All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Kassia St Clair on The Race to the Future – the Peking-Paris 1907 Car Rally – an RAS China Zoom, 21.2.24
Shanghai 202 Folding Camera, 1960s…
As it’s that time of year – a reup of my CrimeReads Crime & the City on Chinatowns.
Jonathan Seitz’s Protestant Missionaries in China (University of Notre Dame Press)…
With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world.
As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology.
Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars.
I blogged recently on the aesthetic appeal of old China photo albums that were often supplied by the photograph studios in cities like Shanghai, Tientsin and Hong Kong as well as ports such as Weihaiwei. They were also sold to those on the Eastern Grand Tour in places like Singapore, Manila and Yokohama. Here two lacquered albums, most probably from Japan, with a cover inlaid and painted featuring a bird in a flowering tree. The interior with nine silk lined pages painted with various floral scenes…(another photo album-related post here).
Many “Old China Hands” in Beijing will recognize a woman on the cover of the 2023 Royal Asiatic Society China Journal, which launched in January. Educator and anthropologist Isabel Crook, born in Chengdu to Canadian missionary parents, died last August at the age of 107. She was a long-time Beijing resident known to some of us. Remarkably, she witnessed the demise of the Qing government, two world wars (and took part in WWII as a member of the Canadian armed forces), China’s warlord period and Republican era, and the victory of the communist regime. An obituary appears in the journal.
This edition also features a rich menu of varied topics and contributors, many of them RASBJ speakers: authors Paul French and Mark O’Neill, Sinologist Frances Wood, and culinary writer Jen Lin-Liu. (Jen reviewed the autobiography of Buwei Yang Chao, dubbed the “Julia Child of China”. Many of you may know Jen as the founder of Black Sesame Kitchen, a private dining establishment in Beijing.)
Frances contributed a review of “The Peking Express: The Bandits who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China”, a successful first book by Beijing lawyer and RASBJ advisor James Zimmerman.
There are also hidden gems from less familiar writers such as Margaret Sun who contributed a personal narrative about wartime adversity, starting over, grief, and ultimate contentment, told through the vehicle of a Shanghai apartment building at what was then 156 Peking Road, her former home.
In 2023 London’s RAS — the “mother ship” which inspired RASBJ’s creation ten years ago — celebrated its Bicentenary and the RAS China Journal observed its 165th birthday. To mark these milestones, the journal has several articles focused on the history of RAS branches across the globe. Dr. Elizabeth Driver presents a memorable account of the RAS Bicentenary tour of Rajasthan, which followed in the footsteps of Col James Tod in 1819-1822 when he was the first political agent for the East India Company. Tod became a founding RAS member and the Society’s first Librarian.
PDF copies of the journal will be available free to RASBJ members as a membership perq. If you’d like hard copies, email communications@rasbj.org Also email us to purchase a five-volume hard-copy set of 2019-2023 journals; a few were left over from RASBJ’s silent auction in November. We call them “the color series” because –while a number of previous years’ journal covers were beige — the covers of 2019-2023 ranged from shades of green to turquoise to orange.
If you enjoy reading the journal – published by RAS Shanghai and edited by Melinda Liu – and if it inspires you to propose a contribution to the 2024 journal, read on!
two, sadly non-attirbuted, reverse paintings on glass in the Chinese School featuring the Canton Factories…
