All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
On Wednesday, November 6th, join me and the legendary Frances Wood in conversation at the beautiful Hatchards bookshop on Piccadilly. We’ll be talking about my new book Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot & Thompson). It should be a fun and revealing evening. For more information and to purchase tickets click here:
The London Times have some fun with some of the more salacious rumours that swirled around Wallis’s time in China – and are debunked by me. However, they were all true of other people in China in the 1920s…. (The description of Sir Victor Sassoon as an “Italian hotelier” is not from me or the book, and “harlot” is a very Times slur i feel!!).
Preorder USA – https://read.macmillan.com/lp/her-lotus-year-9781250287472/
Preorder – UK – https://eandtbooks.com/books/her-lotus-year/
Preorder HK – https://bookazine.com.hk/products/her-lotus-year#:~:text=In%20her%20memoirs%2C%20Wallis%20described,to%20appreciate%20traditional%20Chinese%20aesthetics.
A selection of shoulder flashes as worn by the Hong Kong Volunteer Corps’ various divisons….
An SVC cap badges from April 4 1854 – a little special as it commemorates The Battle of Muddy Flat on that date. Units of the SVC joined British and American military units (I think the first time US and GB troops fought together after the American War of Independence) repelling Qing imperial troops besieging the rebel-held city ignored foreign demands to move further away from the foreign concessions.
A 10 Pfennig stamp from the Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory, 1901. Covering 213 sqm of Shandong inc Kiautschou (Jiaozhou) Bay & Tsingtao (Qingdao), it was operated by the East Asia Squadron of the Imperial German Navy between 1898-1914….
I’d seen this Air India Hong Kong poster form the 1960s before but a few details explaining this one…
The Air-India Maharajah mascot was created in 1946 by Bobby Kooka and Umesh Rao – Kooka was Commercial Director with Air India and Rao, an artist at J Walter Thompson in Bombay. Kooka once said: ‘“We can call him the Maharajah for want of a better description. But his blood isn’t blue. He may look like royalty, but he isn’t royal. He is capable of entertaining the Queen of England and splitting a beer with her butler. He is a man of many parts: lover boy, sumo wrestler, pavement artist, vendor of naughty post cards, Capuchin monk, Arab merchant…”
The posters were printed in India by Prasad Process Private of Madras on Japanese paper.
When Wallis sojourned in Shanghai in 1924 it wasn’t quite yet the “City of Sin” it would be a decade later, nor the “Chicago on the Huangpu” it would descend into during the Gudao – Solitary Island – period, but it wasn’t exactly crime and excitement free either…..
Preorder USA –
Preorder – UK –
Preorder HK –
My author Q&A for the China-Britain Business Council Focus magazine with Alec Ash on The Mountains are High (Scribe) – we talk about Dali life, the relaxed pandemic drill there, whether burnt-out urbanites are heading to the mountains, dropping out in China & who’s lying flat – click here to read…
