For many writing and reading Chinese history, and particularly Shanghai history, Lynn Pan (1946-2024) was a major inspiration. Her books showed how history and memoir could be beautifully written and well researched, how style and aesthetic sensibilities could be interwoven with narrative and anecdote.
I was lucky enough in Shanghai to see Lynn often, share panels with her occasionally, run ideas past her. She was always unfailingly generous with her knowledge, contacts and time.
This year, at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, we will be remembering Lynn’s work and inspiration. I’ll be joining her great friends Michelle Garnaut and Karolina Paulik on March 2 at the Fringe Club for a tribute. It’s a free event (but please do register) and any anecdotes or remembrances from the floor will be welcomed.
AJ Arberry’s British Orientalists (1943) was published as part of the very collectible Britain in Pictures series, a series of 126 books published between 1941 and 1945 as an important component of Britain‘s wartime propaganda to try and show their was a British civilization (and in this case very much an empire!) worth fighting to defend. The book focuses on South Asia but does include some discussion of China and Macao. It was written by Arthur John Arberry (1905-1969), an Arabic scholar who had worked at Cairo University before the war. During the Second World War he was a Postal Censor in Liverpool before being moved to the Ministry of Information where, among his task presumably, was writing British Orientalists. He later held the Chair of Persian Studies at SOAS in London.
My interview with James Birch, author of Gilbert & George and the Communists (Cheerio Publishing) & how he managed to arrange their incredible 1993 exhibitions in Beijing & Shanghai – for the China-Britain Business Council magazine Focus… Click here to read…
Thomas Bird will introduce his latest publication Harmony Express: Travels by Train through China, a travelogue that recounts the years he spent railway-wayfaring in China, from 2014 until late-2019, when the country was in the midst of a railway building boom, plying the world’s longest high-speed network.
SOAS, London – 18/2/25 – 5pm – Free but register here
Thomas Bird found himself in southern China free from any serious commitments. His rock band had just split up, he’d left his job as the Shenzhen editor of a lifestyle magazine and his girlfriend disappeared from his life. Seeking the tonic of travel, Bird hit the railroad with a plan… to explore The People’s Republic of China by train. The country was in the midst of a railway building boom the likes of which the world has never seen, and Bird was poised to make China Railways his muse. One year morphed into several as Bird whizzed from high-tech Shenzhen to colonial Xiamen at high-speed; “flew” into Shanghai aboard a Maglev; chugged through rural Sichuan Province aboard an old steam locomotive. Putting the people he meets front and center, Bird delivers a portrait of an era, as he grapples to comprehend an inscrutable land undergoing breakneck change.
Expertly weaving Chinese history into his travelogue, Bird makes the story of China’s long journey to modernity analogues with the development of the national railway network. He investigates the impact of “railway imperialism” a century ago when China’s railways lagged sorely behind the rest of the world and considers Beijing’s obsession with “catching-up” as represented by its stealthy new fleet of Harmony trains plying the world’s longest high-speed network. Through his travels, Bird comes to view Chinese trains as “time-machines” bridging the impoverished countryside, tumbledown third-tier towns and gilded megacities.
Wallis arrived in Peking in December 1924 on the Peking-Tientsin train that ran along the Tartar Wall to the railway station at Chienmen(Qianmen)…what a way to arrive!
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
Photo albums remained popular purchases – while the others in this series have been late 19th and early 20th century this album is from the late 1950s and purchased in Hong Kong…(see here and here and here).
