A Hong Kong 1946 Victory 30c stamp – obviously with a youngish looking George VI.
Includes the slogan ‘1941-1945 Resurgo’, or ‘Arise’. The stamp was designed by Head Postmaster of Hong Kong, Edward Wynne-Jones, while he was interned in Stanley Camp, as an activity to relieve boredom. Eventually is rough pencil sketch done in Stanley. A fellow internee W. E. Jones (no relation), formerbeen Chief Draughtsman of the Hong Kong Public Works Department weorked it up in crayon.
A quite remarkable stamp – more on its unusual creation, production and issuance here from The Smithsonian….
Book #21 on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf is Ma Jian’s Red Dust (2001). Both an insider and an outsider, Ma Jian is concerned with discovering his own country—its vastness, but also how it became the nation it had by the early 1980s, and how he had been formed by that process as an individual. Click here… See all the shelf here…
A Pacific Ocean Islands illustrated travel map made in the USA . Discover the Pacific – published by the Pacific Area Travel Association in the 1960s featuring stereotyped illustrations of a whale in the waves at sea and smaller images representing the people and culture from the region including a traditional junk boat for Hong Kong and totem pole for Alaska being photographed by tourists, a lady in a kimono playing a shamisen music instrument for Japan and a Thai dancer in costume dancing in front of a buddhist temple building for Thailand, a sailing boat for the Philippines and lady walking in front of a long house for Indonesia, a tourist riding a rickshaw in front of palm tree leaves for Singapore and people riding an Indian elephant for India, a policeman in uniform directing traffic for the Fiji Islands and a lady in a straw skirt with flower garland around her neck for Hawaii in front of the volcano mountains, Maori carvings for New Zealand and a tourist petting a kangaroo in Australia.
The second season of the reboot of Perry Mason is now doing the rounds. It’s much tighter and more focussed than the first and really very good. Lots of good sub themes of the time – Hoovervilles, segregated housing, underground lesbian bars, gay blackmail, gauging grocers, gambling ships. One interesting aspect of season two was the recurring warnings of the impending Sino-Japanese War.
I don’t think an exact date for the events occuring in the plot are ever given but the internet tells me that one of the lead actors in the show, Perry Whigham told the press, “We’re in ’33 in Perry Mason,”. This makes sense as we have several references to Japanese agression towards China, a shot or two of a newspaper front page highlighting this and I assume that is the invasion and occupation of Manchuria.
We do see one of the baddies doing a business deal with the Japanese Ambassador Debuchi – Katsuji Debuchi was indeed Japanese Ambassador to the United States between 1928 and November 1933. We also see same baddie getting a bee sting treatment accompanied by Kikutaro Takahashi’s Sendo Kawaiya, a popular ryukoka (“popular song”) – though I think that song was first released in 1935.
Katsuji Debuchi (on the left) and businessman Yasuzaemon Matsunaga in America, 1929
And then we have the Los Angeles judge, in his chambers, feet up on the desk, reading Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth – released in 1931 and a best seller which most curious readers of the time would have dipped into. The judge finds it a bit flowery… Anyway, a nice sub theme of events showing that, alongside the contiuing and grinding Depression in California, the rest of the world is heading to hell in a handbasket too in 1933! But the theme of tensions in China is also very much a homage to Perry Mason’s original creator Erle Stanley Gardner…
The Good Judge reads The Good Earth
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) created the investigating lawyer Perry Mason. As well as being a professional attorney, enthusiastic wildlife photographer and constant traveller most people don’t know that he was also “fluent” in Chinese. After growing up in Massachusetts and Oregon the young Erle made a brief living arranging unlicensed wrestling matches before being admitted to the bar in 1911. Business was slow and to make ends meet he defended Chinese clients who didn’t have much money but did have a lot of friends. Volume rather than value defined his law practise. He claimed he picked up Chinese (though what version of Chinese and how much is not altogether clear) through his clients and when he turned to pulp fiction writing used a lot of stereotypical Chinese villains such as Soo Hoo Duck, The King of Chinatown. Gardner written stories in China without ever having visited the country. So, with some income from his fiction in 1931 Gardner and his wife made a six-month tour of the country.
David Martin, the Curator for the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington spoke on Pictorialist Photography: Soichi Sunami and his Issei Contemporaries at the Daiwa Foundation in London last month. It was a great talk and is now up on youtube –
Japanese “Boxer Rebellion” War Medal created on 21 March 1901 for the members of the 5th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army and of the Japanese Imperial Navy who were part of the eight-nation alliance forces. The Japanese forces consisted of 20,300 soldiers, 540 marines and 18 warships. This is apparently now considered one of the rarest Japanese medals…
A simply question – did anyone ever live better in Peking’s hutongs than aesthete extrordinaire Harold Acton – with a beautiful courtyard home, amazing friends, celebrity visitors, his dogs…it’s hard to imagine. I wrote about Acton’s 1930s home on Kung Hsien Hutong in my colerction Destination Peking (Blacksmith Books)…but thought these photos from his Memoirs of an Aesthete(so clearly images Acton himself thought showed his home to best advantage) might seal the case…
Now called Gongjian Hutong, Kung Hsien Hutong remains in a relatively decent state of repair, including its many xiongs (or adjacent side alleys) running from Dianmen Street, north to south down the side of Beihai Park. It is close to the tourist attraction of Nanluoguxiang Hutong. Gongjian is an interesting hutong as it has a bend in the lane at either end, presumably to afford some additional privacy to the lane as well as prevent it becoming a wind tunnel.
An interesting little find in the London Library. Comte Carlo Sforza’s 1928 book L’Enigme Chinoise (The Chinese Enigma). And a small tale therein. Sforza was an Italian diplomat, head of the country’s foreign affairs ministry till Mussolini and then in exile till after the war as an anti-fascist. He was first in Peking as a consular attache in the early 1900s before returning as Italian ambassador from 1911 to 1915 where he both witnessed the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and then negotiated Italy’s concession in Tientsin (Tianjin). It seems that even as his career progressed back in Rome he retained an interest in China. More on his eventful life here.
This copy of his thoughts on China, published in 1928 in French, was gifted to the London Library in November 1946 by Lewis Einstein, an American diplomat and historian. I believe Srofza and Einstein knew each other from around 1908 when both were stationed in Constantinople during the Young Turk Revolution. More on Einstein here.
I’m hopeless with handwriting – and expect a reader here better – but Sforza inscribed the copy with a message to Einstrein: something like to a reader with Orient interests in common or something??
