All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
As it’s the centenary of modernism (1922-2022 according to Ezra Pound’s start date) I thought I’d put together an A-Z of Shanghai Modernism, a city that embraced pretty much all aspects of modernism – literature, film, art, architecture, design etc – more than most…click here.
A few tickets left I am reliably informed….
Author Mark Gamsa will be talking to the RAS Beijing on his new biography of Harbin….
Megan Walsh’s The Subplot discusses what China is reading now but also looks back over literary trends since the start of the Reform and Opening Up period…I spent some time time talking to Megan about online literary tastes and trends in the PRC for the China-Britain Business Council’s magazine Focus (click here to read)
WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood travelled to Hong Kong, Macao and China in the spring and summer of 1938 to write a travelogue of the war in China commissioned by Faber & Faber. It was a fast writitng job – Isherwood did the text and Auden the accompanying sonnets. Journey to a War was published in Britain in March 1939 with 301 pages for 12s 6d net. In April The Observer noted it as a best selling book alongside Hitler’s Mein Kampf, TS Eliot’s Family Reunion, Isherwood’s own Goodbye to Berlin (later adapted as Cabaret), and Somerset Maugham’s criminally underrated Christmas Holiday. The book was then issued in American by Random House for $3 in August 1939. Readers of this blog, I hope, are familiar with the book….
However, the point of this post is to offer a little something new. As part of the marketing of the book Auden was asked by the BBC to record some impressions of his China trip. The audio archive does exist in the BBC archives. I can tell you that it has a few sound effects – train noises etc – and Auden is rather plummy by today’s standards, as you might expect. Here is the print version to read – Auden on China broadcast on 16th January 1939.
January 16, 1939
I and a friend went to China because we wanted to know what it was like during the war. We stopped first at Hankow. Then we went up the Yellow River. There were two war floods that time, one along the Yellow River and one south of Shanghai. We visited them both by train, car, walking, and once by rickshaw. The authorities gave us every facility to travel and wherever we went soldiers and civilians both seemed genuinely glad to see English people and even grateful. For example, a soldier leaned out of a troop train, laid two fingers side by side and shouted, “England and China together”. We arrived late one night in the pouring rain at a ruined village, which the inhabitants were expecting to evacuate at any moment. So Japs were advancing. And there we found a number of them been standing out in the rain for some time, holding up a banner with the word “WELCOME” in English, written upon it.
Train traveling in China in wartime is more comfortable than you would think. There’s always a tea pot in the compartment, which is never allowed to be empty. And if the train does sometimes stop for days at a time, a market springs up round it at once where you can buy chickens, eggs, peanuts, and so on. Talking of food. A Chinese dinner table looks as if it was set not for eating, but for a lesson in watercolour painting. With this little dishes of coloured sauces, the chopsticks like brushes, even paint rags to wipe the chopsticks off. Many of the dishes such as Bird’s Nest Soup and ancient eggs, we found delicious, but we drew the line at black beetles. Our final impression was that in China, nothing was specifically eatable or uneatable. You could begin munching a hat or biting a mouthful out of a wall. Equally, you could build a hut with the food provided at supper. We had a good many air raids, particularly in Hankow. At night we would go up onto the roof to watch the search light beams plotting the skylight dividers to suddenly they intersected and the Jap planes would be isolated in light, like the bacilli of some fatal disease.
There’s one big air bash in April just after lunch. We put on our sunglasses, lay on our backs on the lawn of the British Consulate. A shell burst near a Japanese bomber flared against the blue like a struck match. Down in the road the rickshaw coolies were delightedly clapping their hands. Then came the whining roar of another machine hopelessly out of control. And suddenly a white parachute mushroomed out over the river. Probably a Chinese plane this time, the Japs, it is said, are not allowed parachutes. A leaflet fluttered down onto the roof of the Consulate to assure the Chinese that Japan was their truest friend.
There is little trench fighting in this war and the actual front is often impossible to find. No one seems to know exactly. The next village is in the hands of the Chinese or the Japanese. The Chinese soldier wears a padded blue uniform rather like an eiderdown quilt. He generally has a couple of hand grenades stuck into his belt like chianti bottles on his back, and either a paper umbrella, or a sword like a gigantic fish knife. The Army Medical Service is pretty primitive. Most of the serious surgical work at the time of our visit was being done by the Mission Hospital.
What is the Chinese war like? Well, least I know it isn’t like wars in history books. You know, those lucid, tidy maps of battles one used to study at school. The flanks like neat little cubes, the pincer movements working with mathematical precision, the reinforcements never failing to arrive. It isn’t like that at all. War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn and worrying about one’s wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do, shouting down a dead telephone, going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance.
Reflected Beauty -Chinese Reverse Glass Paintings from the Mei Lin Collection from a collection assembled by Rupprecht Mayer and Liem Haitang…
Reverse paintings on glass occupy a special place in Chinese art, spanning the genres of glass working, export art, folk art, erotica, and meiren hua (paintings of beauties). Their unique appearance is the result of a challenging production process in which artists layer pigments in the reverse order of the normal painting procedure–highlights first, then mid-layers, and finally base colours. The final product is viewed in reverse from the opposite side of the glass, which must also be considered when creating the paintings.
