Tamsui Customs Wharf

A summer stroll along the river bank at Danshui and down past the old Tamsui Customs Wharf just outside Taipei. The Wharf may not look like much now, and frankly it isn’t, but it was once a naval base for the Qing Dynasty. In 1861 the authorities established a Customs House and converted the wharf into a pier. At one time it must have been quite busy as Tamsui was the largest commercial port in Taiwan. The pier is formed from stones from the Guanyin Mountain across the river from Tamsui at Bali and was a pretty advanced piece of civil engineering for the time.

Shell Oil Ad From 1945

Thanks to Sam Chambers at AsiaScribbler up in Dalian who sent me a copy of this ad for Shell Oil from 1945 – celebrating the ‘8 Day Pony Express’ flying war materials to China – 4 days to get there and 4 to get back which must have taken a lot of oil. From the days of the good old alliance to defeat Japanese militarism.

China Reading – Some Lists

Before I forget I’m going add a couple of links to a few lists I was asked to put together by the good folk at The China Beat blog (which for some weird reason remains on Blogspot and so verboten to those in China (i.e. most people and me) who don’t understand all that VPN and proxy server stuff. Still, they were fun to do and some might enjoy them:

A contribution to The China Beat’s series of reading recommendations on China to the (then) newly installed President Obama – though I feel the other contributors took this a bit more seriously than me and seemed to be labouring under the impression that Obama was actually going to check out these suggestions! Click here

A series of lists that acted as a thinly veiled bit of promotion for my new book on foreign hacks in China and included Five foreign correspondents of the past I never tired of reading while doing my research for this book; Five foreign correspondents I found myself wishing had written less and; Five of the best by now totally forgotten China books from the early-to-mid 1900s. Click here

Alastair Morrison – 1915-2009

Alastair Morrison, the second son of GE ‘Morrison of Peking’ Morrison, sadly passed away in Australia recently. Alastair was a fascinating man himself having travelled in South America before spending the war years in China and India before being parachuted into Malaya as part of Force 136 (the Far East arm of SOE). He was of course married to the photographer Hedda Hammer who had fled the Nazis – I posted on a new collection of her photos of Hong Kong the other day. Morrison is probably best associated with Sarawak where he was a District Officer closely involved with development and also a keen observer of the region’s wildlife. He published several books including – Fair Land Sarawak (1993) and A Bird Fancier: A Journey to Peking (2001).

The Sydney Morning Herald has a more complete account of Morrison’s life and achievements here

Deviation Posting – Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day

My summer holiday reading was somewhat enlivened by picking up a copy, quite by chance, of Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day. I’d never read Lehane before and assumed he was just a crime writer (I say ‘just’ knowing that crime writing friends will haul me over the coals for that dismissive comment). I actually have some of his crime fiction sitting on the shelf waiting to be read and he comes highly recommended by friends who read crime novels obsessively as I do myself. But The Given Day is something else.

The Given Day is one of those great sprawling sagas that the Americans do so well. It must be coming from a big country with such melting pot of modern history and without the burdensome centuries of earlier history to deal with. British writers just don’t quite do the sprawling British novel quite so well though with some honourable exceptions that spring to mind (Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North, David Peace’s GB84 and the Red Riding Quartet as well as, I’d argue a little more contentiously perhaps some of Martina Cole’s sagas of London gangland). The Brits tend to do better at sagas of the posh (Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited etc) which, while fine, don’t have much specific to say about the national experience for those of us from further down the social scale. With modern America built largely on the back of the working classes who emigrated there and, of course, the black population their great sagas tend to be more rooted in ordinary people.

Lehane’s saga concentrates on 1918-1919 Boston, just after WW1 and the terrible flu epidemic obviously, but also (which you hear less about these days) the crackdown on the Left that occurred at the time and the Boston Police strike of 1919. The story centres around a black man who ends up in Boston as well as a family of Irish Boston cops. There’s a good sprinkling of real life characters – Babe Ruth, J Edgar Hoover, Sam Gompers, John Reed etc.

If I have a complaint about the book it’s the rather old fashioned and cardboard cutout portrayal of the radical Left at the time. Boston cops organising a union is deemed OK and those on the soft Left striking against terrible working conditions get out of the book OK too but anyone more radical ends up looking a bit like those old stock characters of anarchists with round black bombs, fuses sizzling, running round. There was a lot more ideology to the anarchist movement than Lehane appears to credit them with while the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW – the “Wobblies”) were, I’d argue, a seriously advanced bunch of people.

Still it’s a good read. Having also recently read Kurt Anderson’s Heyday (see post), a swirling saga of nineteenth century America I can’t help wishing British authors would take up the genre a little more often, dump the endless stately homes and too posh to wash characters and give us a little more grit.

