Most of us don’t think much these days about the Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention Treaty of 1925. Basically Japan recognised the USSR and the agreement was ratified in Peking on February 26, 1925. All very mundane in the long run of history. However, I believe it must be one of the only trreaties between two major nations signed by a guy in bed!
And so here we all are in the Peking bedroom of the Japanese ambassador to China, Minister Kenkichi Yoshizawa who had managed to hurt himself somehow ice skating! So in order to move things along Lev Karakhan (the first Soviet ambassador to China) had to crowd into Yoshizawa’s bedroom, where he was laid up in a kimona on a pile of pillows. But Karakhan (in formal attire) wanted the deal signed and so went round to the Japanese embassy (there he is with a neat goatee beard bending down as Yoshizawa signs. And, by the way, the Russian in the middle in uniform with decorations is Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher, at that time Rusia’s top military adviser to Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the Guomindang. Both Karakhan and Blyukher were to die in Stalin’s purges. Yoshizawawa was Japanese ambassador to French Indochina in the war (a largely pointless post), was then purged by the American occupation after 1945 and eventually ended his career, rehabilitated, as the Japanese amabassador to Taiwan, 1952-1956.
If anyone knows another major treaty between two important nations signed in a bedroom I’d love to know?
Peking is now regularly strewn with red flags as the Communist Party likes to show it can out-flag-shag the best of them. But who raised a red flag first in Peking? I’m pretty sure it was the Soviet Legation in late 1924 as shown below. Those who know their Legation Quarter, and you can still see this despite some destruction and rebuilding, know that the Tsarist Russian (later Soviet Union) Legation was directly opposite the American Legation. The Hammer and Sickle faced off against the Stars and Stripes…
The newspaper informs us that this was the hammer and sickle flag. But this was only adopted in 1924 (below) so one musy have been rushed to Peking.
I’m afraid i don’t know a great deal about Helen Wells Seymour who moved between Washington DC and Japan/China in the 1920s and 1930s as an artist. She would oftren head to Asia for two years at a time. I also do not have any of her China art, though I believe she did paint Peking and environs in the 1930s – so if anyone has any of her paintings I’d love to see them.
Japanese wall paintingsIt appears Wells Seymour was born in in 1878 in Baltimore and lived mostly in neighbouring DC. She may have attended the Friends School in DC for art classes and possibly also Columbia University and/or the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
In the early 1900s she toured Europe (certainly visiting France, Germany, Italy and England) as well as Egypt. By the 1920s she was settled in Asia and survived the 1923 Japanese earthquake. As well as painting in both China and Japan she collected Japanese wall paintings and a wide range of textiles from East Asia, South Asia, and South East Asian batiks (much of the collection is, I think, at the Art Institute of Omaha). In Japan she was also a part-time lecturer at the Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto. She was a member of the Society of Women Geographers, of the Japan Society, the Society for Japanese Studies, and the Washington Club.
In Peking she did meet and intereact with other artists – noting Bertha Lum in 1924.
I believe she returned to America in 1935 from China and Japan to settle in Connectticut, where she died in 1937. She wrote some memoirs of Japan in the 1920s in A Japanese Diary. Below are two of her Japanese paintings…
A quick post for Italian readers – my Long Read for the South China Morning Post from a few years ago in the 1932 kidnapping of Mrs “Tinko” Pawley in northern China (here in English) has been translated into Italian (here) in Il Post. BTW: the story is also coming to RTHK3 as a story of the week later this year….
I came across this interesting watercolour at a local auction recently and decided to bid…and won for a modest fee. It has an interesting story I only partly know at the moment.
It is by Laurence Henry Irving (1897-1988) who was the grandson of the great Victorian actor and theatre impressario Henry Irving and son of the actors HB Irving and Dorothea Baird (who starred in the lead role on the original production of Trilby). Laurence Irving trained at the Royal Academy and was in the Royal Navy Air Service in WW1. He started as a set designer in the West End and, after meeting Douglas Fairbanks, went to Hollywood to design sets for his movies including The Iron Mask (1929). He also collaborated with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. He returned to the UK in the 1930s and worked on both films and in the theatre. I can’t work out when this painting was done but it suggests 1930s.
To the best of my knowledge Irving never went to China so this painting was presumably done from photographs and other images. It does seem very accurate and representative. Which play it was for is also noted noted – I will dig deeper. Still hence the paintings title ‘Chinese’ ‘Theatre’ indicating it is a suggestion for a Chinese set for a theatrical play.
Irving worked on numerous films and stage productions. He exhibited at the RA, the School of Fine Art (London) and the Glasgow Insitute of Art. He lived in Whitstable. He rejoined the RAF in 1939 and after the war did set for the J Arthur Rank film studios. He died in 1988.
Set against the backdrop of regional and international post–Second World War tensions, Grounded at Kai Tak is the most comprehensive account of the complex legal struggle for ownership of seventy-one airplanes belonging to the two main Chinese airlines, which were stranded at Kai Tak airfield in Hong Kong at the end of the Chinese Civil War. The resulting contest for possession of them took place in the courts and among politicians and diplomats on three continents. In the process, the struggle became entangled with the anti-communist policies of the United States in the emerging Cold War, British hopes for the restoration of her pre-war commercial position in China, disagreements between nations about recognition of the new government in Peking, and the delicate balance that the colonial government of Hong Kong had to keep to preserve the colony’s interests. Merry tells the tale of this legal saga by weaving together archival documents and news reports of the day, revealing the international alignments that emerged from the aftermath of the wars and the colorful cast of actors that influenced the outcome of the dispute.
Bruno Lessing was the pen name of Rudolph Edgar Block (1870-1940), an American journalist, columnist, and author. An avid traveler, Block wrote about his experiences in the daily newspaper column “Vagabondia”, which was published from 1928 through 1939. And here is his rather negative view of his visit to Shanghai in 1934 – you can judge for yourselves what might be fair and what not….
Bruno Lessing
Count Ciano being Italian Consul in Shanghai at the time…(1932-1933)
