From Wikipedia: “The one-cent banknote was the smallest denominated banknote issued in Hong Kong. They were issued by the government and were initially released on 30 May 1941 and printed by Noronha and Company Limited[1] to provide small change because of a lack of coinage brought on by the Second World War. The first issue was 42 by 75 mm, the obverse was brown with a serial number of seven numbers with either no prefix or an A or B prefix. This side was mostly in English, except for “Government of Hong Kong” which was also in Chinese. The reverse was red and the denomination in English and Chinese.”
I’d suggest it’s perhaps harder to visualise the Hong Kong Wallis experienced than it is to envisage the Shanghai or Peking she knew in 1924/1925. Shikumen and lilong remain, the Bund remains, hutongs too (just about)…. But old Hong Kong is almost impossible to touch now. Here an autumn rainy day on Queen’s Road Central in the mid-1920s with Chinese men in windmill palm rainproof capes pulling a Cold Storage ice wagon. Photo by William Stewart.
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
“A weed from Catholic Europe, it took root Between some yellow mountains and a sea, Its gay stone houses an exotic fruit, A Portugal-cum-China oddity.
Rococo images of Saint and Saviour Promise her gamblers fortunes when they die; Churches beside the brothels testify That faith can pardon natural behaviour.
This city of indulgence need not fear…”
— WH Auden, Macao: A Sonnet
For the third in my Destination series, it’s time to journey to the former Portuguese enclave of Macao, for me as much a place of the imagination as of reality. Constantly portrayed as the louche, sinful sister of Hong Kong, it was also a key trading post and early melting pot on the South China Sea.
From the Macao of artists George Chinnery and George Smirnoff, the writers Deolinda da Conceição and Maurice Dekobra, to the pulp fiction fantasies and cinematic fever dreams of Josef von Sternberg and Jean Delannoy; from those like Dr Pedro Lobo and Ian Fleming who came to Macao to chase gold, as well as those who sought refuge from war and the combatants who sought secret passage through ‘neutral’ Macao; from the earliest days of the China coast trade and its assorted cast of innkeepers and adventurers to the bizarre tales the changing times in the colony created. Did Japan really try to buy Macao in 1934? Who really sailed with Macao’s pirate queen Lai Choi San? Who were the Portuguese rebels who sought to declare Macao a republic in the 1920s?
Available from March 6 from Blacksmith Books and bookshops in Hong Kong and Macao – on amazon and everywhere else when the boats arrive! Click here to order…
Bill Lascher talking wartime Chungking to The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong and the original China FCC inspired by the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (available now Blacksmith Books, Bookazine & elsewhere and with a foreword by me!)…click here to watch…
How Maoism Was Made focuses on the history of the early years in China after 1949, featuring new scholarship by academics across Europe and North America. The field of early PRC history has been transformed by the unprecedented accessibility of archives from the 1990s to the early 2010s. Sixteen contributors show how the revolutionary system was built and maintained by the efforts of non-elite actors, including scientists, farmers, designers, artists, cadres, and ordinary citizens. By abandoning the Cold War political work of vilifying or celebrating Chinese communism, How Maoism Was Made aims to render the history of the Maoist system comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike, by viewing it through the lens of people who made it. Chinese communism is revealed to be a set of beliefs and practices that inspired millions of people to (re-)build their country and find a new life within it, at times with tragic consequences.
Interesting photographs of Winifred Jackson (I think from Kent) and other British women in post-war occupied Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). BCOF supported the American government in Japan and included British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand personnel between 1946 and 1952. Despite the dominance of the Americans (in reality and certainly culturally) the BCOF was about 25% of the post-war occupation foreign forces presence. They were involved in demilitarisation and the destruction of surplus war materiel. BCOF HQ was at Kure Port near Hiroshima…
Perckhammer (1895–1965) was a Tyrolean photographer best known for his Chinese nudes (now rather controversial) and Peking street scenes. He had been a Japanese prisoner or war captured in Tsingtao (Qingdao) in World War One. Both his Chinese nudes (mostly taken in Macao brothels) and Peking scenes books appeared in 1928. He moved to Berlin in the 1930s and was a photographer with the Waffen SS!
