Always nice to come across something interesting where you might not expect it and not looking for it. ETC Werner, the former British diplomat in China as well as noted Sinologist and father of Pamela Werner (the victim in my forthcoming Murder in Peking book) wrote a number of books, the most famous and oft-reprinted o f which is Myths and Legends of China (1922) which included some impressive images. Strolling around Lin Yutang’s house in Taipei recently (see post on that here) I noticed that his bookshelves have been kept intact and there standing out at me was Lin’s personal copy of Werner’s Myths and Legends of China.
So here’s some prints contained in Werner’s classic book:
I noted the excellent exhibition of John Thomson’s early photographs of China when it passed through China last year. The excellent photos that had come from the Wellcome Trust’s collection, been marvelously cleaned at apparently great expense and exhibited. Now they are also a book – China: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1868-1872) put together by Betty Yao (who I think curated the exhibition too). Thomson’s pictures are probably the most complete of the early China photographers including compared to Beato and others. Anyway, blurb below as ever.
Born two years before the invention of daguerreotype and the birth of photography, Thomson first traveled to Asia in 1862 where he set up a professional photographic studio. The local culture and the people of Asia fascinated him, and in 1868 he made his second trip, this time settling in Hong Kong. Between 1868 and 1872, Thomson made extensive trips to Guangdong, Fujian, Beijing, China’s northeast and down the Yangtse River, covering nearly 5000 miles. This exhibition catalogue is drawn from his time in these regions. These were the early days of photography when negatives were made on glass plates that had to be coated with emulsion before the exposure was made. A huge amount of cumbersome equipment had to be carried from place to place and with perseverance, great energy and stamina, Thomson managed to take a wide variety of images and themes, including landscapes, people, and architecture, domestic and street scenes. As a foreigner, his ability to gain access to photograph women is also remarkable. In China, Thomson excelled as a photographer in quality, depth and breadth, and in artistic sensibility.
John Thomson was born June 14th 1837, in Edinburgh, Scotland. After his schooling in the early 1850s he completed his photographic apprenticeship around 1858. In April 1862, Thomson set off for Singapore. There he opened his first photo studio and became a commercial photographer. During this period, he traveled extensively throughout Asia, photographing the native peoples and their activities. He is the author of several books including The Antiquities of Cambodia (1867), Foochow and the River Min (1873), Illustrations of China and its people (1873), Street life in London (1878) and Through China with a Camera (1898). In 1881 he was appointed photographer to the British Royal Family by Queen Victoria. After retiring from his commercial studio in 1910, Thomson spent most of his time back in Edinburgh. In October 1921, Thomson died of a heart attack at the age of 84.
Just for fun I’ll note that the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s current edition of their magazine, (imaginatively titled) The Correspondent, features my book Fat China (co-authored with Matthew Crabbe). Always great of course to make the cover or such a legendary publication but to also get a cartoon by the great Harry Harrison is an absolute honour.
Mark Kitto is talking about his enjoyable book China Cuckoo, and hopefully the history of Moganshan, this Sunday at the Suzhou Bookworm, a suitable charming little venue.
Book Talk with Mark Kitto- China Cuckoo – Sunday 10th October – 4pm – RMB 30/20 including a free drink
Mark always knew he was operating in dangerous territory from the onset of his media network’s meteoric rise in the late 90s’…Come hear him this Sunday for a breathtaking account of his most unlikely trajectory losing a fortune, and finding a life right here in China.
In booming Shanghai, Mark Kitto hit the big time. The Financial Times called him a ‘mini media mogul’. One weekend, Mark escapes to Moganshan, a dilapidated mountaintop village built by foreigners in the early 1900s as a summer retreat. It’s a familiar story: Mark falls in love with the place and decides to restore one of the villas, as if he were in Tuscany or Provence. But here the familiarity ends. The process is full of the usual pitfalls – but multiplied to the nth degree, Chinese-style. And then, when he dramatically loses his business empire to the Communist Party, what began as a weekend getaway becomes much more: Mark moves his family up the mountain and makes Moganshan his home. The ex-tycoon has gone ‘China CuckooÂ’. Funny, touching and inspiring, Mark’s story gives a very different view of China today.
