In 1941 the Elite Bar on Medhurst Road (Taixing Road) at the corner of Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road) had just been redecorated and was advertising the ‘popular vocalist’ Lilly Flohr. Was Lilly Flohr, ‘who would be flattered to see you’, worth going along to see you ask? Well maybe, if that Lilly Flohr was (and I think she was) the same Lilly Flohr that had been a mildly successful actress in the German silent movies.If so then she ended up in Shanghai and continued her career singing at the Elite Bar.
The Austrian-born Lilly Flohr had been a successful actress, cabaret artist and singer who had first appeared on stage at 8 years old in Vienna and made her first film in 1918 – the picture opposite looks pretty early and not more than a few years off that. She went on to make about 25 films with some leading rolls including in Fridericus Rex (1922, pictured below) – all were German films though in 1927 she appeared in the Romanian film Lia with an all Romanian cast – apparently she very much wanted to do this and the production was paid for by her German businessman husband who wanted to fulfill the wish of his wife. Her last film was Kinder der Strasse in 1928. Strangely for someone who was apparently a good singer, after the introduction of sound films she retired from the business. She then seems to disappear only to resurface in Shanghai later still acting and singing though not sure about the businessman husband.
I’m assuming Lilly was a Jewish refugee – Flohr is often a Jewish name and Lilly appears on the cast lists of several German language operas and she is mentioned with affection in several Jewish memoirs of Shanghai (assuming it’s the same Lilly) including Irene Eber’s Voices From Shanghai where Lilly is noted as a first rate actress existing in the immigrant theatre in Shanghai. Another Jewish memoirist of old Shanghai Ralph Harpuder remembers Lilly in German operas and has a link to a cast list including her. Though I’m not exactly sure when Lilly was born Ithink we can assume that her Elite Bar performances were towards her more mature years – though could still belt out a tune it seems and still had a reputation from the Austrian Theatre and German silent movie world.
A quick recommendation to read Stewart Gordon’s When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the Riches of the East. Gordon’s an academic but he hasn’t allowed that to stop him writing a very readable book highlighting the role networks played in Asia at various points between AD700 to 1500. Those that talk of Asia’s rise as if it’s a new thing would do well to read Gordon’s book – Asia flourishing while Europe was in the Dark Ages. Nowadays we are not so much witnessing Asia’s rise as its recovery after a short blip.
Gordon highlight a number of great examples drawn from meticulous research of sources it’s amazing to read actually have survived to show the linkage through spiritual (Buddhism and Islam), commercial and intellectual connections. While the transmission routes of Buddhism may be quite well known the chapters dealing with the movement of tropical spices and medicines moving from South East Asia north to the plains of India, west into the Middle East and east into China are fascinating. The story of the Jewish traders on the Malabar coast is also fascinating and all new to me at least.
Each story has some great asides – for instance I’d never really clicked that when the Europeans arrived in Asia their great advantage was that they had better ship board cannon than any Asian nation (developed during all the fighting in the Mediterranean) allowing them to bombard coastal defences. That’s why Europe conquered so many ports in Asia but only really penetrated the hinterlands in the nineteenth century. There’s loads more in that vein making When Asia was the World, like this web site hopefully, a marvellous gallimaufry of information and scholarship.
Anyway – you can read the book or listen to Gordon talking about it at the Asia Society (here) in a talk that the powers that be at the Asia Society decided should also include Reginald Chua for some reason who, unsurprisingly, was able to add little of relevance. Chua is a journalist who was with the Wall Street Journal and just recently took the job of Editor-in-Chief at the South China Morning Post – good luck with that turkey!!
This post was inspired by a debate over dinner with a couple of British-born Chinese friends from schooldays recently (that has ended up becoming a bit obsessive and involved vast amounts of emails flying between Islington and Shanghai) about the first Chinese people to ever come to Britain and then who was the first Chinese person to become a British citizen. After some back and forth and admitting that probably one or two Chinese lost to history may have come before the answer seems to be Shen Fu Tsong, a Jesuit convert from Nanking who came to England in 1686. Apparently King James II had his portrait painted and hung in his bed chamber. More importantly it seems Shen was the first person to catalogue the Chinese collection in the Bodleian Library, showing the librarian which way up to hold Chinese books as well as what they contained though who in England at the time could actually read the texts remains unclear.
