A Wee Peking Mystery Solved

Back in mid-December I posted about an old building I’d noticed for the first time in Beijing that appeared to be being refurbished on Chaoyangmanwai Dajie. I appealed for anyone who might know what it was as I didn’t recognize it. Fortunately the Beijing expert Ed Lanfranco got back to me (despite being on his holidays in California) with the following which explains it all:

‘This building was an American missionary compound built in 1910. It was called the North China Union School and was built as a language prep school for missionaries before they headed into the wilds of North China. It was also used as a rest stop for missionaries coming in from the field on their way to home leave. Later on in the 1920s and 1930s when the number of new missionaries dried up, a famed educator named William Pettus converted it into the California College in China which was allied with a university in California which offered a Masters degree in Chinese Studies.’

Ed also notes:

‘It is now being considered a haunted house and a place that has been used as a movie location. I wrote about this place 5-6 years ago in the China Daily’s Beijing Weekend as well as the Washington Times (An American Chai) when they were planning on tearing it down. My favorite thing about the location is some of the people who studied Chinese there: US General Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell when he was the legation’s military attache; polymath (soldier-chef-cartographer-novelist-painter); Frank Dorn; the creator of Chinese Studies in the US; Harvard Professor John King Fairbank; and George Kates, author of the best “I lived in a siheyuan” book, The Years that were Fat.

Thanks Ed – here’s hoping the place stays and is bulldozed for another ridiculous skyscraper.

PS: he’s right – Kates’s The Years that were Fat is a great read.

Two Upcoming Exhibitions of Interest in London

The British Museum is digging out some Chinese objects from its vaults for the forthcoming Treasures from Shanghai: Ancient Chinese Bronzes and Jades. The exhibit runs from 30 January – 27 March. On display for the first time in London will be some of the collection of the Shanghai Museum’s jades and bronzes, with sections on jade and Neolithic pottery; bronzes from the Shang dynasty; objects from the Zhou dynasty (c. 1050–221 BC); tombs, hoards and technology; and some later stuff. The handscroll pictured left by the way is a great

portrait of the bronze collector Wu Dacheng (1835-1890) painted by Ren Xun (1835-1893), with the face painted by Hu Qinhan around 1892 all in ink and colours on silk.

My office is a stone’s throw from the Shanghai Museum on People’s Square and I often pop in while strolling to work to waste an hour or so.Without doubt, along with the collection of Qing clothing and furniture as well as some nice calligraphy, the bronzes are the highlight of the collection – such as th

e wine vessel (pictured left) from the Shang Period, 13th–11th century BC that will be coming to London.

Meanwhile the V&A is running an exhibit to tie in with the run to the nationalistic orgy of the EXPO in Shanghai when competitive nationalism gets to run rampant on the shores of the Haung Pu for a few months by recalling the first EXPO- London in 1851. The V&A over in South Ken is hosting Shanghai Week, from January 29-February 12 with artifacts from exhibits at previous Expos since 1851. What they have exactly is not entirely clear.

Archbishop John of Shanghai

Just a quick follow upon the post about the refurbishment of St Nicholas Orthodox Russian church in Shanghai the other day – click here.

Just to note that a regular visitor was Saint John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco (1896 – 1966) was a noted Eastern Orthodox ascetic and hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). He’s pictured left on the day he arrived in Shanghai. Bishop John came with a mighty reputation as a reputed wonderworker to whom was attributed great powers of prophecy, clairvoyance and healing. A Russian, in Shanghai, he found an Orthodox community deeply divided along ethnic lines. Making contact with all the various groups, he quickly involved himself in the existing charitable institutions and personally founded an orphanage and home for the children of indigents. It was here that he first became known for miracles attributed to his prayer, and as a public figure it was impossible for him to completely conceal his ascetic way of life. Despite his actions during the Japanese occupation, when he routinely ignored the curfew in pursuit of his pastoral activities, the Japanese authorities never harassed him. As the only Russian hierarch in China who refused to submit to the authority of the Soviet-dominated Russian Orthodox Church, he was elevated to the rank of archbishop by the Holy Synod in 1946.

