All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Don’t often get mentioned in restaurant reviews! ‘It’s like a page right out of a Paul French book come to life. And for that, it’s worth the price tag.’
Click here to read the That’s Shanghai review of Silan…
Tony Eggeling writes to me seeking more information on his ancestor Alfred J. Eggeling. He’s hoping China Rhyming readers may have come across Alfred J. Eggeling in their researches. So here’s what he knows….
Eggeling was born and grew up in Edinburgh. However, his father Julius, who was a Professor of Sanskrit at Edinburgh University, was German and never took up British nationality. Julius is thought to have been quite involved in patriotic German societies in the Scottish capital.
Alfred emigrated to the German colony at Kiautschou (Jiaozhou) in 1899 and seemes to have lived in Peking working as a manager at the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank HQ in the Legation Quarter. It is thought he became fluent in Chinese.
Then comes World War One and Eggeling is faced with a decision…Forced to choose between loyalty to his native Britain or to Germany (his employer and whose community he seems to have made a home within), he appewars to have walked a tough line. Things then got even trickier when China joined the Allies in 1917. Eggeling appears to have gone into hiding to avoid deportation. One report puts him at the seaside resort of Peitaiho (Beidaihe, Hebei) in 1919, but he had gone by the time police arrived.
Back in Scotland Julius was also having some problems. He had gone on holiday to Germany prior to the outbreak of war an, though he apparently made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to get back to Scotland once hostilities began, could not. He submitted his resignation from his Chair at the University and was not awarded a pension for his 30 years service. Julius spent the rest of the war lodging with his daughter in Germany and died there in 1918. Alfred’s sister was married to a German pastor with the surmame Wilm. Their son Paul Wilm, an agriculturalist, later went out to China at the invitation of his Alfred to work initially at dairy farms in Mongolia which were financed by development loans from the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB). Paul eventually married Charlotte (Lotte) Cordes, the (Chinese speaking) daughter of the German Consul in Peking. Before moving into the diplomatic service Cordes had been Alfred’s superior at the DAB.
Paul Wilm later wrote an entertaining account of his career in China which adds a few interesting details about the activities of his ‘Onkle Bob’, but also mentions a rift that opened between them that caused he and Charlotte started to dislike Alfred, though the reasons why are unclear. It may have been a result of a 1927/8 court case at the U.S. Court in Shanghai in which Alfred (via his control of a U.S. State of Delaware shell company) was accused of defrauding the DAB of a significant sum. The bank appears not to have uncovered the alleged fraud for two years, Alfred having loaned himself the money towards the end of 1924 in the form of a mortgage on a property in Tientsin.
Alfred does seem to have engaged in some rather dubious activities. During the war he was (according to the pro-British press) seen as pro-German by virtue his actions – i.e. absconding with the ledgers of the DAB so as to frustrate its liquidation. There was also allegations (unproven) that he was plotting with senior members of the German Legation to sabotage the railways and burn Weihaiwei (Weihai).
Alfred was also involved in the reformed Peking Gazette in 1913, foermly a Chinese government publication but then reformed as a more commercial, and Republican-oriented, newspaper. It is claimed he employed a young Eugene Chen (the influential Trinidadian-Chinese later to become foreign minister of the Kuomintang) as editor at the outbreak of World War One, when the sitting editor, an Englishman, was considered too anti-German for Alfred’s taste, it is said. Chen’s contacts amongst the competing factions in the Beiyang government after WW1 and the onset of the Warlord Era later put up the money to buy the paper from Alfred.
Anyway, some, part, all of not much of this may actually be true and Tong Eggeling continues to dig in various archives (subject to the world of covid!) in the UK, France, Germany and China.
Any help on the enigmatic and mysterious Alfred Eggeling much appreciated….
A new collection, Locating Chinese Women, edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martinez….
This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of women’s lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny.
Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class.
Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come to recognize Australia as a crucial site within the ‘Cantonese Pacific’, and this collection provides a new layer of gendered comparison, connecting women’s experiences in Australia with those in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.
Kate Bagnall is a historian at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. She has published on various aspects of Chinese Australian history, particularly on women and family life. Julia T. Martínez is an associate professor of history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published on the history of northern Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
bbA new exhibition at the Freud Museum London explores Sigmund Freud’s relationship to China, Chinese culture and the Chinese objects and books in his collection. More details here.
I review Joseph Sassoon’s excellent new book on the Sassoon dynasty, The Global Merchants, for the SCMP Post weekend magazine…click here
Well worth a listen – China featured in BBC Radio 4’s recent commemoration of the centenary of Modernism….click here
I’m giving a talk (Zoom…again) to the RAS Shanghai – “Thrills, Spills & Femme Fatales – Pulp Fiction & 1950s Shanghai”, based on my RAS China 2021 Journal essay ‘An Appreciation of Don Smith’s 1952 China Coaster and the Period of “Interregnum Shanghai” it Portrays’. February 17th 2022 – 8pm Shanghai time.
Interwar American pulp fiction loved Shanghai – spies of all nations , White Russians dames, Japanese bad guys, all-American good guys. Then, after 1949, it looked like the pulps would have to find somewhere new to write about as the Bamboo Curtain descended. But, in the fascinating integrum period between 1949 and the mid-1950s there was still a space to tell stories of Shanghai as the old pre-war city just about clung on until the Communist consolidation. Paul French argues that Don Smith’s now forgotten 1953 pulp novel China Coaster was the best of these at describing the last vestiges of old Shanghai.
You can sign up here with the RAS for the talk
The good people at Penguin South East Asia have issued a new edition of my Penguin China Special Bloody Saturday about the horrific events of August 14, 1937 in Shanghai. I recently did an interview with the Asian Review of Books podcast. On all the usual apps as well as here….
