All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Some Shanghai silversmiths i’ve noted before include Wang Hing, Wo Shing, Hung Chong, Luen Wo, and Zeewo, Tuck Chang, Zee Sung and others (just put “silversmiths” in the search box). Add to this Shanghai-based Luen Hing…
Another month, another novel set in the Shanghai Jewish “ghetto” – The Box with the Sunflower Clasp by Rachel Meller…(perhaps it’s time, given the welter of history books, novels, articles, docs etc on the subject, to cease using the “hidden history” tagline?)…
Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai.
Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life – a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply – a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love.
Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.
Just telling everyone I know that an old book of mine – about the great American advertising man in Shanghai, Carl Crow, is now available in Chinese!! And a massive thanks to my translator – Nie Zuguo 聂祖国
On Douban : https://book.douban.com/subject/36197122/On Dangdang : http://product.dangdang.com/29566365.html
I just repost this as I thought the book came out earlier this year, but it appears it was just published this May – so a reminder…
I guess the recent Chinese movie The Eight Hundred raised awareness of the Nationalist army’s battle of Sihang Warehouse in 1937 Shanghai and perhaps partly prompted this book by Stephen Robinson, which i was asked to blurb: Here’s a link to the book and below my blurb….and I also note Guan Hu’s movie is available to rent on amazon…
“The story of the 1937 battle of Sihang Warehouse, the resistance against the Japanese onslaught of Shanghai, and the heroism of the 800 Chinese soldiers who fought to the bitter end is one of the great stories of bravery in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Yet it is so little acknowledged outside China. Stephen Robinson’s highly readable history of the event is both comprehensive and concise, detailed yet placing this definitive event within the broader history of wartime China.” ― Paul French, author of City of Devils and Destination Shanghai
Alexander V Pantsov’s new Chiang Kai-shek biography…
Vaudine England’s Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong (Little, Brown) is an absolutely excellent history of the city and much recommended. Vaudine accentuates the multicultural ascpect of Hong Kong, right from the start – English, Portuguese, Parsi etc etc and, of course, Chinese from all over too – Fortune’s Bazaar returns Hong Kong to us as what it essentially is and always has been – a port city. Urging you to pick this one up if you’re at all interested in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party who continues to threaten its democracy and put its rich legacy at risk. Here, renowned journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong’s complex history and its people-diverse, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan-who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today.
Rather than a traditional history describing a town led by British Governors or a mere offshoot of a collapsing Chinese empire, Fortune’s Bazaar is the first thorough examination of the varied peoples who made Hong Kong. While British traders and Asian merchants had long been busy in the Indian and South East Asian seas, there were many from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds who arrived in Hong Kong, met and married-despite all taboos-and created a distinct community. Many of Hong Kong’s most influential figures during its first century as a city were neither British nor Chinese-they were Malay or Indian, Jewish or Armenian, Parsi or Portuguese, Eurasian or Chindian-or simply, Hong Kongers. England describes those overlooked in history including the opium-traders who built synagogues or churches, ship-owners carrying gold-rush migrants, property tycoons, and more. Here, too, is the visionary who plumbed Hong Kong’s harbor depths to spur reclamation, the half-Dutch Chinese gentleman with two wives who was knighted by Queen Victoria, and the landscape gardeners who settled Kowloon and became millionaires.
A story of empire, race, and sex, Fortune’s Bazaar combines deep archival research and oral history to present a vivid history of a special place-a unique city made by diverse people of the world, whose part in its creation has never been properly told until now.
Edward Weech’s Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning…
A brilliant polymath and part of the ‘first wave’ of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world. While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. His travels included the salons of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. Manning’s extraordinary story sheds a new light on English Romanticism.
My Crime and the City column for crimereads.com bounces all over the globe but occasionally to places readers of China Rhyming might find especially interesting – this go round, it’s Kabul…click here
