All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Tonight I have a headache and the regular tablets are not helping. Unfortunately I can no longer pop over the road from my office to SG Arcus on Rue du Consulat (Jingling Lu) and pick up what sound to be the perfect cure for a headache in 1930s Shanghai (too much alcohol perhaps, or the lingering effects of an opium binge?) Dr. Deschamp’s cachets. Even tablets aren’t as interesting now as they used to be!
At long last the China Beat (which despite my image of a modern stupid looking copper on his “beat”, I guess they mean in the hacks sense) blog which has a lot of interesting stuff on it has moved away from Blogspot (block in China) to a proper URL – www.thechinabeat.org/. Took them a while but they got it sorted eventually.
Zhongshan Square (that used to be known as “Banker’s Square”)  in Dalian is one of the best preserved squares left in northern China with a mix of old bank buildings and the former Yamato Hotel. However, since I last visited the city in February this year destruction and construction/”refurbishment” fever has overtaken the city – partly I think Stimulus Package money abouding and partly the local government’s over excitement regarding the Summer Davos silliness (just ask anyone who’s ever attended how ridiculous it is) that happens up there now.
One tendency is to start replacing old roof tiles with plastic ones while ripping out crittal or iron window frames and replacing them with those awful UPVC ones. These pictures don’t really do the change justice – the plasticness is much more evident with the naked eye for some reason – to the new plasticy roof tiles that replaced the old tiles on the CITIC bank building in Zhongshan Square.
Admittedly it’s not as bad as it could have been but replacing the old tiles with non-plastic ones would have been better I’d argue. At top is a picture of the building taken in 2004 and the three below of the building now with the new roof – as I say the photos don’t show how false the roof tiles really look but you hopefully get the idea.
Hong Kong University Press has just published a fascinating new book on the May Day riots in Hong Kong in 1967 which is a subject rarely mentioned much these days in the new PRC-friendly SAR. Pro-communists in Hong Kong, inspired by the Cultural Revolution, turned a strike into a series of large-scale demonstrations against British colonial rule with pretty serious fighting.
The British-run Government imposed emergency regulations, granting the police special powers in attempt to quell the unrest. Leftists newspapers were banned from publishing; leftist schools were shut down; many leftists leaders were arrested, detained, and some of were later deported to the PRC. By the time the riots subsided at the end of the year 51 people were killed, including 5 police officers.
The new book – May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967, edited by Robert Bickers and Ray Yep – covers the the 1967 Riot, its impact on future government policy, Sino-British relations and the legacy for Hong Kong society and the people.
The Shida area is pleasant for a stroll on the weekend and the lynch pin of the area is the Taiwan Normal University. Worth a couple of pictures I think. The Japanese established the place during the colonial era as Taiwan Provincial College and then renamed it Taihoku College (as inTaipei in Japanese). Basically it trained administrators.
The original campus buildings are of course designed to look somewhat like a western university incorporating features of the neo-classical, gothic and gothic revival styles – being early twentieth century it looks more American than European to me personally. Of course lots of new bits have been added on as the college has expended but the central campus buildings remain.
With so many Shanghailanders in the city between the wars plenty of them inevitably died and had to be buried. The two best known undertakers were T. Macdonald & Co of Sinza Road (now Xinzha Road) and the best known of all, and the man who did all the best Shanghailander funerals, EO Scott of Kiaochow Road (now Jiaozhou Road). Both these ads are from 1936.
Mr Macdonald tended to handle the Hongkou dead apparently and, at least in his ad, seems to have had a nice range of monuments in stock. Of course all the cemeteries they used in Shanghai are gone – Shanghai is an odd city (like Peking) in that all the cemeteries in the downtown areas have been built over (and I think we can safely say there was no orderly removal of human remains before demolition – the idea of Shanghai’s rapacious and vandalising property developers doing the job properly is of course a nonsense).
Scott had a prime location – Kiaochow Road ran from the Bubbling Well Cemetery. He also made a nice sideline in supplying obituaries to the North-China Daily News – he was, afterall, the man most likely to know when anyone worthy of an obit had passed on. Apparently he traded obits for ad space. Sadly this odd doesn’t mention it but Scott’s telegram code was “casket”. Don’t know anything about Mr Macdonald but both appear to have been Scots and frankly there is no other race on earth that make better and more professional undertakers.
There was a time when hai-alai was a good night out in Shanghai
Over the holidays a few World War Two located novels, new and not so new, fell into my hands courtesy of the second hand bookshops of Taipei and Hong Kong. I enjoyed them both but then I’m a sucker for anything set during WW2 and the period continues to be a honeypot for authors.
Tim Binding’s Island Madness was published in 1999 but I only just came across it. Set in Guernsey during the War it, of course, raises the thorny issue of collaboration – the Channel Islands being the only part of the UK to be occupied by German troops. Jersey, Alderney and Sark (plus a few small ones I can’t remember the names of) were also occupied – indeed Alderney was turned into a brutal Nazi concentration camp and while Jersey and Guernsey have been talked about over the years little is ever said about Alderney.
Binding’s novel is situated around a murder on the island but raises much wider issues about what you would and wouldn’t do if the Nazis occupied your town, a subject the Brits are often a bit blase about even though we know that the Channel Islanders made some tough and not always wise choices. Binding seems to suggest that collaboration is, obviously, a question of degrees but that people can slip into it through familiarity and routine as easily as through hunger and desperation. There’s also the conundrum of the local detective – black marketeers etc may be resisting in part but may also be stealing from their own and hurting them more than the Germans. And there’s the question of whether when faced with occupation there could ever be such a thing as a ‘good German’? The actual muder plot is pretty good but it’s the wider issues that stick in the mind – the priorities people choose, the decisions they make and the fact that, for the Channel Islanders, the new regime could have been around for a thousand years. In the end of course it wasn’t.
Mark Mills chooses Malta, the fortress island of the Med, for his recently published The Information Officer. While, to be fair, the Channel Islands live on in Britain’s collective memory as a bit of an embarrassment, Malta remains one of those shining examples (at least in the popular memory) of a community standing strong against the forces of fascism – ‘Malta can Take it’ as they said – and it did. Images of Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins in the 1953 film The Malta Story stuck in my head for the sort of architecture and locations Mills is using.
Mills handles the geography of Malta well (considering most readers, including me, don’t the place at all) and the conflicts simmering between the British and the Maltese as the bombings escalated continuously. For me location and setting are always more important than plot and Mills’ plot is a bit thin but that doesn’t matter much as you get the sense of wartime Malta. Incidentally, this book is a prime example of something all too common these days in British published books particularly – it’s full of typos that should have been picked up during proofreading. I guess it’s cutbacks at the publishers but it’s rather annoying when what are obviously, though understanable, errors that crept in at an editing stage remain in the final book.