Four Victorian prattware (a style of English earthenware produced from roughly 1780-1840 by F & R Pratt & Co. of Staffordshire) pottery pot lids comprising top left and right – Transplanting Rice and The Harbour of Hong Kong and bottom left to right The Chin-Chew River, and The Ning Po River. The pots were produced by the Pratts Factory in or around 1846 -1849 and may have been influenced by the then Second Opium War with China. The images are reproductions of watercolours by J.Austin from the originals by Thomas Allom in the then popular book China Illustrated (1845). Allom (who never went to China) was inspired well by sketches made by Captain Stoddart (a Royal Navy officer and artist in the First Opium War).
This Sunday at 7.15pm on BBC Radio 3 my “Between the Ears” documentary Return to the City of Darkness: Kowloon Walled City. Afterwards it’ll be on BBC.com and the BBC Sounds app.
Kowloon Walled City – ‘the City of Darkness’ – vanished from the face of the earth in 1993, torn down as the world’s craziest, densest and most notorious slum. Yet the public memory and re-imagining of it has never stopped. It represents a kind of dynamic, chaotic, insane dream space where people made their lives work despite the greatest odds.
Nowadays at Hong Kong airport, the one that replaced Kai Lak (where vast jumbo jets once soared only a hundred feet over the higgledy piggledy structure that was Kowloon), you can buy replicas of sections of the city. Kowloon lives in Manga, animation, video games and most stunningly in the 2024 Hong Kong actioner, Twilight of the Warriors-Walled In. The film meticulously recreated Kowloon in all its filthy, claustrophobic anarchy. Perfectly capturing the dense, dank, dripping world of pipes, steam and bewildering geography. We summon up the vanished Kowloon to recreate the City of Darkness; drawing on oral histories from its last postman, a Salvation Army worker, former residents, chroniclers of the city’s history and bewildering architecture and those who have now turned it into vibrant stories and settings for an ever curious global audience. For there will never be another Kowloon.
The Nanyang Industrial Exposition, more commonly known as the 1910 Nanking or Nanjing Exposition, was a world’s fair held in Nanjing, China, during the end of the Qing dynasty. It opened on 5 June 1910 and lasted 177 days. I’ve blogged about it before so you can see a map of the site here and a more detailed floor plan of the exhibit booth here. And also a post here on the traces of the 1910 Expo that can still be seen at Nanjing Tech University (here).
So my thanks to John de Lucy for these photos, taken by his grandfather I believe, who attended the Nanyang Industrial Exposition in 1910….
Nanjing Exhibition railway station 1910
Exhibition Grounds – Nanjing Exhibition 1910
Miniature Railway around the grounds -Nanjing Exhibition 1910
Entertainment from the Viceroy’s Brass Band and the expo’s bandstand
Purvis was a sea captain who turned to painting, he was a prolific painter of ship portraits and marine scenes from the early 1890s to the late 1920s. There’s a lot more on him here including the fact that he seems to have abandoned his family in Bristol around 1915, worked as a mate or master of various steamships, at least until 1925, mostly in Far East Ports including Hong Kong. Purvis reportedly died in Hong Kong on 17 January 1933, after an accident.
H31 is something of a mystery – there was a ship marked HS31 in Hong Kong c.1927 – Gwulo has a photo of it though I can’t find a record for it – excepting an H31 (HMS Griffin) that looks similar (second photo below) but was not launched until 1935, after Purvis’s supposed death in Hong Kong. HMS Griffin transferred to the Royal Navy’s Eastern Fleet in March 1942.
There was also a submarine named H31 – a British H-classsubmarine built by Vickers Limited, Barrow-in-Furness. You can see the H31 on the sub’s fin below. She was laid down on 19 April 1917 and was commissioned on 21 February 1919 that survived until World War II. However, Purvis clearly didn’t paint a sub though possibly H31 did go to Hong Kong (Gwulo has a picture of the crew).
So any ideas what this H31 in Victoria Harbour was? My best guess is that it was a submarine support vessel that towed and resupplied and the submarines?
The British Museum’s big new exhibition, Samurai, opens this week. I got a sneak peek of the exhibits last week. One of the most fascinating is that of the Christian samurai, Hasekura Tsunenaga. In 1613 Hasekura led a mission to Madrid and Rome (and stopped briefly in France too) to see pope Paul V. they arrived in 1615 and had his portrait painted in silk clothes by the Urbino artist Archita Ricci. Hasekura returned to Japan in 1620, by which time Christianity had been banned by the shogunate. Hasekura died of illness in 1622 with rumours swirling that he had abandoned Christianity, or that he was martyred for his faith, or that he continued to practise Christianity in secret.
Looking for something to do this Sunday in Hong Kong? Why not get out and do me VoiceMap GPS walking tour Kowloon Tong: Art Deco and Hidden Heritage in Hong Kong – I guarantee you’ll see some architectural treasures and streets you’ve not seen before. So here’s a fun fact – the tour takes your to he Modernist Saint Teresa’s Roman Catholic Church and also the marvellous Art Deco apartments and shops on Prince Edward Road West nearby. Both were financed by one of the great funders of Modernism and Art Deco architecture in Hong Kong, the Franco-Belgian Crédit Foncier d’Extrême-Orient.
A rare “disaster postcard” of the 1886 Glasgow-built PS Hankow, an iron paddle steamer of the China Navigation Company that initially worked the Yangtze River routes up from Shanghai and transferred to service on the Hong Kong-Canton route in in 1886. Hankow was gutted by fire on 14 October 1906 at the Canton Steamer Wharf in Hong Kong with loss of 130 Chinese lives. The wreck was then towed to Shanghai in 1907 and converted to a hulk before being moved once again to Hankou as a transhipment godown. It then spent some time in Shasi in Hubei and Yichang on the Yangtze before being destroyed by American bombing during World War Two.
This postcard was posted from Hong Kong in 1907 where it must have been purchased… It shows a large crowd watching the ship burn, along with people inside it!! The card misidentifies the Hankow as a SS (Steam Ship) rather than a PS (Paddle Steamer).
