Comparing China…Some New Additions…Shanghai as Huddersfield; Peking as Shrewsbury!

Regular readers will know I am a great lover of famous men (and it is all men so far I’m afraid but submissions are open from all periods and genders) making comparisons between China and other places (invariably provincial England). Here is a round up of the best so far:

• The usually erudite and brilliant W Somerset Maugham wrote ‘…the bamboo, the Chinese bamboo, transformed by some magic of the mist, look just like the hops of a Kentish field’;
• The American comedian Will Rogers compared the countryside around Harbin to Nebraska when he visited in the early 1930s;
• In the 1870s Jules Verne compared Hong Kong to a town in Kent or Surrey;
• In 1933 Peter Fleming toured China and compared Chengde to Windsor;
• He then compared Peking with Oxford for some reason! – gotta love the Flemster!!;
• Later in 1938 Auden and Isherwood described the countryside around Canton (Guangzhou) as reminiscent of the Severn Valley;
• And then during his stay in China during the Second World War the (yet to be at the time) famous Sinologist Joseph Needham compared Fuzhou to Clapham and, perhaps most bizzarely, wartime Chongqing to the charming Devon seaside resort of Torquay!

And here’s two new additions –

I’d forgotten Noel Coward’s excellent comparison of 1921 Shanghai as ‘a cross between Brussels and Huddersfield’

Then there’s EM Forster’s science fiction short story from 1909 called The Machine Stops where he writes, ‘What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?’

Two worthy editions I think you’ll agree…

Huddersfield back then – could it have been just a “reet grim” up Shanghai way in 1921??

Behold the lovely old market town of Shrewsbury…errr, in olden times…a dead ringer for Peking I’m sure we can all agree