All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
For those interested in disco, Hong Kong and the 1970s/1980s the two Hong Kong Heritage podcast interviews with the legendary DJ Andrew Bull are great listening. The early years of modern rock music radio in Hong Kong, the first discos, the music, the divas…in two parts click here
Duncan Campbell-Smith’s new history of Standard Chartered Bank.
For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London’s overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two start-up ventures: the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. This book traces their stories in the nineteenth century, their glory days before 1914 – and their remarkable survival in the face of global wars and the collapse of world trade in the first half of the twentieth century.
The unravelling of the Empire after 1945 eventually forced Britain’s overseas banks to confront a different future. The Standard and the Chartered, alarmed at the expansion of American banking, determined in 1969 on a merger as a way of sustaining the best of the City’s overseas traditions. But from the start, Standard Chartered had to grapple with the fading fortunes of its own inherited franchise – badly dented in both Asia and Africa – and with radical changes in the nature of banking. Its British managers, steeped in the past, proved ill-suited to the challenge. By the late 1980s, efforts to expand in Europe and the USA had brought the merged Group to the brink of collapse.
Yet it survived – and then pulled off a dramatic recovery. Standard Chartered realigned itself, just in time, with the phenomenal growth of Asia’s ’emerging markets’, many of them in countries where the Chartered had flourished a century earlier. In the process, the Group was transformed. Trebling its workforce, it brushed aside the global financial crisis of 2008 and by 2012 could look back on a decade of astonishing growth. Recent times have added an eventful postscript to a long and absorbing history.
Crossing Continents recounts Standard Chartered’s story with a wealth of detail from one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain’s commercial influence has actually worked in practice around the world over one hundred and fifty years.
My thanks to George Godula of Shanghai who is an enthusiast of both old slot machines and old slot machine tokens. I sent him a picture of a Jack Riley leased slot machine (for more on all that see my book City of Devils which features the great “Slots King” of Shanghai) – this one from the Astoria Cafe, just over the Garden Bridge close to the Astor House Hotel.
Here it is….
George reckons it’s a Mills 5 Cent Liberty Bell slot machine from the 1920s. Riley shipped his machines in from wherever he could get them – America via Manila and Japan as well as, later, machines sourced through Macao. Here are two examples of the type of machines he imported into Shanghai…
George believes that Riley shipped in whatever machines he could find as Shanghai’s hunger for slots grew (and his bank account!)…In this ad from the Fourth Marines Club magazine Walla Walla the artists rendition is a different type of machine again…
This ad is from the mid-1930s and featured in the magazine of the Fourth Marines in Shanghai, Walla Walla. The Great Shanghai Butchery was on the Avenue Joffre in Frenchtown (Huai Hai Middle Road) and obviously thought those red meat eating Leathernecks were prime (pardon the pun) customers for steak….
18:00 – 18:50 (55 mins) LIVE
CHINESE BOXING
Mark Kitto (Fakenham)
A one-man show about China and the West, ‘Chinese Boxing’ is inspired by the siege of the diplomatic quarter of Peking in 1900 during the Boxer Uprising, an epic clash between China and the West that echoes across the century. Will China and the West ever understand each other?
In 1912 Sir Claude MacDonald, Her Majesty’s former Minister Plenipotentiary to Peking, who was present during the siege and commanded the defence, gives an illustrated talk to the Norwich Asiatic Society. He promises ‘to take you back to Peking in 1900’. You might even find yourself in the Forbidden City while the battle rages outside.
14+, use of swearing.
I rather like the elabortaness of North American Chinese restaurtant ads. I also like that many Chinese restaurants were also cocktail lounges – not somethijng that ever really caught on in England (a process not helped by draconian licensing laws). Sing High in Phoenix, Arizona looks like quite the place in 1974….
Sing High is still in business, and has been since 1928 apparently. Though now at a different address. There’s an article about the history of the restaurant and the family that have run it for several generations here.
Another of my occasional posts featuring parasols (for more just put ‘parasol’ in the search engine). This from afamily portrait in 1987 from Jiaozuo City in Henan Province, taken (i believe) by Sun Qiran….
WHAT: “BASF in China: the First 130 Years”, an RASBJ in-person talk by Jörg Wuttke
WHEN: Wednesday March 24th 7.00 – 8.00 pm Beijing Standard Time
WHERE: The German Embassy, 17 Dongzhimenwai Dajie.
In 1885, BASF established an organization in Shanghai to boost the sales of its products, especially aniline dyes. But this business model had to be adapted to the Chinese market; while French, British, North American and German textile processors needed large batches of BASF dyes, the users in agrarian China were more likely to buy in small volumes. Getting the merchandise from Ludwigshafen to low-volume consumers in remote and hard-to-reach places, was quite laborious. Yet, by 1913, China represented 14% of the global sales of BASF.
In his thought-provoking presentation on over a century of his firm’s involvement in China, BASF China Chief Representative and EU Chamber of Commerce in China President Joerg Wuttke relies on first-hand research, an intimate knowledge of the past and present of the Chinese market and a breath-taking collection of contemporary photographs, marketing materials and documents.
Jörg Wuttke is Vice President and Chief Representative of BASF China, based in Beijing. Since joining BASF in 1997, Mr. Wuttke has been responsible for helping guide the company’s investment strategies for China, negotiation of large projects and government relations. He is the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. He is vice chairman of the CPCIF International Cooperation Committee, a group representing multinational companies in China’s chemical association, and member of the Advisory Board of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin. Since 2013, he has been one of four Advisors to the Royal Asiatic Society Beijing.
HOW MUCH: This event is free and exclusively for members of RASBJ. If you know someone who wants to join the RASBJ in order to attend this talk, please ask them to sign up via our website at https://rasbj.org/membership/ at least 48 hours before the event.
HOW TO REGISTER: Please email your full name and ID number to: events@rasbj.org at least 48 hours before the event. On the day of the event, please arrive at the Embassy at 6.30 pm, and remember to bring a photo ID for the security check.