Came across this ad for the old China Press newspaper the other day – the China Press was founded by Americans and employed Carl Crow when he arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and then a whole host of great American, Chinese and assorted other nationals over the years. Till the end of its days it remained Shanghai major American-run newspaper. Kiukiang Road, where the China Press had its offices, is now Jiujiang Road.
The mighty Old Lady of the Bund, the North-China Daily News felt proud in 1924 to have been around since 1850. Not so long in their new Bund offices back then. Nice to see they maintained correspondents in every major town -Â and they did, not just Peking and Shanghai but the NCDC had folk in Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Tientsin, Wuhan, Chungking and other cities and towns right through to the Second World War.
This weekend – some old adverts from some former bastions of the old pre-1949 China Coast press – a time when independent journalism, journals, magazines and newspapers in a wide variety of languages from Ukrainian to Hebrew, Old Testament English (honest…some bored ex-pats actually launched a journal in old testament English in Chungking to amuse themselves – sadly I don’t believe any copies survive) to Korean flourished in Shanghai, Tientsin and other treaty ports. Now all sadly gone, expect the lone hold out of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Worth remembering.
The China Illustrated Review was an off shoot of the daily Peking and Tientsin Times newspaper which was actually printed and based in Tientsin. It was a sort of version of ‘The Week’ rounding up what was going on, the North-China Daily News did a similar thing out of Shanghai with the North China Herald once a week as a round up publication.
BTW: Victoria Road in Tientsin’s former British Concession is now Jiefang North Road in Tianjin
It’s that time again for the M Literary Residences in Shanghai and India…
Calling all writers of fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, drama!
M Literary Residency Invites Applications
The M Literary Residency Program has been established to disseminate
a broader knowledge of contemporary life and writing in India and China today
and to foster deeper intellectual, cultural and artistic links across individuals
and communities. Applicants are invited to apply for three month
residencies in India or China.
Applications for the 2012-13 Residency are now being accepted.
The application deadline is Friday, 1 July 2011, and decisions
will be announced 31 October, 2011.
To download the Programme Guidelines, click here.
To download the Application Form, click here.
2011 Residency recipients are Rachel DeWoskin (China)
and Francesca Marciano (India).
A slightly tenuous link in Singapore for this statue and memorial – but still Conrad of course deserves to be remembered. The problem is that Conrad memorials could go in a lot of places – Polish born, English naturalised, served with both the French and British merchant navies. And then the books – Heart of Darkness could mean a memorial in Africa, The Secret Agent could justify one in Greenwich and of course he did write a few books that took place aboard ships in the old Malay Federated States. So Singapore has a small claim, and not a lot of other people to erect monuments to I suppose now that all the raffles ones have been done. So here’s the Conrad memorial that sits outside the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. Conrad did apparently spend a few months in Singapore and plenty of kids (me included way back when) got fascinated by South East Asia reading Conrad novels like Lord Jim and Typhoon.
So here’s the memorial with the text on it reproduced below for the interested:
Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski, a Pole by birth, British Master Mariner and a great English writer who made Singapore and the whole of Southeast Asia better known to the world.
Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski, born on the 3rd of December 1857 in Berdichiv (today’s Ukraine, then under Russian rule) in a Polish family, is one of the masters of modern English prose. Although English was his third language, after Polish and French, he wrote in it such classic works as “Heart of Darkness” (1899), “Lord Jim” (1900) and “Nostromo (1904).
The son of a Polish writer and patriotic leader, Conrad experienced political repression while in exile with his parents in Russia. Orphaned at twelve, he left Poland for France when he was seventeen. For four years he served in French merchant vessels. In 1878, he signed up with a British shop and started to learn English. He became a British subject in 1886. As a seaman, later Master Mariner, he sailed several times to Southeast Asia and Australia. Conrad made eight voyages to Singapore between March 1883 and March 1888. Singapore was his home-port for five months in 1887-88 while he served as first mate in the Vidar, a steamboat that plied the trading routes of West Borneo and Celebes (now Sulawesi).
