All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Here’s a close up section of a map sent to me by The Shanghailander Hugues Martin. This is taken from a Japanese map printed around 1932 and clearly shows the location of the Hai-alai stadium
if only…I recently read a Chinese memoir of old Shanghai where the author noted the amazingly fast game that Spanish people played in Shanghai with baskets on their hands – hai alai (which was always hyphenated in Shanghai for some reason). The Hai-alai stadium was part of the Canidrome business, now completely destroyed by the urban planners and replaced with some sort of horrendous space ship thing that utterly ignores the traditional feel and perspectives of the area it sits in. Still, there was a time…
Apparently Hong Kong Government heritage advisers, the Antiquities Advisory Board, are ‘considering’ upgrading the historic rating of the oldest surviving residence on The Peak. Hutchison Whampoa (wouldn’t you know it!) would like to demolish the building. The building does now urgently need to be moved up from Grade II status. The property, a European style mansion at 23 Coombe Road – more details here from the excellent Gwulo: Old Hong Kong site. It dates back to the 1870s and was built for an Irishman John Joseph Francis who was a military officer and later a barrister. What exactly the vandals at Hutchison Whampoa want to replace it with remains unclear – ‘redevelopment’ is all they’re saying.
Heritage is definitely more of a battleground in Hong Kong today than it was previously when the developers and big property companies ruled the roost utterly and the SAR lost some marvellous structures, properties and even old trees to be replaced with, eerrr, mostly more shopping malls actually. Now we know Hong Kongers like to shop but surely they don’t need to do it on the site of the oldest property on The Peak (or maybe they do scarily!!). There has been some resistance, brilliantly often from young people, the ones most curmudgeons like to say don’t care! But seems a lot of them do. We’ll see how this fight develops.
Barber Wilhelmsen was one of the smaller shipping lines sailing out of Shanghai in the 1930s and early 1940s. The Norwegian company dates back to the nineteenth century (there’s a company history here). The company was primarily a tanker operator through to the 1960s. The company still exists as Wilhelmsen Ship Management. Anyway, here they are in 1940 offering Shanghai to New York in an amazing 34 days (via the Panama Canal) – actually quicker I think to jump of at LA and catch a cross country train to New York I think. But hey, who’s rushing!
Thanks to The Shanghailander blog’s Hughes Martin for posting a short biography and details on Sam Sanzetti the White Russian Jewish photographer who captured so many great imagines of Shanghai and assorted Shanghailanders. The post also contains a link to the Israeli Consulate in Shanghai’s postings of some works by Sanzetti here.
I’ve talked about the great Roderick Egal before – the leader of Shanghai’s Free French during the Second World War (click here to see my post on French journalist Veronique Saunier’s articles on Egal and Egal’s grave in Hong Kong here). Egal was the nucleus of those French citizens in Shanghai who rallied to De Gaulle’s cause – sadly most of the rest were rampant Vichyites and collaborators. Anyway, Egal was also Frenchtown’s number 1 vintner with a branch in the International Settlement too. What is amazing about the three ads below was that they all ran in the North-China Daily News in June 1940, the month of the occupation of Paris and the Fall of France, a period of especial anguish to a great French patriot like Egal.
Now many of you will know that a classic red and white barber shop pole can mean any number of things in modern day Shanghai. You may get a haircut but then you may get something else entirely!! Gentlemen in need of a trim and a crop in the 1930s had two excellent barber shops to choose from downtown, either at the Cathay Hotel (now the not brilliantly restored Peace Hotel) or the Metropole round the corner (still there of course as the Metropole Hotel on Jiangxi Road). Pushing yourself as both hygienic and offering ‘moderate charges’ appeals to me.
Found this most interesting – An Unfinished Republic by David Strand. As usual details below plus an online chapter worth reading here.
In this cogent and insightful reading of China’s twentieth-century political culture, David Strand argues that the Chinese Revolution of 1911 engendered a new political life—one that began to free men and women from the inequality and hierarchy that formed the spine of China’s social and cultural order. Chinese citizens confronted their leaders and each other face-to-face in a stance familiar to republics worldwide. This shift in political posture was accompanied by considerable trepidation as well as excitement. Profiling three prominent political actors of the time—suffragist Tang Qunying, diplomat Lu Zhengxiang, and revolutionary Sun Yatsen—Strand demonstrates how a sea change in political performance left leaders dependent on popular support and citizens enmeshed in a political process productive of both authority and dissent.
