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!
