During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.
China
A letter from a nephew to his uncle who died before he was born. It serves as a window into parts of a Eurasian child’s life which his family can never know, documenting his attempt to navigate racial confusion, religious trauma, the meaning of friendship, and the struggle for self-discovery in a shifting culture on the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.
Much has already been written about the Manila Galleon, the system of annual commercial sailings between Manila and Acapulco that dominated trans-Pacific trade for two and a half centuries from the latter part of the 16th-century until the early 19th, a development which is often taken to mark the beginning of “globalization”. Juan José Rivas Moreno reviews much of that as background, but unlike perhaps any other book on the subject to date, he turns his gaze to what was going on in Manila itself.
At a time when much of what passes for international commentary has the depth and nuance of a tweet, Geoff Raby’s Great Game On is something of a relief. The former Australian Ambassador to China keeps his politics largely to himself, but doesn’t have much time for mainstream Western (read “American” for the most part) views, which he finds simplistic.
The Sassoon family was and remains legendary in global business and social history, with Victor Sassoon as its most iconic figure. He embodied the spirit of the cosmopolitan elite in the early 20th century, maintaining residences and businesses across the major financial centers of his time, dividing his life between Bombay, London, and Shanghai. As a financier, he operated worldwide, skillfully navigating the complex networks of empire and commerce that defined his era.
The recently-opened exhibition at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum, “The Origins of Chinese Civilisation”, has a serious purpose, but one suspects that most visitors focus on the objects, as well they might.
Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager—its fifth in as many years—he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.
Silk Roads is the accompanying publication to the current exhibition on display at the British Museum in London. Written by the Curators of the Silk Roads exhibition, Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping and Elisabeth R O’Connell, this beautifully illustrated publication examines cross-cultural exchanges that occurred across Asia, Africa and Europe during 500 and 1000 CE.
Back in the day, everyone went to China, some already famous—Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes, Mary Pickford—and some who later would be famous, such as Wallis Spencer, the woman who, a marriage or two later as Wallis Simpson, caused the King of England to abdicate. Her time in Shanghai was the subject of later scurrilous (and it would appear, entirely fabricated) rumors about pornographic photographs, bordellos and something called the “Shanghai grip” (best left to the imagination).
In her latest collection of short stories set in contemporary China, award-winning writer Yao Emei reveals that, as goes the song, “it’s hard to be a woman”, but not just sometimes: all the time. Alternately macabre, heart-rending and shocking, the four tales comprehensively skewer the aspirational notion of the happy family. No matter how hard Yao’s female characters work to get married, have children and put the rice on the table, they are continually thwarted by their menfolk generating crises which their long-suffering wives, mothers and daughters must clean up.
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