The epic adventure The Rose of Tibet is a stunning work from a largely forgotten writer. Lionel Davidson would make any shortlist for the best thriller writer of the last sixty years whom you’ve never heard of, let alone read. Of his eight novels, three won the prestigious Gold Dagger [...]
Borneo. Few place names are more evocative of old-style adventure. Steamy jungles, headhunting Dayaks, exotic wildlife, and scantily clad native women – the stuff that schoolboy dreams are made of. And the most romantic of all was Sarawak, in northwestern Borneo, a kingdom ruled by a dynastic monarchy of Englishmen [...]
Are foreign English teachers in Asia losers? The usual caveats aside about the unfairness of painting whole swathes of a population with such broad strokes, yes, there are enough deadbeats to justify the stereotype. I recall my first day at an upmarket exam prep school in Taipei, the director explaining [...]
What’s the laziest way of writing a book? Throw together your blog posts or diary entries? No, that still requires you to have written something. An anthology? And one from a writer’s group or “colony.” Fiction or non-fiction, no problem, and let the laziest artists submit poems: “I’m still working [...]
It all started with a sex-crazed American expat asking an unsuspecting Hong Kong woman to strip. Well, kind of. Cartoonist Larry Feign had just moved to Hong Kong, and he and his wife, Cathy, were in the kitchen cooking. Feign asked her in Cantonese if she wanted some “choi sum” [...]
The Pearl River Delta is home to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and cities of millions – such as gritty workshops to the world Dongguan and Zhongshan – that you’ve never heard of. Despite being the powerhouse of the country’s decades-long economic boom, China’s southern cities have been largely ignored [...]
The thriller gets off to a good start with the title. Any China–Taiwan story without “dragon” or similar Orientalist cheese in the name is a welcome reprieve from the likes of Dragon Teeth, Dragon Storm, and Operation Red Dragon. Having a dragon-free title is a minor point perhaps, but it’s [...]
A poor man’s Marco Polo, Hendrick Hamel was the first European to write a detailed account of Korea. The twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper was serving aboard the Dutch East India Company’s Sperwer (Sparrowhawk) as it set sail on July 30, 1653, from the Dutch settlement of Anping, Formosa. Laden with a cargo [...]
Taiwan is a superb destination for rail fans: there’s the new bullet train, Taipei’s showcase MRT, the scenic East Coast railways, the busy main trunk western line, quaint branch lines, and the magnificent Alishan narrow-gauge forestry railway, which climbs a stunning two-thousand meters. Not that you’d know that from the [...]
Some books get under your skin, keep you awake at night long after you’ve finished reading them. This biography of a policeman in Shanghai’s International Settlement in the 1920s and 1930s is such a book. Richard Maurice Tinkler, recently demobbed from First World War service, is back in England looking [...]