A product of the encounter between East and West, the manufacture of glass paintings in China was stimulated by European glass paintings brought to the imperial court by traders and diplomats in the seventeenth century. Initially made in Canton for Western consumers, by the eighteenth century their production had spread throughout China, with subjects and styles adapted to suit local tastes.
The glass paintings in the Mei Lin Collection represent this later flowering of works for the domestic market. Largely ignored by scholars and collectors in favour of exoticized paintings for the West, they depict romantic landscapes, traditional motifs of happiness, scenes from plays and novels, and the changing image of the Chinese woman, demonstrating the diverse appeal of this unique and fragile art form.
The reverse glass paintings presented in this publication and its accompanying exhibition are all from the Mei Lin Collection. Composed of over one hundred works acquired in East Asia between 1968 and 2012, it is one of the world’s most important collections of Chinese reverse glass paintings from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection was assembled by Mr. Rupprecht Mayer and his wife Ms Liem Haitang. Parts of the collection have been shown in the City Museum of Augsburg, Germany, and in the Swiss Glass Museum in Romont, Switzerland.
Don’t often get mentioned in restaurant reviews! ‘It’s like a page right out of a Paul French book come to life. And for that, it’s worth the price tag.’
Click here to read the That’s Shanghai review of Silan…
Tony Eggeling writes to me seeking more information on his ancestor Alfred J. Eggeling. He’s hoping China Rhyming readers may have come across Alfred J. Eggeling in their researches. So here’s what he knows….
Eggeling was born and grew up in Edinburgh. However, his father Julius, who was a Professor of Sanskrit at Edinburgh University, was German and never took up British nationality. Julius is thought to have been quite involved in patriotic German societies in the Scottish capital.
Alfred emigrated to the German colony at Kiautschou (Jiaozhou) in 1899 and seemes to have lived in Peking working as a manager at the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank HQ in the Legation Quarter. It is thought he became fluent in Chinese.
Then comes World War One and Eggeling is faced with a decision…Forced to choose between loyalty to his native Britain or to Germany (his employer and whose community he seems to have made a home within), he appewars to have walked a tough line. Things then got even trickier when China joined the Allies in 1917. Eggeling appears to have gone into hiding to avoid deportation. One report puts him at the seaside resort of Peitaiho (Beidaihe, Hebei) in 1919, but he had gone by the time police arrived.
Back in Scotland Julius was also having some problems. He had gone on holiday to Germany prior to the outbreak of war an, though he apparently made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to get back to Scotland once hostilities began, could not. He submitted his resignation from his Chair at the University and was not awarded a pension for his 30 years service. Julius spent the rest of the war lodging with his daughter in Germany and died there in 1918. Alfred’s sister was married to a German pastor with the surmame Wilm. Their son Paul Wilm, an agriculturalist, later went out to China at the invitation of his Alfred to work initially at dairy farms in Mongolia which were financed by development loans from the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB). Paul eventually married Charlotte (Lotte) Cordes, the (Chinese speaking) daughter of the German Consul in Peking. Before moving into the diplomatic service Cordes had been Alfred’s superior at the DAB.
Paul Wilm later wrote an entertaining account of his career in China which adds a few interesting details about the activities of his ‘Onkle Bob’, but also mentions a rift that opened between them that caused he and Charlotte started to dislike Alfred, though the reasons why are unclear. It may have been a result of a 1927/8 court case at the U.S. Court in Shanghai in which Alfred (via his control of a U.S. State of Delaware shell company) was accused of defrauding the DAB of a significant sum. The bank appears not to have uncovered the alleged fraud for two years, Alfred having loaned himself the money towards the end of 1924 in the form of a mortgage on a property in Tientsin.
Alfred does seem to have engaged in some rather dubious activities. During the war he was (according to the pro-British press) seen as pro-German by virtue his actions – i.e. absconding with the ledgers of the DAB so as to frustrate its liquidation. There was also allegations (unproven) that he was plotting with senior members of the German Legation to sabotage the railways and burn Weihaiwei (Weihai).
Alfred was also involved in the reformed Peking Gazette in 1913, foermly a Chinese government publication but then reformed as a more commercial, and Republican-oriented, newspaper. It is claimed he employed a young Eugene Chen (the influential Trinidadian-Chinese later to become foreign minister of the Kuomintang) as editor at the outbreak of World War One, when the sitting editor, an Englishman, was considered too anti-German for Alfred’s taste, it is said. Chen’s contacts amongst the competing factions in the Beiyang government after WW1 and the onset of the Warlord Era later put up the money to buy the paper from Alfred.
Anyway, some, part, all of not much of this may actually be true and Tong Eggeling continues to dig in various archives (subject to the world of covid!) in the UK, France, Germany and China.
Any help on the enigmatic and mysterious Alfred Eggeling much appreciated….