Shamus A’Rabbitt – ‘The poet laureate of the China Treaty Ports’

Years ago I came across a very dog eared and tattered copy of Shamus A’Rabbitt’s China Coast Ballads. At the time I was most thrilled by the illustrations throughout the slim volume that were done by the great White Russian cartoonist in Shanghai Sapajou. But the poetry itself was a wonderful looksee on old Shanghailander society – China Coast pidgin English mixed with English slang, the odd Americanism and the slang of old Shanghai.

Shamus A’Rabbitt, and who exactly he was I admit I’m not sure, was dubbed ‘The poet laureate of the China Treaty Ports’ and his ballads appeared in China coast newspapers and in locally published volumes throughout the 1930s. He (and I’m assuming here it was actually a ‘he’ but can’t be 100% sure) cast a ribald eye over the pompous taipans, the drunk and whoring sailors, the stuck up and self-important Shanghailanders and the hard working Chinese who had the bad luck to have to work for them! And now he’s back in print, thanks to Earnshaw Books, and with the original Sapajou cartoons too. In fact I believe it was my battered and torn first edition of China Coast Ballads that provided the version scanned and reprinted here. Good to see them backing print.

Return of the Pirates

Regular readers will know I’m interested in pirates and piracy (in fact a new book I’m working on with my colleague Sam Chambers on oil transportation issues features a chapter on the resurgence of piracy) and wrote this year in the Asia Literary Review about the history of piracy in the South China Sea. Now while it is Somali pirates that are getting all the headlines it is important to remember that piracy continues to be a problem in the Straits of Malacca, the Singapore Straits and up into the South China Sea. While myself and Sam sailed on a VLCC oil tanker last autumn researching the book close to the Riau Islands up into the Sea our vessel was on night time anti-pirate lock down and in the day or so we passed through the southern portion of the South China Sea several container ships and a bulk chemicals carrier not far from us were attacked and robbed by pirates.

Now it seems that after a few years of seeming decline acts of piracy in the South China Sea are on the rise again. Perhaps the pirates of Asia are being inspired by the audacity, seeming impunity and cash rewards being garnered by the Somali pirates? Perhaps they feel they’re rather letting the side down and being eclipsed by the Africans or perhaps the massive multi-navy effort around the Horn of Affrica, off the Somali coast, up around the Nigerian coast and in the Straits of Hormuz are meaning that the South China Sea is being somewhat overlooked by the authorties?

Anyway, according to the venerable and ancient Lloyds List (the world’s oldest newspaper) recently a Singapore-flagged tug became the seventh vessel to be attacked by pirates in the South China Sea this year, attacked by five pirates armed with knives on August 2 at 0130 hrs local time while transiting the South China Sea. Pirates attacks were regular occurances in the 1920s and 1930s in the South China Sea as you can read in the recent republication of Aleko Lilius’s 1932 I Sailed with Chinese Pirates (which I contributed a foreword to). Recently I came across a couple of photographs of pirate actions in the South China Seas around the late 1920s/1930s so this seemed like a good time to put them up.

The first photo is taken on the deck of the burnt out tug and you can see just how total the damage was.The second photo is of the tug after it ha been attacked and burnt by pirates somewhere off the South China coast around Bias Bay, a notorious area for pirates (now where China has situated a couple of nuclear power stations in Guangdong province) – the junk is taking survivors from the tug while the picture is taken from a Royal Navy patrol ship that responded to the incident. The third photo is of the pirates believed to be responsible for the attack and fire, captured and aboard a Royal Navy ship.

The YM Oceanic Culture & Art Museum – Don’t Bother

As a service to readers who may find themselves in the Taiwanese port city of Keelung with time to kill and kids to amuse I’m going to tell you not to bother with the dreadful YM Oceanic Culture & Art Museum (in which there is no art). We visited on a rather rainy day but quite honestly we’d have been better off just getting wet. This has to be the worst maritime themed museum I’ve ever been to and just about the worst any type of museum too. The exhibits are boring, the illustrations invariably inaccurate and most of the display is a turgid history of the Yangming Marine Transport Group!!

