Nanking Road, Old Shanghai – courtesy of Meaghan Walsh Gerard

Posted: June 25th, 2023 | No Comments »

My thanks to Meaghan Walsh Gerard of Savannah, Georgia for sending me this lovely Kodak snap of Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road).

The photo paper dates it as 1930s and it is titled on the reverse, as you can see – a worthwhile US$2.98 and so kind of her to send it to me.

BTW: Meaghan is a prolific and excellent book and film reviewer (which I think is how we first met ages ago) – her website is here. But I must thank her massively and repeatedly for helping me access the Harry Hervey archives at the Georgia State Historical Society when a combination of a) the archive imminently closing for some time for major building works and b) covid prevented me from getting over there in person.

In case you don’t know Hervey was a Charleston and Savannah inhabitant who was obsessed with Asia and ‘the Orient’. He wrote a number of exotic novels before even visiting. In the 1920s he then did a couple of extensive tours of Japan/Korea/Hong Kong/Macao and mainland China, as well as South East Asia and French Indochina. I reproduced some of his travel writing in my first China Revisited reprint (with Blacksmith Books) – Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Herveys 1920s Hong Kong, Macao & Canton Sojourns.

But most importantly Hervey wrote the original treatment for the movie Shanghai Express and sold it to Josef von Sternberg – cue Marlene, Anna May and one of the best movies ever. I dug that out of the Stanford Archives and then found that Hervey’s own archives were also at the Georgia State Historical Society including letters and a bunch of obscurely publoshed, or totally unpublished, but really very interesting, short stories featuring Peking. Meaghan got those for me and I wrote about them in a chapter of my collection Destination Peking – Harry Hervey’s Peking of the Imagination.

So once again – thank you Meaghan…

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