https://www.scmp.com/rss/13666/feed Paul French is the author of Midnight in Peking and City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, as well as most recently, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson. en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com Paul French Paul French You could be forgiven for thinking that the UK has gone samurai mad of late. Director Michihito Fujii’s Last Samurai Standing remains high up the Netflix UK chart, Penguin Books is enjoying a massive bestseller in Shotaro Ikenami’s multi-volume The Samurai Detectives, and the FX miniseries retelling of James Clavell’s Shogun (originally a 1975 novel) was a surprise hit and won various awards. The samurai-inspired Assassin’s Creed Shadows was the fastest-selling video game in Britain in 2025,... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/travel-leisure/article/3345076/gripping-london-samurai-exhibition-explores-japans-warrior-class-and-cuts-through-myths?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/travel-leisure/article/3345076/gripping-london-samurai-exhibition-explores-japans-warrior-class-and-cuts-through-myths?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:15:07 +0000 Paul French Paul French On July 22, 1928, the great and good of Macau gathered to celebrate the official opening of the seven-storey President Hotel, led by the brilliantly mustachioed, poetry-loving Portuguese governor Artur Tamagnini de Sousa Barbosa. The location of the colony’s newest hotel couldn’t have been better: it was the most prominent building on the colonnaded thoroughfare of Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro (San Ma Lo in Cantonese), a stone’s throw from the two historic hubs of colonial Macau: Senado Square and... https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3341024/hotel-central-reopens-and-brings-old-macau-back-life?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3341024/hotel-central-reopens-and-brings-old-macau-back-life?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 02 Feb 2026 04:00:08 +0000 Paul French Paul French Beloved by children, parents, aunties and grandparents alike, this tall, thin, bespectacled and mustachioed gentleman clad in traditional Chinese attire seems to have emerged straight out of the Qing dynasty to observe, under his furrowed brow, the boomtown Hong Kong has become. Old Master Q (老夫子) is too honest, too trusting, too kind for the city’s dog-eat-dog ways, but one who always gets up and dusts himself off. After first appearing in February 1962, the manhua art, or Chinese-language... https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3321945/how-legacy-beloved-hong-kong-comic-strip-old-master-q-lives?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3321945/how-legacy-beloved-hong-kong-comic-strip-old-master-q-lives?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 16 Aug 2025 22:15:08 +0000 Paul French Paul French A precise birth date for art deco is hard to pinpoint, but the term came into common parlance following the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, France, making this year the centenary of one of the most distinctive architectural styles. Cities that embraced the innovations of the early 20th century, in industry, finance, fashion and the arts, likewise embraced art deco in their architecture. In the booming metropolises of New York and Chicago, as... https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3315082/where-find-glimpses-art-deco-architecture-kowloon-hong-kong?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3315082/where-find-glimpses-art-deco-architecture-kowloon-hong-kong?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 22 Jun 2025 11:00:07 +0000 Paul French Paul French What do you do when you’re the two best-known contemporary artists in Britain, you’re at the top of your game and you’re itching to conquer the international art world? That was the question facing the London-based duo Gilbert & George in 1993, and their answer at the time, however counter-intuitively, was China. The controversial pair had long divided British art critics as to whether they were national treasures or merely, as the London Evening Standard’s influential pundit Brian Sewell once... https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3295898/when-brit-art-world-provocateurs-gilbert-george-went-china?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3295898/when-brit-art-world-provocateurs-gilbert-george-went-china?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 30 Jan 2025 06:00:10 +0000 Paul French Paul French The Hongkong Hotel, cornering Queen’s Road Central and Pedder Street, had been a tip-top luxury resort at the turn of the 20th century, but by the start of the Roaring 20s, things were feeling gloomy and down-at-heel. It was unfashionable, unsophisticated and, as non-British guests regularly complained, unwelcoming. Its dinners were boiled to within an inch of remaining solid (proper English style), its dance floor sagged and the overall atmosphere as stuffy and strait-laced as the colonials who... https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3286223/did-you-know-wallis-simpson-stayed-hong-kong-hotel?