When the Communists took power in China, the White Russians were forced to flee, first to a refugee camp on the island of Tubabao in the Philippines (were many died) and then mainly to the United States and Australia.

Remembering the SS Manchuria

I get a chance to combine a few interests here – China, ships and travelling to China. I’ve been researching a person for a forthcoming book and discovered them in the shipping records as having left China for New York (landing in San Francisco and then travelling overland) in January 1909 aboard the SS Manchuria (left). This gives me a chance to blog about the Manchuria as the details won’t make it into the book.

 The Manchuria was owned by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and worked the trans-Pacific routes. She waspretty new in 1909 having been launched in late 1903. The coal-fired 13,639 ton Manchuria was built by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation of Camden, New Jersey (guess what? it ain’t there anymore!) and remained in service until the early 1950s eventually being scrapped in Italy. Basically she was a beautiful ship.

 Pacific Mail was the major carrier of Americans and their mail between the US and Asia – in 1866, Washington had awarded the first mail contract of US$500,000 per annum between San Francisco and the Far East, to be specific to Hong Kong via Japan and the Sandwich Islands, to Pacific Mail. By 1867, the company was running several different lines in the Far East: The monthly China Line, between San Francisco and Hong Kong, stopping at Yokohama and the monthly Shanghai Line between Yokohama and Shanghai, via Nagasaki. This also ran once, linking with the China Line.

Through these links, freight could be moved from New York to Yokohama in 42 days, to Shanghai in 47 days and Hong Kong in 50 days. In 1902, Pacific Mail launched the SS Korea and SS Siberia, which were their first steel hulled ships, followed by SS Manchuria and SS Mongolia in 1904. These ships were the largest and fastest passenger-freight ships in the Pacific at the time.

 Life aboard appears pretty good – strolling the deck, gazing at passing junks or dancing the night away as the postcards issued on the Manchuria to send to friends indicate (above and left obviously). OK, so it took a bit of time and you stopped of in Japan and maybe Hawaii but think of the books you’d read, the sleep you’d catch upon, the leisurely meals and new friends and basically what’s the rush? And all with a fraction of the emissions. Damn – born too late again!

Opium Dens and Opium Museums

Via Thomas Crampton’s blog I was alerted to the Opium Museum online – a nice resource. Steven Martin, the author of The Art of Opium Antiques, runs the site which has a lot of good photos and text – Martin’s emphasis is on the attractiveness of the paraphernalia. He also makes some useful brief comments on opium use in Europe.

As I’ve been working on a few things around opium use and image in Europe in late nineteenth century I’m interested to note that Martin writes that, ‘Only in France did opium smoking take hold in Europe, and Brassaï captured images of opium dens in his famous photographic studies of Parisian nightlife (his self portrait in an opium den is left). The existence of opium smoking in London was, and continues to be, highly exaggerated. The complete lack of photographic evidence of opium smoking in London strongly suggests that tales of posh debauchery in London’s Limehouse district are nothing more than literary fantasy.’

I think he’s basically right about Limehouse which was more written and gossiped about by the toffs than visited though it is the case that a number of local East Enders did enjoy the drug – up until at least the early 1980s there were a number of old people (mostly old Cockney ladies) who were registered by the NHS to use opium and still smoked it through the traditional pipes.

PS: picture at the top is the cover of Le Petit Journal, 5 July 1903 entitled “A New Vice: Opium Dens in France”

St Nicholas’ Shanghai – Refurbished

I note the recent restoration of the St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Shanghai with interest pictured left with it’s new lick of paint.

The former St Nicholas Russian Orthodox church on Gaolan Road (formerly Rue Corneille), originally completed in 1934 I think, was a pretty average but rather pleasant (ambience wise) restaurants in the 1990s and into the early 2000s called Ashanti Dome which served undistinguished Italian and/or French food after a fashion (i.e. nothing too memorable). There was also for a while a Spanish tapas restaurant called Boca on the ground floor for a while but the less said about that the better I think. Of course you went there for the architecture not some knocked up Eurotrash food however good or bad.

