Her Lotus Year on Kindle for Just £1.99

A great limited time deal on the kindle of Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties & the Making of Wallis Simpson at amazon.uk….

This Sunday – the Final Day of the Macao Literary Festival 2025

Domingo à tarde – Barra – Macao Literary Festival – 3pm

Mel Jacoby’s Photography at the HK FCC

An exhibition of amazing photograohy from Mel Jacoby curated by his biographer Bill Lascher opening in the Hong Kong FCC Monday.

BTW: the book of Jacoby’s incredible 1930s and wartime photography in Asia is also still available from Blacksmith Books – A Danger Shared – a must have for anyone interested im the region period….

The exhibit opens on April 1 in the FCC’s main bar and lounge and will run through April 30. Bill will be at the club for its opening and for a lunchtime book talk the following day and an evening event for the Royal Geographical Society – Hong Kong.

Her Lotus Year – Madame Wellington Koo

Koo Vi Kyuin, better known to everyone as Wellington Koo (and now often Gu Weijun in China). He had grown up in a well-to-do Shanghai cosmopolitan family and was educated at Shanghai’s St. John’s University and at Columbia in New York. In 1912, he had returned to work for President Yuan Shih-kai
and then, at just twenty-seven, was appointed China’s ambassador to the United States. In China and abroad, Koo was best known for having been the Chinese diplomat who refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference over objections to Japan’s Great War land grab in Shantung. He had since served as both China’s foreign minister and finance minister.

He was still only thirty-seven and married to the beautiful daughter of a Chinese-Javanese
sugar baron, Oei Hui-lan. They were the most celebrated couple on the Peking circuit, and Wallis attended a dinner at their home at least once in the company of her then lover Alberto da Zara. How they got along is not recorded—at the time, Oei Hui-lan was apparently exasperated at the number of dinners she was having to arrange in their home.

Twenty years later, Madame Koo was in London, as her husband was the wartime Chinese ambassador to Britain. Wallis was now the Duchess of Windsor, and the infamous China Dossier had spread a great deal of gossip about her China time. Madame Koo made the comment that Wallis knew only four words of Chinese: “Boy, pass the champagne.” This is a somewhat catty story in a rather catty memoir, not to mention the phrase being actually unrenderable in the exact form Oei Hui-lan suggests.

This portrait is by Olive Snell, a South African born English artist – her portrait of Oei Hui-lan was painted in 1927, a few years after Wallis met her in Peking.

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…

Chiang Yee in the Modern British History Journal

A nice review for Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950 (Hong Kong University Press)….

While Chiang Yee may not be a household name for Modern British History readers, this multidisciplinary collection expands both our knowledge of cultural encounters between China and the West, as well as the diasporic experiences of Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth-century England. It will also be of interest to historians of Chinese art and literature, of Second World War at home, as well as of race and ethnic minorities in modern Britain.

Dr Sha Zhou (Manchester Uni) – Modern British History Journal

Destination Macao at the University of Macao – 28/3/25

An event on my new essay collection Destination Macao (Blacksmith Books) at the University of Macau this Friday evening….Ranging from the epic poet Luis de Camões in the 1550s to Ian Fleming in the 1950s….

Her Lotus Year – Remembering Wallis in the Ballroom of the Grand Hotel de Pekin

The Royal Asiatic Society hosted a dinner in the ballroom of the old Grand Hotel de Pekin (now the Hotel Nuo) – where Wallis checked in when she first arrived in Peking just before Christmas 1924. It was an amazing evening – the brave went for 1920s costume, the British Ambassador came, and we all took a photo on the lobby staircase Wallis must have gone up and down a dozen times or more. You can imagine how mind blowing for me this all was!

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…

The HongKonger on Her Lotus Year

A kind review in The HongKonger online here…