About China Rhyming

China Rhyming

China Rhyming, at chinarhyming.com, is a long-running blog by the British author Paul French. French describes it himself as a gallimaufry of random China history and research interests. The blog covers old China through books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts and archival photographs, and it is now also continued as a Substack under the same China Rhyming name. French, who co-founded the Shanghai research firm Access Asia in 1997 and lived in China before becoming a full-time writer, is the author of Midnight in Peking and Her Lotus Year. China Rhyming was named in Danwei's 2012 Model Worker awards for the best specialist websites and blogs about China.

Paul French: from Access Asia to full-time writing

Paul French studied history, economics and Mandarin in London and holds an M.Phil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He co-founded Access Asia, a Shanghai-based research firm, in 1997, and worked as a business advisor and analyst in China before becoming a full-time writer. Alongside his books he has contributed to publications including Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and The Guardian, served as a columnist for the China Economic Quarterly and China Economic Review, and held editorial roles including series editor for Zed Books' Asian Arguments series and advisor for Anthem Press's China series. China Rhyming grew out of that working life in China: it is the public notebook of a researcher whose day job, for many years, was explaining China to outsiders.

What China Rhyming publishes

The blog's own description, a gallimaufry of random China history and research interests, is accurate. Posts rummage through old China: forgotten books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts and archival photographs, alongside news of French's own books, talks and walking tours. A representative post from May 2012 announced that Midnight in Peking would be BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, with daily abridged readings read by Crawford Logan. The site's archive mixes that kind of publishing news with historical finds, such as material on the 1930s photographer Mel Jacoby, whose never-before-seen images of China, Hong Kong, Macao, Indochina, the Philippines and Australia French later introduced in a foreword to the collection A Danger Shared. The result is part research diary, part commonplace book, written for readers who share French's fascination with the foreign presence in pre-1949 China.

Midnight in Peking and the Pamela Werner case

The blog is inseparable from French's best-known book. Midnight in Peking tells the story of Pamela Werner, the daughter of former British consul Edward Werner, whose body was found near the Fox Tower in Peking in January 1937, in a murder that was never solved. French came across Edward Werner's lost case file in the Scotland Yard archives seventy-five years later and used it to reconstruct the investigation and identify the likely killer. The book was a bestseller, spending seven weeks in the South China Morning Post's top ten list, and became BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in May 2012. China Rhyming carried the news, the readings schedule and, later, the afterlife of the book, including the Penguin China Midnight in Peking walking tour in Beijing, relaunched in April 2025 with the travel company WildChina, which retraces stops including Armour Factory Alley, where Pamela and her father lived near Edgar Snow and Helen Foster Snow, and the Fox Tower itself.

The wider bibliography behind the blog

The blog draws on, and promotes, a substantial body of work. French's earlier books include Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula, One Billion Shoppers: Accessing Asia's Consuming Passions and Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from the Opium Wars to Mao. After Midnight in Peking came its companion volume Badlands, on the decadent playground of old Peking, and City of Devils, set in old Shanghai. His Destination series now runs to three volumes, Destination Shanghai, Destination Peking and Destination Macao. His most recent major work discussed on the blog is Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson. These books supply the blog's raw material: the characters, streets and scandals of treaty-port China that French researches for print return as posts, photographs and anecdotes online.

China Rhyming on Substack

The blog now continues in parallel as a Substack, also called China Rhyming, while the original site at chinarhyming.com remains live and French reminds readers that he still blogs there. His April 2026 Substack dispatch, covering books in Beijing, rooftops in Macao and a giveaway of the Japanese edition of Midnight in Peking, shows the newsletter's working method: signing sessions with his Chinese publishers, Social Sciences Academic Press, in Beijing, an appearance at the Macao International Literary Festival on the roof of the restored Hotel Central, and reading recommendations such as Donald Mennie's 1926 photography book The Grandeur of the Gorges. French notes that he is a slight anomaly in Chinese publishing, a foreigner writing about Chinese history in English who is also popular in China. He has left Twitter, and connects with readers instead through Bluesky, Threads, Instagram and WeChat.

Recognition: Danwei's Model Worker awards

China Rhyming was named in Danwei's 2012 Model Worker awards, which recognised the best specialist websites and blogs about China. The timing is significant: 2012 was the year Midnight in Peking reached its widest audience, and the award placed the blog at the centre of the then-flourishing English-language China blogsphere, a scene of journalists, researchers and residents publishing independently about the country. That China Rhyming has outlived most of that scene, continuing first as a blog and then also as a newsletter, is part of its distinction: it has kept a single author's voice and subject, the history of old China, in continuous publication while the platforms around it changed.

Old China as a subject

The blog's enduring subject is the world that ended in 1949 and, in Peking's case, in 1937: the legation quarter, the Badlands, the race clubs and hotels, the journalists, missionaries, adventurers and refugees of the treaty ports. French approaches that world through objects and paper, a consul's case file, a photographer's negatives, a 1926 book of Yangtze gorge photographs, a restored 1928 hotel in Macao. China Rhyming collects the by-products of that research that do not fit between book covers: the anecdote too small for a chapter, the photograph too good to leave in an archive, the forgotten book that deserves a new reader. For readers of his books, it is the workshop behind the finished volumes; for everyone else, it is a free-standing cabinet of curiosities about old China.

Why China Rhyming matters

China Rhyming matters because it connects a bestselling body of historical writing to a living, searchable public archive. Its author spent a decade running a Shanghai research firm, wrote the standard popular account of the Pamela Werner murder, and has been recognised by Danwei, broadcast by BBC Radio 4 and published in Chinese by Social Sciences Academic Press. Through the blog and its Substack continuation, that work stays in conversation with readers between books: walking tours are announced, foreign editions are given away, archival photographs are identified, and old books are put back into circulation. Few author blogs from the China blogsphere of the early 2010s are still publishing; China Rhyming is, in the same voice and on the same subject as when it won its Model Worker award in 2012.