A heads up for this documentary i’ve been working on for some time for BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature – A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London – following the lives, worrk and motivations of the group of Chinese intellectuals who lived in the Belsize Park, NW3 district of Hampstead in the 1930s and during WW2…the dramatists, artists, reporters, poets, autobiographers and others, SI Hsiung, Dymia Hsiung, Chiang Yee, “Shelley” Wang Lixi, Lu Jingqing and Hsiao Chien (Xiao Chen) with cameo appearances from George Orwell, Clementine Churchill, Mulk Raj Anand, William Empson, Mei Lanfang and others…..
More details here – show broadcasts 6/2/22 and then will available to stream or download on the BBC Sounds app
A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London
Between 1937 and 1945, a small group of émigré Chinese artists and intellectuals living in London forged a unique bond between Britain and China. Paul French recovers the story.
Christie’s London Au Bord du Lac sale this late January (full details here for my wealthier readers) is a feast of Chinoiserie and Japonisme… click here for a history of the villa and its contents)…
Her best selling Oil for the Lamps of China was yet to come, but in 1926 (which means it’s just come into the public domain this year) Alice Tisdale Hobart published By the City of the Long Sand, subtitled, A Tale of New China.
Her image was everywhere…
The 1926 first edition – note the unique chinoiserie indentation on the front…
One of the great commercial dynasties of the 19th century, the Sassoons were as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds were bankers: a handful of Jewish refugees exiled from Ottoman Baghdad who forged a mercantile juggernaut trading cotton and opium, whose vast network of agents, informants and politicians bridged East and West, beyond their new home in India. Details and tickets here. Joseph Sassoon’s book is available here.
Descendant Joseph Sassoon, Professor of History & Political Economy at Georgetown, draws on 130 years of correspondence to provide the first full history of the family, taking in the American Civil War, the British Raj, Japanese occupation of China and much more. He will be in conversation with ethnomusicologist, performer and researcher in the musical traditions of the Jews of Iraq, Sara Manasseh.
I’ve blogged a couple of times on the old Bubbling Well Road SWETCO store. First from an old ad I found and then aftet a great photo (reproduced again below) was sent to me by Fred Schevtz, a relative of the owners and who explained the origin of the SWETCO name to me too (in that post – here).
This photo got the amazing Katya Knyazeva to work who dug out the following on her blog (full text here)…thanks Katya…
“The store opened in 1935 under a name that was both an abbreviation for Swedish Trading Co. and, apparently, a reference to the owner’s surname, Shvetz; the Chinese name was initially 四淮脱高, and later 瑞典洋行. The store sold high-class cut glass, household furnishings and fancy gifts – all “high quality goods at reasonable prices for every purse”. The managing director was Wm. M. Henkin, and the manager was E. M. Baumzweiger. The store had branches in Harbin and Tientsin.
“The display inside the store bears out the promise of the windows”, wrote The China Press in December 1936. “One huge case across the back of the room is full of nothing but cut glass and crystal, such as should grace a well-dressed dining room. There is a large selection of the famous Bohemian crystal, some Finnish “Kurgula” and some of the equally fine “Orrefos” from Sweden. Goblets, cocktail glasses, wine glasses, whiskey and wine decanters, cruets – in fact, every sort of article ever made of this lovely glass. Swetco also has an assortment of colored glass […], dinner and tea sets of Czechoslovakian and Chinese porcelain and a variety of different patterns in Swedish and German cutlery. Chromium plated odd dishes and small pieces for your living room are also in abundance. […] And if one is looking for gifts, there are countless small articles, which would always be acceptable, such as all manner of accessories for milady’s dressing table, manicure sets, vases, notebooks, wallets, lighters, cigarette cases, ash trays and more.”
The store’s founder, Efraim Grigorievich Shvetz (Эфраим (Ефим) Григорьевич Швец; 1874–1946), was originally from Kherson province, in today’s Ukraine. He owned a successful haberdashery in the town of Nicolaev, which he later recreated in Petersburg, Harbin and eventually Shanghai. His children, all born in Nicolaev, were Roman (b. 1909, listed in Shanghai as broker), Bella (1917–2012, dentist) and Alexander (1913–1993, listed as merchant), whose wife Ida (Eda) is in the picture above. A fake gravestone for Efraim G. Shvetz exists in Song Qingling’s Memorial Park in Shanghai.
In April 1938, Swetco was among the 30 Russian stores which the local anti-Bolshevik publication Aktiv called to boycott; the list included Shanghai businesses and entrepreneurs that presumably sold Soviet goods or advertised in Soviet press. But Swetco survived this attack, and stayed in business as late as 1947.
The building on Bubbling Well Road (West Nanjing Road 南京西路) where Swetco was located, near the east end of Love Lane (Wujiang Road 吴江路), is no longer standing.”
An interesting article in The Guardianabout the Chinese objects in Freud’s study, now his museum in Hampstead, a new exhibition and Craig Clunas’s long-running research into several of those objects…
See below Sun Yat-sen’s 1922 map detailing his port development plans for China. Sun’s infrastructure obsessions were always fascinating, especially his plans for China’s rail network.
What is perhaps interesting here is that Sun has to deal with the issue of the treaty ports of Shanghai and Tientsin (Tianjin) being major ports. He neatly circumvents this by making them both First Class Ports and dubbing them Great Eastern Port and Great Northern Port respectively. I wonder if Shanghai as the GEP would ever have caught on?
I should have noted the Noguchi exhibition at the Barbican earlier – but never late than never…more details here.
It’s a good excuse to also remind China Rhymers of my essay on Noguchi and his time in China working with Qi Baishi, – “Peking is Like Paris”: Isamu Noguchi and his Encounter with Beijing’s International Milieu in 1930.
You can buy as a chapter in my collectionDestination Pekingor as a separate inexpensive kindle here in the UK or here in the USA.
