The growth of markets and consumerism in China’s post-Mao era of political and economic reform is a story familiar to many. By contrast, the Mao period (1949–1976)—rightly framed as a time of scarcity—initially appears to have had little material culture to speak of. Yet people attributed great meaning to materials and objects often precisely because they were rare and difficult to obtain. This first volume devoted to the material history of the period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough.
Bringing together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more, this volume shares groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film. With engaging narratives and probing analysis, the contributors make a place for China’s experience in the history of global material culture and the study of socialist modernity.
ntroduction: Making Revolution Material / Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho
Bamboo Objects and Socialist Construction / Jennifer Altehenger
The Brick / Cole Roskam
Design and Handicraft / Christine I. Ho
Dance Props and the Rural Imaginary / Emily Wilcox
Mobile Projectionists and the Things They Carried / Jie Li
Outside Objects and Material Propaganda / Denise Y. Ho
The Problematics of Plenty / Laurence Coderre
Nationalizing Food Provision in Beijing / Madeleine Yue Dong
One Country, Two Material Cultures / Jacob Eyferth
The Makings of China’s Cold War Motor City / Covell F. Meyskens Afterword: Material Culture and the Socialist Uncanny in Mao’s China / Jonathan Bach
Sadly Helen Burton and her great store The Camel’s Bell (which once stood in the lobby and third floor of the Peking Hotel (now the Nuo Hotel) is largely forgotten now. She is important though – an American woman entrepreneur in inter-war China, a very famous store at the time, she also ran trunk sales of her Chinese stuff (purses, furs, dresses, various jewellery and objet etc) across America. I think she was from Bismark, Nebraska. She was briefly interned by the Japanese in WW2 in China but swapped for Japanese citizens in America and returned home. She never married but adopted about half a dozen young Chinese girl orphans. She should be much better known. Her parties at her hutong home and an old temple she rented in the hills outside Peking were legendary!
Many thanks to a ChinaRhyming reader for sharing this beautiful purse – if you’re interested by the way, it may be up for sale, so let me know and I’ll connect etc….
Sanshichiro Yamamoto (1855-1943) was a Japanese photographer from Okayama Prefecture. He started a photo studio in Shibahikage-cho (near present day Shimbashi Station) in Tokyo, Japan, in 1882 (the 15th year of Meiji Era). Yamamoto later moved to Peking (Beijing) and opened a photo studio (Yamamoto Shōzō Kan or Yamamoto Syozo House), from where he sold photographs, souvenir photobooks and coloured post cards, of Beijing, its suburbs and people, at the end of Qing period.
Accompanied by one photograph from Sze Yuen Ming, Shanghai.The Chinese studio Sze Yuen Ming and Co was known in Chinese as Yao Hua studio (Shangyang Yaohua zhaoxiang 上洋耀華照相). This studio based in Shanghai and active between 1892 and the 1920s was directed by Shi Dezhi 施德之 (1861-1935). Szes production ranged from portraits (notably popular hand-tinted photographs of courtesans) and news pictures, to topographical scenes that suited the tastes of both Chinese and Western communities. Szes landscape photographs received official recognition at the Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1900 with the jury awarding the studio a honourable grant. It became then the only studio in the late Qing dynasty period to be awarded an international prize. Yamamoto’s photographs were published in Views of the North China Affair, Picturesque Views of Peking and View and Custom of North China (1909).
Talking of Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time (1950) yesterday – Book #4 on my Ultimate China Bookshelf for The China Project click here… I didn’t really emphasise enough how good his illustrations are in the book…so here’s a selection…
If you’ve never read Jane Gardam’s Old Filth then you are in for a treat. A marvellous & funny evocation of Empire Hong Kong & Malaya, the perfidy of the legal ‘profession’ & the sad inevitable return to a home never really known. A lovely 50th Anniversary Edition (the 50th of Abacus Books, not Old Filth) out next week from Hachette.
This list is from 1930 and, I presume, was used by Asian hotels to facilitate guests doing the Grand Far Eastern Tour and moving from establishment to establishment. Who the hell thought this up I have no idea!