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/postmag/culture/article/3286223/did-you-know-wallis-simpson-stayed-hong-kong-hotel?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:15:15 +0000 Today it’s hard to imagine such a place existed, but once, on the Sino-Siberian border, there was a kind of Wild West town, similar to those seen in California and Australia. At times of tension between Russia and China, that stretch has been contentious, but for a while in the 1880s, a raft of fortune-seekers descended, searching for gold, from the encampment on the banks of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Amur river, called Zheltuga. At least 10,000 came within a few months, around... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3276514/tales-old-zheltuga-rise-and-equally-abrupt-fall-lawless-19th-century-gold-rush-republic-russia-china?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3276514/tales-old-zheltuga-rise-and-equally-abrupt-fall-lawless-19th-century-gold-rush-republic-russia-china?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 31 Aug 2024 03:15:15 +0000 When a 23-year-old Eurasian woman calling herself Maria Wendt touched down at an airfield near Los Angeles in 1936, the press flocked onto the runway to capture the first images of her descending from the plane. Pathé, Reuters, Gaumont, all sent crews to capture the “woman of mystery” who had made fools of the FBI, who were none too happy about it. As the woman was escorted away by plain-clothes policemen, she pulled down her black hat to cover her face and wrapped her coat tight around her. The... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3274766/og-war-drugs-when-23-year-old-shanghai-nurse-was-busted-smuggling-us1-million-heroin-us?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3274766/og-war-drugs-when-23-year-old-shanghai-nurse-was-busted-smuggling-us1-million-heroin-us?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 17 Aug 2024 07:45:11 +0000 In the 1920s, the pirates of the South China coast faced a new threat to their livelihood of smuggling, kidnapping and hijacking, one that gave them significant pause for thought – anti-piracy submarines. Britain’s Royal Navy, overstuffed with ships, crews and submarines after World War I, wondered what it might do with its new sleek, silent, torpedo-laden vessels. The ships had been battling German U-boats in the North Sea and the English Channel for four long years. In London the Admiralty... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3267357/when-british-sent-submarines-1920s-hong-kong-wipe-out-south-china-coast-pirates?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3267357/when-british-sent-submarines-1920s-hong-kong-wipe-out-south-china-coast-pirates?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 22 Jun 2024 23:45:09 +0000 From the 1930s through to the 70s, the Scottish artist Anna M. Hotchkis’ vibrant watercolours of China and Hong Kong were much sought after and regularly exhibited. So, too, were those of her friend and companion, the American artist Mary Augusta Mullikin. The two women travelled across China together, shared a hutong studio in Beijing and both painted numerous scenes of Beijing and northern China. They also collaborated on several books. Today, the pair are rarely remembered. Hotchkis still... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3263764/intrepid-women-artists-china-who-documented-country-one-painting-time-almost-forgotten-today?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3263764/intrepid-women-artists-china-who-documented-country-one-painting-time-almost-forgotten-today?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 25 May 2024 10:15:10 +0000 You may already know the story of Reginald Johnston, the British tutor to the final Dragon Emperor of the Qing dynasty, Aisin-Gioro Puyi. Even if you haven’t read Johnston’s 1934 memoir, Twilight in the Forbidden City, you might remember him being played by Peter O’Toole in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film, The Last Emperor. The Manchu empire had crumbled, the Chinese Republic was still shaky but triumphant, and emperor, tutor and courtiers knew their days in the Forbidden City were numbered. The... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3257040/last-empress-how-puyis-wife-wanrong-befriended-her-american-tutor-isabel-ingram-forbidden-city?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3257040/last-empress-how-puyis-wife-wanrong-befriended-her-american-tutor-isabel-ingram-forbidden-city?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 29 Mar 2024 23:15:11 +0000 Early March 1942: a squadron of Curtiss-Wright P-40 Warhawk pursuit fighter planes rips across the vast blue skies of the Burma-Yunnan border. The roar is immense, but there are few to hear it. Below is the long and twisting Burma Road, China’s vital lifeline from the Shan State town of Lashio to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, and within what is, in 1942, termed “Free China”. The pilots, a mix of American and British volunteers, have had one mission since their formation in December 1941:... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3253621/how-disneys-flying-tigers-logo-became-symbol-chinas-fight-against-japan-during-world-war-ii?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3253621/how-disneys-flying-tigers-logo-became-symbol-chinas-fight-against-japan-during-world-war-ii?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 02 Mar 2024 07:15:10 +0000 Christmas Eve at the Gascoigne Apartments was always a special time and December 24, 1930, was expected to be the same as usual. The Gascoigne wasn’t the largest apartment building in Shanghai’s Frenchtown, or even the most impressive on the wide boulevard of Avenue Joffre. But it always stood out at Christmas time with coloured lights hung over the entrance and candlelit Chinese lanterns in every window. The residents of the Gascoigne’s five apartments each celebrated the festive season in... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3245991/festive-fiction-mysterious-christmas-eve-party-guest-shanghais-french-concession-and-murder?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3245991/festive-fiction-mysterious-christmas-eve-party-guest-shanghais-french-concession-and-murder?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 23 Dec 2023 23:45:12 +0000 Gina Lollobrigida, one of the big stars of Italian post-war cinema and a Hollywood icon, was the public face of the 1971 Venice International Film Festival. Surrounded by fans and paparazzi, she was clad in a revealing bead-encrusted gown and matching cloche hat. Looking every inch the movie star, Lollobrigida was caught in conversation with a clearly charmed Chinese man wearing a navy blue Zhongshan suit and looking every inch the dedicated Maoist. The picture is all the more remarkable when... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3232907/how-during-cultural-revolution-chinese-ballet-film-broke-west-after-premiering-venice?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3232907/how-during-cultural-revolution-chinese-ballet-film-broke-west-after-premiering-venice?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 31 Aug 2023 10:15:17 +0000 There is much to delight the eye at the current British Museum blockbuster exhibition “China’s Hidden Century (1796-1912)”, on in London until October 8. On show are vivid vermilion and imperial yellow textiles that are two centuries old yet look brand new, minutely decorated fans, intricately woven tapestries, beautiful objets from ceramics to silverware, photography and even early moving pictures. And one exhibit of exceptional historical significance is tucked away in a corner. Encased within... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3228309/british-museums-chinas-hidden-century-exhibition-incredible-history-lesson-whether-or-not-youre?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3228309/british-museums-chinas-hidden-century-exhibition-incredible-history-lesson-whether-or-not-youre?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 22 Jul 2023 09:15:08 +0000 After half a dozen years working in British intelligence, David Cornwell, better known to the world as John le Carré, became a bestselling writer with his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). It was just as well his new career was taking off because le Carré’s days as a spy were over, thanks to Kim Philby’s defection blowing his cover to the KGB. By the 1970s, le Carré was making a decent living from his books, and he decided he wanted to move from Europe and travel Asia to... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3226812/john-le-carres-time-hong-kong-and-spy-novelists-shame-detail-he-got-wrong-about-colony?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3226812/john-le-carres-time-hong-kong-and-spy-novelists-shame-detail-he-got-wrong-about-colony?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 08 Jul 2023 23:45:08 +0000 Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Tan Teng-pho (alternatively Chen Cheng-Po or Chen Chengbo) was the Taiwanese artistic community’s local boy done good, painting many scenes of the island over three productive decades. Now he is little remembered outside his birthplace of Taiwan, but the oil paintings he produced while living and working in Shanghai in the early ’30s were his most admired works, and his best-known today. Tan’s was a life of movement, interacting with the avant garde art worlds of... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3218723/what-would-shanghai-or-tokyo-look-almost-empty-how-taiwanese-artist-found-fame-stripping-cities?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3218723/what-would-shanghai-or-tokyo-look-almost-empty-how-taiwanese-artist-found-fame-stripping-cities?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 29 Apr 2023 23:45:08 +0000 At the turn of the 20th century, any discerning American home whose inhabitants displayed “taste” had an Oriental rug, invariably a Chinese one. But by the late 1920s, tastes were evolving and, while there was still a great appreciation for traditional patterns and the skilled weaving of Chinese pieces, there rose a desire for rugs that incorporated the new vogue for abstract designs and more vibrant colours. The art deco style was popularised largely as the result of the highly influential 1925... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3209709/how-american-transformed-chinese-rug-making-early-1900s-clean-designs-and-work-conditions?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3209709/how-american-transformed-chinese-rug-making-early-1900s-clean-designs-and-work-conditions?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 11 Feb 2023 10:15:09 +0000 Randal Purcell and John Creighton arrived at the door of their first-class couchette on the Shanghai Express at the same time. They would have to share the cramped accommodation, tickets being at a premium on the last Express of the year out of Peking and arriving in time for Christmas Day. Despite living in the same city, the two Englishmen had never met, and moved in very different circles. They would just have to make the best of it. The first-class carriages were the last four, the furthest... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3203572/christmas-fiction-murder-shanghai-express-original-whodunit?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3203572/christmas-fiction-murder-shanghai-express-original-whodunit?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 24 Dec 2022 23:45:13 +0000 The night was a typically hot and humid one in Guangzhou. Martial Henri Merlin, serving governor-general of French Indochina for less than a year, had arrived by train that afternoon from Hong Kong. It was June 1924 and he was on his way home to Hanoi after visiting Tokyo, ostensibly promoting greater trade with French Indochina. His short time in Guangzhou was to be spent entirely on Shamian Island, divided into two foreign concessions controlled by France and Britain since 1859, measuring... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3199814/how-vietnamese-revolutionary-leader-ho-chi-minh-was-inspired-guangzhou-hotel-bombers-anti-colonial?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3199814/how-vietnamese-revolutionary-leader-ho-chi-minh-was-inspired-guangzhou-hotel-bombers-anti-colonial?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 19 Nov 2022 05:15:09 +0000 At 11 o’clock on a warm summer’s morning in 1903, 38-year-old artist Katharine Augusta Carl was ushered into the throne room of the Summer Palace, on the western outskirts of Beijing. 67-year-old Empress Dowager Cixi, who had effectively controlled China for more than 40 years, entered with her chief lady-in-waiting and interpreter Princess Der Ling, an ambassador’s daughter who had spent time in Europe and the United States. By Cixi’s side, as always, was the Guangxu Emperor who, though... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3195121/american-artist-china-who-painted-empress?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3195121/american-artist-china-who-painted-empress?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:15:15 +0000 Until the expulsion, in 1924, of Puyi, the last emperor of China, the treasures of the Forbidden City were largely unknown to the Chinese people. As Puyi left, curatorial teams swiftly moved in to catalogue the imperial collection. The volume and value of what they found was staggering but one object caught the people’s imagination. Adam Brookes’ tale of the fate of the Forbidden City’s treasures, Fragile Cargo, recounts how the collection’s curators – who emerge quickly as heroes – were... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3192072/race-against-time-save-forbidden-citys-treasures?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3192072/race-against-time-save-forbidden-citys-treasures?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 11 Sep 2022 03:15:14 +0000 By the early 1920s, the Beijing Legation Quarter was enjoying a period of relative calm. Behind the precautionary iron gates and the high Tartar Wall, the quarter’s privileged denizens in their embassies, banks, offices, hotels, clubs and residences were slowly forgetting the terror of the Boxer rebellion that had threatened their very existence two decades earlier. Diplomatically there wasn’t much happening. The Republican government was hopelessly divided. It was hard to know which side to... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3190306/sex-violence-suicide-love-triangle-scandal-1920s?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3190306/sex-violence-suicide-love-triangle-scandal-1920s?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 26 Aug 2022 22:15:13 +0000 Today, the name L. Ron Hubbard is automatically referenced as the founder of the Church of Scientology, the celebrity-laden super-rich pyramid faith that has spread around the world with controversies and scandals following at every step. That the religion’s tenets, mostly of attaining consciousness commensurate with a gang of intergalactic superbeings, were dreamed up by Hubbard is well known. Perhaps it is more affirming than surprising then, to find that when spending a few idle hours... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3184563/are-scientology-founder-l-ron-hubbards-far?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3184563/are-scientology-founder-l-ron-hubbards-far?