The photograph album of Kenneth Mathieson Fardell, sailing with HMS Minotaur of the China Station, 1913-1914 contained 213 coloured and black and white photographs and at the rear of the album an attached envelope inscribed ‘AH Fong Photographer P, 369 Nanking Road, Shanghai and Wei-hai-wei’ and also handwritten ‘Lieut K. M. Fardell’, with images including Weihaiwei, Nagasaki, Canton, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Ceylon, Aden, Port Said and Malta. Fardell spent a lot of time in the China Station’s anchorage of Weihaiwei too. Fardell was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant on 30th November,1913 and was awarded the Goodenough Medal for 1913-1914, being the Sub-Lieutenant who achieved the highest gunnery examination for the year and who also achieved a first-class certificate in seamanship. Fardell was commended for his handling of enciphered messages at Tsingtao in 1914 – obviously a tense time given the German occupation of the ity before it was taken by British and Japanese troops.
Ah Fong had studios in Shanghai, on Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) and in Weihaiwei – I’m assuming Fardell’s pictures were developed in Weihaiwei while Minotaur was based there.
A little taste of our next China Revisited book (#4) from Blacksmith Books- Harry A Franck’s (billed by US newspapers at the time as “The Prince of Vagabonds” – Roving Through Southern China (1925)…(preorder here)
“Hong Kong loomed up through the mists of a late December morning during my second year in China; I was due to pass through it half a dozen times before I left the Orient. Like Shanghai, it had changed much since I first saw it, almost twenty years before. The same funicular cable-cars, however, still carry one to the Peak – so do automobiles also now – to look down upon a scene in a milder way almost as striking as Rio. From the compact narrow city below like the embroidery on the bottom of a skirt the eyes wander away across the deep-blue harbor scattered with scores of ships riding at anchor because the wharves on both sides of the bay are already crowded from end to end with others, merging into islands in the offing that seem likewise anchored in the blue sea, a harbor streaked by constantly arriving and departing steamers from everywhere and by the ferries to the various parts of the mainland suburb of Kowloon, beyond which one may even see hills that are still Chinese.
Two-storied street-cars, like those of Chile – though here classes are reversed and the haughty white man deigns to ride aloft – move from end to end of the narrow island town, through Happy Valley, promoted now from cemetery to race-track, Kennedy Town, and other sections of British nomenclature; and farther still motor-cars will carry those who can afford them up and over or clear around the steep little island. Motoring is cheaper across the bay, where motor-buses race in constant streams from the ferry-landing to every suburb, and there rickshaws have unlimited scope compared with the little level space in down-town Victoria, behind which the “Do Be Chairful Company” – English wit sieved through Chinese brains comes out in strange forms of facetiousness – provide many clean and comfortable conveyances that are not exactly chairs, though you may sit in them and be carried.”
In the 1920s the American travel writer Harry A Franck was known to readers as the “Prince of Vagabonds”. His wanderings were family affairs and he arrived in southern China in 1923 with his wife, their two young children and his mother. Franck always claimed that his travel plans were random, subject to chance encounters and whatever caught his eye.
He arrives in a Hong Kong which is building modern department stores and large houses while labourers sleep on straw mats beside the harbour. In Macao he visits temples, ancient forts and, of course, casinos. And then to Canton (Guangzhou), a city in flux where new buildings are transforming the waterfront, the ancient city walls are being demolished, and the traditional rookeries of small lanes are being replaced by wide asphalt roads as the city rapidly modernises. Franck also provides us with a highly detailed description of Shamian Island a year after the tumultuous strikes and boycotts that meant naval gunboats and barbed wire still protected the small foreign enclave.
A pair of watercolour portraits of high-born children by Yat On, an early 20th Century Chinese School artist. But what is perhaps most interesting is the Wyndham Street studio label on the reverse…
Antonio Caeiro’s O dia em que Portugal entrou na China (in Portuguese, 2021) – Shanghai 1927. The day Portugal entered China is an investigation into the landing of Portuguese troops in Shanghai to defend their compatriots who lived in the economic capital of China, known as the “Paris of the East”. The Portuguese became the third largest European community in Shanghai. Click here to read free from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian…
In issue #33 of the Mekong Review, the November-January 2023/2024 edition, I review Florence Mok’s Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97.
