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Hailing from the Burgundy region in France, Hugues Martin has lived in Shanghai since 2004. A partner at Expatrimo, a firm specialized in real estate investment in France, he is also the man behind Old Shanghai blog and newsletter, Shanghailander. With its 15th anniversary coming up, we caught up with him to find out more.
How did Shanghailander first come about?
Shanghailander was born out of my interest for the city and its past. It is focused on Old Shanghai, meaning the 1920s and 30s. I am particularly interested in the way foreign and Chinese culture intertwined to become the typical Shanghai style, or
The Wandering Jew Has Arrived by Albert Londres is a new translation by Helga Abraham of
Le Juif errant est arrivé, first published in France in 1930. The text is a collection of twenty-seven
articles by Londres originally published in the mass-circulation newspaper
Le Petit Parisien.
One of the great journalists of his time, of any time, Londres was born in 1884 and died in 1932 when the passenger ship taking him back to France, after carrying out a major and mysterious investigation in China, caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Aden. If he was writing now he would be called an investigative journalist. He wrote on prisons, colonial labour, prostitution and madness and is recognised as a source for Hergé’s cartoon character Tintin, whose first journalistic adventure, set in the Soviet Union, was published in January 1929; Londres’s own highly critical account of the Soviet Union had appeared in 1920.