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 10 Jul 2022 08:15:23 +0000 Founded as a military outpost around 1860 and named “Lord of the East”, Vladivostok grew rapidly when it was designated by the Imperial Russian Navy as its main Pacific naval base in 1872. In the 1880s and 1890s, the city was integrated into the Trans-Siberian Railway, running all the way west to Moscow and St Petersburg, and linked up with the Chinese Eastern Railway, with its connections back through Siberia, down to Korea, and as far as the ice-free port of Dalian and the Chinese capital,... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3182097/chinatown-stalin-made-ghost-town-millionka?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3182097/chinatown-stalin-made-ghost-town-millionka?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:15:18 +0000 On the afternoon of Sunday, November 19, 1922, British coastal steamer the Sui An departed Macau on its regular 50-mile journey to Hong Kong. The ship was at capacity, carrying 400 Chinese and a further 60 European passengers, most of the former in second class and the latter, with a few seemingly wealthier Chinese dressed in Western suits, in first. The Sui An was operated by the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company and was a familiar sight in Victoria Harbour. An hour or so out of... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3179279/history-real-pirates-who-dressed-passengers?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3179279/history-real-pirates-who-dressed-passengers?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 29 May 2022 05:45:12 +0000 Portrait of a Thief, by Grace D. Li. Published by Tiny Reparations Books Grace D. Li is extremely busy. She has just published one of the year’s most talked about crime novels, Portrait of a Thief. She is on the road fulfilling a hectic marketing schedule while also executive producing an adaptation of the book for Netflix. In addition, she is about to start her residency at Stanford University’s medical school in the US state of California. Despite everything, she is still keen to jump on Zoom... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3178512/fast-and-furious-movies-portrait-thief-part-heist?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3178512/fast-and-furious-movies-portrait-thief-part-heist?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 21 May 2022 09:15:16 +0000 Too Far From Antibes by Bede Scott; The Zero Season by Justin T. Clark, pub. Penguin Random House SEA Since its launch in 2018, Singapore-based Penguin Random House SEA has sought out new local writing and publisher Nora Nazerene Abu Bakar has built a diverse list across genres and countries. For those who like historical fiction with a powerful sense of place, two new novels from the publisher stand out. Both are from debut novelists and set amid the post-war anti-colonial struggles of French... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3176212/echoes-graham-greene-andre-malraux-debut-novels-set?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3176212/echoes-graham-greene-andre-malraux-debut-novels-set?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 03 May 2022 09:12:09 +0000 British artist Katharine Jowett is little remembered today, but in the mid-20th century she was extremely popular for her oil paintings and woodcuts. But not in Britain. She would come to be known as one of only a few Western female artists who chose to live and work in Japan, Korea and northern China in the years between the two world wars. Jowett’s informal cohort included Americans Helen Hyde, Lilian May Miller and Bertha Lum, along with Scottish artists Elizabeth Keith and Anna Hotchkis.... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3172706/british-artist-whose-paintings-chinas-capital?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3172706/british-artist-whose-paintings-chinas-capital?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 03 Apr 2022 05:15:13 +0000 A hundred years ago, the way the world looked and sounded was being shaped by a host of new technologies that allowed soaring skyscrapers, “talking pictures” at the cinema and a radio in every home. Artists, archi­tects, musicians and writers responded to these developments with new sets of aesthetics such as jazz rhythms, abstract painting and forms of literature, all of which were such departures from their categorical norms that they came to be known, collectively, as modernism. American poet... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3168296/modernism-shanghai-z-art-deco-lu-xun-and-wing?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3168296/modernism-shanghai-z-art-deco-lu-xun-and-wing?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 27 Feb 2022 01:15:24 +0000 The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty, by Joseph Sassoon, pub. Allen Lane Our taste for tales of business dynasties is clearly insatiable. Just ask the creators of patriarch-oligarch Logan Roy and his scheming offspring in HBO’s Succession, watched by millions of television viewers. Pondering his chosen pool of successors, Logan might do well to read Joseph Sassoon’s The Global Merchants for tips. At its height, in the early 20th century, the Sassoon... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3166803/sassoon-dynasty-and-its-succession-problem-how-bad?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3166803/sassoon-dynasty-and-its-succession-problem-how-bad?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 12 Feb 2022 11:15:11 +0000 The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu, translated by Jeremy Tiang, pub. Amazon Crossing A happy winter scene, a smiling close-knit community, good food and a little alcohol. The cover of the first English translation of Liu Xinwu’s 1984 novel The Wedding Party might have you thinking this 400-page novel is a piece of light nostalgia set amid the old hutong alleyway communities of Beijing’s ancient Drum and Bell Towers district (Gulou). Liu also dangles the lure of easy entertainment in the first few... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3162661/dickens-or-dostoevsky-novel-tale-beijing-hutong-life?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3162661/dickens-or-dostoevsky-novel-tale-beijing-hutong-life?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 09 Jan 2022 08:45:18 +0000 Throughout January 1939, newspaper reporters across the United States were salivating over the sordid story of a freshly landed femme fatale and her tanglings with a Hong Kong drugs kingpin. A tale involving war-torn Guangzhou, teeming Hong Kong and seedy Macau, and a luxury-liner voyage across the sea ending in a bedbug-infested hovel in San Francisco’s Chinatown, culminated in a kind of hard-boiled film noir set of a California courthouse. And like any classic of the noir genre, this was a... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3162314/chinese-beauty-caught-smuggling-drugs-us-1939?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3162314/chinese-beauty-caught-smuggling-drugs-us-1939?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 07 Jan 2022 22:15:16 +0000 It’s hard to imagine now, but there were once three mountainous, verdant islands between Macau and mainland China. The Portuguese named them Dom João, Montanha and Lapa. Later the islands became known in Chinese as Xiao (Little) Hengqin, Da (Big) Hengqin and Wanzai, respectively. The two Hengqins, which faced Coloane and Taipa, were eventually joined by land reclamation to form a single island while Wanzai, a mere few hundred metres from Macau’s Inner Harbour (Porto Interior), saw its inclines... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3156715/chinese-islands-next-macau-great-stories-pirates?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3156715/chinese-islands-next-macau-great-stories-pirates?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 21 Nov 2021 05:15:27 +0000 Tokyo Redux by David Peace, pub. Knopf With Tokyo Redux, David Peace’s dark, deep and often twisted neo-noir Tokyo trilogy set in post-war Japan reaches its apotheosis. Peace is partly relieved. The series, based on true stories and still unsolved crimes, has absorbed 14 years of his life. Speaking from his home in Tokyo, the Yorkshire-born British author says: “The crimes that form the focus of the three books are central, but it’s the period that is omnipresent.” That period is that of the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3146021/understand-tokyo-grasp-impact-japans-occupation-after?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3146021/understand-tokyo-grasp-impact-japans-occupation-after?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 23 Aug 2021 08:45:08 +0000 On June 8, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor warned the city’s universities not to let their students be “easily indoctrinated” after being “penetrated by foreign forces” bent on “brainwashing”; forces who either “want to undermine the Chinese government, or have ideological prejudices against China”, expressing that she had “no doubt” that “ulterior motives” were at play, confirming her belief that “these external forces are at work”. Which external forces were these exactly?... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3137711/spies-hong-kong-mainland-chinese-agents-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3137711/spies-hong-kong-mainland-chinese-agents-and?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 20 Jun 2021 06:45:00 +0000 Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin, pub. Granta Publications Until now, Emma Larkin’s much praised writing has centred on Myanmar. Her 2005 book, Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop, sought to explain that country’s history through its ghosts, underground salons and rumour mills – the Burma beyond foreign correspondents’ dispatches or academic conferences; the society below the surface. In her first novel, Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok, Larkin... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3136766/emma-larkins-ode-thailands-capital-city-bangkok?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3136766/emma-larkins-ode-thailands-capital-city-bangkok?