An Irishman In China

In 1994, Irishman Graeme Allen arrived in Urumqi, China, the most landlocked city in the world. With barely a penny to his name and not a word of Chinese, he set about building a new life and career in Chinaâ€s burgeoning tourist industry.Since then, Graeme has immersed himself in one of the worldâ€s most fascinating and confounding cultures. As China opened up its markets and grew into the second-largest economy on earth, Graeme moved between six different cities, working for the most renowned names in hospitality and eventually opening The Flying Fox, an Irish restaurant and bar in Shanghai.This funny and revealing memoir explores a country where youâ€ll definitely need good guanxi (connections) if you want to open a business, pass your driving test or even get an anaesthetic before surgery. In fact, doing just about anything in China requires an open mind and a different approach than Westerners are used to, as Graeme has discovered a thousand times over!Told with genuine warmth and affection for the country that has become his home and for the people who have welcomed him there, Is That Fat Foreigner Rich? is a window onto a culture so rich and diverse that it delights and astounds in equal measure.

It was a long journey—in more ways than mere geography—from a childhood in Northern Ireland to becoming the most influential foreigner in 19th-century China. This historical novel follows the life of Robert Hart, whose career in China spanned more than half a century during the turbulent last decades of the Qing dynasty. As the Qing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Hart was involved in many major events of late Imperial China. While negotiating his way through civil dissent and foreign conflicts, he played an instrumental role in the country's modernization. A rare foreigner who learned the language and developed a deep interest in and sensitivity to the culture, Hart had a passion for his adopted country but continually struggled in his dual role as British subject and employee of the Chinese government. Hart's personal life was not without its own challenges as he grappled with his relationship with his Chinese lover and the children he had with her, as well as his British wife and their family together. Long periods of conflict, loneliness and doubt lurked behind the professional triumphs for which he became world-renowned. Based on exhaustive historical research, the story is enlivened by dialogue and plot elements suggested by the author's deep knowledge of Hart and the country and times in which he lived. The reader will be rewarded with insight into this pivotal period in Chinese history through the lens of the life of one fascinating individual.

In 1793, George Macartney introduced two of the leading empires of his age, and set off one of the greatest power shifts in history. Kowtow: Georgian Britain, Imperial China and the Irishman who Introduced Them tells the story of Macartney, Britain's first Ambassador to China, and his career that spanned the globe, from the Caribbean to India, from Brazil to Indonesia, and then finally through China to Peking. Kowtow explains why Macartney s embassy was needed, and examines the nature and personalities of the Ambassador and his imperial host, the Emperor Qianlong. The reader will journey with Macartney across the world into Peking s Summer Palace, before crossing over the Great Wall to Qianlong s summer hunting grounds in Rehe. The story of the Macartney mission provides significant lessons for modern diplomatic engagements and trade relations, and still causes great reverberations today. As a result, his mission represents one of the major missed opportunities in history and the challenges faced by Macartney still finds echoes in relations between China and the West.

This is a collection of fifty-eight letters, written by an interpreter attached to the British legation in Peking, to his family between 7 January 1866 and 27 March 1869. The author was a man in his early twenties, the son of the Revd John Scott Porter, minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, Belfast, a non-subscribing Presbyterian or Unitarian congregation. Written in the very early days of Western intrusion into China, the letters (which also cover Porter's journey east) comment on many of the events which had significance for the future as well as revealing the daily life and social activities of this first generation of ex-patriots. The manuscript transcription (now the property of Mr John Donnellan) of the letters was made by a member of his family after Porter's early death.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imperial powers—principally Britain, the United States, Russia, France, Germany and Japan—signed treaties with China to secure trading, residence and other rights in cities on the coast, along important rivers, and in remote places further inland. The largest of them—the great treaty ports of Shanghai and Tientsin—became modern cities of international importance, centres of cultural exchange and safe havens for Chinese who sought to subvert the Qing government. They are also lasting symbols of the uninvited and often violent incursions by foreign powers during China’s century of weakness. The extraterritorial privileges that underpinned the treaty ports were abolished in 1943—a time when much of the treaty port world was under Japanese occupation. China’s Foreign Places provides a historical account of the hundred or more major foreign settlements that appeared in China during the period 1840 to 1943. Most of the entries are about treaty ports, large and small, but the book also includes colonies, leased territories, resorts and illicit centres of trade. Information has been drawn from a wide range of sources and entries are arranged alphabetically with extensive illustrations and maps. China’s Foreign Places is both a unique work of reference, essential for scholars of this period and travellers to modern China. It is also a fascinating account of the people, institutions and businesses that inhabited China’s treaty port world.

This edited volume moves beyond the traditional examination of the treaty ports of China and Japan as places of cultural interaction. It moves ‘beyond the Bund’, presenting instead the history of material culture, the everyday life of the residents of the treaty ports beyond the symbology of Shanghai's waterfront. Bringing for the first time together scholars of China and Japan, museum curators, legal, economic and architectural historians, it studies the treaty ports not only as sites of cultural exchange, but also as sites of social contestation, accommodation and mobility, covering topics as varied as day to day life itself, such as family, property and law, health and welfare, travel, visual culture and memory. The call of this volume is to peel the multiple layers of the encounter between East and West in the treaty ports of China and Japan.