Over at the Irish Times (paywalled), Oliver Farry calls my book Rebel Island “…a brisk narrative… related with style and brio… a splendid portrait of the layers of identity and resistance in what is no less a settler society than the United States, Australia or Argentina.”
The gold ingots are roughly the size of iPhones, and the company gets them from the Nanjing bank. Then then put them through a machine that hammers them, repeatedly, until one gold ingot is nine metres long and as thin as a sheet of paper. Then they hammer them again, and again and again. And when they are small CD-sized roundels of thin gold, they cut them into squares and cut the squares into smaller squares, and then they hammer them again, until they are literally as thin as a cicada’s wings.
Miss Li is part of the process. She has to take a roundel of beaten gold, tease it gently off the paper with a goose feather, and then move it onto a new piece of paper, blowing gently on it to flatten it and move it around.
“It is very difficult training,” she says. “You have to pass exam where you blow middle candle out of three, without blowing out other two. Training for blow job took me eighteen months.”
I nod sagely.
Nanjing used to be called Jinling (Gold Hill), so the gold foil company based here couldn’t resist calling itself Jinling. Mr Ge, who is the sixth generation of his family to oversee Miss Li and her colleagues, takes me around the factory, and we have fun banging on an anvil with hammers, which was the way things were done before they automated so many elements of the process.
He takes me to the showroom, which is a Trumpish extravaganza of gold leaf on everything – gold leaf pianos, gold leaf Buddhas and other tat. Waiting for us there, unexpectedly, is his foreign liaison Viviana, a young Italian artist of some renown, who works with gold leaf in some of her paintings, and has ended up as a part-time greeter for foreign bigwigs who come to talk about painting their toilets gold, or something.
Viviana is very easy on the eye, and I think she would make a striking interviewee as both artist and employee, a welcome change from our usual run of middle-aged men, but the director immediately assumes that she works in another capacity and shouts at me to “stop chatting up the Russian” and to get on my marks ready to interview Mr Ge. He talks for a while about the history of gold leaf in Nanjing, and delicately describes his customers as devout religious believers, and not, say, ghastly billionaires. And that is another day done.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).
Tales of skulduggery, cross-dressing and… er… stamp-collecting, as I talk to the History Hack podcast about the brief moment in 1895 that Taiwan was an independent republic… or was it? Just one chapter from my new book, Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan, out now in the UK.
This isn’t the first time I have boggled the people at History Hack with tales of Taiwan. You can also hear my archived interviews about The Pirate King of Taiwan and the historical importance of two obscure shipwrecks.
The picture shown is one of the hastily created Republic of Formosa postage stamps: “whether it represents a dragon or a squirrel or a landscape or anything else or even which is the right way up we have not been able to discover,” according to the Stanley Gibbons Monthly Journal. It is, of course, the tiger of the republican flag.
For readers in the UK, the Kindle version of my new book, Rebel Island is available now.
In 886, during the last days of the Tang dynasty, the poet Wei Zhuang dropped in on Nanjing, once a great capital, now a forgotten backwater, its walls in disrepair, and its canals choked with weeds. He wrote:
Drizzle on the river, and the reeds grow high / The Six Dynasties are but a dream, and the birds call in the sky / Cares not the willow by the walls / Ten leagues around in the smoky mist.
Nanjing has improved a lot in the sun. The remains of the walls still bracket a sizeable chunk of Xuanwu Lake, just to the north of the old city, and are dotted with Ming- and Qing-era cannons poking from the crenellations. The park is nice with autumn trees and the Jiming temple looms above outside the city walls. So we ought to get some nice shots that make Nanjing look less like an urban jungle in the rain, and more like a pleasant bit of park life. The Propaganda Bureau should be pleased, as well they should be when the woman who mans the gate to the city walls insists on taking a photograph of us filming the sign so she can send it to her boss.
We put on the most ridiculous charade of setting up a shot by the sign, with me not bothering to take off my sunglasses, Mickey the sound man not bothering to boom, and Eric the cameraman not even starting the camera.
“Are we rolling?” calls the director.
“Nope!” says Eric, with a thumbs-up.
“Action!”
“I’m standing here next to a sign,” I say earnestly, “while a woman in a mustard yellow puffa jacket films me with her phone.”
“And cut!”
