RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 15th September, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
InterfaceFLOR, Room 201 Raffles City, 268 Central Xizang Zhong lu, Shanghai
Paul French
Daily Life in War-torn Chungking – A Unique Insight into a City under Siege
Corbis | Corbis |
Mother and Children amid Debris | Road Work Crew Cutting Through Hillside |
In 1939 Carl Crow – an American who had lived in Shanghai for 25 years – travelled up the Burma Road from Rangoon to Chongqing on assignment for Liberty magazine - ‘the most interesting assignment I have ever been given’. The Burma Road (‘the road of a thousand thrills and a thousand dangers’) was China’s vital but perilous 717-mile lifeline to the outside world. In China’s wartime capital Crow found himself in the most heavily bombed city on earth, a city the Japanese air force had sworn to wipe of the face of the map, witnessing the daily struggle of the Chinese people under Japanese aerial bombardment and interviewing the most senior Chinese figures in the government as well as orphans, diplomats, generals and the ordinary men and women in the streets.
Crow’s impressions of war-torn Chongqing and the allied attempts to supply the city lay forgotten in an archive until recently recovered and now published. They vividly relate the story of a city under siege suffering from a daily aerial bombardment unprecedented in history at the time. Crow reported the city’s daily life from the villa command centre of Chiang Kai-shek to the hastily constructed bomb shelters on the city’s teeming streets, the wartime HQ of Zhou En-lai to the newly necessary orphanages, the Chinese resistance movement in the countryside to the only other route out of China via French Indo-China. Crow always meant his war diaries and notes to be published and now they have been as The Long Road Back to China, his typically observant and sympathetic first hand memoir of China’s darkest hour.
Paul French is a founder and the Chief China Representative of the research consultancy Access Asia based in Shanghai. He has previously written a number of books on China’s modern history including a biography of the legendary Shanghai adman, journalist and adventurer Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai, described by the Financial Times as a ‘captivating narrative’ and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium War to Mao, described as ‘fascinating’ by the Far Eastern Economic Review and a ‘rollercoaster journey through Chinese history’ by Time Out Hong Kong. He is also the author of the well-received North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula – A Modern History.
ENTRANCE: RMB 30 (RAS members) and RMB 80 (non-members) Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
BOOKS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT A SPECIAL RAS MEMBERS PRICE OF RMB 100.00
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