All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
In the South China Morning Post magazine this weekend i’ve tried to track down Katharine Jowett, a prolific artist in watercolours, woodcuts & linocuts in interwar Peking. While her work remains & is often posted unattributed her life is largely unknown…
Among all the usual gush about interwar old Shanghai, some visitors hated the place….fakes, stinks, dumb, laowai and a (more common) complaint of people from other big cities – Shanghai is the ‘Big City’ only if you’re a hick…
These are the view of Bruno Lessing (the pen name of the American journalist Rudolph Edgar Block. He was a pretty witty guy – wrote strips for The Yellow Kid, Happy Hooligan and the Katzenjammer Kids as well as a lot of pretty good short stories about life in New York’s Jewish Lower East Side. He was also an inveterate traveller writing a scathing column on most places foreign to Manhattan – “Vagabondia” (from which the below is a typical excerpt). He also collected walking sticks and eventually has 1,400 of the things!
Emily Williams’s Collecting the Revolution is now out…
In the late 1960s, student protests broke out throughout much of the world, and while Britain’s anti-Vietnam protestors and China’s Red Guards were clearly radically different, these movements at times shared inspirations, aspirations and aesthetics. Within Western popular media, Mao’s China was portrayed as a danger to world peace, but at the same time, for some on the counter-cultural left, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) contained ideas worthy of exploration. Moreover, because of Britain’s continued colonial possession of Hong Kong, Britain had a specific interest in ongoing events in China, and information was highly sought after. Thus, the objects that China exported – propaganda posters, paintings, Mao badges, periodicals, ceramics etc – became a crucial avenue through which China was known at this time, and interest in them crossed the political divide.
Collecting the Revolution uses the objects that the Chinese government sent abroad and that visitors brought back with them to open up the stories of diplomats, journalists, activists, students and others, and how they imagined, engaged with and later remembered Mao’s China through its objects. It chronicles the story of how these objects were later incorporated into the collections of some of Britain’s most prominent museums, thus allowing later generations to continue to engage with one of the most controversial and important periods of China’s recent history.
Mentioning John Stericker’s amusing 1958 memoir of China and Hong Kong, A Tear for the Dragon, I note he mentions Joe Farren, hero of my book City of Devils…a nice rememberance (though Vera was a girlfriend and never, i think, formally a wife…)
A memoir, wittily written, that I hadn’t come across before. Stericker’s A Tear for the Dragon started with the Englishman’s first journey to China in the mid-1930s via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Stericker ended up a Stanley prisoner-of-war camp internee ion Hong Kong.
No photos sadly, though Stericker, with his wife Veronica, did earlier publish Hong Kong: In Picture and Story (1953) and a confectionery of images and notes called a Hong Kong Gift Book (1954).
I came across this image on ARTSTOR and hadn’t seen it before. Here’s is their accompanying notes below:
This broadside was apparently produced by the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese war, announcing (hopefully) the “Last Days” of the war and “Construction of a Liberated North China.” The Japanese had captured Nanjing in December 1937; the figure in black fleeing Nanjing with a moneybag is labeled “VIP” or “important cliques,” a reference to senior Kuomintang Party officials. Following the Japanese capture of industrial Wuhan and the vital port of Canton in the fall of 1938, large parts of the north were under control of the Japanese or guerrilla forces. The happy figure in the north signals “a liberated North China,” bright with hope.“The Japanese, not without reason, assumed that Nationalist China was bound to fall,” or that Chiang Kai-Shek would be forced to negotiate terms. Instead, Chiang – “in a miracle of organization” – moved the entire government and supporting infrastructure in late 1938 to remote Chongqing in remote western Szechuan province, far beyond the reach of the Japanese army. Jowett 73.In response, Japan unleashed massive “indiscriminate” air raid attacks, killing more than 5,000 “Chinese noncombatants” in the first two days of raids alone. Bix 364. Chongqing became “one of the most bombed places on earth.” Jowett 74. Hundreds of raids were conducted, mostly using incendiary bombs, from May 1939 into mid-1943. In the best-known raid, on June 5, 1941, some 4,000 civilians were asphyxiated in an air-raid shelter tunnel.This map was likely produced during that period. Because the text is in Chinese, it appears to be a Japanese effort to weaken the resolve of the Nationalists and their supporters. The figure cringing under the Japanese bombs falling on Western China is captioned “Chiang Kai-shek is embattled/bruised and battered.” Below him are huge flames with the caption “burning in the flames of the Red Peril” (here likely a reference to the incendiary bombs, rather than the nascent communist movement).Date is estimated.
Jack Torry’s The Last One Out looks at the life of Yates McDaniel…Best known for reporting the fall of Singapore McDaniel was also a witness to the Nanking Massacre. McDaniel was a “mishkid” born in Suzhou who was to go on to become famous for covering the fall of Singapore. In China he noted: “My last remembrance of Nanking: Dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese”.
When Yates McDaniel died in Florida in 1983, few outside his family paid much attention. The only hint of his fame came in a brief obituary buried on the inside pages of the New York Times. The obit suggested bravery and a past far more exciting than almost anyone knew. Even those who worked alongside him in the 1960s at the Associated Press were startled to learn what McDaniel had been, what he had done when he was a young man and the world was at war. Yet, this remarkable reporter covered more of the Asian war than anyone else—from the savage Japanese assault on Nanking in 1937 to the fall of Singapore in 1942 to landing with US Marines on New Britain in 1943. He took risks no other reporter ever accepted, and colleagues joked that Japanese bombers followed him wherever he went.
Happening again – covid-permitting….April 1….