Michelle rushes in with her clapperboard and brightly says: “Waste of Time Fake Thing, Take One!”
We lurk around the walls for a while, which are picturesque but thick with flies, and then head off to the Longjiang Shipyard Ruins.
The layout will be familiar to anyone who has been to London Docklands. Three long strips of water, each the size of an airport runway, run in parallel through what is now billed as a park. But this park was the site of the Ming-era shipyards where the Treasure Fleet was built, and from where it set sail, down the Yangtze and as far as Africa. The lakes are all that remains of docks four, five and six. One, two and three, of similar size, are buried somewhere under the nearby housing estate.
Everybody knows the story of Zheng He, or at least thinks they know: the boy captured at the fall of Yuan-era Yunnan, castrated and shipped off to Beijing aged ten as a slave to the Yongle Emperor. Originally named Ma, short for Mohammed, for he was a Muslim, he was renamed Zheng in honour of his spirited defence of the Zhengcunba reservoir during the dastardly Yongle’s grab for power. Eventually put in charge of the Treasure Fleet, he set sail for the south and the west in 1405 on the first of what would become seven voyages, designed to tell all the natives in far-flung kingdoms just how awesome China was. When he came home, he turned up with a giraffe, so everybody was happy. Just for kicks, I pace out the rudder in the museum, which is 14 metres long, with a flappy bit that comprises the bottom six metres. The people from Propaganda, ever willing to say no to everything, have told us that we can film in the dockyards but that we can’t film the replica ship at one end of it, because it might be moved by the time our film broadcasts. Or it might not.
Suspicious, I pace out the length of the ship and find it to be 73 metres – a perfectly reasonable size for a Chinese trading galleon, but nothing like the aircraft-carrier sized behemoths claimed by some of the world’s more breathless popular historians. The shipyards are very long indeed, but even the artists’ impressions in the nearby museum show several ships being built at once in any single dock. They were not, and never were intended to hold single giant galleons. If they were, there would not have been enough turning space to get them out of the gate and into the Qinhuai River to sail down to the Yangtze and out to sea.
Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).
Christopher Harding in The Telegraph is first off the blocks with a newspaper review of my new book, Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan, calling it “a compelling portrait of a perennially fragmented place.” Article here (paywalled).
Leila Roine (Lea Joutseno) is shortly to marry her engineer fiancé Lauri Honkatie (Tauno Majuri), and so is conducting the traditional ceremonies of a 1940s Finnish bride-to-be, which apparently includes feeding letters and photographs connected to her former boyfriends into the fireplace. But as she confesses to cousin Mirjami (Kaija Rahola), arriving for the nuptials, she still carries a torch for Esko (Olavi Reimas), an impoverished poet.
Meanwhile, Lauri is fighting off his ex Asta (Hanna Taini), who arrives at his house to plead with him not to marry Leila, but instead to run away with her. The much-missed Esko shows up at Leila’s to present her with a poetry collection dedicated to her, and makes a similar offer to elope.
So, both bride and groom are facing last-minute temptations, but each of them nobly resists. Leila politely declines Esko’s offer, and they part as friends, but is then subject to an elaborate deception by Asta, who persuades her that she and Lauri are not only still an item, but actually betrothed. Mirjami can’t talk her out of it (because Mirjami has been tied to a chair), and Leila gets the wrong end of the stick when she calls a hotel and hears that Lauri is scandalously there…. Although in truth he is innocently lunching with his mother.
With all the parties eventually checked into the same hotel, a series of misunderstandings soon ensue. Lauri befriends Esko, and confides in him about the inconstancies of women, unaware that Esko has been busily trying to get inconstant with his fiancée. With everything liable to fall apart, the Roine family housekeeper Salli (Hilppa Ilvos) helps matters along by enlisting a bunch of kids to let off smoke bombs, propelling everybody into the arms of their correctly mandated future-spouse, including Esko and Mirjami, who have fallen for each other.
Morsian yllättää was the first collaboration between director Valentin Vaala, writer Kersti Bergroth (of Rich Girl fame), and actress Lea Joutseno, who is credited in some quarters as a co-writer – one suspects that modern-day writer’s union rules might prefer to credit her as an executive producer, since saying “What about a farce where everybody gets confused in a hotel?” hardly constitutes an “original” idea. Whatever was done by whoever, this triumvirate of Finnish film movers and shakers would go on to make several more comedies in the 1940s, including With Serious Intent (Tositarkoituksella, 1943) and The Girl and the Gangsters (Dynamiittityttö, 1944).
