These are all quite rare to see…(up for auction 22/23 November if you’re interested – here)
The Illustrated Catalogue of Chinese Government Exhibits for the International Exhibition of Chinese Art in London edited by the Chinese Organising Committee, Nanking, 1936, Vols I, II and III, with dust jackets; also Nanking published by The Commercial Press Ltd, Shanghai, China; S Howard Hansford Chinese Jade Carving published 1950; and The Hong Kong Countryside by J A C Herklots, published 1951 (6 Vols)…
Ian Gill’s first visit to Hong Kong takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great-grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s – and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985.
The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China’s turbulent century from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s to the advent of communism.
In China, a fan has traditionally been both a practical object and an artistic work that expresses the owner’s learning or personality. The high-end craftsmanship of Chinese fans, encompassing poetry, calligraphy and painting, has long captivated the West.
This sumptuous book, newly translated from the original Korean, showcases 71 examples dating from between the late 18th and 20th centuries. It follows on from the popular volume on European Fans, and the fine objects featured in Chinese Fans are again drawn from the renowned Eurus Collection in South Korea.
Two picture albums (sorry no shots of the inside) that show what the publishers (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Yokohama) were publishing out of their Yokohama operation in the 1890s. These albums were prepared by the prolific local photographer Kazumasa Ogawa (1860-1929), best known perhaps for his 1892 book for Kelly & Walsh, Japanese Life. More on Ogawa here.
These albums form the later 1890s were prepared and sold by Kelly & Walsh, – Souvenir of a Garden Party at Waseda and The Hanami (Flower Picnic) – were mostly sold to visitors, sojourners and the foreign colony at Yokohama in its treaty port period.
The photograph album of Kenneth Mathieson Fardell, sailing with HMS Minotaur of the China Station, 1913-1914 contained 213 coloured and black and white photographs and at the rear of the album an attached envelope inscribed ‘AH Fong Photographer P, 369 Nanking Road, Shanghai and Wei-hai-wei’ and also handwritten ‘Lieut K. M. Fardell’, with images including Weihaiwei, Nagasaki, Canton, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Ceylon, Aden, Port Said and Malta. Fardell spent a lot of time in the China Station’s anchorage of Weihaiwei too. Fardell was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant on 30th November,1913 and was awarded the Goodenough Medal for 1913-1914, being the Sub-Lieutenant who achieved the highest gunnery examination for the year and who also achieved a first-class certificate in seamanship. Fardell was commended for his handling of enciphered messages at Tsingtao in 1914 – obviously a tense time given the German occupation of the ity before it was taken by British and Japanese troops.
Ah Fong had studios in Shanghai, on Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) and in Weihaiwei – I’m assuming Fardell’s pictures were developed in Weihaiwei while Minotaur was based there.
A little taste of our next China Revisited book (#4) from Blacksmith Books- Harry A Franck’s (billed by US newspapers at the time as “The Prince of Vagabonds” – Roving Through Southern China (1925)…(preorder here)
“Hong Kong loomed up through the mists of a late December morning during my second year in China; I was due to pass through it half a dozen times before I left the Orient. Like Shanghai, it had changed much since I first saw it, almost twenty years before. The same funicular cable-cars, however, still carry one to the Peak – so do automobiles also now – to look down upon a scene in a milder way almost as striking as Rio. From the compact narrow city below like the embroidery on the bottom of a skirt the eyes wander away across the deep-blue harbor scattered with scores of ships riding at anchor because the wharves on both sides of the bay are already crowded from end to end with others, merging into islands in the offing that seem likewise anchored in the blue sea, a harbor streaked by constantly arriving and departing steamers from everywhere and by the ferries to the various parts of the mainland suburb of Kowloon, beyond which one may even see hills that are still Chinese.
Two-storied street-cars, like those of Chile – though here classes are reversed and the haughty white man deigns to ride aloft – move from end to end of the narrow island town, through Happy Valley, promoted now from cemetery to race-track, Kennedy Town, and other sections of British nomenclature; and farther still motor-cars will carry those who can afford them up and over or clear around the steep little island. Motoring is cheaper across the bay, where motor-buses race in constant streams from the ferry-landing to every suburb, and there rickshaws have unlimited scope compared with the little level space in down-town Victoria, behind which the “Do Be Chairful Company” – English wit sieved through Chinese brains comes out in strange forms of facetiousness – provide many clean and comfortable conveyances that are not exactly chairs, though you may sit in them and be carried.”
In the 1920s the American travel writer Harry A Franck was known to readers as the “Prince of Vagabonds”. His wanderings were family affairs and he arrived in southern China in 1923 with his wife, their two young children and his mother. Franck always claimed that his travel plans were random, subject to chance encounters and whatever caught his eye.
He arrives in a Hong Kong which is building modern department stores and large houses while labourers sleep on straw mats beside the harbour. In Macao he visits temples, ancient forts and, of course, casinos. And then to Canton (Guangzhou), a city in flux where new buildings are transforming the waterfront, the ancient city walls are being demolished, and the traditional rookeries of small lanes are being replaced by wide asphalt roads as the city rapidly modernises. Franck also provides us with a highly detailed description of Shamian Island a year after the tumultuous strikes and boycotts that meant naval gunboats and barbed wire still protected the small foreign enclave.