About the Author
Mark Kitto was a Captain in the Welsh Guards before he became a metals trader in London and then China. His series of That’s listings magazines became the most successful English language publications in China. On the verge of signing the groundbreaking deal that would make him the first authorised foreign publisher, the Communist Party took over his business. He is still in a legal wrangle over copyright. Variously accused of being a spy, pornographer and terrorist, he retreated to Moganshan where he now lives with his wife and two children. The family runs a successful coffee shop that is bringing foreigners back to the mountain for the first time since the Communists came in 1949.
Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to find out that I find today’s selection of cars in the showroom a little dreary. I’ll give you Bentley but the legions of BMWs, Mercedes and GM’s are, as far as I can see, designed for mediocre philistines with little sense of real of real style – the sort of cars men who have those constantly knocking ball things (Newton’s Cradles I believe they’re called) on their desk like.
Oh how different it was in 1941 when cars really were cars and Shanghai streets buzzed with more than a bunch of shitty BYDs and Buick Sails. How about a De Soto or a Chrysler – both with some seriously sleek lines and cars for men who know exactly what they’re capable of and don’t need a canary yellow sports car – remember that prick you saw in Shanghai or Beijing with a pink Lamborghini the other day wearing sunglasses in the rain? He doesn’t get the De Soto!
And a dealership in the Settlement and another in Frenchtown to save you the effort of going far to get one.
As part of the celebrations around Penguin’s five years in China there’s some talks going on this autumn/winter in Shanghai and Peking. I noted Hong Ying talking about Eileen Chang previously in Shanghai and now the same is happening up in China’s latest capital city at the Bookworm.
Friday 8 October
Penguin Classics lunch series
9am-12 noon
150rmb
includes 2-course lunch and tea/coffee
We open the series with Hong Ying discussing Eileen Chang. Prolific Chinese writer Hong Ying is best known for her novels K: the Art of Love, Summer of Betrayal, and her autobiography Daughter of the River.
As part of the celebration of Penguin’s 5th anniversary in China, The Bookworm will be hosting a series of lively Friday lunchtime talks. Each lunch features a well known Penguin author discussing their favourite Penguin Classics book.
Tickets available on the door although we encourage you to book in advance as they go rapidly.
Anyone living in a Chinese city will know that book pirates are commonplace in China selling an increasing range of titles in English and Chinese. I’ve noticed lately the range of English books is getting broader and not just endless Harry Potter and Steig Larson or Malcolm Gladwell and business case study boredom.
However, just in case anyone out there thought book piracy in China was anything new I offer this article from the ChinaWeekly Review in 1940 expressing concerns in Hong Kong about the market being flooded by Chinese made pirated books. Nothing new under the sun! –
A wonderful little book from Patrick Wright – Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China – that digs up some eclectic stuff on British delegations to China all of who were new to me – I had no idea Clem Attlee and Nye Bevan undertook an official delegation to Peking!! Blurb below as usual.
President Nixon’s famous 1972 trip has gone down in history as the first great opening between the West and Communist China. However, eighteen years previously, former prime minister Clement Attlee had also been to China to shake Chairman Mao by the hand. In the second half of 1954, scores of European delegations set off for Beijing, in response to Prime Minister Chou En-lai’s invitation to ‘come and see’ the New China and celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Communist victory. In this delightfully eclectic book, part comedy, part travelogue, and part cultural history, Patrick Wright uncovers the story of the four British delegations that made this journey. These delegations included an amazing range of people from the political, academic, artistic, and cultural worlds of the day: Clement Attlee and his former Health Minister, Nye Bevan; dapper and self-important philosopher A. J. Ayer; the brilliant young artist-reporter Paul Hogarth; poet and novelist Rex Warner (a former Marxist who had just married a Rothschild); and the infuriatingly self-obsessed Stanley Spencer who famously lectured Chou En-lai on the merits of his hometown of Cookham, but who emerges as the unlikely hero of the story. Using a host of previously unpublished letters and diaries, Patrick Wright reconstructs their journey via the USSR to the New China, capturing the impressions – both mistaken and genuinely insightful – of the delegates as they ventured behind both the iron and the bamboo curtains. Full of comic detail of the delegates and their interactions, it is also a study of China as it has loomed in the British mind: the primitive orient of early western philosophy, a land of backwardness that was used to contrast with the progressive dynamism of Victorian Britain, as well as the more recent allure of revolutionary transformation as it appeared in the minds of twentieth century Britons.
