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 an adjunct to both the last couple posts on Portsmouth and past occasional posts on Chinatowns in Britain and the plethora of places calling themselves variations on China and opium I happened to walk past Portsmouth’s Club China Town the other week – but I don’t think I’ll be returning for a visit. It’s closed and looks like it might have been a bit crap anyway. However, it is on the side of the rather impressive Queen’s Hotel on the Portsmouth/Southsea border designed by the architect Augustus Livesay and opened in 1861. It was slightly posher in those days, surrounded by woods, rather than Southsea High Street and had a yacht club attached. Following a fire the hotel was rebuilt in 1903 by the architect TW Cutler.
Where Club China Town came into it I’m not quite sure!
By the way Portsmouth has long had a Chinese community, bolstered in recent years I assume by more recent migrants and Chinese students at the local colleges. As a port it’s inevitable that Portsmouth’s Chinese community goes backaways. One interesting aspect of the community is that during World War One quite a few of the Chinese Labour Corp (the so-called ‘Coolie Corps’ – see here, here and here) were stationed in Portsmouth loading armaments onto ships for France. A tragedy occurred when a shell exploded during the loading and killed a large number of Chinese workers on the docks. I had heard that there was a plaque there at one point commemorating them but not sure where and didn’t notice it while I was strolling around. If anyone knows where it is or what happened to it I’d like to know?
While we’re on the subject of monuments related to China that just happen to be in the Hampshire town of Portsmouth and that I didn’t know existed (see yesterday’s post on the Siege of Tsingtao) I also didn’t know there was a monument to the Royal Navy in the Second Opium War and the march on Peking by Lord Elgin – which also happens (perhaps unsurprisingly) to be in Portsmouth. It notes ‘China’, ‘Pekin’ and ‘Peiho’ (the river that saw a battle on the way to Peking). Simple monument with no historical details or notes so largely walked past by the seafront strollers and ignored I suspect.
The Siege of Tsingtao is not much remembered now but it was a side show to the main performances of World War One. The Siege was the attack on the then German-controlled port of Tsingtao (Qingdao) during World War One by Japan and Britain’s Royal Navy against the Kaiser’s boats. It was the first encounter between Japanese and German forces and the first joint British-Japanese operation in the war. No time to go into the whole business here – more on this web page for those interested in the details.
The point of this post is that I was not aware that there was a memorial to the Royal Navy men who fought at Tsingtao – that is until I was wandering around Portsmouth recently (a city with rather a large amount of memorials to just about everything nautical in British history). The World War One memorial in Portsmouth is naturally dedicated to the Royal Navy and includes the Siege of Tsingtao – so it is remembered, in Portsmouth at least.
Back last December I posted about the developments at Gallions Reach, where there is still the old hotel that passengers waiting to embark to sail to China and points East often stayed before boarding their ship. I first mentioned the Gallions Hotel back in December 2008 in a post hoping that it would be restored and then posted again last December when some news filtered out about plans for the site. Well things seem to be moving again as I noticed when I hopped down to Beckton recently. The boards are down and you can see inside the old hotel – the exterior and interior seem relatively well preserved and a children’s playground has appeared at the rear of the building. Still not quite sure what the final use will be yet but it seems safe anyway.
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 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:
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.
