All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Just noticed RTHK3’s Hong Kong Heritage repeated the walk I talk through Hampstead with Annemarie Evans & Diana Yeh rediscovering the lives of playwright Hsiung Shih-I & his writer wife Dymia in 1930s London…click here
Bateman‘s in the village of Burwash, East Sussex is the grand old (originally Jacobean) home of Rudyard Kipling. the views of the Sussex countryside are delightful and it is well maintained courtesy of the National Trust. There is also a lot of Kipling-memorabilia all around, much of it Chinese or Chinoiserie. These items include a Chinese pen-case and Tibetan ghost-dagger and a set of Chinese porcelain glazed with the East India Company crest (once noted in a 1987 piece for the NY Times). Rather unremarkable but still interesting is this portrait of a Chinese lady that is on the wall beside Kipling’s former bed… perhaps interesting that he chose this to be in his bedroom where he would see it everyday…
Shanhaiguan, 1910, photographed by Private H Brown, 1st Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers….
Mark L Clifford’s Let There Be Light: How Electricity Made Modern Hong Kong (Columbia University Press)…
The remarkable success of twentieth-century Hong Kong was driven by electricity. The British colony’s stunning export-driven economic growth, its status as a Cold War capitalist dynamo, its energetic civil society, its alluring urban modernity―all of these are stories of electricity’s transformative power.
Let There Be Light is a groundbreaking history of electrification in Hong Kong. Mark L. Clifford traces how a power company and its visionary founder jumpstarted Hong Kong’s postwar economic rise and set in motion far-reaching political and social change against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s shifting relations with the People’s Republic of China and the United Kingdom. Clifford examines avowedly laissez-faire Hong Kong’s attempt to nationalize electricity companies and the longer-term implications of debates over the power supply for citizen activism and the development of civil society, government involvement in tackling housing and other social issues, and state controls on private businesses.
Clifford explores the effects of electrification on both grand politics and daily life. In the geopolitical struggle of the Cold War, Hong Kong became an explicitly anti-Communist showcase of production and consumption. Its bright lights and neon signs stood in contrast to the darkness and drabness of neighboring China. Electricity transformed people’s everyday lives, allowing children to study at night, streets to be lit, and shops in a self-consciously commercial mecca to stay open late.
Mark L. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and the former executive director of the Asia Business Council. He was a director of Next Digital, publisher of the prodemocracy Apple Daily newspaper, and editor in chief of Hong Kong’s two English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and The Standard. His books include The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency (Columbia, 2015). Clifford lived in Hong Kong from 1992 to 2020.
Two war posters celebrating the 19th Route Army in the 1932 Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai. Both titled “Nineteenth Route Army in the Battle at Shanghai”. The design features 15 wartime scenes from the Shanghai War of 1932 including soldiers, horses, canons, planes, boats, nurses and battlefield conflicts. The main defence force at the The Battle of Shanghai was the 19th Route Army.
Part 2 (of 3 – it’s such a massive & complex book!) of my chat with Jeff Quest of The Le Carre Podcast on The Honourable Schoolboy where we deep-dive Liese Worth, the Kuo Brothers, Smiley’s problems & Westerby’s motivations (you can find part 1 at the same site) – click here
My September author Q&A for the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine – Michael Sheridan, author The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China (Headline Books) understanding Xi’s motivations is key to understanding China’s business landscape going forward. Click here
John Hambleton Holdcroft’s (1926-2014) Hong Kong Harbour scene is perhaps interesting as, though painted in the twentieth century it is a representation of Victoria harbour in the nineteenth century. Similarly so with his image of HMS Tamar, which was gone by 1941. So I’m not sure when, or if, Holdcroft was in Hong Kong (he may have worked from photographs, other China School paintings) – if any has more information I’d love to know?
John Hambleton Holdcroft was born in Bristol, educated at the Bristol Cathedral School, war service with the Black Watch regiment and then returned to Bristol to study at The West England College of Art. He later spent time at the artists’ colony on the Channel Island of Sark (where Mervyn Peake was). He later worked with the Oslo Museum on producing a series of large pen drawings of the city and, in 1960 he returned to London to work for the advertising firm Mather & Crowther. In 1967 John moved to St Leonard’s to take up the post of Head of Graphic Design at Hastings College.
