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.
In the spring of 1918 a pneumonic plague epidemic swept through nothern China and close to Peking. Few cases were reported in the city itself though new arrivals from the countryside were eyed warily and the Legation Quarter prepared to slam shut its gates in a quarantine from the rest of the city. Quarantine and disinfection camps were established city-wide and railway stations temporarily closed to limit spread. Still there were some cases. Controls on foreigners were considerably less than on Chinese peasants arriving in the city and so three Russian travelers who lodged at the Hotel des Wagons-Lits in the Legation Quarter without inspection died. Alexis Leger (also known as the poet Saint-John Perse) was a secretary at the French Legation at the time and wrote:
‘As a matter of fact, this pulmonary plague, which is the most serious (he reports that the recovery was so low that some men sat with loaded revolvers ready to kill themselves if infected and avoid the horrors of the disease), is also the easiest to avoid individually. B y simply wearing a mask you can avoid catching it even in a particularly infected area. Real danger exists only for the teeming masses plodding along the roads.’April 9, 1918, Peking…
And here is a Japanese soldier on duty at the Japanese Legation in Peking wearing a mask…
Just noticed that the new UK Paperback edition from Granta of Emma Larkin’s Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok uses a quote from my South China Morning Post review (here) on the back cover…
Looking back at Shanghai’s history we mostly all remember Longhua (Lunghwa) Airfield (and the adjacent Civilian Internment Camp) to the south, Hongqiao (Hungjao) Aerodrome to the west, Jiangwan Airfield to the northeast, and the far flung Pudong much later. But rarely do people remember Dachang Airfield to the northwest around Baoshan (Paoshan). For a long time the airfield remained and was used occasionally as an emergency runway, a test runway and by the air force. As the Baoshan/Zhabei area rose up as a nest of hi-rises the airfield remained controlled by the airforce, annoying both the local politicians who wanted the land to build on (and so enrich thesmelves and their property developer cronies, such is the basic land/profit/Party nexus of Shanghai, and locals occasionally woken by randomly landing and taking off planes.
Of course visits to Shanghai are a bit tricky at the moment so I when i was looking at a 1985 guide to Shanghai the other day i wondered if Dachang has survived or been swallowed up with more Ballardian hi-rises? Anyone who knows please do drop me a line…
