The First Shanghai War – Howitzers on the Racecourse in 1932

The Shanghai War of 1932 – January to March. The Japanese orchestrated an incident to cause trouble leading to anti-Japanese protests and boycotts. Fighting broke out between the Japanese and Chinese 19th Route Army and, contrary to expectations, the Chinese put up a hell of a fight. The fighting in Hongkew (Hongkou) was especially fierce, not far from the International Settlement. So the foreign troops in the Settlement got ready for a fight – including a Tasmanian member of the Hong Kong Volunteers called Errol Flynn (who deserted when the going got tough)! My old mate Carl Crow was even made an officer in the Shanghai Volunteer Force, given a gun and assigned to a unit of British troops to make sure they didn’t shoot at Chinese troops mistaking them for Japanese. All hands to the pump in foreign Shanghai in other words.

Here then are some pictures I came across recently from that time – they show a foreign army detachment (navy – American?) observing the fighting in Hongkew from a rooftop and also digging in (in February in Shanghai that ground would have been hard!) with their Howitzers on the racecourse (now People’s Square). I’m assuming the two pictures of the Howitzer emplacements are taken from the Observation Point in the first photograph – which would place them probably on top of one of the buildings along Nanjing West Road (Bubbling Well Road as was) around by the Park Hotel (still standing) looking down onto the racecourse somewhere around where the Museum of Contemporary Art is now.

Dragon Boat Festivals in Old Shanghai

The Dragon Boat Festival is now a public holiday under the new holidays regimen that replaced the old Golden Weeks system a couple of years back. Nonsense said some – dragon boats are a southern thing – all very well in Hong Kong and Guangdong but rarely if ever seen in Shanghai or north of the Yangtze (indeed obviously rarely seen in Peking due to their being nothing more than a spit of a river, some remnants of Grand Canal and not much water anywhere really). Well here’s proof that Shanghai has long liked dragon boats and that before 1949 they were far more impressive than the skiff type things  you see today. Here’s a multi-manned and rowed dragon boat heading down the Whangpoo – sorry though I don’t have a firm date for this picture.

Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945 Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley

Just released in a paperback edition, Geoffrey Emerson’s study of internment in Hong Kong. A rather useful read for anyone interested in Hong Kong history.

The Bund from the Ninth Floor of Broadway Mansions – A Shanghai Correspondent Tradition Revived

As mentioned the other day the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club got a tour of Broadway Mansions this week courtesy of the management there. Why is Broadway Mansions interesting to the members of the FCC – well, the ninth floor of the building was home to the FCC between 1945 and 1949 – that’s to say after the club moved from Chungking and before it moved once again down to Hong Kong (for all the details see my book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium War to Mao – it’s a bargain on Kindle). Broadway Mansions, an apartment building mostly though now a hotel, was also home to about 50 correspondents who had flats cum bureau offices in the building. That’s why you see so many shots of the Bund from up above across the northern side of the Garden Bridge and Suzhou (Soochow) Creek. They were just pointing the camera out of the bar window!! Yes, journalists don’t really get more hardworking as the years pass.

So here are two typical pictures showing the view across the Bund across the Garden Bridge shot from 1947 and Life magazine – there are literally hundreds more – those journos and cameramen spent a lot of time on the ninth floor FCC bar. Today we went up to the ninth floor, now hotel rooms, so I thought I’d snap a shot out of the window too, just for old times sake and to keep the tradition going!!

Admittedly my camera phone effort is a bit sub-standard but you get the point of being on the ninth floor of Broadway Mansions – sadly the rather shabby architectural effort that is the Peninsula Hotel that has nothing in common with the other buildings on the Bund and is by far the ugliest structure on the sweeping boulevard rather buggers the view. As Betjeman said of Slough so say I (with amendments) of the Peninsula – ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on the Peninsula. It isn’t fit for humans now,…’:

Tien Hsin Cheng’s Store by the Tung Tan Pailou, Hatamen Street

Tien Hsin Teng was a well known store along Hatamen Street on the edge of the old Peking Legation Quarter that sold cloisonne , lacquer and beadwork products to wealthy Chinese and foreigners on the grand tour. Their store was just south of the Tung Tan Pailou (the Chinese style arch) along Hatamen Street (now Chongwenmen Street).

So here’s their ad and below that a picture of Hatamen Street showing the Tung Tan Pailou, now of course long gone in the general post-1949 gutting of Peking. The use of the name Peiping (Southern Peace) for Peking identifies this ad as being from the post-1927 period once Chiang had upped and taken the capital to Nanking.

Fat China for Kindle

Can I just interrupt for a wee bit of self promotion and let people know that we have a Kindle edition of Fat China available on Amazon.

Thanks

Normal service resumed imminently after gratuitous self promotion

A Sneak Around Broadway Mansions with the FCC

Among the architectural jewels in the crown (those that survive anyway!) in Shanghai, Broadway Mansions must be one of the most prized. There’s no doubt it’s a tad shabby these days compared to its pre-1949 heyday but it still stands majestic in its unabashed modernism at the northern side of the Garden Bridge. Broadway Mansions – the ninth floor was the home of the legendary Foreign Correspondents Club when hacks really knew how to be hacks and journalism was a lifestyle rather than an MA and a route to management; several floors above Russian gangsters ran one of the most louche casinos in Shanghai; and, for a time, both the Japanese and then the US Army occupied the buildings with all the coming and goings you can imagine from soldiers and what they bring back at night!

