“Grant Hayter-Menzies brings his talent for recreating the material, cultural and mental textures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bear on the story of Sarah Conger. He presents the reader not only a story, not only characters, but a world.” – Pamela Kyle Crossley, author of The Manchus
- Traces the parallel lives of the Empress Dowager Cixi and American diplomat’s wife Sarah Pike Conger, which converged to alter their perspectives of each other and each other’s worlds.
– Uses rare and unpublished letters, diaries and photographs, benefiting from the cooperation and assistance of family of Sarah Conger and the Empress Dowager.
-Â Treats of the topical subject which dogged Mrs. Conger till the end of her life: did she or did she not purchase and sell goods she knew to be loot?
Grant Hayter-Menzies‘s first book for Hong Kong University Press was Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling. He is also the biographer of stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke.
Over Chinese New Year the last corner buildings (the north east corner to be precise) at the heavily bulldozed and widened junction of Dong Changzhi Road (Seward Road East) and Xinjian Road (Sinkeipang Road) in eastern Hongkou (Hongkew) were smashed into. Xinjian was a narrow, and actually originally rather insignificant, road prior to road widening to allow for greater traffic access north-south. Seward Road East ran into the Jewish Ghetto and was home to several Jewish businesses in the 1930s and early 1940s including Freundlich Tailors at 899 and the Harpuder block ice business at 978.
The loss of this corner is especially sad because a number of blocks in the vicinity, including the one just gone, and others still remaining (but obviously now highly vulnerable) nearby were only recently refurbished to a pretty high standard with new interiors, UPVC windows with double glazing, roof tiles, new communal rubbish bins, security entry gates and repainted exteriors. That was only a couple of years ago as part of the general Shanghai tart up for EXPO.
I’m not convinced in these more health-and-safety aware days of the virtues of standing a sopping wet toddler in front of an electrical appliance…but it seems it was popular in the late 1920s in Shanghai-Hankow-Hong Kong-Tientsin and wherever in China Westinghouse sold heaters. Of course nowadays they sell AP-1000 nuclear reactors to China – probably not a good idea to stand too close to those either when you’re naked!
Recently I came across two old postcards of Hongkew (Hongkou) Park which was, technically speaking, just outside the northern boundaries of the International Settlement in Hongkou but still considered a largely foreign park.Below those postcards plus some history of the park, now renamed Lu Xun Park. I took a stroll over to the park recently and some pics of the same area today.
In 1896 the Bureau of Construction of the Shanghai International Settlement purchased 39 acres of rural land at the end ofSichuan Road North, just outside the Settlement’s boundary, and built a shooting field for the Municipal Rifle Range which was mostly used by the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. In 1905, the park was rebuilt as the Hongkew Sports Games Park and Shooting Field apparently modelled on a park in Glasgow and with the addition of a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, extensive playing fields and a bowling green. It was then renamed as simply Hongkew Park in 1922.
The Park was famously the scene of an explosion in 1932 when the Korean patriot and anti-Japanese resistance activist Yoon Bong-gil threw a bomb during a Japanese celebration for the birthday of Emperor Hirohito. The bomb blast destroyed the bandstand and instantly killed two Japanese officials, Yoshinori Shirakawa, a Japanese Imperial Army general, and Kawabata Sadaji, the Government Chancellor of Japanese residents in Shanghai. Adjoining the Park was the Mei Ren Company’s factory, one of Shanghai’s best-known makers of mah-jong tiles. The Park was also close to the Scott Road area that was best known for its numerous low-end brothels – the “trenches†– and so a little after dark frolicking was perhaps inevitable.
Well, the park has changed its name in honour of the writer Lu Xun and of course the landscaping has changed dramatically in the intervening decades with some bits lopped off, unsurprisingly, to the property developers and a chunk lost to construct the Hongkou Stadium. Anyway, a reduced version of the lawns above still exist and the manmade lake, seen in the picture immediately above, is still there too. The lawns as they are now as below, the second picture shows the encroachment of the stadium:
No doubt about it 100 is the magic number in Taiwan this year – 100 years of Xinhai, 100 years of the Republic of China in one form or another.
Taipei is full of signage and ads with something other to with the hundredth anniversary. Government bodies of course, the police and military but also companies jumping on the Xinhai bandwagon and even the subway system celebrating the opening of over 100 kilometres of track. 100 is truly the magic number.
