(BTW: members of RAS Shanghai & Beijing have reciprocal rights to attend)
New York Times bestselling author Paul French (Midnight in Peking, City of Devils) returns to the Chinese capital to tell 18 true stories of fascinating people who visited the city in the first half of the 20th century.
“Paul French resurrects a Peking that was filled with glitter as well as evil, but was never known for being dull.â€Â – The Economist
Discount Code: RASHK members can get 10% off the cover price (and free delivery within Asia) by using discount code RAS21 at checkout on www.blacksmithbooks.com.
The old Shanghai Art Academy, founded in 1912, existed to just after the 1949 communist take over. It’s alumni list is long and illustrious, it was a school that saw modernism and western art techniques fused with traditional Chjinese artistic styles to both pure art and commercial ends. The building, on Shunchang Lu (former Rue Bard) is now apparently slated for demolition – no plaque, no memorial and soon no building at all….click here to read my article in the South China Morning Post Weekend Magazine….
The Oriental Restaurant was inside the Sincere Department Store on Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road now). The old department store building with its distinctive clock tower still stands on the corner with Chekiang Road (Zhejiang Lu), just as it has since 1917. It’s the rather dismal Bailian store today with no food options to rival the once highly rated Cantonese restaurant, The Oriental. It was there from at least the early-1930s through to 1949.
Yesterday i posted about the destruction of No.4-6 Glasshouse Street, just off Piccadilly. The building was the original home of the first Chinese restaurant in the West End. Here is the 1921 entry for the restaurant and its owner Mr Chong Choy from the Post Office Directory for London…
A significant, if little known, piece of British-Chinese heritage disappeared from the map recently in central London. I had noticed some time back, prior to the pandemic, that there had been rather a lot of major clearance on the junction of Shaftesbury Avenue and Denman Street. Walking across Piccadilly Circus this week i noticed that the entire triangular block bordered by Shaftesbury Avenue, Denman Street and the pedestrianised Glasshouse Street, which runs northwest off Piccadilly Circus has been cleared for a new development. This is part of the general (and sadly ongoing) gutting and destruction of Soho between Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, Regent Street and Oxford Street that has been continuing for some years now causing destruction and heritage loss as far as over Charing Cross Road in Denmark Street (once London’s Little Tokyo).
What might not be noticed in this mass clearance (to allow the property developers in to build God only knows what) is that the site of the West End’s first Chinese restaurant (arguably) has gone entirely and for good. The building that comprised 4-6 Glasshouse Street has been demolished. It first opened as a Chinese restaurant in 1909 as this article entitled LONDON’S CHINESE RESTAURANTS in The Queenslander newspaper from July 21st 1932 indicates:
IF we start from the centre of the West-End of London, setting out from Piccadilly Circus, we can take in all the Chinese restaurants of the West-End within half an hour’s walk (writes Townley Searle in his book, “Strange News from Chinaâ€). The Chinese Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus was one, if not the first, to open in their neighbourhood. It was started in 1909 by Mr. Chang Choy, and has continued for 22 years. The premises are, of cource, the most centrally situated of any, and consist of the upper floors of 4 Glasshouse Street. Each floor is decorated in approved Chinese style, in which the Chinese lantern predominates. The food is excellent, as it is in every Chinese restaurant, and if one knows “what to order†there can be no question of disappointment.
I’m afraid i do not have a picture of The Chinese Restaurant – though if anyone does please do get in touch! By the 1930s The Chinese Restaurant was next to several other “ethnic†restaurants including Doveed, a Jewish kosher establishment opened in 1937. The Chinese Restaurant attracted smart shoppers around Regent Street and Piccadilly with tables on the first floor that looked out onto the street and became places to see and be seen. The restaurant claimed to specialise in imperial banquet cuisine, but required at least half a day’s notice to dine and a deposit in advance to cover the purchase of the ingredients. Still, despite the bother, the 1937 edition of Where to Dine in London declared that, “Englishmen who have spent their lives in the East†appreciate the traditional menu. In his 1938 novel Murphy, Samuel Beckett, has his character Neary, an eccentric visiting London from Cork, eat in “…a Chinese restaurant on Glasshouse Street†which perhaps the writer himself knew?
Some time after WW2 The Chinese Restaurant morphed into the Cathay Chinese Restaurant – and that, courtesy of the London Picture Archive, we do have a picture of. Later still, and in it’s last incarnation, it became a cocktail bar called jewel, still using the first floor windows as great people watching seats. By this time its Chinese connection was long gone (except perhaps having a lychee martini on the menu). And now the entire building is gone and with it a key moment in the history of the Chinese in the West End…
The Cathay, here in the 1970s, replaced The Chinese Restaurant with H Samuel, the jewellers, to one side, and a giant Wimpy Bar to the other….Their sign rather obscured the popular arched first floor windows
The last tenant – Jewel Bar, did at least restore the balcony
After the liberation of Shanghai from Japanese occupation in summer 1945 and with the old foreign concession abolsihed Nationalist China established a new Shanghai Telecommunication Administration for the city with offices up on Szechuen Road North (Sichuan Bei Lu)….Here’s the logo. ..
In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing state and its activities, transmitting state news across a vast empire and beyond. And the most essential window onto Qing politics was the Peking Gazette, a genre that circulated globally over the course of the dynasty.
This illuminating study presents a comprehensive history of the Peking Gazette and frames it as the cornerstone of a Qing information policy that, paradoxically, prized both transparency and secrecy. Gazettes gave readers a glimpse into the state’s inner workings but also served as a carefully curated form of public relations. Historian Emily Mokros draws from international archives to reconstruct who read the gazette and how they used it to guide their interactions with the Chinese state. Her research into the Peking Gazette’s evolution over more than two centuries is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between media, information, and state power.
Emily Mokros is assistant professor of history at the University of Kentucky.
Well done to the The “Little Museum Of Foreign Brand Advertising In The R.O.C.”, a private collection of old Shanghai advertising memorabilia and now they have tracked down every address Carl Crow Advertising Inc ever occupied!… It’s fun…..click here
