Geoff Emerson has been doing great work on Hong Kong in WW2 and internment for years so it’s good to see an event anyone anywhere can be involved with…
Time & Location
10 Apr, 14:30 – 16:00
Hong Kong Maritime Museum
About the Event
In view of the latest social distancing measures announced by the Government, the talk will now be conducted online. The talk’s link will be sent to registered participants via email.
Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945：Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley
Speaker: Mr. Geoffrey Charles Emerson (Hong Kong Historian)
Abstract:
This talk tells the story of the more than 3000 non-Chinese civilians: British, American, Dutch and others, who were trapped in the British colony and interned behind barbed wire in Stanley Internment Camp from 1942 to 1945. From 1970 to 1972, while researching for his MPhil thesis at the University of Hong Kong, the speaker interviewed twenty-three former Stanley internees. The thesis has been long regarded as an invaluable reference and frequently consulted as a primary source on Stanley Camp. This talk is part of the “The Fall and Rebirth of the City: Hong Kong during the Japanese Occupation” Talk Series.
Speaker’s Bio:
Mr. Geoffrey Charles Emerson has lived in Hong Kong for more than forty years. He retired from St Paul’s College, where he taught history and English and served as Vice Principal and Careers Master. He was President of the Hong Kong History Society (1974-1984) and has been a Council Member of the Royal Asiatic Society (Hong Kong Branch).
The Kindle edition of Destination Peking is now available for preorder (here) – out 11 April – 18 tales of aesthetes, artists, sojourners, thieves, spies, disgraced Nazis, Bolsheviks, dreamers & rebels – from Blacksmith Books…
Katharine Jowett, who worked in Beijing in the interwar period, is an artist who has always intrigued me – a wealth or oils and water colours, woodcuts and linocuts, yet very little personal information. So I decided to try and find out as much as possible about her. Jowett never saw herself really as a professional artist (despite acclaim, sales, commissions and exhibitions) so she never really pushed herself meaning we have this fantastic body of work with little biographical information on the artist….So I set oiut to find out what I could and hopefully win her some new fans….It’s all in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine here…
In the South China Morning Post magazine this weekend i’ve tried to track down Katharine Jowett, a prolific artist in watercolours, woodcuts & linocuts in interwar Peking. While her work remains & is often posted unattributed her life is largely unknown…
Among all the usual gush about interwar old Shanghai, some visitors hated the place….fakes, stinks, dumb, laowai and a (more common) complaint of people from other big cities – Shanghai is the ‘Big City’ only if you’re a hick…
These are the view of Bruno Lessing (the pen name of the American journalist Rudolph Edgar Block. He was a pretty witty guy – wrote strips for The Yellow Kid, Happy Hooligan and the Katzenjammer Kids as well as a lot of pretty good short stories about life in New York’s Jewish Lower East Side. He was also an inveterate traveller writing a scathing column on most places foreign to Manhattan – “Vagabondia” (from which the below is a typical excerpt). He also collected walking sticks and eventually has 1,400 of the things!
In the late 1960s, student protests broke out throughout much of the world, and while Britain’s anti-Vietnam protestors and China’s Red Guards were clearly radically different, these movements at times shared inspirations, aspirations and aesthetics. Within Western popular media, Mao’s China was portrayed as a danger to world peace, but at the same time, for some on the counter-cultural left, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) contained ideas worthy of exploration. Moreover, because of Britain’s continued colonial possession of Hong Kong, Britain had a specific interest in ongoing events in China, and information was highly sought after. Thus, the objects that China exported – propaganda posters, paintings, Mao badges, periodicals, ceramics etc – became a crucial avenue through which China was known at this time, and interest in them crossed the political divide.
Collecting the Revolution uses the objects that the Chinese government sent abroad and that visitors brought back with them to open up the stories of diplomats, journalists, activists, students and others, and how they imagined, engaged with and later remembered Mao’s China through its objects. It chronicles the story of how these objects were later incorporated into the collections of some of Britain’s most prominent museums, thus allowing later generations to continue to engage with one of the most controversial and important periods of China’s recent history.
Mentioning John Stericker’s amusing 1958 memoir of China and Hong Kong, A Tear for the Dragon, I note he mentions Joe Farren, hero of my book City of Devils…a nice rememberance (though Vera was a girlfriend and never, i think, formally a wife…)
A memoir, wittily written, that I hadn’t come across before. Stericker’s A Tear for the Dragon started with the Englishman’s first journey to China in the mid-1930s via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Stericker ended up a Stanley prisoner-of-war camp internee ion Hong Kong.
No photos sadly, though Stericker, with his wife Veronica, did earlier publish Hong Kong: In Picture and Story (1953) and a confectionery of images and notes called a Hong Kong Gift Book (1954).
