Chiang Yee, Queen Mary, the London Library, London Zoo’s Pandas & Chinese Monkeys

Posted: May 24th, 2021 | No Comments »

I was looking at the London Library’s copy of Chiang Yee’s Yebbin: A Guest from the Wild (if you are unfamiliar with Chiang just use the search box opposite to see previous posts and the blue plaque we arranged to commemorate him in 2019 in Oxford). This London Library edition (a first edition from 1947) was presented to the library by Queen Mary (wife of King George V and Elizabeth II’s grandmother) in 1950. Yebbin was a children’s book (details below) but there’s a long link between Chiang Yee, Queen Mary and London Zoo’s pandas.

Queen Mary was somewhat of a fan of many things Chinese/chinoiserie. In the 1930s she went to see the hit West End play Lady Precious Stream (based on the Chinese folklore Wang Baochuan and Xue Pinggui) reportedly a half dozen times. The play was by Chiang Yee’s good friend and neighbour in Hampstead, Hsiung Shih-I (Xiong Shiyi). When the first pandas arrived at London Zoo in 1938 Queen Mary also visited along with the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. During the war Lady Cripps established the United Aid to China Fund and held an exhibition to raise funds to support Nationalist China’s resistance. Chiang Yee provided a number of paintings for the exhibition, as did Hsiung’s 14-year old daughter Diana alongside a rose quartz carving of a musician (see below). And so in 1947 Chiang Yee’s publishers (remembering the royal family’s fascination with the pandas), Methuen, sent several copies of Yebbin to the Palace, one of which, it would seem was then gifted to the London Library (and taken out by me in January 2021!).

Yebbin: London: Methuen, 1947. 143 pages. Illustrated by the author. Chiang Yee (1903-1977), Chinese poet, author, painter and calligrapher. Monkeys of the Rhesus tribe are common inhabitants of the mountain districts of China. They had always been a source of pleasure and admiration to Wang Ta-Yu, a well-to-do Chinese merchant, who was also a nature lover. One day Wang Ta-Yu bought a very young monkey from some hunters. It had such a sad and pitiful expression tht he decided to let the little creature free. Finally, however, he gave the monkey to his ten-year old son, Wang Ming, calling it Yebbin.

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