Shot largely on studio sets to escape the winter of 1941, and hence replicating many of the tropes and set-ups of a dozen other farces that had originally been written for the stage, the film was damned with faint praise in Uusi Suomi, the reviewer for which deemed it “harmless” and mercifully lacking in any actual surprises. Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraati instead distinguished something more enduring: a lightness of tone and snappiness of naturalistic dialogue that made it more than the sum of its parts. Paula Talaskivi, the only Finnish 1940s critic whose opinion really counts for posterity, called it a “cheerful frolic” and praised it for what she saw as its “piquant note of parody” – in other words, she saw it not as yet another farce, but a commentary on all the others.
Posterity has brought a mixed memory. Aune Kämäräinen in Uusi Suomi in 1980 commented on its TV broadcast that “we no longer laugh at the same things today as we did in 1941”, nevertheless pleading its case as a shining example of a particular kind of film that needed to be appreciated in its historical context. Other contemporary critics have been similarly forgiving, with Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat noting that Joutseno’s star power gave Hollywood screwball comedies a run for their money, and Pertti Avolakin in the Helsingin Sanomat observing that modern viewers truly needed to appreciate that this was a comedy made in wartime (or its immediate aftermath) specifically to distract and entertain the women of the home front.
One of the little rascals with smoke bombs was played by Kalevi Koski, previously seen in The Man from Sysmä (1938). He would leave child-acting behind to become an orthodontist and professor of dentistry, becoming the first person in Finnish academia to write his thesis in English.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Articles about the late Michael Bakewell struggled to contain his career high-points. He had, after all, been the BBC’s first Head of Plays, appointed in 1963 to add a touch of class to broadcasting. He arrived at the television wing after almost a decade directing radio for the “Third Programme”, and continued to oversee radio adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and the acclaimed radio version of The Lord of the Rings.
Bakewell was a hands-on director, often taking a partial credit for the scripts. Surviving footage of him at work shows him pushing his actors to wring every nuance from their words, vitally aware that in radio, words are often all they have. In the mid-1970s, shortly before his radio triumphs with Holmes and Frodo, Bakewell was roped into an unusual job, replacing the audio of a Japanese television programme with believable English dialogue.
“We thought at first the thing was undubbable,” he told Nationwide. “The only way to get it at was to do it in what I can only describe as, kind of, English Oriental tradition, somewhere in between Fu Manchu and The Goon Show.”
The programme was The Water Margin, based on the manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, itself inspired by a classical Chinese novel. An entire generation of British children grew up listening to Burt Kwouk’s cod-philosophical voice-overs, and puzzling at some of the weirder churns of dialogue made to match the lip-sync. NTV’s Monkey soon followed, making Bakewell the go-to guy for difficult Asian dub-jobs.
A few years later, he was hired by Manga Entertainment to oversee their early cartoons for grown-ups, often punched up with questionably racy dialogue. His output was sometimes dismissive, giving trash like Dark Myth and Mad Bull 34 little better than they deserved, but also with some real gems among the classier releases. Roujin-Z, with an ADR script from George Roubicek, was a superb job, as were Bakewell’s English audios for the Patlabor movies. Even his throwaway projects have often gained a certain cachet – Cyber City Oedo 808 has come to be something of a classic because of its sweary dub, scripted by John Wolskel.
Budget cuts at Manga coincided with Bakewell’s brush with bowel cancer, leaving much of the later-period 1990s Manga Video dubs either bought in from America or flung together at a lower-rent outfit. In semi-retirement, he turned to writing, leaving a clear mark on Manga Entertainment’s style and library in its heyday. Anime News Network lists literally dozens of anime dubs to his credit, entirely unmentioned in his mainstream obituaries.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #235, 2023.
On 8 February 1644, the first day of the Chinese New Year, the ministers of the Emperor of Lofty Omens woke before dawn and journeyed through the streets of Beijing. At the break of day, in keeping with tradition that stretched back for centuries, they would greet their 33-year-old ruler, whom the gods had selected to reign over the entire world. Then, the assembled throng would welcome in the new year, the 4341st since China’s first, legendary kings, and entreat the gods and ancestors to bring them good fortune.
