Lionel Jupp’s Extraordinary China Life and Photos

Posted: June 20th, 2025 | No Comments »

Englishman Lionel Jupp (1878-1951) first arrived in China in 1895 and settled in Shanghai where he worked for S Moutrie, the musical instrument manufacturers and sellers who operated all over China, Japan and South East Asia (see previous posts on Moutrie here). He served in the volunteer Second British Brigade that was organised over concerns about the Boxers in 1900.

Jupp was also a great self-promoter and willing to comment to the newspapers on just about anything – tariffs!, Japanese aggression in 1910 etc. At some point he moved north and took over the management of the Empire Theatre, Tientsin (Tianjin)* and the Pavilion Theatre in Peking (which was, I think, actually a cinema). He then left China and went to America in 1917 where he publicly announced he was joining the British Army to fight in the First World War.

*The original Empire Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1921, rebuilt and is now the Tianjin Concert Hall – see below at bottom

While in Tientsin he also took up photography and made the slightly eccentric posed photos using his Chinese household staff below…. I assume some were used to promote the theatres or for amateur theatrical as they were posed as famous British music hall characters – Dan Leno – or in slapstick style japes. Jupp was the Secretary and Treasurer of the Tientsin Amateur Dramatic Club in the early 1920s when these photos were taken. And also below what appear to be some studies of street people in Tientsin (where the photos were developed at the Kodak Shop…).

Jupp retired and left China in 1924 after nearly 30 years in China (less WW1)

The Tianjin Concert Hall, formerly the Empire Theatre (1922)

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