This is an old photo well known to collectors and historians that seems to have suddenly started doing the rounds on social media the way things do these days… it’s the Daqing bicycle shop in Peking (c.1900-1912).
There’s many reasons this is interesting – a great shot of a full shop frontage, text running in three directions, late Qing modernity etc etc.
But also in this period we find ourselves in of a sudden gush of dubious China Experts offering their opinions on the complexities of the China Market and its many mysteries only they can solve, I love that Daqing were the China reps for Nottinghamshire’s Humber bikes. All these supposed China experts would charge you a fortune and claim you need specialist skills to establish a relationship like that now, but presumably Humber and Daqing did it all fine 125 years ago with a few letters, some cargo ships and perhaps a travelling salesman passing through Peking.
My latest column on Macao in popular culture for Macau Closermagazine. This issue it’s Han Suyin’s semi-autobiographical novel (with nods to the later movie – of which some stills below with William Holden and Jennifer Jones as Mark and Han) A Many Splendoured Thing from 1952. For Han Macao, an interesting side trip in the developing romance, is a place for transgression, to escape the social, racial and colonial rigidness and prudity of British Hong Kong for a weekend of gambling, eating, flirtation and lovemaking in the more louche and relaxed Portuguese enclave. Click to read here, or (if you’re in Macao) head to Livraria Portuguesa on rua de São Domingos to buy a hard copy of the magazine.
The Hong Kong-Macao Ferry
Dinner at the Macau Gran Hotel (modelled on the recently refurbished Hotel Central)
You don’t have to wait for me to turn up in Beijing to do the Midnight in Peking Walk (though it’s fun to do it that way) – it’s available on VoiceMap too if you just fancy heading out into the hutongs – click here
In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup― the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this endeavor.
In Safe Passage, the award-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the herculean efforts of the American diplomat James Keeley to engineer these wartime exchanges despite great resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard conflicts among passengers, including missionaries, revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists; and the moral compromises involved in securing their safe passage. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States uprooted and repatriated Japanese citizens of Latin America, sometimes against their will, while Japanese imprisoned in camps, many of them American citizens, were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. The result is a revelatory account of the hurdles to pursuing humanitarian action in wartime.
Hans Bahlke – “General Merchant” – ran a stationary and general store on Hatamen Street (Chongwenmen) in the early 1900s. As you can see in the photo here there was also a depot attached to the store. He sold postcards (photographed, printed and sold by Bahlke under his own brand), maps and souvenirs of Peking and the surrounding area. He also stocked newspapers, journals and books, novels particularly, in English, French and German advertising “First Class Authors Only” – I wonder who didn’t make the cut!! Bahlke also had a store in Tianjin and both sold German coffee, cigars, liqueurs and clothing items (see the ad below for a full list!)
In 1909 he published “Guide to Peking and Neighbourhood” which was published by the German newspaper in Tianjin Tageblatt für Nord-China. The usual guide to hotels, restaurants and sights with ads for newspapers, shops and hotels.
Hans Bahlke’s General Store, Hatamen Street, Peking, 1910
‘Shanghai Millionaire’ board game, which is a rare localized version of Monopoly, produced for English speaking expatriates in Shanghai between 1935 and 1946.
