China Conversations

Connecting Across Time and Culture

Historical mystery writer Elsa Hart in conversation with Jonathan Chatwin

Where did your interest in China – and the particular period of imperial Chinese history you deal with in your novels – come from?

My interest in 18th-century China developed during days spent on the scree slopes and alpine meadows of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in Yunnan Province. I traveled to Kunming and Lijiang for the first time in 2010 when my husband, a biologist who studies mountain plants, was doing fieldwork for his dissertation. We returned to the area in 2011 and spent most of the following three years there. It was in Lijiang that I learned about the network of old trade routes between China and Tibet known as the Tea Horse Road. And a visit to the ancient observatory in Beijing inspired me to read about the Jesuits who oversaw the construction of its instruments in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

China Conversations

Delving into Shanghai’s Demimonde

Paul French talks nonfiction noir with  Jonathan Chatwin

Where did the research for City of Devils start?

My first port of call is newspapers, specifically the old China coast newspapers, which are mainly – though not exclusively – in English: the North China Daily News; the China Press; the Shanghai Mercury; the Peking Gazette. Some of it is online, but not much has been scanned, so you have to go to the British Library newspaper archive, Hong Kong University library or the Zikawei library in the Xujiahui district of Shanghai, and use originals or microfilms. In going through those, you find stories which give you threads to pull at. And the stories are important in context of the Sinology. City of Devils, for instance, takes its lead from Frederic Wakeman’s Sinological work. He wrote two books, on policing Shanghai in the 1930s and on Shanghai’s Badlands. But both are focused on the Chinese experience, whereas I write about the foreigners.

China Conversations

In China, No Never Means No

Zhou Xun, in conversation with Jonathan Chatwin

Did you always have an interest in Chinese history?

My first degree was actually nothing to do with history; it was in librarianship, which has been hugely useful in preparing me to do archival research – I walk straight into the archives and know where to start! When I came to the UK, my academic interest was more around the history of religion, in particular Judaism. Through that I met a group of Jewish people who were born in Manchuria and became interested in their story. I initially wanted to pursue a PhD on the subject, but as I started, I changed my mind as I came across a vast amount of material on Chinese perception of the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries; it was this that really began my interest in modern Chinese history.

China Conversations

Robert Bickers: “Look for China and You Will Find It”

Could you outline how your interest in China, and Chinese history, began?

The logical answer might be: I spent three years of my childhood living in Hong Kong, where my father was posted with the Royal Air Force to a helicopter squadron. I was just six when we arrived, but remember the first day vividly. But it’s not that. Applying to London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) to study Mandarin just seemed like a good idea at the time. I might say specifically that it was a course on ‘Chinese Peasants and Revolution’ at SOAS, led by Charles Curwen, who had worked in China with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and stayed on in China until 1954. In London in the mid-1980s, Curwen was no less wrapped up in the Chinese revolution than he had been in China. But it’s probably not that course either. Again, it just seemed a good idea at the time when I applied to study for a doctorate in Chinese studies; there weren’t many people in that field in the UK then.

Reviews

Imperial Stars

Jonathan Chatwin reviews Heavenly Numbers by Christopher Cullen

High on a solitary outcrop of crenellated city wall in Beijing – an anomaly among the towering glass and concrete – sits China’s Imperial Observatory: a collection of the astronomical instruments with which the officials of the Qing dynasty tracked the movement of the heavenly bodies.

It is a relic of an age that can often seem confoundingly distant in modern China. The small stretch of city wall is one of the only sections of that fortification remaining, the rest having been demolished in the two decades after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. That absence finds an ironic echo in the name of the adjacent subway stop and traffic intersection: Jianguomen, the “Gate of National Construction.” This was one of the gates punched through the old city wall by the Japanese, during their occupation of the city in the late 1930s. It met its end, along with much along this axis of the city, in the 1960s as the government began constructing a subway system.