This is a potentially fascinating letter dated November 29, 1834 from a destitute American seeking help to return home) from Macao. The letter is addressed to William Shepard Wetmore in Canton (Guangzhou). Wetmore had traveled to Canton and took over a partnership in Dunn & Company. With Joseph Archer he established a new merchant house, Wetmore & Company. Wetmore traded tea, silks and spices as well as wines, ports, opium, hemp, pearl buttons, copper and coffee. They also transported a variety of foreign currencies, and delivered newspapers and letters via “Fast boats” between Canton and Macao.
According to the Derby auctioneers Cavendish:
“The letter is rare as it is stamped with the ‘Boat Office’ Post service. The Canton Boat Office did not employ a handstamp for this 10c charge, although Macao Boat Office did from 1832 to 1838. Only two examples of this Canton Manuscript “10. Cents” marking have been recorded the other example was in the Richard Chan collection (here) and was from the same correspondence but dated 27 Sept. 1834. This first local Boat Office mail service linking Canton and Macao started in 1832. The Macao “Boat OFFICE/10 Cents” marks (1832-38) are well known, but this is one of only two recorded covers with this matching Canton “10 Cents” manuscript mark.”
Home to 25 million people, Shanghai is the most populous and wealthiest city in China. A meeting point between China and the wider world, the city has become the beating heart of Chinese capitalism, a place of initiative, confidence, and forward thinking. It is a city of stark contradictions, suffused with both extreme wealth and poverty, luxury living, and a highly organised criminal underworld.
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Found time, on a boiling hot day, to visit the replica of the Santa Maria which tours Europe stopping off at ports and harbours to let visitors aboard. It happened to be at Eastbourne (East Sussex) and has now moved on to Shoreham (near Brighton) and who knows where after that.
The Santa María was the largest of the three Spanish ships (alongside the Niña and Pinta) used by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage across the Atlantic. The ship ran aground off Haiti on Christmas Day in 1492.
What interested me was that the Santa Maria was a nao (or carrack), making it highly similar to Portuguese vessels of the era that made it to Macao by the 1500s. Portugal and Spain shared nearly identical Iberian shipbuilding traditions, and naos were the standard, ocean-going, round-hulled ships used throughout the “Age of Discovery”. Portuguese naos sailed to Macao during the 16th and 17th centuries. They navigated the treacherous Cape of Good Hope, connecting Lisbon to Goa, Malacca, and eventually Macao and the Pearl River Delta. By the mid-1550s naos hag gotten significantly larger, but not that much that the Santa Maria is not perhaps an interesting visit to gauge the sort of vessels the Portuguese used to get as far as China and on the initial “black ships” trade with Japan.
Anyone who ever wandered the old flea markets of outer Shanghai or the more organised tourist markets such as the old Dongtai Lu (now destroyed) may have bought beautiful old Swan brand electric fan. Swan desktop fans were popular in Shanghai, imported from Britain and made by Bulpitt & Sons Ltd of Birmingham under the Swan brand (registered 1868). Bulpitt and the Swan brand have gone through multiple owners since, so many I’ve lost track, but the brand is still around and still making desktop fans. Competing with Swan was GE, from America, also popular and also regularly to be found in old Shanghai markets. Most I found could be rewired and worked perfectly well.
But there was a local competitor, Wahson, founded by Shanghai businessman Yang Jichuan and which produced the first domestically-made electric fans in China and who claimed to export to over 90 countries by 1924.
Wahson Electronic appeared around 1916 with a factory in Hongkou. They were a Chinese-owned business and manufactured small electrical items, most popularly desk top fans, similar in design (if not actually identical and reverse engineered) to the Swan brand. The company is still in existence and still makes ceiling fans though no longer desktops. Still, their desktop fans were things of beauty too and probably essential in any Shanghai office or home in the summers…..
The Chinese characters on the building read “华生” (Huáshēng), which translates to Wahson.
A series of sadly anonymous photos with Japan officially signing the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2,1945. However, they appear to have been taken by a crew member (one assumes an officer given the level of access) on the the Royal Navy Dido-class light cruiser HMS Black Prince. On 16 January 1945, Black Prince sailed East as part of the British Pacific Fleet. She saw action off Okinawa and in the final bombardments of the Japanese mainland before withdrawing to Sydney and then to Hong Kong in October 1945. She remained in Hong Kong for five weeks. About 300 of the ship’s company went ashore to serve as guards in a POW camp for the Japanese.
On the 22nd November Black Prince arrived in Shanghai. Black Prince then spent nine-weeks on the Huangpu (one of only a couple of Royal Navy ships greatly outnumbers by the Americans – the other being the the mine laying cruiser HMS Apollo) over the Christmas period in 1945/1946.
After the Japanese surrender, Black Prince remained in the Far East, back to Hong Kong, back to Australia, and was finally transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy on 25 May 1946. She became rather dated and unpopular with crews, was placed in reserve, and eventually towed to Japan to be scrapped in 1962.
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