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 14 Jun 2021 06:45:00 +0000 A naked woman stands on a sturdy lace-covered table, hands behind her back, head turned to the side, one knee raised, while a group of students flit their eyes between the Chinese model and the adjustable wooden mannequins surrounding her. This scene was photographed in 1920, but not in any European salon. The picture was taken in a shikumen-style building in Shanghai, and it captured the first known life-drawing class using a nude model in China. The Shanghai Academy of Art was a private school... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3130553/shanghai-academy-art-school-gave-city-its-early?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3130553/shanghai-academy-art-school-gave-city-its-early?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 25 Apr 2021 03:15:06 +0000 The great myth of Shenzhen bursting forth from humble fishing village to skyscraping megalopolis has been perpetuated ad nauseam for decades, by earnest politicians, foreign business consultants and lazy journalists alike. But the truth is more intriguing and, it must be said, far sleazier. Well into the 1930s, Shum Chun, the town that gave Shenzhen its name, was a gangsters’ haven serving risk-hungry Hongkongers pouring across the river that separated the British colony from the mainland into... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3117505/myth-busting-shenzhens-sleazy-past-short-lived?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3117505/myth-busting-shenzhens-sleazy-past-short-lived?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 17 Jan 2021 02:15:09 +0000 The 1917 Russian Revolution led to an exodus of two million “White Russians” escaping the Bolshevik “Reds”. Of those, an estimated 100,000 settled in China. Some began new lives in Harbin and Tianjin, others moved as far south as Hong Kong and Macau. About 25,000 Russian émigrés settled in Shanghai, giving the already multinational metropolis a heightened sense of cosmopolitanism. The main thoroughfare of the city’s French Concession, the Avenue Joffre (Huaihai Lu), became known as Little... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3107622/how-white-russian-ballet-dancers-sparked?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3107622/how-white-russian-ballet-dancers-sparked?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 01 Nov 2020 06:15:12 +0000 China’s Good War by Rana Mitter, Belknap Press. 4/5 stars Wars, hot and cold, have come and gone, but World War II remains a constant presence, hovering over our culture and politics, its myths recycled and repurposed to meet individual ends: consider Boris Johnson on Brexit, Donald Trump with Make America Great Again or Vladimir Putin and Russian exceptionalism. Having been all things to all people, The War has inspired shelves of novels, endless movies and constant references to the “greatest... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3100103/chinas-good-war-rana-mitter-explores-how-national-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3100103/chinas-good-war-rana-mitter-explores-how-national-and?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 04 Sep 2020 21:15:16 +0000 Hong Kong appeared to many to be doomed. It could surely never recover from destruction, human casualties and economic loss on such a scale. Wave after wave of disaster had hit the city in late summer and autumn. First came an unnamed typhoon, gusting in on September 1, 1937, with winds so strong that the Hong Kong Observatory was incapable of registering their true strength, its instruments unable to measure wind velocity beyond 200km/h. Boats upended, buildings and entire streets were... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3096162/forget-2020-hong-kong-1937-was-year-hell?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3096162/forget-2020-hong-kong-1937-was-year-hell?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 09 Aug 2020 02:15:17 +0000 The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman Viking 3.5/5 The Sassoons and the Kadoories were two Baghdadi Jewish families that followed the coattails of the British Empire from Iraq to India to Shanghai to Hong Kong, and they provide a great lesson in making smart decisions until the day that you don’t. Jonathan Kaufman’s The Last Kings of Shanghai is at its best when it explains those smart moves, and the occasion­al not-so-smart... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3091585/last-kings-shanghai-history-sassoons-and-kadoories?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3091585/last-kings-shanghai-history-sassoons-and-kadoories?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 04 Jul 2020 02:15:08 +0000 China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816-1980 by Robert Bickers, 5/5 stars Swire is ubiquitous in Hong Kong and mainland China, where the conglo­merate is involved in a wide range of businesses, from property and retail mall developments to hotels, Coca-Cola bottling, Taikoo Sugar, container terminals and Cathay Pacific. Elsewhere in the world, it has business interests in several countries, from Scotland (biodiesel) to Papua New Guinea (ferry services). China Bound, a new book by... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3077036/story-swire-british-hong-hong-kong-tale-empire?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3077036/story-swire-british-hong-hong-kong-tale-empire?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 28 Mar 2020 10:00:09 +0000 In the summer of 1941 in New York, United China Relief (UCR) was founded, bringing together eight organisations that had been working towards the same ends: to raise the American public’s awareness of China’s resistance to Japan, and to collect funds to directly aid civilians. The images chosen to promote their work were a series of full-colour posters that appeared in newspapers, maga­zines and on billboards nationwide, images that would be seared into many people’s memories long after the war,... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3074920/chinas-plight-under-japanese-occupation-how?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3074920/chinas-plight-under-japanese-occupation-how?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 15 Mar 2020 21:00:07 +0000 In the 1930s, Western newspapers were in the habit of portraying Macau as a haven of pirates, scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells, gambling the days away and smoking opium by night. Maurice Dekobra, a bestselling French writer of the inter­war years, had a hit with his 1938 novel, Macao, enfer du jeu (Macao, Gambling Hell), which became an equally sensationalist film. Lacking Peking’s bohemianism, Shanghai’s modernity or Hong Kong’s dynamism, Macau sat in the South China Sea, fanning itself in the... https://www.scmp.com/society/japan-was-rumored-try-buy-macau-right-world-war-ii/article/3050617?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/society/japan-was-rumored-try-buy-macau-right-world-war-ii/article/3050617?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 14 Feb 2020 11:21:43 +0000 In the 1930s, Western newspapers were in the habit of portraying Macau as a haven of pirates, scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells, gambling the days away and smoking opium by night. Bestselling French writer of the inter­war years Maurice Dekobra had a hit with his 1938 novel, Macao, enfer du jeu (Macao, Gambling Hell), which became an equally sensationalist film starring Erich von Stroheim, Parisian starlet of the day Mireille Balin and the first Japanese actor to conquer both Hollywood and European... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3049322/did-japan-really-offer-portugal-us100-million?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3049322/did-japan-really-offer-portugal-us100-million?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 08 Feb 2020 06:00:17 +0000 In the first half of the 20th century, Peking paid little attention to Christmas. By then, the resident Chinese were already busy preparing for Lunar New Year. But in the strictly demarcated Legation Quarter, at the heart of the city’s foreign community, yuletide memories were invariably fond. Beyond imposing gates and armed sentries with signs ordering rickshaw pullers to slow down for inspection was a haven of Western architecture, commerce and entertainment: embassies, hospitals, churches and... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3041629/christmas-pekings-foreign-colony-ice-skating-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3041629/christmas-pekings-foreign-colony-ice-skating-and?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 13 Dec 2019 18:00:13 +0000 In early 1903, a 40-year-old big-game hunter, Dr William Lord Smith, who had stalked Kodiak bears in Alaska and shot lions, tigers, elephants and rhinos from the safety of a hot-air balloon in Africa, heard there were man-eating beasts roaming the hills of Fujian province. The American was immediately gripped by the prospect of bagging a South China tiger. Swarthy, moustachioed Smith set off, stopping in Japan and Manchuria before sailing down the China coast to the port of Amoy (now Xiamen). He... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3036511/american-hunter-who-hastened-demise-south-china?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3036511/american-hunter-who-hastened-demise-south-china?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 09 Nov 2019 08:00:13 +0000 Beijing Payback by Daniel Nieh Ecco 5/5 stars Victor Li’s father is killed in an apparently random robbery at his Chinese restaurant in California’s quiet and safe city of San Dimas. Naturally, Victor is devastated. His father seemed the archetypal Chinese immigrant dad – hardworking and honest, and raised to anger only by his children’s poor grades. Then Victor starts to learn a little more about the man. It turns out he didn’t own the chain of Chinese restaurants he managed – Beijing... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3022878/beijing-payback-daniel-nieh-paints-picture-perfect?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3022878/beijing-payback-daniel-nieh-paints-picture-perfect?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 15 Aug 2019 12:00:09 +0000