Coming in June – Madmen in Shanghai

Cecile Armand’s Madmen in Shanghai: A Social History of Advertising in Shanghai, 1914-1956 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg) is out in June …..click here

Obviously, I approve….

Developing Mission – Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China

In Developing Mission (Cornell University Press), Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People’s Republic of China.

When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war.

Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.

Barnes & Noble members – Preorder my new book HER LOTUS YEAR by 4/19 & Get 25% off

Hey Barnes & Noble members – Preorder my new book HER LOTUS YEAR (out 11/24 from St MartinsPress) before 4/19 & get 25% off with code PREORDER25. NB: discount only available to B&N members (sign up here: barnesandnoble.com/membership/). Already a member? Preorder at: https://bit.ly/HerLotusYearBN

Captain John Dewar and Susan Dewar’s Chinese Paintings

These images (below) are all interesting, not just for their intrinsic beauty as watercolurs, but their ownership. The paintings were all purchased, probably in Shanghai, around the late 1890s by Captain John Dewar (1866-1950), a ship master, born in Shanghai though probably of Scottish origins. In 1896 Dewar married Susan Smith Oudney (1875-1967) in Shanghai. Susan’s father was William Oudney (DOB: 1846), originally from Dundee (Susan too was born in Dundee), who became a sailor and eventually a master mariner owned two clipper ships involved in the China Trade. Her mother was Isabella Mawer.

John and Susan were prolific collectors (much of which was passed down through the famioly andhas recently been coming up for auction) and seem to have bought mostly Chinese paintings and objets d’art, including the items below…

Mr & Mrs Satterthwaite’s Silver Dragon Bowl, 1934

A Chinese silver dragon bowl by Sing Fat of Shanghai. Embossed with a finely detailed flying dragon below a scrolling foliate border. Presented as a wedding gift in 1934 to Mr & Mrs C.G Satterthwaite, by Lo Po Chun & Lo Po Wa. I think Satterthwaite was actually the Reverend Satterthwaite and originally came from Wales.

Some Images of Wartime Chungking from A Danger Shared

The new collection of never-seen-before images by the 1930s/wartime correspondent in Asia Mel Jacoby, A Danger Shared is now available here from Blacksmith Books. It contains an amazing array of photographs from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, and Chungking as well as French Indochina, the Philippines and Australia. The pictures and Mel’s story are annotated by Bill Lascher and there’s an introduction by me. An exclusive run of images from Chungking, China’s wartime capital, ran in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine recently – here.

April 17 Zoom – Ian Gill discusses online the family mysteries unveiled in his book “Searching for Billie”, with RASBJ moderator Rianka Mohan

WHAT: Author Ian Gill unravels his family’s past and discusses his new book “Searching for Billie” with moderator Rianka Mohan (ONLINE)

WHEN: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 7:00-8:00 PM Beijing Time (ONLINE)

MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Ian Gill’s first visit to Hong Kong takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great-grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s – and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985. The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China’s turbulent century between the Anglo-Chinese wars and the advent of communism.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Because of his mother’s circumstances, Ian Gill was conceived in a Japanese prison camp in Hong Kong in 1945 and born in New Zealand after liberation. With his mother, he spent his early life in England, China and Bangkok. After boarding school, university and joining newspapers in England, he worked as a journalist in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Hawaii (where he took a master’s degree as a grantee with the East-West Center), Hong Kong and Singapore for 14 years. In 1985, he joined the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral financing institution with headquarters in Manila. Over two decades, he travelled widely around the Asia-Pacific region, writing and producing video documentaries.

HOW MUCH: Free for RASBJ members. RMB 50 for members of RAS branches in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul. RMB 100 for non-members. If you experience difficulty paying via Wechat, please try Alipay instead. You can also pay by credit card. Interested in becoming an RASB member? Please sign up at http://rasbj.org/membership/

HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: Please click “Register” or “I will attend” before April 15 and follow the instructions. After successful registration you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to join the event online. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder.

Members of partner RAS Branches: Please register 72 hours in advance to allow time for membership verification. You’ll receive three emails from us: the first confirming receipt of your registration request, the second requesting payment, and the third confirming receipt of your payment. Please check your spam folder to ensure you see all RASBJ emails.

HOW TO BUY THE BOOK: Blacksmith Books will ship hard copies to purchasers in mainland China with no shipping fee. To take advantage of this offer, go to https://www.blacksmithbooks.com/books/searching-for-billie-a-journalists-quest-to-understand-his-mothers-past-leads-him-to-discover-a-vanished-china/

Tientsin Chinese Arsenal, 1909

A rather dull postcard of Tientsin’s (Tianjin) Chinese Arsenal, 1909, with a Peking postmark…