In this wide-ranging study, Ghassan Moazzin sheds critical new light on the history of foreign banks in late 19th and early 20th century China, a time period that saw a substantial influx of foreign financial institutions into China and a rapid increase of both China’s foreign trade and its interactions with international capital markets. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese and Chinese primary sources, including business records, government documents and personal papers, Moazzin reconstructs how during this period foreign banks facilitated China’s financial integration into the first global economy and provided the financial infrastructure required for modern economic globalization in China. Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China shows the key role international finance and foreign banks and capital markets played at important turning points in modern Chinese history.
A nice picture of the Bund taken in early 1924 showing the newly completed (and still standing) HSBC Building adjacent to the soon-to-be demolished Customs House Building before a new one (the one there now) was constructed. The old one, built in the Gothic style in 1891, was demolished in 1925 so this is the last few months of the old and the new alongside…
I’ve blogged before about the intrepid and entrepreneurial North Dakotan Helen Burton who ran a number of interesting businesses in Peking between the wars, the best known of which was The Camel’s Bell, situated in the lobby of the Grand Hotel de Pekin on Chang’an Jie (now the Nuo Hotel portion of the much expanded Beijing Hotel). The Camel’s Bell sold curios, antiques, art, objets and fashions. It wa sa must-stop shop for the Peking Foreign Colony as well as sojourners and tourists. Helen Burton, who also had a wonderful temple out in the Western Hills for weekends and adopted a number of Chinese kids threw generally agreed the best parties in Peking.
And so my thanks to Marieanne Doyle of Indiana, USA who contacted me to show me a purse her mother purchased at The Camel’s Bell some time before World War Two. It is very beautiful. Marieanne then amazingly posted the purse (the British at the time would call it an ‘evening bag’) to me in England. So here’s a closer look at the purse, it’s beautiful beading and the legendary label….Interestingly back then ‘Made in China’ would have been exotic and exciting rather run-of-the-mill.
Note the detailed beading work….
And the legendary Camel’s Bell label…
This picture of Helen Burton, as well as showing her stylishness (even in the adversity of WW2) is very poignant. It shows her in about 1944 on the US evacuation ship Gripsholm after a prisoner swap with Japanese civilians in the US. She is older, but still stylish with a lovely bangle, and yet it was taken at the very moment her mail has reached her and she is hearing of her brothers death in the war for the first time.
Shanghai-born Maureen de la Harpe got in touch with me some time ago to talk about her plans to write a history of her four-generation Shanghailander family that eventually left China after internment and WW2. Happy to report that Maureen has finished her family history and produced a memoir Dinner at the Cathay…
Shanghai-born Maureen de la Harpe was eight months old when the city was attacked by Japanese forces and two thousand people lost their lives. At the age of seven, her family and close relatives were interned in a Japanese concentration camp until the end of WW2. The family left China a year later.
It was not until 2014 that the author returned to Shanghai, with her daughter Lara, to rediscover the city of her birth, and it was that visit that prompted them to begin tracking the lives of their forebears. The author discovered she was a fourth generation ‘Shanghailander’, whose family history spanned the period of foreign settlement in the city.
Through the lives of her ancestors and her own childhood experiences during the war, the author has woven the story of foreign settlement in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai.
Speaking of J Van Dyke yesterday I though this cover amusing. Van Dyke wrote two reasonably popular but not particularly distinguished novels about shenanigans among foreign men and women in Peking – Peking Madness in 1933 and Passenger to Peking in 1935. Neither are particularly recommended except to the serious student of the old ‘Foreign Colony’, but the photomontage cover is interesting…
I don’t often enter the Maoist world but Vanessa Hua’s novel Forbidden City looks interesting covering Mao, his young women and the secret life inside Zhongnanhai…won’t win many friends among the super-Nationalists and neo-Maoists but…
On the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished village. It is only when Mei arrives at the Chairman’s opulent residence–a forbidden city unto itself–that she learns that the girls’ job is to dance with the Party elites. Ambitious and whip-smart, Mei beelines toward the Chairman.
Mei gradually separates herself from the other recruits to become the Chairman’s confidante–and paramour. While he fends off political rivals, Mei faces down schemers from the dance troupe who will stop at nothing to take her place and the Chairman’s imperious wife, who has secret plans of her own.
When the Chairman finally gives Mei a political mission, she seizes it with fervor, but the brutality of this latest stage of the revolution makes her begin to doubt all the certainties she has held so dear.
This new book from Patrick Chiu (below) caught my eye as it has a famous photo of MacTavish & Lehmann’s major Shanghai store on the cover. MacTavish & Lehmann were early to the Settlement with a store at #1 Bund before moving to a larger location (pictured below) at the junction of Broadway (Daming Lu) and Soochow Road North (Suzhou Bei Lu), often referred to as Hongkew Medical Hall (and roughly where the Boradway Mansions building stands today). A chemists, parfumerie, medical instruments store and a photography studio all in one building including a dark room for the use of amateur photographers. In the photo below blown up you can also see the Tramways Offices by The Eastern Produce and Jewellery Co. To the right of the Medical Hall, are two shops, Havana Cigar Depot and Broadway Drapery & Outfitting Stores.
For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao’s successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao’s strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi’s rapid consolidation of power after 2012.
