In 2010, I was with Narrelle on the south bank of the Yangtze river in Fengdu, one of the towns that was demolished and completely rebuilt higher ground to cope with rising water levels after construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The point of coming here was that over on the north bank is Ming Shan, a row of hills …
The Birdsville Races
I wrote this piece for the book “World Party”, after a weekend at the races in 1993. Looking back, there are no photos of the races themselves, or even a horse. Oh well. Come September, locals flee the dusty desert township of Birdsville, as a six-thousand-strong crowd descends for a weekend of hard drinking – and, if they sober up …
Verbiest’s World Map 坤與全圖
In 2016 I was extraordinarily lucky to come across this woodblock-printed world map at an antiques stall in Beijing. (The poor quality of the photo is because they didn’t want me taking one, and I had to sneak it from a distance with my ancient, low-res ipod touch camera. They wouldn’t sell me the print either.) The original version dates …
Rams, Cabbages and Murder
On 17 November, 1874, the Peking Gazette – which published official statements from the Chinese court – made the following announcement: “The Court of Censorate forwards another appeal lodged on behalf of a woman of the Yuhang District in Zhejiang, complaining that her husband has been falsely accused of murdering a man named Ge Pinlian, the accuser being his wife, …
Cicadas, paper horses, and Chinese gods
Here’s some background to my first ebook, “Paper Horses: Woodblock Prints of Chinese Gods from 1930s Beijing”, which you can find via Amazon or Apple Books. In 2020 I bought an album containing seventy-nine “paper horses” (紙馬) – simple woodblock prints of Chinese folk deities – from a dealer in the United States. Each print was numbered with a sticker …
Across Guangxi By Boat
In March 1879, after spending nearly two years on the road between China and Europe, Mesny left the southern metropolis of Guangzhou to head home to his wife in Guizhou province, a journey of perhaps 1000km. Renting a roomy daobazi (刀把子) or “knife-handle” houseboat, named after the shape of their sterns, Mesny followed the Xi river to Wuzhou before turning …
Cats, Rats, Marriage and Messages
“The Rats Marrying Off Their Daughter” (老鼠嫁女) was a popular theme for Chinese woodblock prints during the nineteenth century, and different designs were produced by studios all over the country. The title of this one, from Yangjiabu in Shandong province, translates freely as “A misfortunate rat got married in town; The groom was a cat, who swallowed her down”. The …
Lockets, locks and longevity
In 2018 I bought this antique child’s locket (鎖片) in Dali, an old walled caravan town in China’s Yunnan province. Today Dali has become a bohemian holiday retreat for China’s urban middle class, but from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries served as the capital of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, whose borders reached from Tibet to Thailand, and at …
Xiage’s yangong deity shrine
I took this photo in 2010 at Yangong Ci (檐公祠), a wayside shrine in the Dong hamlet of Xiage, two kilometres uphill from the popular wooden village of Zhaoxing (肇兴). Yangong Ci translates literally as “Lord Eave’s Ancestral Shrine”, but yangong is in fact a Chinese transliteration of the Dong term for something like “home of the venerable grandfather”. The …
Feathers, Fakes and Fees
I’m no expert in Chinese antiques, but I have spent a lot of time browsing antiques markets all over the country, looking at everything from old woodblock prints to iron cannon and pieces of nineteenth-century official regalia. These include rank decorations such as “hat buttons” (maoding, 帽顶), a coloured bead mounted on top of an official’s headgear, and “mandarin squares” …