Here are the highlights from the final Tales of Asia talk, featuring cities of the British Empire – Rangoon, Penang and Singapore.
The full talk to follow.
Tales of Asia V – Rangoon (Yangon), Penang & Singapore HIGHLIGHTS
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Tag Archives: Port Cities
Tales of Asia I – Malacca & Manila (Highlights)
Dear armchair time-travellers, here’s a clip featuring highlights from my talk at the Woodlands Regional Library, Singapore on 18 October 2015. A link to entire talk to follow soon. In the meantime, enjoy…
A link to the full talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYa3SA8_7HY
[The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in Southeast Asia is available now at all major bookstores in Singapore, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and London. Find it also at http://www.amazon.co.uk, http://www.amazon.com, http://www.waterstones.com and http://www.bookdepository.com.
Tales of Asia I – Malacca and Manila, Sunday, 18 Oct, 2 – 3 pm, Woodlands Regional Library
Part I of Tales of Asia – my series of talks on port cities in Southeast Asia – features Malacca and Manila, mediaeval walled cities built in the 16th century by the Portuguese and the Spanish respectively.
Join me as we explore the cities’ rise and fall, and uncover traces of the Portuguese and Spanish heritage that still remain today. In particular, we…
- Trace the path of the former walls of the Fortaleza de Malacca, and understand the colonial history of the city through one remaining portion of the wall – La Porta de Santiago.
- Visit the Portuguese Settlement in Melaka today to explore Kristang food and culture.
- Retrace the journey of the fabled Manila Galleon across the Pacific from Manila to Acapulco
- Revisit the walled city of Manila at the height of its splendour, in the 1700s and 1800s.
- Understand the unique mestizo architecture – the bahay na bato – that developed due to the adaptation of Spanish colonial styles to the tropics
…amongst other things.
Map of Intramuros, 1917. Private Collection.
Tales of Asia – Public Talks in Singapore, 18 Oct – 14 Nov 2015
For those of you who are in Singapore, join me in October and November for a series of 5 weekend public talks, featuring histories and images from The Romance of the Grand Tour.
Tales of Asia takes the armchair time-traveller back in time to the East Indies – what we know as Southeast Asia today. Over the course of 5 talks, we visit 10 historic port cities in the region. In each city, we journey back through time to the 1500s – 1800s, and back again to the present day to hunt down traces of the past that remain in the cities today.
The talks will be visually rich – featuring archival images, maps, prints, as well as contemporary photography. We shall explore castles and forts, rivers and canals, city streets, and the often strange, hybrid architecture and cultures that evolved in these cities where the East and the West met.
Here are the dates, times and venues for the talks. No registration is required. Just come and be ready for an hour of travel, wonder and nostalgia!
More details on each talk shall be posted here on The Romance of the Grand Tour each week. The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in Southeast Asia shall also be available for purchase at selected talks.
[The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in Southeast Asia is available now at all major bookstores in Singapore, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and London. Find it also at http://www.amazon.co.uk, http://www.amazon.com, http://www.waterstones.com and http://www.bookdepository.com.]
The Hong Kong Skyline: Then and Now
The Hong Kong skyline in the 1890s/1900s.
Hong Kong is the sister city to Singapore, and like its sibling, it presents a very stark illustration of how trade and commerce shapes a city.
Hong Kong’s skyline is one of the most iconic skylines in the world – this was true of the city in the early 1900s, as it is today. The following two shots provide a sense of how this skyline has changed, but still remains memorable.
What unfortunately has faded away are those sweeping vistas of Chinese junks sailing past Hong Kong Harbour – the very essence of Hong Kong itself. Today, only one junk plies these waters, and even then, it is a pale shadow of those that came before it.
[The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in Southeast Asia is available now at all major bookstores in Singapore, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. As of mid-June, it will also be available at Waterstones and Blackwells in London, on http://www.amazon.co.uk and http://www.bookdepository.com]
An iconic junk in Hong Kong Harbour, early 1900s.
The Hong Kong skyline today, and the lone junk still plying the waters of the harbour (at bottom left).
Hôtel Métropole, Hanoi
The iconic and fabulous La Terrasse cafe restaurant, at today’s Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi.
Hôtel Métropole in Hanoi is one of the most beautiful hotels on this Grand Tour of Southeast Asia, and it is easily also one of my favourite hotels of all. Opened in 1901, it was the grande dame of the Hanoi social scene; and over a hundred years later, as the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi, it remains the city’s most illustrious hotel establishment.
Hotel Metropole sits at left in a postcard from the early 1900s. The square it sits on was known as Square Chavassieux. Across from the Hotel stood (and stills stands) the Residence Superieure.
Stepping into the hotel is like stepping back in time – the atmosphere is chic, glamorous, chic and steeped in nostalgia. Wrapped up in a seasonal quilt in Winter and supping at one’s aperitif in the famous Bamboo Bar inside the hotel’s central courtyard, one feels transported to Paris during the Belle Epoque (1870s – 1910s). The hotel is lit up with a thousand christmas lights, and the lilting melody of French chansons waft through the air.
Another memorable and unique experience the hotel offers is a spin across town in one of its 1950s vintage Citroën cars. Sailing through the streets in this vehicle, with hundreds of ordinary Hanoi-ans peering curiously at one from their motorcycles, it is hard not to feel like a turn-of-the- century colonialist, ostentatiously descending onto the town for a sumptuous dinner and subsequent merry-making at the cabaret.
Que la vie est belle!
[The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in Southeast Asia is available now at all major bookstores in Singapore – Kinokuniya, Times and MPH – as well as at museum shops and the airport. As of mid-June, it will also be available at major bookstores across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, at Waterstones and Blackwells in London. It is further available on http://www.amazon.co.uk and http://www.bookdepository.com]
The Hotel Lobby today.
The Hotel’s chandelier.
Vintage Citroens at the hotel.
Steamships, Grand Hotels and Port Cities in Southeast Asia
Dear Readers,
After two and a half years of working on this, my new book, The Romance of Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in Southeast Asia is finally to be launched on 15th April, 2015 in my home city of Singapore.
It is a new coffee table book celebrating the Grand Tour of Southeast Asia in the 1920s. Retracing the journey of those grand tourists of the ‘20s, the book takes today’s traveller through 12 fabled port cities in what was then known as the East Indies.
Setting sail from Rangoon (Yangon), we visit Penang, Malacca, Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta), Surabaya, Bangkok, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Phnom Penh, Hanoi and Manila before disembarking at Hong Kong harbour.
Each chapter presents a historical and photographic overview of the city’s old town, colonial precincts and living cultural heritage, drawing on archival images, maps and accounts, as well as contemporary photos.
In each city, we also stop at the city’s grand colonial hotel – the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, the Eastern & Oriental Hotel in Penang and the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi, to name a few.
As part of the on-going marketing and publicity campaign for the book, I am starting this new blog, where in the course of the year, I shall be posting images, photographs, maps and quotes from my book; interesting stories related to the “making of” the book; book events in the region, AND – as a plus – images, quotes, bits of history that are related to the history of travel, or to the 12 port cities in my book, but which did not make it into the “final cut.”
Welcome on board ship… and to a year of history, nostalgic and excitement!
Sincerely,
Kennie Ting
The Romance Of The Grand Tour 