The city, however, was quiet. Many of its inhabitants had succumbed to a harsh outbreak of disease the previous year, and according to one diarist, ‘no babies had been born in the city for the previous six months.’ Not all the ministers arrived at the palace on time. Those that did found the gates jammed shut, and were only able to open them with some difficulty. Eventually, they found the Emperor of Lofty Omens, in the Hall of the Central Ultimate. He was weeping.
China was doomed. The Dynasty of Brightness, the Ming, which had ruled the world’s largest nation for centuries, had lost its hold on power. A Confucian scholar would have been scandalised at the low attendance that morning; without a full complement of ministers, how could they perform the necessary ceremonies? But not even the Emperor himself bore a grudge against the absentees, or those who arrived late, wheezing breathless apologies. No amount of prayers and ceremony would change the inevitable, and no sacrifice, however elaborate, would attract the ancestors’ attention from the afterlife.
Besides, the Emperor could not afford it. Ever since the disastrous reign of his father, the nation’s budgets had spiralled wildly out of control. Attempts to curtail imperial luxuries were not enough, fundamental cornerstones of civilization had gone to ruin. The Grand Canal to the south was falling into disrepair, and the postal system had been shut down. Smallpox had wrought havoc among the farming communities, who struggled in vain to tease crops from the earth – though few realised at the time, the middle of the 17th century gripped the world in a mini-ice age. The same weather conditions that were then freezing over the Thames in London were also bringing deadly cold to the lands north of the Great Wall.
The Emperor was fated to fall. While the Great Wall still held, a new enemy struck from within. Starved of food and decimated by disease, a distant inland province rose up in revolt. An army of disaffected soldiers and peasants, began to march on the capital city, led by the rebel Li Zicheng.
Li Zicheng, formerly one of the post-riders who delivered mail along China’s once-great roads, had been obsessed with seizing control of the Empire from his youth. Not even losing an eye in battle dimmed his ardour, as one old prophecy had predicted the Empire would fall to a man with only one eye. His previous dealings with other members of the imperial family had been less than favourable. During his campaigns, he not only killed the Emperor’s uncle the Prince of Fu, but drank his blood, mixing it into his venison broth. Li Zicheng was the leader of a horde of almost 100,000 soldiers, boiling across the country towards Beijing, gathering still greater numbers as peasants flocked to its tax-free banners.
On New Year’s Day, as the Ming Emperor sat sobbing in his palace, Li Zicheng announced his intention to found a new dynasty. The Dynasty of Brightness, he said, had fallen. Long live the Da Shun, the Dynasty of Great Obedience.
With the usurper Li Zicheng advancing ever closer to Beijing, the Emperor of Lofty Omens knew it was time for drastic measures. Drunk and disoriented, he ordered for the Ming Heir Apparent to be smuggled out of the city. He gathered the rest of his family about him and informed them that it was time to die. Some of his wives and concubines had already committed suicide, and were found hanged or poisoned in their chambers. Others had fled. There was no such option for the immediate family of the Emperor, who attacked his own children with a sword. The 15-year-old Princess Imperial held out her right arm to stay his attack, and the Emperor hacked it off. The maimed girl fled screaming through the halls, leaving a trail of blood. Her younger sisters were not so lucky, and both died where they stood, stabbed by their own father. The Emperor then went to the base of nearby hill, where he wrote a final 
message in his own blood, before hanging himself as Li Zicheng’s army drew closer. Later writers would claim the Emperor’s last words blamed his ministers and his own ‘small virtue’ for the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, and exhorted the rebels to spare his people from suffering. In fact, the Emperor’s bleeding finger simply traced the plaintive, spidery characters ‘Son of Heaven.’ His body lay undiscovered for three days.
Extract from Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements, available in the UK and US.
After successfully chasing the Mongols out of China, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Hongwu, tried to erase his humble, rebellious origins by aspiring to be the perfect ruler. And the perfect emperor needed an ideal capital, so he planned one out in Nanjing. The Nanjing Museum is set in the grounds of his palace, a Forbidden City manqué climbing up the side of a hill with a view of the city walls. And since it’s Monday and the museum is closed to the public, we have it to ourselves except for the fidgeting security guards, and a man from the propaganda office, who is putting a brave face on the fact that he is incredibly bored.
