In the twenty years since I wrote the first edition, the imagery of Chairman Mao has gained new currency in modern China, sometimes literally. In 2012, I found two ladies selling trinkets on a street corner in Xi’an. Their baskets included stacks of ‘ghost money’ – counterfeit cash for filial Chinese to burn on pyres in order to send gifts to their ancestors in the afterlife. It was designed in a reasonable facsimile of real-life 100-yuan notes, printed in red ink and bearing the image of Chairman Mao. Each promised to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten million yuan, redeemable at the ‘Bank of Hell’. I found it ironic that the man who had once tried to ban both money and superstition should endure as the figurehead on cash for use in the spirit world.
I bought a supposed fortune in ghost money for a knockdown price, since the women were trying to offload their Mao notes as fast as possible. Such realistic ghost money had recently been declared illegal, in a re-establishment of respect for Mao that would see a new edition of his SelectedQuotations (the famous Little Red Book) republished a few months later. The following October, when I went looking for ghost money again, I could only buy notes bearing the face of the King of Hell. I would keep my Mao money for a decade, until I was persuaded to burn it on camera for William Shatner’s The UnXplained to demonstrate how to turn my ancestors into millionaires.
Only two months after I bought the last of the Mao ghost money on the street, China’s new president Xi Jinping delivered a stirring speech about his plans for the nation during what would turn out to be his lifelong term in office. He was determined, he said, for the Chinese Communist Party to celebrate its centenary in 2021 without any slanders or smears committed against it by hostile forces peddling an incorrect version of history. In doing so, he used the phrase ‘historical nihilism’ (lishi xuwuzhuyi), a term that has come to colour huge areas in subsequent discourse.
Thereafter, if I described myself as a historian, people became noticeably jumpy. There was, after all, now a hotline for concerned citizens to call if they encountered anyone suspected of harming the reputation of the Communist Party and its role in creating the new China. History was now whatever the Party said it was, which has effectively criminalised anyone who dares to question it.
From the introduction to the new edition of Mao by Jonathan Clements.
The journalist Sarah Harris asked Dame Barbara Cartland if relations between the classes had changed during her lifetime.
“Of course they have,” replied Cartland, “or I wouldn’t be talking to someone like you.”
Dame Barbara Cartland was, quite deliberately, an enigma and a performance – I remember her as a woman in her eighties, dressed like a pink parade float, grotesquely clinging to the stylings of the 1920s, as if fighting the ravages of time and reason, still pretending to be a teenage dilettante from one of her early novels. In my own youth, she became a pink ghost haunting the nuptials of then-Prince Charles to her step-granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer. Cartland seemed to be regarded by the Establishment as an arriviste and an embarrassment, disinvited from a fairytale wedding that, as the media constantly pointed out, seemed inspired by one of her novels.
Matthew Sweet’s new biography of Cartland, chips its way through the wall of “pink granite” that Cartland used to shield herself from media enquiry. He points to her parallel careers in non-fiction and history, her time as an agony aunt, and a long and largely pseudonymous stint as the queen of gossip columnists. He also homes in on a critical rupture in her work, when in 1945 she turned aside from true-life accounts of what she knew into more fanciful tales of what she wished for. Until the end of the Second World War, her novels were crammed with flappers and airmen, motor-cars and Charlestons – the stuff of her lived experience. Thereafter, they segued more often into pirates and cannoneers, stage coaches and bodices, as she sought refuge from the modern world in olde-worlde fantasies.
“You can’t dress your heroine up, because clothes are rationed,” she complained. “You can’t give her a glamorous occupation because labour is directed. You can’t describe a dinner party because food is rationed. You can’t even send her for a ride in a car, because there is no petrol. I’m writing a Regency novel.”
In these days of AI slop, when “writers” can produce books at the touch of a button, wordcounts have become something of a theoretical metric. For the record, I consider a day well-spent if I walk away from my keyboard with 1,000 new, publishable words on the hard drive – which is, I vaguely remember, a yardstick I copied from Isaac Asimov. Dan Abnett, the most prolific of potboilerists, manages 3,000 a day. Joe Haldeman, 500. Graham Greene, a couple of sentences, but good ones. Barbara Cartland would recline on her ottoman, stare at the ceiling, and regularly dictate 7,000 words a day to her stenographer. It is this, writes Sweet, that propelled her to the record-breaking output that defined her literary life: 723 books published during her lifetime, with another 150 punted out post-mortem.