Additionally there’s some rather weak exhibits on global warming that aren’t very instructive (the kids knew more about it already and they’re under 10!) and a 3-D cinema will show you a totally stupid cartoon on earthquakes and tectonic plate movements with some dubious science, crap 3-D visuals and of very little educational merit. The only remotely fun bit was a mocked up long boat of some description (Viking?) where you get to dress up like a Roman!!

Avoid at all costs

Taiwan Beer – Probably Not the World’s Best But…

I can’t imagine anyone would argue that Taiwan Beer,brought to you by the sexily named  Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation, is the best beer in the world – in fact it’s pretty awful but it remains the omnipresent, best selling and pretty cheap lager of the ROC. Below two labels for Taiwan Beer,the first from the 1950s, the second from the 1970s.

Ransome, China, Swallows, Amazons, Spies

It’s amazing how people and subjects suddenly repeatedly pop up. Case in point – I hadn’t read anything by or about Arthur Ransome since I was a kid and loved the Swallows and Amazons books. Then a while back he popped up as a character I needed to research for my history of foreign correspondents in China – Through the Looking Glass (Ransome spent some time in China covering the Kiangse Soviet and also had a keen interested in warlords and coined the terms the ‘Shanghai Mind’ to describe the closed minds of the Shanghailanders). Then I chanced upon a DVD of the Swalllows and Amazons movie, watched it and found it’s still fun. Earlier this year I was writing a piece on pirates in the South China Sea and finally read the Swallow and Amazons story where the kids end up in China and meet a pirate queen – Missee Lee. Now I’ve just picked up a copy of what looks like a great new biography of Ransome by Roland Chambers – The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome.

What most people don’t appreciate about Ransome is that the Swallows and Amazons series that made him popular with kids across the world was first started when Ransome was 45. Arguably the best was behind him – his trip to Russia in 1913 as a struggling young freelance writer and association with the Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks as well as falling in love with a young Russian woman, Yevgenia. After this, and with a short stop in Sweden, he arrived in China and spent time in Shanghai where due to his supposed pro-Bolshevism and anti-war activities between 1914-18 Special Branch kept him under close watch. It was also thought that his Russian love interest Yevgenia was trading smuggled diamonds to raise funds for the Comintern.

All of which leave the question, which I didn’t answer in my book and Chambers tries to grapple with, of whether or not Ransome was a British agent, a Russian agent or a double agent. As I’ve yet to read the book I don’t know the answer but Ransome was a fascinating character and well deserves a new biography as well as being remembered as a journalist who wrote some interesting article on the Kiangse Soviet, Shanghai and Chinese warlords. By the way you can listen to an interview with the author on the Guardian books podcast (here)

Taipei – Japan-era “Preserved” Housing

Up a back street of Taipei near the Normal University and the Shida district are some ‘preserved’ houses that formerly belonged to the Forestry Department. The local government seems pretty proud of the ‘preservation’ though most of them looked pretty gutted though some appear lived in still. The gardens are rather overgrown and some in a state of disrepair. So if this is Taipei city government’s definition of preservation I’d hate to see what happens when they totally don’t give a s**t.

Here’s some photos of the houses anyway, as much as you can get given the high walls and lack of access.

Dimsum on Nanking Road

The Sun Ya Cantonese Restaurant awaited your order in the 1930s:

PS: nice to see someone loaded up a whole menu for Sun Ya here

Carl Crow – America and the Philippines

While I was working on my Carl Crow biography (A Tough Old China Hand) I searched high and low for a copy of Carl’s first book – America and the Philippines – published in 1914. I was never able to find a copy except in various libraries. It seems to be extremely hard to find and a long, long time out of print. Until now when a company called Bibliolife has brought it back. Bibliolife seems to have thousand of titles ready to print and they don’t work out too expensive. So I ordered me a copy (US$23.99) and it arrived today. It’s not bad, pretty basic but with the original pictures and typeface. As I couldn’t get this anywhere secondhand I’m just glad to have a copy at last. Time to see what they’ve got that might be interesting. Apologies for promopting my own book but the original edition of Crow’s America and the Philippines didn’t have any cover design.