However the first Chinese to become a British citizen it seems was a Chinese employee of the East India Company who called himself John Anthony and seems to have been in Britain in 1805. We know he was the first Chinese to become a UK citizen because it too took an Act of Parliament to allow it to happen. Apparently John Anthony became wealthy through the China trade and became a Christian which helped him be accepted we can assume. Part of Anthony’s job for the East India Company was apparently to ensure lodgings and food etc for Chinese arriving in England on Company ships – in this sense he is perhaps the father of Limehouse’s Chinatown. He became rich enough to buy a big house in Essex a a country residence and maintain a house in Shadwell in the East End as his town house. Sadly he died only a few months after gaining British citizenship.
If anyone knows of anyone who came prior to Shen Fu Tsong in 1686 I’d like to hear from you obviously.
Since my history of foreign correspondents in China – Through the Looking Glass– was published a couple of months ago I’ve been meaning to post about the Newsreel Wong bombed baby controversy of 1937. Most people know the classic picture Wong got of a distraught Chinese baby at the Shanghai South Railway Station after a Japanese attack in 1937 and the controversy that has raged about whether the photo was genuine or staged.
In my book I included the famous photo but did not get release rights for the other photo that indicates the shot may have been staged somewhat – not that a baby wasn’t caught in the raid and left distraught in the Station but that the baby may have been repositioned or encouraged to stay in place while a photo was taken.
Below I’ve added the section from the book on the photo and ensuing controversy as well as both pictures. Judge for yourself as far as possible. My own opinion is that Wong was using his craft and the situation to create a justified image that shocked many, particularly in America, into a realization of what the Japanese were doing in China and that they should support China against Japanese militarism and invasion. That seems justification enough – Japan was bombing and raping Chinese cities, babies were being killed daily, people dying – Wong captured that horror. I’m on Wong’s side with the photo, disinterest among people around the world was aiding nobody except Japan – but I suspect the row will continue anyway.
‘Newsreels were not without controversy, however. One of the most famous incidents involved Newsreel Wong. He filmed the Japanese bombing of Shanghai’s South Station in September 1937, a reel that included a now-famous scene of a crying baby sitting on the tracks amid the rubble of the station. The scene became one of the most celebrated symbols of the Asian conflict and over 136 million people were said to have seen it, not least due to the fact that it appeared on the cover of Life magazine, as well as 25 million copies of various Hearst publications and a further 1.75 million copies of other newspapers globally, including 800 American newspapers alone. The photo had a profound impact, its release leading to the Japanese government placing a price of $50,000 on Wong’s head.
But many people were suspicious of the photo: Wong was known to have leftist sympathies and was a close friend of Edgar and Helen Snow; and others simply remembered William Randolph Hearst’s well-known phrase: “You provide the photographs, I’ll provide the warâ€. Questions started to be asked almost immediately. What was the baby doing sitting alone on the tracks inside the station building? Having taken still photographs of the baby, Wong also filmed the scene. Is it possible that the distressed little baby would have sat still for that long? Soon another picture appeared in the 21 December 1937 issue of Look magazine. This was of an Asian man, probably Wong’s assistant Taguchi, carrying the infant. It does seem that Wong staged the photo for propaganda purposes; and it had a devastating effect too at a time when support for the Nationalist army was rising and dislike of Japan increasing. The arguments still continued over the photo, with people debating shadows, sight lines and lighting almost as much as the famed Zapruda footage of the Kennedy assassination. For his part, Wong never fully committed to either conclusively denying or admitting the rumour. He wasn’t the only newsreel reporter accused of a little exaggeration in pursuit of a good story or personal image.’