For the last few months, I have been working on a book of my own about another forgotten bestseller. Mrs Alec-Tweedie (1862-1940) was old enough to be Cartland’s mother, and indeed, when Cartland was hailed in the 1920s as the bright young voice in syndicated gossip columns, it may have been Mrs Tweedie whom she elbowed aside. Both women had a huge output derived from dictation; both skirted the fringes of bounderism, both were left behind by their eras; both ended their days fretting about the onset of blindness. They also competed to fling together a British Empire pageant in 1930 – reading between the lines, Mrs Tweedie’s failure was Cartland’s success, appearing literally dressed as a ship for the pageant of British industries, and quashing her rival’s attempt to come up with something similar. But whereas Mrs Tweedie’s papers were destroyed in a fit of depression and grief in 1926, Cartland’s were retained in meticulous order, ready for her great grand-daughter to grant access to Sweet.
Mrs Tweedie was pole-axed by the Great War, which claimed the life of her youngest son. But that same war had an arguably greater effect on the young Cartland, killing her father, and dooming her to come of age “in a world depleted of men. This,” writes Sweet, “is one of the most important facts of her biography, and one she shared, like a hidden wound, with her contemporaries and legions of her readers.” Cartland was one of an estimated surplus of two million women, left to pick and fuss among the traumatised and the walking wounded who made it to the 1920s, if not unscathed, then at least alive. Her life, and that of her readers, was dominated by World Wars 1 and 2, and the grim austerity that lagged behind them. In one of the most evocative moments in Sweet’s book, he recounts the sudden boils and eruptions of bone fragments through the skin of Cartland’s second husband, still manifesting the effects of a wound suffered decades earlier.
Sweet is given unfettered access to Cartland’s archives, including her unpublished manuscripts and her lifelong correspondence with her mother – the racier letters being discreetly filed in their own special brown envelope. He takes light-hearted relish in the bad reviews, of Germaine Greer declaring her fair game because she is an agent of the Patriarchy, or Peter Ackroyd calling her “the literary muzak of the hypermarkets.” But he also notes that Umberto Eco cited her as the very cornerstone of post-modernism – that it was impossible for a husband to tell his wife he “loved her madly”, since by the late twentieth century, both of them would know he was quoting one of Cartland’s novels, rather than saying it from the heart.
Sweet also pokes gently at the traumas behind her media profile, particularly her grandfather’s suicide in 1903, which had “a long trajectory… a long cold line through a century of mother-daughter relationships.” When asked in 1981 why she used boot polish to do her eyelashes, she revealed that, unlike mascara, she had discovered it would not run. “I cried,” she confessed, “all through my first honeymoon.”
In all this, Sweet offers an impassioned defence of the middlebrow, pointing out that while Cartland and her ilk became jokes among media pundits, they were far wider read and remembered than the people who were trashing them. He cautions the reader and the historian against assuming that everything was the way that the media choose to remember it today: “…the fabled sixties, the sixties of stock footage – screaming Beatles fans, Roundhouse happenings, Carnaby Street boys dressed as Edwardian hussars – obscure a counternarrative that tells us The Sound of Music was the decade’s biggest film at the UK box office; that polls conducted in 1963 and 1964 showed that two-thirds of people disapproved of sex before marriage.”
Sweet recounts angry screeds from Georgette Heyer, who accused Cartland (rightly, it seems) of plagiarism. The Cartland Reality Distortion Field was operating throughout her life, transforming the seediest and most sordid couplings into romantic fictions, but also dodging many a libel suit and plausible deniability. In her archives, Sweet digs up several affronted correspondents, including the royal muck-raker Kitty Kelley, who warns her to stop claiming they had never met, because she has her on tape.
Sweet admits that covering such overwhelming literary output in detail would risk turning “biography into bibliography.” But he offers up a single calendar year, 1975, in order to demonstrate Cartland’s word factory in action. In that twelve months alone, Cartland’s various publishers released twenty-five books, including several reprints of works from up to thirty years previously, given new titles and more modern covers – I have observed similar sleight of hand in the world of women’s romance manga, where nobody expects the same readers to be around a generation later. But someone was reading them – housewives and schoolgirls, and, bizarrely, Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, who left a £50,000 deposit at Foyle’s to have her books forwarded to him in Tripoli.
