Henri Lecourt’s La Cuisine Chinoise, 1925 – (#3 of 3) – The Aesthetes of Ganyu Hutong

Posted: December 29th, 2025 | No Comments »

Albert Nachbaur ran all his businesses, including his book publishing business from #16 Kan Yu Hutong. Now Ganyu Hutong it runs west to east from Wangfujing to Dengshikou subway station.

This fact is of interest to me as Kan Yu Hutong was something of a centre for European aesthetes in Peking. It is where the English aesthete, writer and artist Osbert Sitwell rented a courtyard hutong home (after a period staying with his old friend Harold Acton). Translated as Alley of the Sweet Rain, this is where Sitwell worked mornings on his planned book about Brighton (Sitwell and Margaret Barton, Brighton, London: Faber & Faber, 1935, and which fascinatingly includes an 1877 account of Brighton by a visiting Chinese diplomat, and translated by none other than Arthur Waley) and then spent his afternoons exploring the hutongs and temples of the city during his sojourn.

Kan Yu Hutong was something of a locale for French aesthetes. Nachbaur’s friend, the French Sinologist, writer, diplomat and translator André d’Hormon (1881-1965) who taught at Beijing University between 1906 and 1955 lived on the hutong while the well-known long time French resident of Peking Dr. Jean Jerome August Bussière (the French Legation doctor who also treated Yuan Shikai and Gladys Werner, wife of ETC Werner and mother of Pamela Werner – see my book Midnight in Peking). Bussière knew everyone medically and artistically in the Foreign Colony and also had a much-admired retreat in the Western Hills. Bussière, Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), and Li Shizeng [5] (1881-1973) founded the Franco-Chinese Center for Sinological Studies in Beijing, of which d’Hormon was the director.

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