Came across this ad for an apartment on Medhurst Road (now Taixing Lu) from 1941 – US$125 per month – pretty good deal including heating, water taxes and a fridge. The two roof gardens and a sun room sound good too.
The last few years have seen the rapid rise of general interest in Confucianism and the Party’s incorporation of Confucianism as another plank in both its attempt to shore itself up and heighten its legitimacy (as well as a dose of real politik) as well as playing into the general nationalist agenda. CKS’s was of course indebted to Confucianism for so much of his own thought process.
Confucianism is also of course a useful way of pressuring people to fall into line, conform and accept orders while also being part of China’s overseas soft power campaign. We see it clearly now in campaigns urging people to take more responsibility and show filial piety in looking after ageing parents and not complaining about the lack of decent healthcare etc. It’s impossible for those familiar with CKS’s New Life Movement of the 1930s and the current spate of ever increasing social control campaigns dealing with everything from patriotism, spitting through to supposed internet game addicts and obesity. My old hero Carl Crow noted that while the KMT promoted and enforced the NLM in the 1930s and during the War Madame Chiang continued to smoke away nineteen to the dozen in private and the Chiang were hardly fiscally scrupulous – today’s venal communist officials uncovered with their mistresses, stashes of cash and private fiefdoms while pushing the Harmonious Society line in public are hardly anything new.
At the same time among a section of academia in China there has been a growing interest in reinterpreting the republican era. Though the Great Communist Party Myth of China that infests the state media, education system, university syllabuses, approved films etc is of course that CKS and the republic were hopelessly corrupt this is being reassessed semi-privately. It’s always fascinating to see how the Whig historians of China (which they basically act like as far as I can tell) arguing for ever progressing society cope with issues like warlords, Taiping rebels, pirates, Boxers and Chiang Kai-shek. CKS of course has taken all the blame for everything. An attitude that seems to have filtered into at least some foreigners as the myth gets repeated in books by westerners too now quite regularly I note. In the English language press in China those foreigners who agree to write editorials and slightly odd ‘think pieces’ for Xinhua now regularly use (or allow their editors to insert) the term ‘liberation’ to describe 1949.
Taylor’s new bio is written within these contexts which makes it interesting and relevant. There are some good points in Taylor’s biography too – that CKS did worry about his fascistic Blue Shirts. However, I think by the time he did this the rabid dogs were out of their cages and reining them in was pretty impossible – a common problem, ask anyone who’s ever created a paramilitary wing how easy they are to control!!. One wonders whether the CPC worries about some of its somewhat autonomous affiliates, such as the Xinjiang Corps, and whether or not they could do anything about them anyway even if they did want to condemn their excesses.
The KMT was of course corruption-ridden and the Chiang-Soong clan responsible for far more than their fair share of this problem. However, the CPC became corrupt quickly too when in power (and before) and this problem hasn’t been resolved yet. Chiang and the KMT invariably enforced China’s continental empire across Tibet, Xinjiang (and in their case all of Mongolia too) which resonates with the Party’s policy now in the last year or so and the last month as events in Tibet and Xinjiang show.
The Xian Incident of 1936 and CKS’s kidnapping was an even more important than most previously thought. CKS when given the opportunity to strike against the communists and possibly wipe them out did not as he had given his word not too – it’s hard to see any winner from this decision to stand on a point of honour (and given subsequent history – perhaps an overrated virtue in this case) than Mao. It leads to one of those great what ifs of history? If Mao had been removed courtesy of the Nationalist air force how would things have played out?
There’s far more I could say about this bio but who the hell reads long reviews these days on the internet? Taylor’s bio is a good read- I urge those people – especially those foreigners who seem to actually be trailing current Chinese academic thought and still denigrating CKS at every opportunity – to read Taylor’s book and perhaps challenge the Great Communist Party Myth and reassess their opinion of CKS and the KMT. Strangely in both some good ways and some very bad ways the PRC is moving towards something similar to what CKS envisaged and might have moved towards had he not let his regime become so incestuously corrupt and, of course, not had Japanese militarism to deal with. Some more of those great what ifs??