Ahn Jung-geun’s Reputation in China

Ahn Jung-geun was a Korean independence activist who assassinated the first Prime Minister of Japan, Ito Hirobumi, following the signing of the Eulsa Treaty, with Korea on the verge of annexation by Japan. Ahn gunned down Hirobumi on Harbin Railway Station in 1909. He was arrested by Russian guards who held him for two days before turning him over to Japanese colonial authorities. He was later executed.

Anyway The Korea Times has an interesting article on the modern day reputation of Ahn in China, which is not much, but there are some traces of him and his act left in Harbin apparently.

Julia Child’s China Spying Days

I had a conversation in Peking recently with a friend who is a long time foreign correspondent in the city. We were discussing the history of foreign journalists being accused of (or in actuality) being spies in China over the decades. She mentioned to me Julia Childs. Now, being a Brit, I’m not overly familiar with Julia Childs and her fame as a cooking programme person in America – don’t watch TV much, don’t cook and don’t remember the programme ever being on TV (we got an awful women called Fanny Craddock in my day). Still, I understand Childs was/is a household name in America.

Now we are to get a movie about her starring Meryl Streep but I have no idea if Child’s China espionage days are included.

After Pearl Harbour Childs apparently volunteered for service for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the predecessor of the CIA. At first she was assigned to typing thousands of names on index cards, which formed a sort of rudimentary indexing system to help keep track of people before the days of computers. After this she was promoted to a senior clerical position and worked for the Emergency Rescue Equipment section, where she was assigned the task of determining whether people stranded on a lifeboat at sea could survive by catching fish and squeezing the water out of them. She called this the “fish-squeezing unit.” In 1944 she was assigned to work in India and ended up in Ceylon, where she had top secret access to communications detailing all manner of covert military matters. According to a colleague of hers in US Air Force Intelligence, Julia “was privy to every top secret … which required a person of unquestioned loyalty, of rock-solid integrity, of unblemished lifestyle, of keen intelligence.”

In March of 1945, the China-Burma-India division of the OSS relocated to Chongqing (left) where she started training to be a proper spy according to people who worked with her but the war ended. After the war she accompanied her husband to France, got into cooking and then became a TV star in America. I must admit the whole TV chef thing strikes me as boring as hell – but the spying in China sounds much more interesting

Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab – Melbourne, it’s Glory Days and its Chinatown

Australian ABC Radio National’s excellent The Book Show broadcast a fascinating programme on Fergus Hume’s (below) 1886 novel Mystery of a Hansom Cab. I hadn’t thought about the book for years – I read it originally on a trip to Melbourne where the story is set. I was bored, jetlagged, didn’t know anyone and had nothing to do – the book saved me – I was riveted and read it while exploring the city. It’s a great murder thriller that predates Conan Doyle so is one of the first in the genre and clearly influential on the writers who followed. It’s also a fascinating (though I’m not altogether sure how accurate) portrait of Melbourne in the latter half of the nineteenth century and Melbourne’s Chinatown.

The opening paragraph was enough to grip me when I picked it up, never having heard of it before, in a Melbourne bookshop:

Truth is said to be stranger than fiction, and certainly the extraordinary murder which took place in Melbourne on Thursday night, or rather Friday morning, goes a long way towards verifying this saying. A crime has been committed by an unknown assassin, within a short distance of the principal streets of this great city, and is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. Indeed, from the nature of the crime itself, the place where it was committed, and the fact that the assassin has escaped without leaving a trace behind him, it would seem as though the case itself had been taken bodily out of one of Gaboriau’s novels, and that his famous detective Lecoq only would be able to unravel it. The facts of the case are simply these:-

On the twenty-seventh of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o’clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station, in Grey Street, St Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man whom he had the reason to believe had been murdered.

A couple of things also fascinated me about the book – which is a great sprawling story taking the reader all over Melbourne in its Gold Rush glory days (just before the Australian crash). Firstly, despite all the talk of Australia as a new country at the time we are confronted with a host of characters including Mother Guttersnipe who are clearly the residue of the convicts and who, in their speech and mannerisms, are pure good old time London low life (a species I know pretty well). The book also features a depiction of Melbourne’s Chinatown at the time (again I can’t attest to the accuracy of the depiction) but it’s a thrilling read. The picture opposite is slightly later – 1900 – of kids in Melbourne’s Chinatown. Many of the locations can still be traced around Melbourne which adds something to strolling Bourke and Collins Street at 6am jetlagged (as I ended up doing!!).

There’s any number of editions available though the one pictured has a nice historical shot on the front.