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 13th 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.
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.
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 privateParc 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.
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 Coppersand 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wasn’t down to speak at the Shanghai International Literary Festival this year – nothing to sell! But a speaker dropped out for some reason and a gap needed filling so I’m the plug and this was the best I could come up with to amuse the punters.
The Down and Dirty Secrets of Seedy Shanghai and Perverted Peking
Sunday – 7th March
Glamour Bar, M on the Bund – 3 PM
We’ve had the glamour, we’ve had the politics – now it’s time for the secret and sordid history of the foreign criminal underworld of Shanghai and Peking in the first half of the twentieth century. Pimps and pros; gangsters and gamblers – from Shanghai’s ‘Line’ and its notorious luxury bordellos full of ‘American Girls’ to the illegal casinos of the Badlands; the sexual-sadist cults of Peking’s Legation Quarter to the secret cabarets of the Tartar City – foreigners were mad, bad and depraved on a scale few can imagine. They murdered and robbed, procured and pimped in a haze of drugs, sex and debauchery.
Paul French tells the largely hidden tales of the underworld that include murder, gun fights and easy money based on his forthcoming trilogy of books that aim to reveal the largely previously ignored lower depths of low life foreign China. Not for the easily shocked or the legally upstanding.
Paul French is the author of various books including Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists From Opium to Mao. He is currently completing the first in his low life trilogy – A Peking Murder – a dramatic investigation into the previously unsolved and horrific murder of a young English woman in 1937 Peking to be published by Penguin Books in 2011.
A plug for an event I’m moderating at the Shanghai International Literary Festival 2010:
Hyejin Kim in conversation with Paul French
South Korean writer and activist Hyejin Kim has worked extensively with North Korean refugees living in China and subsequently wrote the book Jia: A Novel of North Korea. Jia is one woman’s story, inextricably interwoven with the tragic story of North Korea. Hyejin Kim discusses the importance of bringing to light the stories of ordinary North Korean people, often overlooked by the media with Paul French (author of North Korea the Paranoid Peninsula).
Date: Saturday March 6th
Time: 4pm
Venue: M on the Bund, No. 5 on the Bund, 20 Guangdong Road, by Zhongshan Dong Yi Road, Shanghai
As someone who divides his time pretty evenly writing about China now and China back then this seemed like a place to throw all the interesting bits that fall through the cracks somehow and never get used anywhere else. It's basically the stuff that doesn't get used in my writing about modern China or in the books I do about old China — i.e. probably of little interest to anyone but me and therefore ideally suited to an obscure blog up a dark cul-de-sac of the Internet. I'm also adding the odd 'Deviation Posting' about non-China stuff that interests me — Paul French
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 
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.