While I’m plugging friend’s book events I better mention that Kerry Brown is speaking Tuesday night (4th) at the Beijing Bookworm on his new book Friends and Enemies– a history and analysis of the Chinese Communist Party. I won’t comment on it in detail here as I read a pre-publication, pre-proofed copy and he might have changed some things for the final published version so that would be a bit unfair. However, the earlier version I read was an excellent and succinct summation of the Party’s history and future based on the ideological strait jackets it has got itself into over the decades since forming back in the 1920s.The draft was an excellent read so I have no doubt the finished product is excellent too*.
Following Kerry’s Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century, it seems he is becoming the master of the short (by short I mean under 90,000 words) study relating to China. As books get ever longer, less rigorously edited and contain endless footnotes and theoretical waffle (at least those from academics) this style of writing is ever more appreciated by many of us (even those of us who admittedly turn out the 120,000+ word tomes!) for its pointed brevity.
Details of Tuesday night’s book event in Beijing here
* a word of caution – the book comes with a foreword from the risible Will Hutton obviously aimed at attracting the casual browser’s attention. You may want to skip the fatuous China amateurism of Hutton and dive straight into the meat rather than get put off by the great man’s ramblings from afar at the start. Understandable that publishers want forewords written by people who get a lot of airtime like Hutton and attract the attention of the media-mafia inside the M25 but, as those with good China knowledge know from reading his dreadful Writing on the Wall book, Hutton has jumped the China bandwagon for a brief ride ill-prepared and with little in-depth knowledge or first hand experience and has been lauded by few outside of his cohorts in the London Metropolitan liberal media with equally scant knowledge of China.
And Kerry’s speaking in Shanghai too courtesy of the Shanghai FCC at Maya, Shanghai Grand Plaza, 568 Julu Lu at 7pm on Tuesday August 11. Just RSVP to fcc.sfcc@gmail.com by August 10.
I posted the other day on the new Art of the DPRK book that is available and is part of the ever expanding Koryo Tours global domination campaign it seems. See that post for details of their book launch in Beijing – but now they’re heading to Shanghai too, so a quick heads up:
Sunday 9th August – 4PM – Glamour Bar (beneath M on the Bund) – The Shanghai book launch of Art of the DPRK – Promoting North Korean Film, will take place. The book is a beautifully put-together collection of North Korean film posters from the last 40 years, with descriptions from the official North Korean promotional material for the films as well as expert analysis about the films and posters themselves. This book is hot off the press and will be made available for the first time at this event. Simon Cockerell will present this launch and will be able to answer questions about the book and other North Korea related subjects. 65 RMB on the door includes one free drink.
And the day before:
Saturday 8th August – 2 PM – Sasha’s (11 Dongping Lu, nr Hengshan Lu) – Koryo will be presenting their award-winning film A State of Mind – the story of 2 teenage gymnasts preparing for the Arirang Mass Games. Koryo’s Simon Cockerell will be on hand to present the film and answer any and all questions afterwards. 50RMB on the door which includes a free drink.
Space is limited so please rsvp to simon@koryogroup.com
In 1941 the Elite Bar on Medhurst Road (Taixing Road) at the corner of Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road) had just been redecorated and was advertising the ‘popular vocalist’ Lilly Flohr. Was Lilly Flohr, ‘who would be flattered to see you’, worth going along to see you ask? Well maybe, if that Lilly Flohr was (and I think she was) the same Lilly Flohr that had been a mildly successful actress in the German silent movies.If so then she ended up in Shanghai and continued her career singing at the Elite Bar.
very much wanted to do this and the production was paid for by her German businessman husband who wanted to fulfill the wish of his wife. Her last film was Kinder der Strasse in 1928. Strangely for someone who was apparently a good singer, after the introduction of sound films she retired from the business. She then seems to disappear only to resurface in Shanghai later still acting and singing though not sure about the businessman husband.
