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 Using a host of previously unpublished letters and diaries, Patrick Wright reconstructs their journey via the USSR to the New China, capturing the impressions – both mistaken and genuinely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.
If you ask me Canadian Pacific looks rather a nice way to go from Shanghai to Canada (you could then jump a train to the USA if you wanted). Although times have changed – I’m up for deck games and parties but not sure my British sense of ‘Carry On’ could handle the promise ‘Hardly an hours passes but they give me some little unexpected service…’ Ohh Matron!
Still, better than watching moronic kids play mindless video games for 12 hours in a flying sardine can.
Passing through London it seemed only right that China Rhyming should pass a pleasant weekend breakfast (full English of course) at this appropriate establishment on Marylebone High Street. Apologies for erratic posting over the next week or so as criss-crossing America in a rather hasty way.
Of course the great Chinese film studios of the interwar years, largely in Shanghai, made films with Chinese actors for Chinese audiences about largely Chinese themes. Yet why not try and persuade some Shanghailanders to go see the movies too? And indeed the studios did some times, such as this example of advertising in the English language press for United China Motion Picture Corp’s 1940 flick The Beauty of Beauties. I know nothing about this film except what the ad tells me. It might be a good flick or it might be a load of toss, I don’t know. But the ad directed at Shanghailanders (who could go see no end of Westerns, Shirley Temples etc etc coming out of Hollywood) is interesting all the same. I’m also afraid that the ‘Orient’s Greatest Love-Team’ of Claire Yuan and Sunny May strike no chords or ring any bells with me.
Still 10 out of 10 for effort – I wonder if anyone went to see it?
Now I know next to nothing about cars – don’t own one, don’t pay much attention to them, basically couldn’t care less about them. And there’s definitely too many of them. But, were I back in 1937 (where regular readers of this blog will know that I long to be!) I would make a withdrawal from my bank accounts and slap down some silver taels on the new 1937 Dodge, a rather attractive looking little beast for the Shanghailander about town and a damn sight better looking than a VW Passat I think you’ll agree. Dodge hoped so too and had the full range up at the China Motors Distributors on Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road).
OK – this is one of those posts where you all go, ‘what? you didn’t know that!’
Stuck in Hong Kong airport courtesy of Typhoon Fanapi trying to get back to Shanghai last week. Faced with a long delay I walk into the bookshop and buy Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles figuring he’s entertaining enough to make a delay a pleasure (and it worked too!). Enjoyed it so much that got home and looked up Fry’s old Jeeves and Wooster show on Tudou, source of all illegal TV for me – they’ve got it (here). While watching laugh to myself that the day before, wasting time in Hong Kong University Library, I had been reading reports of cases of pirates in Hong Kong coming up before the stern British judge called Wodehouse.
A Hong Kong typhoon – Stephen Fry – Jeeves and Wooster – PG Wodehouse – a judge called Wodehouse in 19th century Hong Kong – a lovely bit of coincidence
Except of course that Henry Ernest Wodehouse(1845–1929), who received the CMG, was indeed a British judge in Hong Kong. His, and wife Eleanor’s, third son was christened Pelham Grenville. Though born in the rather boring surroundings of Guilford, young Pelham Grenville did go to Hong Kong and lived there until he was four, not really enough time to get to know the Colony or for it to leave any particular mark on the young PG the way it did with other British writers who spent part of their youth in China such as JG Ballard and his Shanghai years feeding his modernism or Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (spookily the 2000 TV adaptation of which featured Stephen Fry I believe) clearly revealing his early years in the British Concession of Tientsin and visitng the Forbidden City in Peking.
No – sadly Jeeves and Bertie Wooster owe nothing to Hong Kong but Pelham Grenville’s old man laid down the law on the barren rock between 1869 and 1895.
What looks to be an interesting book just out – Early Kowloon – from the University Art Gallery at Hong Kong University
In 1897, the Hong Kong government authorized the Kowloon Godown Company to construct a tramway in Kowloon. It was constructed for transporting cargo, not passengers. The success of passenger-carrying trams on Hong Kong Island which had been in operation since 1904, had encouraged the Hong Kong Tramway Ltd to ask the Government for permission to establish tramlines for passenger-carrying trams in Kowloon. However, the government rejected the proposal. This book focuses on the regions of Kowloon where tramways were proposed to be constructed in the 1910s. In recent years, Kowloon has undergone rapid development. The whole district including Tseung Kwan O is covered or will be covered with underground railways or railways, which are, in fact, a kind of modernized tram. Based on historical documents, records, newspapers, and old photographs, this book hopes to take readers back to the old days along the route of the planned Kowloon tramways.
Wednesday, September 29th, 7 pm (talk starts at 7:30)
China has gone from famine to gluttony in two generations – a massive achievement. But there is a downside. Up to 120 million Chinese are obese – a fourfold increase in less than two decades – and about half are kids. The costs of obesity will be massive. China’s healthcare system faces a time bomb of 100 million adults with diabetes within a couple years. Matthew Crabbe will talk about impact of rising incomes, changing lifestyles and fast-food culture on the world’s most populous nation and the challenges ahead.
Venue details: The House of Roosevelt (Teddy or FD??), Bund No. 27, 27 Zhongshan Dong Yi Road (Between the Peace Hotel and the Peninsula) Tel: 2333 0800