Now it’s a little down on its uppers and under appreciated like most of old Shanghai. There’s a hotel, but it’s far from one of Shanghai’s best. A run of the mill restaurant, overpriced curios shop…but perhaps the old corridors are still redolent of the atmosphere of Shanghai’s heyday? Well, members of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club have the opportunity to find out this week. They’re having their AGM in the building and getting a tour from the current management and (how happy they must be!) a few anecdotes of the old hack pack’s antics from yours truly. Worth the annual membership fee right there I reckon!

Details below – if any good photo opportunities present themselves then I’ll post on the interior….

Who’d have thought it – members of the current Shanghai hack pack venturing north of Suzhou Creek…that’s worth a picture in itself!

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents’ Club Presents:

2011 Annual General Meeting and
Tour of Broadway Mansions

Thursday, July 21th, 5:30pm (Formal meeting starts at 6:30)

Broadway Mansions, No.20 North Suzhou Road, Hongkou District

Please join us to elect the SFCC’s new board and enjoy free drinks with colleagues and friends!  Two free drinks and snacks will be provided to all current members.  A third free drink will be provided to members who renew their membership on the spot. (Correspondent and media members: 500 RMB; Associate members: 800 RMB.)

The Annual General Meeting will start at 6:30 p.m.

The list of candidates for board seats is below. If you cannot attend the meeting, please send one of the attached absentee ballots based on your category of membership.  Completed absentee voting forms must reach us by 12 noon on Thursday, July 21th.

Before officially kicking off the 2011 AGM, we’re happy to offer members a step back into the the history of the foreign correspondent community in Shanghai with a tour of Broadway Mansions, a famous FCC headquarters and colorful abode for resident journalists in Shanghai before the founding of the People’s Republic. We are scheduled to receive a welcome from a spokesman from the building’s current owner (the city-owned Hengshan Group), an introduction to the building’s history and architecture by a Broadway Mansions Hotel executive, and a comparison of life for Shanghai-based foreign correspondents then and now by the Shanghai FCC’s own Paul French, author of “Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.”  We will see the floor where the Shanghai FCC was once headquartered, among other highlights.  We believe this will be the largest Shanghai FCC return to Broadway Mansions in decades, reflecting Shanghai’s renewed economic clout in the world and the vitality of the FCC community in the city today.

The Broadway Manisons tour will start at 5:30p.m.

Admission: Free for paid-up members. This event is members only. Members whose dues are not current can renew on the spot.

Note: You must RSVP before noon on Thursday, July 21 to be admitted. This is necessary so we can do our best to manage the flow of cocktails and food that evening.

RSVP now! We hope to see you for a memorable night on Thursday.

RSVP: fcc.sfcc@gmail.com

JG Ballard’s Shepperton Home Up For Sale

JG Ballard, the most famous of all Shangailanders, subtitled his memoir, Miracles of Life,  penned shortly before his death Shanghai to Shepperton. Ballard lived in Shepperton for many years. This otherwise rather dreary suburb of London sends a special frisson of excitement through many of us Ballard fans for his various reinterpretations of the area over the course of his novels and short stories, including his masterpiece Crash. If Shanghai was once one of the most amazing and modern, yet combustible and volatile, places on earth when Ballard was a boy and lived there, so Shepperton was in many ways its antithesis, representing dreary but solid English bourgeois suburbanism. Shanghai-Shepperton – Ballard’s whole oeuvre is right there.

Now of course I’ve sadly had to report on the ongoing destruction and gutting of Ballard’s boyhood Shanghai home (see here and here, for instance). Except among a few well read folk Ballard is all but forgotten in Shanghai, his legacy unacknowledged. Among the current crop of Shanghailanders he is rarely noted for his modrnist writing which stemmed from that Shanghai-Shepperton contract but is rather mostly remembered for the (given the director) predictably  sentimental film of Empire of the Sun that didn’t do the rather wonderfully spiteful book any justice at all. There’s no blue plaques to anyone not a revolutionary hero of the Communist Party in this town, let alone British modernist writers. Ballard’s former Amherst Avenue (now Xinhua Road) family house is now almost totally unrecognisable with crass additions outside and a total gutting inside. And, having tried it, the food at the fish restaurant is pretty sub-standard as a final insult. However, pop up Panyu Road (formerly Columbia Road) and there is a disused outdoor swimming pool at the old Columbia Country Club (now a crappy chemical factory) which was inspirational to the young JG. It’s still disused and full of sludge.

It’s a different sort of debate in Shepperton – Ballard’s old semi detached house is up for sale and is a snip at 320,000 quid. Simon Sellars of the Ballardian website suggests fans club together to buy the house and turn it into a museum to all things Ballard. I think it should remain a family house, lived in, inhabited and perhaps inspire another resident to start writing. But, at the very least, a blue plaque is required PDQ. It’s essential we remember JG in Shepperton even if Shanghai stubbornly refuses to acknowledge him.

More from The Guardian here