All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
You don’t have to wait for me to turn up in Beijing to do the Midnight in Peking Walk (though it’s fun to do it that way) – it’s available on VoiceMap too if you just fancy heading out into the hutongs – https://voicemap.me/tour/beijing/midnight-in-peking
Evelyn Iritani’s Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II (Farrer, Strauss, Giraux)…..
In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup― the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this endeavor.
In Safe Passage, the award-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the herculean efforts of the American diplomat James Keeley to engineer these wartime exchanges despite great resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard conflicts among passengers, including missionaries, revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists; and the moral compromises involved in securing their safe passage. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States uprooted and repatriated Japanese citizens of Latin America, sometimes against their will, while Japanese imprisoned in camps, many of them American citizens, were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. The result is a revelatory account of the hurdles to pursuing humanitarian action in wartime.
Caroline Sanderson’s August 2026 UK Non-Fiction Picks for The Bookseller magazine…
Hans Bahlke – “General Merchant” – ran a stationary and general store on Hatamen Street (Chongwenmen) in the early 1900s. As you can see in the photo here there was also a depot attached to the store. He sold postcards (photographed, printed and sold by Bahlke under his own brand), maps and souvenirs of Peking and the surrounding area. He also stocked newspapers, journals and books, novels particularly, in English, French and German advertising “First Class Authors Only” – I wonder who didn’t make the cut!! Bahlke also had a store in Tianjin and both sold German coffee, cigars, liqueurs and clothing items (see the ad below for a full list!)
In 1909 he published “Guide to Peking and Neighbourhood” which was published by the German newspaper in Tianjin Tageblatt für Nord-China. The usual guide to hotels, restaurants and sights with ads for newspapers, shops and hotels.
Loving Monument Books and Toys Phnom Penh, Cambodia!!
‘Shanghai Millionaire’ board game, which is a rare localized version of Monopoly, produced for English speaking expatriates in Shanghai between 1935 and 1946.
Ruth Mandujano López’s Steamships across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914 (Hong Kong University Press)….
During the nineteenth century, the transpacific world underwent profound transformation, due to the transition from sail to steam navigation that was accompanied by a concomitant reconfiguration of power. This book explores the ways in which diverse Mexican, British, Chinese, and Japanese interests participated, particularly during Porfirio Díaz’s presidency at the peak of Mexico’s participation in the steam network: from its 1860s outset through a time of many revolutionary changes ending with the World War, the Mexican Revolution, the opening of the Panama Canal, and the introduction of a new maritime technology based on vessels run by oil. These transoceanic exchanges, generated within these new geographies of power, contributed not only to the formation of a transpacific region but also to refashioning the Mexican national imaginary.
With transnationalism, global and migration studies as its main framework, this study draws upon a dazzling array of primary sources to center Mexico’s transpacific relations and the influence they wielded over the region at the height of the steamship period.
Mahjong of course remains a part of life in the Chinese world, and is having a sometimes curious sort of revival among some groups in America at the moment attracting attention – as in the slightly bizarre March New York Times magazine piece which led to a lot of justified ridicule online – below if you haven’t seen it). Of course Mahjong has a history and was also popular with Shanghailanders in the early twentieth century. And so guides and rules had to be published in English too by enterprising local publishers.
A rare copy of Directions for Playing Ma-Jong, (Mahjong) published by Ven Ku Tsar & Co., (文源齋), a curio and fine arts dealer located in the Shanghai French Concession of during the early 20th century. It’s just nine pages with illustrations. The address is #70 Yen Hai Street, Old North Gate (Laobeimen), Shanghai – so the old town (Nanshi). Their store was at #416 Rue Eugene Bard (which, depending on which end of the street #416 at that time, was either Taicang Road (South) or Shunchang Road (North).
[nd], c.1910, full page illustration followed by 9pp text