The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet is available in bookshops now. Ethel Brilliana: The Well-Travelled Mrs Alec-Tweedie by Jonathan Clements is forthcoming from the History Press.
“The set outside looks unfamiliar. By which I mean that we are used to seeing the same buildings dressed, and redressed and reused in multiple movies shot on the Shaw Brothers backlot, but this is not a film by Shaw Brothers. Where are they getting that village from? If it’s not somewhere in Hong Kong, where is it?
“Well, the answer is supplied as we ride off, because right there you can see a very distinctive gorge with a road that’s been cut into the side of it. And that is not in Hong Kong at all. That is Taroko Gorge in eastern Taiwan, now known as Taroko National Park, one of a few river valleys to be cut through marble, and the sacred territory of the Truku people.
“So really it should be called Truku Gorge, but we use the pronunciation first established internationally when the place was a Japanese colony in the early 20th century. The thing about Taroko Gorge, is it, like everywhere else in Taiwan, has been subjected to a feverish renovation and rebuilding project since 1949, as the Kuomintang, the ruling Nationalist party, try to establish that Taiwan has always been part of China.
“So if anywhere is going to get little lion statues, and intricately carved fairy tale bridges, and little pagodas, shoved up in the 20 years before the film crew showed up, it’s Taroko Gorge, which is great. Because Lo Wei wants to make a film in a place that looks like China, and here we have the KMT shovelling as much cement as they can to oblige.”
For a long time, it was believed that a folk tradition among Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu people was some race-memory of a forgotten genocide. The belief that there were korpokkur “little people” whose unseen activities rustled the broad-leafed fuki plants (Japanese butterbur, a.k.a. sweet coltsfoot) were a kind of faery folk, hiding in the undergrowth from invaders who had displaced them.
Their effigies sit at the heart of Hakodate’s Museum of the Northern Peoples, seemingly grown to human size, but really shrinking the human visitor to their level, to consider just for a moment how the world might look to the very small, like The Borrowers.
But modern scholars have repeatedly changed their mind about the korpokkur. These days, it is widely believed that the korpokkur of Ainu mythology are an odd suppressed memories of the Ainu’s own past – a fairy tale told among modern Hokkaido city-dwellers about the people they used to be. Korpokkur legends thin out, the further north you go; they appear to have arisen as the Japanese infiltrated Hokkaido, and the Ainu began to associate themselves not with their old selves, the “people of the land” (yaunkur), but with the new arrivals, the “people of the sea” (repunkur).
Like all hauntings, they occasionally manifest in popular culture. Hokkaido gift shops are dripping with gnomish representations as dolls, fridge magnets and lucky gonks. In 1973, Sumitomo Life Insurance sponsored a 23-part anime series, Adventures of Korobokkle – when I put it on the slate for the Anime Encylopedia twenty years ago, I was not familiar with Ainu orthography, hence the misspelling, although the book does note that it seemed to prefigure a much more famous moment in Japanese animation.
Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro is riddled with references to the forgotten beliefs of marginalised peoples. Like his later Princess Mononoke, it is seeped in alternate pathways in Japanese history. We see Jomon pottery scattered at the entrance to Totoro’s sacred tree, itself a relic of long-gone camphor forests. Jizo statues lurk discreetly in the background as Mei wanders the countryside, hinting that there is no danger, because this child is under divine protection. And when Totoro himself shows up at the iconic bus stop, he, too, carries the marks of ancient traditions, wearing a fuki leaf on his head.
It is a wonderful moment of artistic playfulness – the least convincing of all “little people”, like an elephant wearing a man-sized baseball cap. But that is Totoro all over: a symbol of ancient, numinous power, manifesting to the children as a fat, cuddly teddy bear, his ominous, fixed Cheshire Cat grin and his obvious claws only unsettling to adults.
“Only when you are a child,” says the theme song, “will he appear to you.”
Ever since I first visited Hakodate, gathering materials on its ill-fated Republic of Ezo, I have loved the city. It has a certain resemblance to my native Southend on Sea, but also a bunch of craziness. There’s the locals’ odd obsession with pretty-boy vigilante Toshizo Hijikata, shown on contemporary T-shirts fighting a giant squid for some reason, and celebrated in a blue-and-white slushy that imitates the colours of his lynch mob, the Shinsengumi.
