After yesterday’s post about heading to Marseilles for the summer some curmudgeons emailed to say they prefer Italy in the summer months. OK then – for you lot it’s Lloyd Triestino – take your choice of destination ports – Naples, Genoa, Brindisi, their home port of Trieste and, of course, magical Venice. Sailing all summer…at least in 1937.
Note of an event this weekend organised by the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre.
Join one of the most innovative and exciting fundraising events this summer featuring a collection of distinctive courtyard gate artwork exclusively created by local artists and designers.
When: Saturday 17th July 2010, 7.00pm-11.00pm
Where: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre @ 155 Caochangdi
Advance ticket: RMB150 | At door: RMB200
Advance ticket sales at CHP, 46 Fangjia Hutong or the NLGX Design Store, 33 Nanluoguxiang
This is a private event, so please register in advance. Registration or more information: 6403 6532 or events.chp@gmail.com
Planning some home leave from Shanghai this summer? I’d recommend Messageries Maritimes who can whisk you off to Marseilles via Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Colombo, Djibouti (perhaps stay on-board for that one!) and Port-Said. Sailing this month and next – in 1937 anyway.
The idea of a building contractor providing ‘quality service’ these days in Shanghai is about as likely as the Party holding a general election – ain’t going to happen. Don’t know whether or not Joe Becker Real Estate Agents really did provide ‘quality service’ as they claimed but they must have been doing something right to be able to afford offices in Hamilton House on Kiangse Road (Jiangxi Road) – which is still a nice building. If their ad is to be believed then they did deal in good properties though as this ad ran in the North-China Daily News in 1941 you have to ask yourself who was feeling bullish enough to lay down a sizeable deposit on a property in such volatile times?
The latest issue of the China Heritage Quarterly (available online here) is a special on Shanghai and includes a number of interesting pieces including Richard Rigby on Sapajou and two pieces by Jonathan Hutt on Zhou Zuroen and developments in Shanghai. There’s also some reprints of stuff by Lin Yutang and Emily Hahn.
You don’t hear people moaning about suffering from coolth much these days – but in the 1930s bosses regularly got a call from their employees crying of work due to coolth. Basically, I think, it’s when you’re cold and shivery and can’t seem to shake it. Coolth was a common old Shanghailander complaint and Dixon’s the chemists on the Szechuan Road had the best known remedy, Eno’s Fruit Salad.
You’ve have thought by now that just about every aspect of the First World War had been covered in detail, though as we head towards the 2014 centenary we can expect a load more I suspect. Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918, is an interesting side bar to WW1 and a fascinating book. As usual blurb below.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express explores one of the big, previously unresearched subjects of the First World War: the German bid for world power – and the destruction of the British Empire – through the harnessing of the Ottoman Empire.
McMeekin’s book shows how incredibly high the stakes were in the Middle East – with the Germans in the tantalizing position of taking over the core of the British Empire via the extraordinary railway that would link Central Europe and the Persian Gulf. Germany sought the Ottoman Empire as an ally to create jihad against the British – whose Empire at the time was the largest Islamic power in the world.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express is a fascinating account of western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It explains and brings to life a massive area of fighting, which in most other accounts is restricted to the disaster at Gallipoli and the British invasions of Iraq and Palestine.
If you’re looking for somewhere to live I’d suggest Graham Greeneland – a great place I visit and revisit often and am never disappointed. Popping round the world there are quite a few Greeneland locations you can hang out in: The Metropole in Hanoi, the Oloffson in Port-au-Prince (The Trianon in The Comedians), the Majestic, the Continental and the Mondial in Saigon, the Sevilla in Havana and others. Nobody really beats Greene for place.
Sadly though you can no longer hang out in one of Greene’s most famous hotels – The City in Freetown, Sierre Leone. The City appeared in Greene’s travelogue Journey Without Maps (1936) and appeared as The Bedford in The Heart of the Matter (1948) and again in a 1968 essay on post-independence Sierra Leone. In Greene it was, typically, hot, sweaty and full of rogues…and marvellous.
I’d heard there was a fire there some time ago but that the structure remained and functioned as a hotel, or rather as a rooms-by-the-hour brothel but now it has been destroyed completely and is gone. Shame.