A quick recommendation to read Stewart Gordon’s 
This post was inspired by a debate over dinner with a couple of British-born Chinese friends from schooldays recently (that has ended up becoming a bit obsessive and involved vast amounts of emails flying between Islington and Shanghai) about the first Chinese people to ever come to Britain and then who was the first Chinese person to become a British citizen. After some back and forth and admitting that probably one or two Chinese lost to history may have come before the answer seems to be Shen Fu Tsong, a Jesuit convert from Nanking who came to England in 1686. Apparently King James II had his portrait painted and hung in his bed chamber. More importantly it seems Shen was the first person to catalogue the Chinese collection in the Bodleian Library, showing the librarian which way up to hold Chinese books as well as what they contained though who in England at the time could actually read the texts remains unclear.
However the first Chinese to become a British citizen it seems was a Chinese employee of the East India Company who called himself John Anthony and seems to have been in Britain in 1805. We know he was the first Chinese to become a UK citizen because it too took an Act of Parliament to allow it to happen. Apparently John Anthony became wealthy through the China trade and became a Christian which helped him be accepted we can assume. Part of Anthony’s job for the East India Company was apparently to ensure lodgings and food etc for Chinese arriving in England on Company ships – in this sense he is perhaps the father of Limehouse’s Chinatown. He became rich enough to buy a big house in Essex a a country residence and maintain a house in Shadwell in the East End as his town house. Sadly he died only a few months after gaining British citizenship.
‘Newsreels were not without controversy, however. One of the most famous incidents involved Newsreel Wong. He filmed the Japanese bombing of Shanghai’s South Station in September 1937, a reel that included a now-famous scene of a crying baby sitting on the tracks amid the rubble of the station. The scene became one of the most celebrated symbols of the Asian conflict and over 136 million people were said to have seen it, not least due to the fact that it appeared on the cover of Life magazine, as well as 25 million copies of various Hearst publications and a further 1.75 million copies of other newspapers globally, including 800 American newspapers alone. The photo had a profound impact, its release leading to the Japanese government placing a price of $50,000 on Wong’s head.
Snow; and others simply remembered William Randolph Hearst’s well-known phrase: “You provide the photographs, I’ll provide the warâ€. Questions started to be asked almost immediately. What was the baby doing sitting alone on the tracks inside the station building? Having taken still photographs of the baby, Wong also filmed the scene. Is it possible that the distressed little baby would have sat still for that long? Soon another picture appeared in the 21 December 1937 issue of Look magazine. This was of an Asian man, probably Wong’s assistant Taguchi, carrying the infant. It does seem that Wong staged the photo for propaganda purposes; and it had a devastating effect too at a time when support for the Nationalist army was rising and dislike of Japan increasing. The arguments still continued over the photo, with people debating shadows, sight lines and lighting almost as much as the famed Zapruda footage of the Kennedy assassination. For his part, Wong never fully committed to either conclusively denying or admitting the rumour. He wasn’t the only newsreel reporter accused of a little exaggeration in pursuit of a good story or personal image.’
Every few years a new biography of Chiang Kai-shek comes along. The last big one was Jonathan Fenby’s 
At the same time among a section of academia in China there has been a growing interest in reinterpreting the republican era. Though the Great Communist Party Myth of China that infests the state media, education system, university syllabuses, approved films etc is of course that CKS and the republic were hopelessly corrupt this is being reassessed semi-privately. It’s always fascinating to see how the Whig historians of China (which they basically act like as far as I can tell) arguing for ever progressing society cope with issues like warlords, Taiping rebels, pirates, Boxers and Chiang Kai-shek. CKS of course has taken all the blame for everything. An attitude that seems to have filtered into at least some foreigners as the myth gets repeated in books by westerners too now quite regularly I note. In the English language press in China those foreigners who agree to write editorials and slightly odd ‘think pieces’ for Xinhua now regularly use (or allow their editors to insert) the term ‘liberation’ to describe 1949.
While I’m plugging friend’s book events I better mention that Kerry Brown is speaking Tuesday night (4th) at the Beijing Bookworm on his new book 
Sunday 9th August – 4PM – 
Saturday 8th August – 2 PM – 