Paper Scissors Stone

Notes

NoTeS 61 ‘Pictures of Foreign objects’ is the title of an exhibit in From East to West: Traditional East Asian and Contemporary European Printing at the British Library in 2008. LRB is the London Review of Books Bookshop on Bury Place near the British Museum. ‘Thatched House Destroyed by an Autumn Storm’, ‘In a Pavilion by a Stream’, and ‘Rain on a Spring Night’: Tu Fu wrote these poems in AD 761, when he was 50. He had escaped capture and been forced into exile after the Tang dynasty had been torn apart by An Lushan’s rebellion (AD 755–759). He drifted from town to town, witnessing bombed farmhouses, unfed children and mutilated corpses. Sick and utterly impoverished, he arrived at Chengdu, Sichuan in october 759. He spent several weeks without any shelter, before earning enough money to set about building a simple thatched house by a stream. The building work took a year, and he finally moved in spring 761. ‘Roots’: The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong started on 25 December 1941 and lasted for three years and eight months. The population of Hong Kong dwindled from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 in 1945. Strict rationing was imposed, causing many to die of starvation. My grandparents survived but lost their metal shop and everything they owned at gunpoint. ‘Hero Tree’: the quotation is from ezra Pound’s translation of Confucius’s The Great Digest. 62 ‘China Landscape in the Forecourt of the British Museum’: China Landscape was an outdoor exhibition at the British Museum in 2008. The calligrapher Zhao Yizhou inscribed the Chinese character 華 on the scholar’s rock. ‘BN(o)’: British National (overseas) is a category of British Nationality created after the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1995) signed by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. ‘Reading Thom Gunn’s Notebooks at the Bancroft Library’: the fourth stanza opens with a line from Book Six of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, where the poet described his disappointment at finding that he had already crossed the Alps. ‘Handwriting’: the first stanza draws on Joyce’s Ulysses. ‘Watershed’: the last line is the opening of Hamlet. ‘obstacles to Dreams’: the quotation is from The Tempest. ‘Ghost Letter’: see ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’ by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. ‘Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Studio’: the four treasures are a brush, ink, ink stone, and paper. ...