There’s the town’s weird Foreigners’ Cemetery, with all the stories implicit in the headstones of sailors and entrepreneurs far from home at one of the first Treaty Ports, just up the hill from a Monument to Local Prostitutes. There’s the Old Town Hall, which inevitably comes scattered with Japanese women of a certain age, cosplaying as Victorian aristocrats. And as I discovered to my cost (about ten thousand yen), it now has a town tartan, registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2024.
“This design is intended to reflect the city and its location including the ridgeline of Mt. Hakodate and the curves of the Port. Colours: red is intended to symbolise the red brick warehouses and the tram trains; dark blue for the Tsugaru Strait; light grey for the winter snow in the city and sepia for squid ink.”
“The Iria animation was both popular and obscure. Representatives for one US anime company went on the record to say that it had proved so popular on pirate video that they no longer thought there would be a market for it in the US.”
Over at my Behind the Screens column at Media OCD, I write up Keita Amemiya’s Zeiram and Iria.
Prohibition may have been lifted in Finland, but the old smuggling routes are still in place, and there are still profits to be made by evading the local alcohol tax. Coastguards Olavi (Joel Rinne) and Haanpää (Oke Tuuri) run down a likely smuggler, only for the sneaky boat-captain Kivalo (Santeri Karilo) to outwit them by towing his cargo behind him in the water, out of sight.
Later at a town dance, Olavi and Haanpää run into the two pretty girls who were catching a lift on Kivalo’s boat. Anni (Martta Kinnunen) hits it off with Haanpää, but Marja (Regina Linnanheimo, in her first major film role) snootily dismisses the lawman, because she’s a bad girl who runs with gangsters. She changes her tune after Kivalo gets handsy, and Olavi comes to her rescue, but before any snogging can commence, a coastguard emergency flare goes up, and Olavi and Haanpää have to rush to their posts…
Retitled somewhat unimaginatively in the United States as “The Smugglers”, VMV 6 is a fascinating snapshot of the mid-1930s, when Finland was still struggling with the impact of its thirteen-year ban on strong alcohol, one of the first laws passed after the country gained its independence from Russia. While some are dyed-in-the-wool teetotalers, a huge swathe of the population are secret tipplers under Prohibition, criminalised by decree. Now that booze is legal again, a good number of them still stray onto the wrong side of the law, eager to pay less for contraband drinks. Olavi’s investigation of the hooch trade turns into a logistical forerunner of The Wire, with a conspiracy that reaches all the way up to the local consul Dasselheim (Axel Slangus) – a dastardly Swede.
Smuggling pays better than fishing for the boatmen of south Finland, an inevitable temptation when toffs in straw boaters are sidling up to waitresses in the cafés and asking if they have a stronger kind of tea. Meanwhile, the coastguards are outnumbered and outgunned, forced to patrol miles of shoreline, to stop cargo reaching local people who often turn out to be their friends and families. In one scene, the coastguard Hämäläinen (Eino Hyyrynen) is left alone, nursing a toothache, when his station is stormed by a posse of smugglers he cannot possibly fight off.
The film’s uncredited star is the coastguard motorboat (Vartiomoottorivene) that provides its Finnish title, one of fifteen real-life patrol boats criss-crossing the Baltic in search of bootleggers at the time. But all the chase sequences and stunt work, outside locations and watery dynamics ran up the budget far beyond those of the average Finnish movie. Even simple set-ups come with a certain flair, such as the opening sequence of churning waves, filmed from a speedboat, or a decision to film smugglers unloading their cargo in a vertiginous shot, for which someone has somehow carried a bulky camera up to the topmast. Although it was a success, it took six years to recoup its costs at the box office, as one might expect for a 1936 action film in which our heroes rush to the rescue in a seaplane.
The storyline is a heady mix of unexpected juxtapositions. The upper classes are in bed with smugglers, and the cops are drinking at the bar alongside the people they are supposed to be chasing. Originally clocking in at over two hours, even this shorter cut takes its sweet time with a long, languorous interlude on a rocky beach, as the smugglers drink and make merry, confident that their fortunes will be made as soon as their contraband reaches town. Kivalo is indignant and aggressive when the coastguards stop his boat, fulminating about what a waste of time this all is, even though the audience knows he has a fortune in contraband floating underneath it.