Conrad’s impressions of Singapore appear in several of his stories, notably “The End of the Tether” (1902). At that time, all incoming vessels would have to report at the General Post Office (presently the Fullerton Hotel) to collect and deliver mails. When Conrad’s ships docked in Singapore, he would have used the postal services of the Master Attendant’s Marine Office at the General Post Office.
In 1896, Conrad settled permanently in England. He died in Canterbury on the 3rd of August 1924.
This plaque was officially unveiled by H.E. Aleksander Kwasniewski, President of the Republic of Poland, on 24th February 2004.
Among the best photographers working in Shanghai at the moment is Xi Zi. He also leaves a lot of helpful and corrective comments on this site when I get streets and location wrong! So excellently The Disappearance of Dongjiadu, a slide show of Xi Zi’s photos and a conversation with the photographer is being held at the Rockbund Art Museum down by the Bund this Friday.
For those who’ve never been there Dongjiadu is the area of the South Bund (beyond the old Quai de France) by the old city. It’s perhaps best known for the Catholic Cathedral down there.It’s certainly an area that’s taken a pounding from the bulldozers in recent years and while, in the former Settlement and Frenchtown areas we’ve lost plenty, some of the structures lost around Dongjiadu are Chinese in their origin and date back over 300 years. Anyone who thinks that the destruction of Shanghai has only been about treaty port western inspired architecture may want to think upon what’s happened to Dongjiadu. Essentially Dongjiadu has ceased to exist as a formerly Chinese part of old Shanghai.
And so the importance of Xi Zi’s photography….
Slide show of PhotographyWorksby Xi Zi and Conversation with thePhotographer: Disappearance of Dongjiadu
Time: Friday Apr. 15th 7 P.M.
Address: Rockbund Art Museum, 169 Yuan Ming Yuan Road, 1st floor
The Slide show features the independent photographer Xi Zi’s documentary on the transformation of the Dongjiadu community from the beginning to the end. The photographer will be there to take comments and answer questions. Director Zhou Hongbo of the documentary film Lotus Ferry will be there as well.
Earnshaw Books and Derek Sandhaus have done an amazing job bringing us a new translation and interpretation of Backhouse’s scurrilous and filthy memoir Decadence Mandchoue – I’ll write more on the book soon when time allows. However, if in Peking this week you really need to get along to the launch of the book and get the inside story on all this – Decadence Mandchoue is perhaps quite the maddest book on China ever written by a foreigner…and well worth reading (well, the sane are generally a bit of a bore).
Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse (1873-1944), Baronet, arrived in Peking in 1898 and quickly became the city’s most respected translator, working for both the British Foreign Service and London Times correspondent George Morrison. Considered a brilliant linguist and Chinese scholar in his day, his diaries have been the subject of great controversy due to their illicit and salacious depictions of imperial life.  Backhouse’s reputation was posthumously tarnished when it was alleged that much of his work was based upon forged documents. Join us to hear Derek Sandhaus shed light on Backhouse’s fascinating writings and life.
Recently I was one of several folk in Shanghai roped in by Indiana University prof Scott Kennedy to try and locate the previous address of the great Mongolist and Sinologist (and later a man to be horrendously persecuted by that bastard Joe McCarthy) Owen Lattimore. We didn’t have much to go on and his home address was too tricky along with a reference to Shanghai’s ‘American Compound’ which appears to be a generic descriptive rather than an actual place (unless anyone reading this knows different?) – still we did point the interested party in the direction of his former haunts when he worked for Arnhold and Company in the city. It was a pleasure as the person Scott was accompanying to China on a trip was the Managing Editor of the Indianapolis Business Journal Greg Andrews, fully Greg Lattimore Andrews (and if it was me I’d definitely leave the ‘Lattimore’ in all the time) who’s great uncle was the ‘great’ Owen Lattimore.
Anyway, Scott wrote it all up on his blog called The China Track and you can see their tour of Lattimore’s old Shanghai haunts here and the building they decided to adopt as the spiritual home of Owen in Shanghai.
Of course if anyone has anything to add to Scott’s findings I’m sure he, and Greg, would love to hear from you (as would I).
