A Quick Plug for the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai’s Book Club

A change, and an expansion, to the RAS Shanghai book club: more details on their website

Frontline Club Event – Andrew MacGregor Marshall on Thailand: A Kingdom in Crisis – 12/11/14

Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s controversial Thailand: A Kingdom in Crisis is the latest book in the Asian Arguments series that I commission and edit for Zed Books. Struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. Long dreaded by Thais, the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analyzed, because Thailand’s draconian lèse majesté law has silenced most discussion.

Andrew will be speaking at the Frontline Club in London on November 12th…more details here

In May 2014, Thailand underwent its 12th successful military coup in 82 years. This time, there has been no promise of a quick return to civilian rule; a spokesperson for the National Council of Peace and Order has stated that in Thailand’s current situation, normal democratic principles cannot be applied. In August, King Bhumibol officially endorsed General Prayuth Chan-ocha as the country’s Prime Minister.

As the country’s plans for political reform begin to take shape, we will be discussing the normalisation of coups in Thailand, the problematic issue of the country’s ageing king and the perennial conflict between the Thai elite and the rural majority.

We will be joined by a panel of experts to examine the root causes of Thailand’s ongoing political crisis and what actions, if any, can be taken to resolve it.

The panel:

Andrew MacGregor Marshall is a journalist, political risk consultant and corporate investigator, focusing mainly on Southeast Asia. He spent 17 years as a correspondent for Reuters, covering amongst others conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and political upheaval in Thailand. He is author of A Kingdom in Crisis.

Additional speaker to be announced.

Rememberance Day – Betrayal at Versailles – To understand Beijing now, go back to Paris then

November 11th, remembering the 11th day of the of the eleventh month of 1918 and the armistice of World War One. Time to link to a recent piece I penned for the China Economic Review on how the immediate fall out from World War One has affected China’s development from that moment till the present day….

Allied troops crowd round a window by Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors to witness the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty in 1919 – China chose not to sign…

Raymond Chandler and Chinese Rugs

What was it with hard boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler and Chinese rugs? Regular China Rhyming readers will know I often go for a bit of a wander up some rather obscure alleyways of China studies and Chinoiserie and this is one of those alleys I’m afraid. However, I recently decided to reread a bit of Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels as a hard boiled noir fan and because the great Glaswegian crime writer William Macillvaney recently recommended, at the Getafe Negro noir writing festival, Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake as the best noir novel ever written.

And it does seem Chinese rugs pop up rather a lot in Chandler. Take the aforementioned The Lady in the Lake (1943) for instance – page 1 in fact – when Marlowe visits the Treloar Building on LA’s Olive Street and the offices of the Gillerlain Company – “Their reception room had Chinese rugs, dull silver walls, angular but elaborate furniture, sharp shiny bits of abstract scultpture on pedestals and a tall display in a triangular showcase in the corner.” Just pages later an interior office also features more Chinese rugs. Shortly afterwards Marlowe heads off towards Malibu to see a man called Lavery, a gigolo – “He held the door wide and I went past him, into a dim pleasant room with an apricot Chinese rug that looked expensive….” There’s those Chinese rugs again!

Bogart as Marlowe

Chinoiserie pops up in his earlier novel The Big Sleep (1939) as well. Again Marlowe is on the prowl in LA – “A. G. Geiger’s place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevard near Las Palmas. The entrance door was set far back in the middle and there was a copper trim on the windows, which were backed with Chinese screens, so I couldn’t see into the store. There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows. I didn’t know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills.” Later Marlowe get to the antique dealer Geiger’s house – examining the floor by a totem pole Marlowe notices things: “At its foot, beyond the margin of a Chinese rug, on the bare floor, another rug had been spread.” Geiger is dead and, you’ve guess it, laid out on top of a Chinese rug. We already know what this room looks like – “It was a wide room, the whole width of the house. It had a low beamed ceiling and brown plaster walls decked out with strips of Chinese embroidery and Chinese and Japanese prints in grained wood frames. There were low bookshelves, there was a thick pinkish Chinese rug in which a gopher could have spent a week without showing his nose above the nap.”

Indeed hardly a work of Chandler’s doesn’t feature a Chinese rug. In The Simple Art of Murder (1950), a collection of Philip Marlowe stories, Marlowe visits the house of a rather villainous Filipino character – “It was a big room with walls paneled in diagonal strips of  wood. A yellow Chinese rug on the floor, plenty of good furniture, countersunk doors that told of soundproofing, and no windows.” In Trouble is My Business (1950) a peach coloured Chinese rug makes an appearance.

So what was it with Raymond Chandler and Chinese rugs – sorry, no idea!

Raymond Chandler – a man who clearly appreciated a good Chinese rug

Peake in China: Memoirs of Ernest Cromwell Peake

Ernest Cromwell Peake, medical missionary in northern China and father of Mervyn Peake of Gormenghast fame, has had his China memoirs published by the British Library….

Dr Ernest Cromwell Peake was the first medical missionary to arrive in the region of Hankow, inland China, and he had to overcome significant obstacles in the building and establishment of his hospital, as well as the intense hostility of the Chinese towards foreigners and towards Western medical practice. He succeeded in his endeavour, and during his time in China he also married and had two children, one of whom was the writer and artist Mervyn Peake, whose first 12 years were spent there. Dr Peake wrote his memories of this period many years later when he had returned with his family to England, recording his arrival, his impressions of the Chinese, and the story of his establishment of a hospital. He also witnessed the historic events of the Chinese Revolution in 1911, the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the Boxer Rebellion. The memoirs provide a fascinating account of a Westerner in China at the turn of the last century. Of equal interest is the influence of the China years on Dr Peake’s son Mervyn, who was born in China and went on to become one of the most talented British writers and artists of the twentieth century. An introduction by the renowned biographer Hilary Spurling explores the connection between Mervyn Peake’s years in China and his Gormenghast novels.

Marco Polo Reaches the Distant Shores of Netflix

Netflix is running trailers for its latest big TV series – Marco Polo. Some will love it, some will hate it….

Here’s the trailer…

and here’s the creator James Fusco talking about it with some “historians”….

Shanghai’s Russkiye Zapiski (Russian Annals)

I know very little about this publication from 1930s/1940s Shanghai – Russkiye Zapiski, or Russian Annals. This letterhead is from 1940 and shows the publication as bi-monthly and headquartered on the rue du Roi Albert, now Shanxi Road South. I believe the publication was established around 1937 and had links with White Russian emigre groups in Paris (noting that it was based in the French Concession in Shanghai). Things are slightly confused due to spellings and translations – it appears in records as Russkie and also as Russian Notes as well as Annals. The publication appears to have been founded in Shanghai though perhaps funded by the Russian emigre community in France. And that’s all I know I’m afraid.

Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai – Looting and Burning the Yuanmingyuan: The event of 1860, its Afterlife and Interpretation Today in China – 8/11/14

RAS WEEKENDER

The event of 1860, its Afterlife and Interpretation Today in China