In one lovely touch, Olavi dismisses the thwarted Kivalo with a stern “Good night” even though they are standing in broad daylight – this is Finland, where such a counter-intuitive set-up is indeed possible all through the summer (see, for example, similar midnight-sun shooting in Helsinki Crimes). Marjo’s character journey is also well realised, as she evolves from a bored small-town bad girl into a good-hearted heroine. It’s she, literally paddling her own canoe, who finds a wounded coastguard left for dead in the water and alerts the authorities.
The film was an early leading role for Regina Linnanheimo, whose star quality in the 1930s and 1940s was one of those mysteries, like the contemporary rise of Gracie Fields in the UK, that eludes the modern critic. But there was something about her that would make her one of the holy pantheon of Finnish movies until the middle of the 1950s, anchoring big-name films like Beautiful Regina of Kaivopuisto (1941). Although it’s become a running gag in this blog that she never bloody smiles, she is beaming all over the place in this one, even when a bootlegger serenades her with an accordion. In fact, the musicality of this films is one of its most intriguing historical issues– the jury is still out as to whether Finns were more musical in days of yore, or if the crew are just trying to distract the audience with an occasional sing-song.
Behind the scenes, the film’s biggest technical innovation came in sound, when director Risto Orko at the Suomi-Filmi studio acquired better recording equipment from Aga-Baltic, as well as a two-channel mixer which allowed dialogue to be post-synched, and music to be integrated with sound. You can see (and hear) the results here, as well as in the The Woodcutter’s Bride (1931), in which such widgets transformed a director’s ability to tell a story. This veritably encourages the cast to burst into song at inopportune moments – I have asked around about this, and the newly PhD’d researcher Jaana Ruotsalainen tells me that communal singing was indeed more of a thing in Finland before the onset of a culture in which music was experienced as recordings rather than live.
The film was also an early scripting job for the author Mika Waltari, who would become internationally famous as a novelist, but whose high-class work for the screen is often overlooked by modern readers. VMV 6 was actually the fourth script he wrote, after several false starts and disappointing collaborations, but it’s weird to see him here, paired with the “more experienced” scenarist Tauno Tattari, who was only 29 on this project, and who was fated to die of tuberculosis shortly after it was finished. But 1930s Finnish cinema was indeed a place where “veterans” could still be in their twenties. We find Waltari later in this blog’s chronology writing some of the best scripts of the decade to follow, such as The February Manifesto (1939) and Finland, Our Dear Native Land (1940).
The critics loved it, with Arvo Ääri in the Helsingin Sanomat calling it “a triumph for Finnish cinema… offering the best in speed and excitement that Finnish film has yet to achieve.” It certainly marked a nexus in production in the early thirties when directors and actors thrilled to the application of new technologies and the opportunities they brought, leading to sparkling blockbusters like Our Boys in the Air (1934) before the industry started to get swamped once more with cheapo theatre adaptations and unfunny comedies. It even made it to America, where a print toured the Finnish-speaking enclaves of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Canada’s Thunder Bay.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
“Some scholars have argued that far from clinging to the past until they were overwhelmed, the Qing dynasty created modern China in 1644, by establishing a previously unseen level of centralized control, and by wiping out the northern border problem. The Qing dynasty is hence, in the words of William T. Rowe, ‘a constantly moving target,’ only passing from living memory in the twenty-first century.
“We might equally argue that the period of ‘humiliation’ began not in the 1840s, but two hundred years earlier, in 1644, when the first and most successful foreign element, the Manchus themselves, swept in from the north-east to form a lasting, exploitative aristocracy.
“Or, if we accept, as all modern Chinese books do, that the Manchus were simply another sector of the Chinese world, and that they were hence not really foreign, then surely their regime, with its wars of conquest in Central Asia, its self-assurance of its racial and cultural superiority, and a military mission that doubled the size of Chinese territory in the space of 150 years, was an immensely successful imperialist power, not all that different in attitude from the outsiders that would bring it down.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I update my entry on China with details of the relatively new sub-genre of stories in which time-travelling boffins try to make China great again.
“Officially, the film was shot entirely in Iran during the last years of the Shah, presenting a priceless time-capsule of everyday life before the 1979 revolution propelled the Ayatollah into power. Secretly, several pick-ups and interiors were actually filmed back in Japan, but the media printed the legend, possibly because admitting it might have triggered a breach of contract with the manga creator.” Over at MediaOCD.com, I delve into the curious history of Golgo 13’s live-action mission to Iran.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 