03 +0000

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 13^th 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.

A Few Posts from Paris 2 – The CT Loo Gallery

Paul French — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:29:42 +0000

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.

A Few Posts from Paris 1 – Parc Monceau

Paul French — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:38:16 +0000

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 private Parc 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.

Weekend Deviations – The Devil’s Paintbrush

Paul French — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:23:43 +0000

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 Coppers and 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.

Weekend Deviation – China Rhyming at the Movies

Paul French — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:44:39 +0000

I don’t talk about films here much but a couple peaked my interest recently so thought I’d note them as they fit into the usual time periods I cover in this blog. What I want to really note is Steven Poliakoff’s new film Glorious 39, but I feel I should note An Education quickly first. I happened to watch the BAFTAs in London and was pleased to see An Education do well – I enjoyed it any rate. It does have a rather nice authentic feel of the early 1960s about it – though I thought Lynn Barber (on who’s story Nick Hornby based his script) got have got a bit more praise. Still it’s fun to watch and does have a rather nice Bristol car, some great frocks, a shot of Walthamstow dog track and some great lines:

‘have you never heard of supper?’

‘of course we have,but we’ve never eaten it!’

Nice to see a nodding glance to Peter Rackman who must surely be overdue a decent biography and while noting Carey Mulligan, Alfred Molina and other great performances (including Peter Sarsgaard’s rather good accent and English mannerisms – he is after all American and it’s not easy as countless American actors playing Brits have proved) I rather thought Rosamund Pyke stole the show as a ditzy and dim posh bird – ‘I always think I’m going to my own funeral when I listen to classical music.’

I also feel the urge to give a nod to the great (and original song) written by and performed in the film by Beth Rowley. The nightclub scene is one of the best in the film and the song is so spot on for the time I’m sure most people don’t realise it’s an original (click here to listen).

Anyway, on to Glorious 39, which is very much my period. I thought this a great period thriller – a posh English family caught up in pro-appeasement skullduggery and far better than the overrated Atonement movie of a couple of years ago. It gets the feel of the bleakness of Britain in the early years of the war thanks to filming in the rather stark Norfolk winter landscapes. One critic thought it OK but not quite Hitchcock’s 1938 The Lady Vanishes. Now I bow to no one in my appreciation of Hitchcock, and the film is about the dangers of appeasement, but I thought Glorious 39 measured in a way The Lady Vanishes is not. The strength of the pro-appeasement lobby among the British political and upper classes (like the secret, and often not so secret, support for Mosley among the same) seem to me rarely talked about issues and the film dealt with them nicely. I hope people go to see it – meanwhile given its magnetism to awards givers it seems An Education doesn’t really need any help from me.

Two good dramas – and may God preserve us from the morons queuing up to see Avatar.

Around the China Lit Festivals this Weekend

Paul French — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:05:37 +0000

OK – here’s what I’d if I could be in three places at once and wasn’t talking about North Korea (Saturday in Shanghai at 4pm and sex and depravity in pre-1949 China – Shanghai, Sunday 3pm).

Saturday, 6th March

Beijing:

10.00am – Graham Earnshaw of Earnshaw Books talks about his new title detailing his walk from Shanghai to pretty close to Tibet and what he encountered on the way.

12.30pm – Derek Sandhaus of Earnshaw Books and Linda Jaivin talk about the new reprint of Bland and Backhouse’s China Under the Empress Dowager - given Backhouse’s proclivities and Linda’s tendency to like to talk about sex in old China and her recent book of the dirty old bastard Morrison of Peking this should be a raunchy early lunch!

3.00pm – Amitav Ghosh – if you like the big sagas Ghosh turns out (and I do) he should be pretty interesting. Also would be interesting to hear what the next two volumes that follow on from Sea of Poppies will be about.

Shanghai:

2.00pm – Yuan Tseng Chen: Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries and the Birth of Modern China – I think this is some from the family of Eugene Chen, the Trinidadian-Chinese who was often a rather shady character around the First Republic. Not sure if that’s how his family like to remember him though – personally I always thought he was well dodgy.

4.00pm – Hyejin Kim, the author of Jia: A Novel of Conversation having a chat with me. See here for more details.

Sunday, 7th March

Suzhou:

3.00pm – Fesity Tess Johnston launches her autobiography Permanently Temporary out at Suzhou. If you’re in Suzhou get along – Tess leaves Shanghai about once a millennium and gets nervous if she steps 100 feet out of the old French Concession so this is a treat.

Shanghai:

3.00pm – and as a late edition to plug a gap due to a cancelled author – me – on the down and dirty of China’s foreign criminals in the first half of the 20th century – see here for more details.