The Sea Captain’s Shop was a very well-known store in 1930s Shanghai run by local celebrity Mrs W Tornroth (a celeb as she was always in the Shanghai paper social columns). This advert from December 1934.
The store was known for its amazing interior decor and range of luxury Chinese made goods (silk etc) for men and women mixed in with various curios and Chinese objets. The store’s location, adjacent to the Cathay Hotel in the Central Arcade alongside other antique stores and useful locations such as American Express and Thomas Cook. Tornroth specialised in selling to the sojourners arriving by ship and staying at the Cathay and Palace – prices were high, but good by US and European standards.
The shop, by the way, was named in honour of Mrs Tornroth’s husband, Captain W Tornroth, a US Naval Commander (around the time of World War One) who had also commanded one of the Yangtze Rapids ships for several years. Tornroth and his wife were lifelong collectors of Chinese antiques and curios. The Tornroth’s were interned in WW2 and repatriated from Shanghai on the Gripsholm.
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Alec Ash describes his book, slated to come out Feb. 8, as the memoir of his first year living in a quiet mountain village in the valley of Dali, southwest China, in 2020, after leaving the honk and buzz of Beijing. This enclave of rural escape has increasingly attracted ‘reverse-migrants’ from the cities, disillusioned with China’s high-pressure urban life (and authoritarian politics), instead seeking personal freedoms and alternative ways of life, be it spirituality, environmentalism, mind-altering experiences or just the simple life – hiding away from the state, and from modernity, where “the mountains are high, the emperor far away.” The book traces his quest for some of the same grails, after personal circumstances led him there. The Mountains Are High is a beautifully written, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important and taking a leap of faith to reach it can genuinely transform your life. As one of the ‘new migrants’ tells Alec when he arrives: it is easy to change your environment, far more difficult to change your mind.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:A writer and editor focused on China, Alec Ash lived in Beijing and Dali between 2008 and 2022. He is the author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), literary nonfiction about the lives of six young Chinese people, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His long-form articles have appeared in NYRB, LARB, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and elsewhere, and he has been a stringer for The Sunday Times and The Economist. He was previously editor of LARB China Channel, founder of the writers’ collective The Anthill, and contributor to two anthologies of literary reportage, Chinese Characters, and While We’re Here. He currently edits the China Books Review at Asia Society.
MORE ABOUT THE MODERATOR: Rianka Mohan is a freelance writer and former investment banker. Her poetry was included in Mingled Voices 6: The International Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology and her work has been showcased at The Glass House Festival, Lens of Passion, Spittoon, and Republic of Brown. Previously, she has moderated panels for the Beijing International Society, RASBJ (Desert Pilgrims), the EU-China Literary Festivals, and the Neilson Hays Literature Festival, among others.
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From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West’s relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back.
The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways seen as superseded by the West. From Chicago to Calcutta, and from antiquity to the new millennium, this is a rich, involving story of misunderstandings and sincere connection, of inspiration and falsehood, of geniuses, adventurers and con-men.
Christopher Harding’s captivating gallery of people and places celebrates Asia’s impact on the West in all its variety.
Christopher Harding is the author of the widely praised Japan Story: In Search of a Nation– described by Neil MacGregor as ‘Masterly. How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it’ – and The Japanese. Harding teaches at the University of Edinburgh and frequently broadcasts on Radio 3 and Radio 4. He also writes the IlluminAsia blog, about Asia’s influence on Western life.
A set of three prints/engravings – panoramic Views of Hong Kong Island and the Vicinity, with Named Landmarks, as seen from, and drawn by, Lieutenant L. G. Heath, R.N. of H.M.S. Iris in 1846. I also add below a painting of Iris in Hong Kong in 1846….
Graham Sutherland painted Maugham in 1949 at Cap Ferrat. The artist Gerald Kelly told Maugham ‘you look like the madam of a brothel in Shanghai’. Maugham’s reaction is not known. The portrait now resides the Tate Collection
As Blacksmith Books have just published the fourth in the China Revisited series of reprints of old writing on Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China (Harry A Franck’sRoving Through Southern China) you can catch up with a series bundle from Blacksmith and save 20% on the combined price of the four – that’s a good Stretched January deal for you!!
A photo of the unveiling of the statue of Zhou En-lai in the North Korean city of Hamhung, South Hamgyong province. The Statue was unveiled in May 1979 (or Juche 68 for those so inclined) with attendant wreaths, a few years after Zhou’s death. Zhou had visited the city in 1958. I see some later pictures on the internet and it remains in place, largely unchanged though the base seems a little reduced, but otherwise….
