Old Peking’s Legation Quarter was a hive of western shops and businesses alongside what can still be seen today, the old churches, hospitals, legations and banks mostly. The stores are all gone – the best known such as Kerluff’s department store and Senet Freres jewellers are remembered in some books but smaller businesses, like S Moutrie & Co’s musical instrument shop have rather slipped form history.
Not sure how many ex-pats in Peking these days play the ukelele or the mandolin. I have walked in to a few bars, by mistake, to see washed up foreigners abusing the guitar on more than one occasion.
I’m in Beijing this week so here’s an old Peking post…
Plenty of ice skating in a Peking winter in the 1930s whether it was Pai-ho Lake or the rink at the French Legation in the Legation Quarter, just off Legation Street. And, handily nearby, was E. Lee’s General Store on Hataman Street (now Chongwenmen Street) at the junction with Legation Street (now Dongjianmixiang).
To chances to see Robert Bickers talk about his book in Shanghai next week….
The Scramble for China:
Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914
RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 17th May, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road,Shanghai
兴国宾馆 上海市兴国路78å·
ROBERT BICKERS
THE SCRAMBLE FOR CHINA
Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832 – 1914
From 1832, when British ships sailed into forbidden Chinese waters, China suffered a century of national humiliation. It is a grand narrative of infamy, in which China’s development was skewed by impositions from foreign imperialists, craven collaborators, decadent, feudal Manchu emperors, warlords and bureaucratic capitalists, and it is a story repeatedly told in modern China. Yet for the outside world, this traumatic period is a matter of history, done and dusted.
The Scramble for China is an epic, dynamic account of a century of Sino-foreign interactions, confrontation and confusion. Told from both the Western and Chinese point-of-view, Robert Bickers’ book examines how events such as the opium wars or the Boxer uprising have impacted upon China’s relations with the world. For, as China resumes its central place on the world stage, we cannot understand the country’s resurgence and its sometimes quiet, sometimes raucous anger at the world unless we understand first this dark, complex phase of its modern history, the memory of which is embedded in the state’s very articulation of itself.
Bickers seeks to tell this story from the inside, through missionary records, Customs files, court reports, consular correspondence, scandalous diaries and fantastical memoirs, as well as tickets, dance cards, menus – incidental traces of otherwise lost moments in another realm. For, he argues, mere history matters in modern China, and the past is unfinished business. The Scramble for China is a highly original account of this time when two equally arrogant and scornful civilisations clashed. It is a tale of squalor, romance, brutality and exoticism, and it changed the world.
Robert Bickers is the author of the highly-acclaimed Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. He has written extensively on Chinese history and is currently Professor of History at the University of Bristol. To write The Scramble for China he travelled at length, visiting many of the haunting sites scattered across China that feature in the book.
Entrance: RMB 30 (RAS members) and RMB 80 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
Robert Bickers tells the epic, dynamic account of a century of
Sino-foreign interactions, confrontation and confusion.
Told from both the Western and Chinese point-of-view,
The Scramble for China examines how events such as the opium wars
or the Boxer uprising have impacted upon China’s relations
with the world as China resumes its central place on the world stage.
Bickers, Professor of History at University of Bristol and the author of
Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai, tells this story from the inside,
through missionary records, customs files, court reports, consular correspondence,
scandalous diaries and fantastical memoirs, as well as tickets, dance cards, menus
– incidental traces of otherwise lost moments in another realm.
History matters in modern China, and the past is unfinished business.
The Scramble for China is a highly original account of this time when two equally
arrogant and scornful civilisations clashed.
It is a tale of squalor, romance, brutality and exoticism,
and it changed the world.
I met a bloke the other day who swore blind that the Pudong side of the Huangpu was beautiful and Puxi, the Bund, just a bunch of old relics. I told him he needed an optician – and in 1937 he could have wandered along Nanking Road (Nanjing Road) to Lazarus Opticians. Not quite sure what the hell their out there slogan means though!!
Not quite sure why now but Patrick French’s biography of Sir Frances Younghusband, who obviously conquered Tibet and all that for the Empire, has been reissued. Never mind why, it’s a good book and worth a read so worth a plug. As usual no review here but publishers blurb below as ever.
Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers.
Patrick French’s award-winning biography traces the unpredictable life of the maverick with the ‘damned rum name’, who singlehandedly led the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, discovered a new route from China to India, organized the first expeditions up Mount Everest and attempted to start a new world religion. Following in Younghusband’s footsteps, from Calcutta to the snows of the Himalayas, French pieces together the story of a man who embodies all the romance and folly of Britain’s lost imperial dream.
Although I’d read about it a lot in memoirs and novels I’d never actually seen a picture of the old Repulse Bay Lido before. Of course I should have expected something special – lidos usually are. I’ve never quite worked out how property developers and local politicians came to so hate lidos everywhere from Hong Kong to North London (the great London lidos of my youthful summers are pretty much all gone – and all were beautiful 1930s art-deco structures)?
Anyway, there’s a lovely postcard of Repulse Bay Lido just added to Tony Banham’s Hong Kong War Diary blog (here) and I found a few other shots around the web
The Gwulo: Old Hong Kong blog has some nice shots and ephemera from the 1935 built lido – here
The lido closed in 1951 I believe for reasons I’m not sure about but probably to do with property development knowing Hong Kong. News of the loss of the popular adjacent Lido Cafe is here.
Here’s the front of the lido – sadly now completely erased
The Royal Asiatic Society of Suzhou is hosting two more events before it breaks for the hottest, stickiest parts of the summer, to return in September:
On Thursday, May 19, 2011, 7pm “The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832 – 1914“ is a history book that should be required reading for any foreigner interested in China or who wants to do business in the Middle Kingdom. Robert Bickers of Bristol University writes a riveting account of foreign adventures in China during one of the most dramatic episodes in modern history, detailing how the clash of arrogances between China and the West have shaped commercial and political relationships between the two ever since. The Royal Asiatic Society hosts Professor Bickers as he introduces some of the most defining characters and events in history.
On Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 4pm Graham Earnshaw, CEO of Sinomedia (which produces the China Economic Review) and Publisher of Earnshaw Books, introduces his own recently published book, The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet (Blacksmith Books, Dec. 2010). Graham writes about his experiences, observations and conversations with Chinese as he just recently undertook a Great Walk across a fast-changing and amazingly diverse Chinese landscape. His journey fits squarely within the genre of great China walks in the fashion of Edwin Dingle and Isabella Bird, a hundred years ago. He’ll also be introducing the writings of some of those writers of a bygone era, which Earnshaw Books has re-published.
Both events will be held at The Suzhou Bookworm, Gunxiu Fang 77, Shi Quan Jie.
50 rmb for members; 70 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer.
For more information, contact Bill Dodson at +86 135 0613 6662.