The only real reason for eating there when it was a restaurant was the drawings inside which were interesting though poorly preserved when I last saw them around 2002. The management used to say that they had been vandalised by the communists when a visiting delegation of Russians had been taken there at some point and all the tits painted over to spare anyone’s blushes – though it’s hard to imagine a Russian being blushing at the sight of a pair of breasts, the Chinese Communist Party could give the Plymouth Brethren a run in the prudery stakes.

It then shut for a while and during 2008 was the scene of feverish refurbishment. Before I knew it as a so-so restaurant it had had a number of former incarnations during the more surly communist period as a washing machine factory among other things. Apparently the Red Guards wanted to demolish it but concerned locals who rather liked their Church hung a picture of Chairman Mao on the outside and they left it alone. I note that the refurbishment seems to have been completed and certainly the old place looks the better for a lick of paint. What it is to become I have no idea – runmour says it’s been restored as a church though how many practicing Russian Orthodox God Botherers there are in Shanghai I have no idea.

St Nicholas’s was one of several Orthodox churches in Shanghai – some are gone beneath the relentless bulldozers of course, a couple remain including St Nicholas and the Russian Mission Orthodox church on the corner of Xinle and Xiang Yang Roads (left, around the time of completion in the mid-1930s) that was completed about 1934-36 and throughout most of the 1990s was an early stock trading centre before becoming a restaurant and nightclub briefly, a venture that swiftly failed.

Whatever St Nicholas’s becomes it’s nice to have it back in seemingly decent shape – I’ll try and get a look inside to see how well that went – regularShanghai architecture fans will know that while facades get preserved more these days in Shanghai the insides invariably get ripped out, so we’ll see.

Comparing China

The other day I noted that the American comedian Will Rogers compared the countryside around Harbin to Nebraska when he visited in the early 1930s. This jogged my memory to other bizarre comparisons that have cropped up over the decades – invariably to various English places:

In the 1870s Jules Verne compared Hong Kong to a town in Kent or Surrey

In 1933 Peter Fleming toured China and compared Chengde to Windsor

He then compared Peking with Oxford for some reason!

Later in 1938 Auden and Isherwood (above obviously) described the countryside around Guangzhou as reminiscent of the Severn Valley

And then during his stay in China during the Second World War the (yet to be at the time) famous Sinologist Joseph Needham compared Fuzhou to Clapham and, perhaps most bizzarely, wartime Chongqing to Torquay!

And so a blog about China gets to include a picture of Torquay in the charming county of Devon

Suddenly Lascars Are Everywhere

More strange coincidences after reading about the Indian philosopher Tagore in China and then stumbling across one of his sayings carved into the pavement in Taipei (see here).

I meant to note that the best piece of literature I read last year was Amitav Ghosh’s excellent Sea of Poppies. It seems this is the first in a trilogy of books about the opium trade that will eventually feature China more heavily.

As someone who has long been a habitual peruser (if such a word exists) of Henry Yule’s (left) Hobson Jobson Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases I enjoy pidgin English in all its variants – Portuguese pidgin, China coast and Anglo-Indian. Ghosh peppers his novel with pidgin and nautical terms and, for me at least, writes some scenes that compare with Joseph Conrad’s great sea-borne stories of Asia (Victory, Lord Jim etc).

Ghosh’s book also has Lascars in it, who are always fascinating – Indian seaman usually employed on European ships. I first heard of them as a kid walking around the Port of London with my dad in the 70s just before all the old streets got cleared for Canary Wharf and Thastcher’s Docklands toytown. He’d waffle on about the old communities in that area (seemed like waffling at the time anyway when I had Action Man to be dealing with) – Chinese as well as Lascars that were there when my grandfather worked in the docks area. At the time of the First World War there were apparently about 50,000 Indian Lascars living in Britain’s port cities alone, mostly in Stepney and Canning Town around the East and West India Docks.

Having finished the book and with Lascars still in my mind they popped up twice quite by accident. First, I picked up a DVD in Shanghai of the old Arthur Conan Doyle mystery The Man With the Twisted Lip, where Sherlock Holmes ventures in an East End opium den run by a Lascar and then wandering through Hong Kong happened to catch myself passing Upper Lascar Row. Lascars live on it seems.

By the way I just found out that Hobson Jobson has gone all interweb so I can spare my battered old copy any more damage as there’s an online version courtesy of the University of Chicago – click here