Nanjing’s history goes back to the Stone Age, although the museum concentrates on those moments in Chinese history when it was a capital. When the Han dynasty fell in 220 AD, China spent 350 years in a state of disunity, and Zhuge Liang, a ministerial adviser to one of the upstart kingdoms, recommended Nanjing as the ideal location for capital. It had, he said, mountains around it like a crouching tiger and a coiling dragon, and the river Yangtze acted as a natural moat. When northern China fell to barbarian invaders, the nomads couldn’t make it south of the Yangtze, turning Nanjing into a bastion of old culture and a guardian of Chinese heritage.
I have to do pieces to camera in front of the museum’s various displays – Nanjing has been a sort of capital of China for several cumulative centuries, but for most of those times, it was in one of the squib dynasties of the Dark Ages, when it was only really the capital not of an empire, but of a glorified kingdom in the lower Yangtze area. When even educated foreigners are unlikely to be able to name half a dozen major Chinese dynasties, it is tough to run through the likes of the Liu Song, the Chen and the Southern Qi, none of which lasted for more than a few decades, but all of which were centred on Nanjing, quite probably the greatest city in the world at the time. I pick a giant stone pixiu, a chimera-like mythological beast from the squib emperors’ tombs, as a means of pointing out that they achieved some big things and had an enduring culture, even if the family at the top switched around a few times.
I am actually a huge fan of the Six Dynasties — I love it as one of those neglected periods in Chinese histories, and I am a sad enough Six Dynasties nerd that I could indeed be found on the day of the release of the Cambridge History of China: Six Dynasties, waiting outside the Cambridge University Press bookshop for it to open. Good job, too, because they only had one copy in stock of their new £115 monster, so I got in there ahead of the rush.
We point the camera at ceramic, open-mouthed rhinos, made as bespoke piss-pots for Six Dynasties emperors, as well as fragments of Nanjing’s famous Porcelain Tower, a diorama of the old Yuecheng (Fortress of the Viet) built on the future site of Nanjing by the king of Wu to watch over the conquered 5th century BC kingdom of Yue. The security guards lurk glumly, ordered to be on their feet whenever we are around, and hence forced to be on their feet all day.
A bunch of them sit around in their office smoking fags, leading to the fantastically Chinese moment when their closed circuit TV monitors show our director lighting up behind the toilets in the park, and they rush out to tell her that the whole facility is Non-Smoking. Except, apparently, their office, which has so much smoke billowing out of it that you would be forgiven for thinking it was on fire.
The curator Wu Tian starts off a little timid and unsure of himself. But we get him to show us some of his favourite pieces in the museum, and he starts talking with true passion and excitement about truly weird items. One is a bit of road with ruts worn by four hundred years of ox-carts. Another looks like a mini bedpan, but turns out to be a Six Dynasties iron for smoothing clothes flat. Another looks like half a toilet seat on legs, but is instead a sort of arm rest for people on divans in a culture that has yet to invent the chair.
“I suppose not,” I wonder aloud, “because after all, the chair is a Song-dynasty innovation.”
Mr Wu stands bolt upright, as if poked with a cattle prod. Not for the first time on this shoot, the fact that I am not only listening, but can say something relevant in Chinese makes his eyes stick out on stalks, and suddenly he is twice as animated and excited. The interview goes swimmingly well, since he has worked out that I am not some fat white sock puppet, but an actual historian who knows his Han from his Ming. So he chats excitedly about Dark Age hairstyles and roof tiles, and saves the best till last.
“Now this, he says, “is my favourite. We found it smashed into a hundred pieces in a Nanjing grave, and we put it back together. It’s a glass cup, from a time when China didn’t have any glass blowers. We think it came from the Eastern Roman Empire, by sea, and ended up in Guangzhou, from where it made its way north to Nanjing as some sort of curio to impress visitors. The grave was a wealthy merchant’s, but this isn’t the only Roman glass we’ve found in Nanjing. It’s actually the twelfth.”
Camera A on the interviewee, B-roll on the interviewer, me interjecting with actual questions that make it clear we are not some bored school party fubbing with our phones, but a bunch of people who have come to Nanjing specifically to talk about the Six Dynasties, the squib dynasties that everybody usually ignores. Mr Wu is very pleased, and thanks us profusely for actually knowing what he is talking about. I get the feeling it’s a rare occurrence.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appear in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 