Shanghai
Jewish Shanghai Worth the Visit
I highly recommend Dvir Bar-Gal’s entertaining and informative walking tours of Jewish Shanghai. You will see a side of Shanghai that most people don’t know exists and gain a greater understanding of the city’s past. Dvir is working to preserve old parts of Shanghai, something that interests too few people.
Old Maps: Paul French, a journalist and director of Access Asia, has reproduced a lovely 1935 map of Shanghai produced by adman Carl Crow. (About whom Paul wrote a biography). To get a copy - if he still has any left - contact Paul on +86-21-6374-5679 or paul at accessasia.co.uk.
The Municipal Council’s map, issued for visitors to Shanghai in 1935, shows a city that had grown up in the previous 20 years — by 1935 the Bund was formed pretty much as we know it today and the International Concession reached out past the race course, now People’s Square. One interesting thing to note is that when supposed old hands in Shanghai tell you Pudong was nothing but fields and farms when they came here you’ll know they are bullshitting — the map shows how Pudong was a thriving factory area then around what is now Lujiazui.
Graham Earnshaw also has a nice collection of Shanghai maps online.
A list of some famous Shanghai Jews by Ron Gluckman:
The Kadoories - Family made its fortune in Shanghai and Hong Kong real estate, utilities and their Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotel chain (which includes the famed Peninsula).
The Sassoons - One-time opium traders who went big-time into trading and property.
Morris Cohen - Known by his nickname Two-Gun Cohen, he served as bodyguard and aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen, eventually becoming a Chinese general.
Dr. Jakob Rosenfeld - An Austrian who spent nine years overseeing health care for the Communist army.
Michael Medavoy - Lived in Shanghai until age 7, he went onto a career as Hollywood mogul at Columbia, Orion and TriStar Pictures.
Peter Max - Influential American pop artist born in Germany, but spent 10 years in Shanghai.
Mike Blumenthal - U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Eric Halpern - Co-founder of the Far Eastern Economic Review and first editor.
(h/t to the Shanghaiist for the Paul French quote.)
Dvir Bar-Gal
Dvir Bar-Gal offers highly entertaining and informative walking tours of Jewish Shanghai. You will see a side of Shanghai that most people don’t know exists.
Dvir is a Shanghai-based Israel-born journalist who has dedicated himself to saving the building, memories and trying to build a memorial to the Jews of Shanghai. He has collected for preservation, the many Jewish tombstones found by farmers and builders around Shanghai.
A documentarist, videographer and photojournalist, Dvir graduated from Tel-Aviv University’s Film department and the Art-Inter Disciplinary program in 1996. His tours take over the guided visits given by Flora Amiel and Georgia Noy from 1998 until 2002.
Ken Carroll: How to learn Chinese using Web 2.0
The Internet - and Web 2.0 tools in particular - are extremely well suited to language teaching, explains Ken Carroll, co-founder of Chinesepod.com in this video.
Carroll’s Shanghai-based company (which I use to learn Mandarin) employs Web 2.0 methods to teach Chinese and a growing range of other languages.
To see why Carroll thinks Web 2.0 works so well, you need to see the process of a typical student: me!
I usually begin a new topic listening to a radio show-style hosted podcast in which two presenters introduce a dialogue. I then listen to another podcast that reviews vocabulary before I get to a third podcast in which I can listen to the dialogue alone several times. (I do all this while at the gym or going to the office)
After listening to the podcast, you can go on the Chinesepod website and play a variety of games with the vocabulary from that lesson.
In terms of which lesson you choose, there is no order. I usually just start with the most recent lesson. Some lessons make reference to recent events, while other lessons are less time sensitive.
To Carroll, that is the key insight of using the Internet for language teaching: Students have a framework in which to explore topics that are of interest to them.
“You have a personalized studying framework, but the student is free to explore any topic or information that interests them,” Carroll said. “Language takes on an exploratory approach.”
To Carroll, this fits with the way children learn language - based on the child’s experience and interests.
Twitter in China (Cloned of course)
The Pacific Ocean appeared to protect China from the Twitter craze hitting the US and Europe over the last year.
No more!
(Note for Luddite friends: Twitter is a San Francisco micro-blogging phenome that has thousands of people sending 160 character sms messages to each other. It is weird, yes, but also somewhat addictive.)
China has Twitter-ers both in English and in Chinese, but the local specialty of knock-offs has already kicked in. Adam J. Schokora of Edelman Digital speaks in this video about Twitter knock-offs Fanfou, Jiwai and the biggest of them all, Zuosa.
Schokora estimates that while there are only 7,000 Chinese-language Twitter-ers, Zuosa has more than 600,000.
Jiwai has the best looking homepage, but none of them have Twhirl-like offline client. How do you say “Business Opportunity” in Chinese?
To follow China Twitters in English, check out the Chinalist compiled by Christine Lu.
Shanghaiist
Met with Dan Washburn and Kenneth Tan of the Shanghaiist this morning for brunch.
Dan, a former newspaper writer in America’s Bible belt, came to China in 2002 and started an urban blog called Shanghai Diaries. Seeing the popularity of the site - and lack of such a site for Shanghai - Washburn approached the Gothamist team in New York.
Taking advantage of the City-ist network’s name, Dan started launched the Shanghaiist, which has turned into one of China’s most popular English-language blog/portals. There is no sharing of advertising across the city-ist network, but a number of the English-language portals in China have considered teaming up to make themselves a single sale for an ad rep. (Not a bad approach, in my view.)
As Dan concentrated in 2007 more on his book about golf in China, Par for China, Kenneth Tan joined the team to make sure the site is updated half a dozen times per day. Kenneth runs the site while selling men’s underwear from a disused bomb shelter in Shanghai’s French Concession.
Kenneth Tan of Shanghaiist
The primary contributor to the popular Shanghaiist blog, Kenneth Tan also runs a men’s underwear store out of a disused bomb shelter in Shanghai’s French Concession. Tan’s shop, Manifesto.com.cn, recently opened another outlet near the Forbidden in Beijing.
Singaporean-born, Tan has been in Shanghai since 2003.
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