No surprise really that Taiwan is making a big deal of the anniversary, but I am a little surprised that I’ve seen next to nothing about it anywhere in China yet. I have visits in the next couple of months to two cradles of the Republic, Nanking and Wuhan, who should be doing something. Or perhaps we’ll hear more about Xinhai towards the second half of the year though I suspect that the powers that be in Peking just simply haven’t been able to fix a line on the anniversary so they’re falling back to the default position of ignoring it entirely. We shall see. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, expect more ‘100’ references as we approach October and the Double Ten.
An interesting post on the excellent Bricoleurbanism blog on the development of Pudong (Pootung). I have tried, usually in vain, to fight the continuing number of fake Old China Hands in Shanghai who regularly like to drone on about remembering Pudong when, standing on the Bund, all you could see was farmland and marsh on the otherside of the river. I still occasionally get stuck at dinners where people drag this old nonsense out – most recently someone talking about the late 1990s!! Truth is that if you’re old enough to stood on the Bund and looked across the Huangpu River at marsh and farmland then you are the oldest person in the world by about 190 years and you’re still lying…there was no Bund to stand on then!!
I offer as evidence once again Carl Crow’s 1935 Shanghai map that clearly shows the lines of godowns, wharfs, shipyards and warehouses along the Pootung waterfront and stretching back (and, shameless plug, I’ve still got some repros of the map for sale at RMB250 if you email me!!).
Bricoleurbanism has an excellent image from 1990 (I first saw this view just a few years earlier) that also shows the build up along the Pudong waterfront. If I remember correctly the green you see towards where the Pearl Oriental Tower and the north side of the headland was formerly low-level factories cleared for those developments to start – this was also the area where the old cemetery was where many sailors and other foreign visitors to China were buried if they died on board ship or while in Pootung – now under the Pudong Convention Centre (as with other cemeteries in Shanghai such as the one under the JW Marriot, Bubbling Well in the Jing’an Park and the cemetery under what is now Huaihai Park I don’t think there was ever any proper remains removal procedure, they just churned it up and dug it over).
I won’t nick the image from the site – just click through to see it.
Somewhere I have a bunch of photos of various expeditions to Pudong undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s – I’ll try and find them and scan them in.
Bricoleurbanism’s comments on the failure of urban planning in Pudong are also of interest.
The previous post on the restoration of the facades and properties along Taipei’s historic Dihua Street may not be a solo project. I’m not au fait enough with Taipei city politics I’m afraid but, during a recent trip at Chinese New Year to the city, it did seem to me that rather a lot of facades of great buildings were getting a bit of a polish and clean, as well as a restoration to ensure their longer term health. If that’s the case, then hats of to the local pols. If it’s just a coincidence then hopefully it’s one that’ll keep right on happening!!
Here’s two examples:
First up a building that sits prominently on the junction of Chang’an West Road and Tian Shui Road (not that far from Dihua Street discussed yesterday actually). It appears to be getting a restoration and looks great.
Second, and under wraps, the excellent Taipei main Post Office Building which I’ve blogged about before as one of the best European style post offices outside of Shanghai’s International Post Office down on Suzhou Creek (see here for more on the Taipei PO). Not sure how extensive the restoration is at the Post Office, it’s next to a major elevated highway so a good scrub and brush up alone will do wonders.
By the way, here’s what the Taipei Main Post Office looked like last summer before the sheets went up over it….
Dihua Street is one of Taipei’s more interesting thoroughfares dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, though traces have been found that date back to the 1600s and the Dutch occupation of Formosa. It certainly contrasts with much of central Taipei which was developed slightly later and still betrays its Japanese influences. Pretty much since then it has been an area specialising in the sale of traditional products – medicines, teas, cloth, herbs and spices etc. The name Dihua was given to the street in 1949 in reference to Urumqi. Dihua is one of a network of pre-1949 streets in the area. The Taipei City Government has been renovating many of the building facades along the street (the phenomenon of ‘facadicide’ is sadly no stranger to Taipei’s older streets). Work is still ongoing but plenty of them look good now.
I’m sorry but I can’t help but wish that such a programme of facade refurbishment had occurred along Shanghai’s Wujiang Road rather than the wholesale destruction that took place – think how great the old Love Lane could have looked.
Well done Taipei city authorities; shame on Shanghai…I think though the example of Dihua Street is worth studying for those who persist on telling me that streets like Wujiang Road in Shanghai are all slums and fit only to to be bulldozed.
Two views along Dihua Street showing how much better the building facades are now looking
A Dihua Street facade being worked on – brick and concrete cleaned before windows reinstalled and then the traditional shop space below can be re-coccupied
One building covered up where work is underway
A particularly Dihua Street shop house yet to be finished
