All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A second edition of Robert Fortune’s Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China: Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk and Cotton Industries With an Account of the Agriculture and Horticulture of the Chinese, John Murray, London 1847 – includes illustrations.
Brilliantly there is now an affordable paperback edition of British Modernism and Chinoiserie, (Edinburgh University Press), edited by Anne Witchard (Emeritus Fellow of the University of Westminster) ….
British Modernism and Chinoiserie Explores Chinese artistic and stylistic influences on Modernist practice in early-twentieth century Britain This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism.
Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealised notion of China, chinoiserie was revived among London’s avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia.
As part of Modernism’s challenge to the ‘universality’ of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking.
As these 10 new chapters demonstrate, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes.
At the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialised.
The essays show that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period.
Key Features * 10 original chapters from leading international figures in the field, including Elizabeth Chang, David Porter and Patricia Laurence * Includes 28 figures (10 in colour) to illustrate the text * Coverage of literature, painting and poetry, as well as performance and visual media, theatre, fashion and dance, interior and garden design and international exhibitions.
A little follow on from my post yesterday regarding my latest column for Macau Closer magazine on Maurice Dekobra’s 1938 Macao: L’enfer du jeu:
Maurice Dekobra’s 1938 Macao: L’enfer du jeu (Macao: Gambling Hell) has never been translated into English. But here’s a French first edition from Les éditions Baudinière of Paris, who were Dekobra’s long time publishers…
Unfortunately in 1940 founder Gilbert Baudinière chose to align with Vichy and Éditions Baudinière pivoted into publishing explicitly antisemitic and collaborationist literature immediately following the German occupation of France. In 1944 Éditions Baudinière was officially banned and excluded from the French publishing profession.
My latest column for Macau Closer magazine (online and available in Macau at stockists including Livraria Portuguesa) is on the now rather overlooked interwar French literary star Maurice Dekobra’s 1938 novel Macao: L’enfer du jeu (Macao: Gambling Hell), unfortunately never translated into English and, perhaps more intriguingly, you can watch the French movie adaptations (the original was reshot for reasons of Nazis, Vichy, antisemitism and occupation…
Oliver Bullough’s Everyone Loves Our Dollars (W&N) is a fascinating read on the business of money laundering. For those interested in where China fits into the global picture Bullough has plenty to say on Informal Value Transfer Systems (IVTSs), Bicester, Macao and Chinese involvement in Saipan.
We spoke about this and a lot more at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last week…
A Royal Berkshire Regiment’s embroidered panel. The regiment’s predecessor (the 49th Hertfordshire Regiment of Foot) fought in the First Opium War in China, being awarded by the British Army the “China Dragon” symbol for actions in Chusan (Zhoushan), Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), and Shanghai. Later units also served in garrison and patrol duties in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Thomas Cook’s Handbook for Tourists to Peking, Tientsin, Shan-Hai-Kwan, Mukden, Dairen, Port Arthur and Keijyo – that’s to say Beijing, Tianjin, Shanhaiguan, Shenyang, Dalian, Lushunkou and Seoul. This is a second edition with the original publisher’s yellow cloth boards, cover lettered in black within black frame, yellow advertising end papers, folding frontispiece map of railway and steam connections across East Asia and folding maps of Beijing and Seoul.
The second edition was published in 1913 in London and was revised and updated version of the first edition in 1911 and the end of the Qing and formation of the first Chinese Republic. They included the line, “It is seldom such momentous changes take place in a country within three years as have shaken the political, industrial and civil life of China since this book was first compiled.”
A great launch earlier this week of the UK edition of The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City (Elliot & Thompson) at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Thanks to EIBF, James Brodie for moderating, Waterstones for their immense book tent and everyone who came along….
