In 1938 you really needed to warn the kids about playing with unexploded ordinance in your French Concession garden….And just for the record – AC Cornish had worked for the Standard Oil Co. of New York (SOCONY) since 1915 (since graduating from Princeton) all over the country including a stint in Changsha and was also one of the American Concillors on the Shanghai Municipal Council and a President of the American Chamber of Commerce. Not sure who the Reilly’s were.
Old Town expert Katya Knyazeva notes that Chinese blogs have begun to alert the public to the impending demolition of the historic neighborhoods on Canton (Guangdong) Road. Click here:
For more details see Katya’s excellent blog – here
As she rightly points out this is a very important street that once housed all manner of tea houses and curio shops. It is still very vibrant and walkable – though not for much longer sadly it would seem.
An advert for the great China Motors that had several branches around town before the war – mostly US cars, but also Fiat flatbed trucks (which were the preferred flat bed of Shanghai)….
I’ve posted about Thomson’s China photography quite a few times on this blog. Now he’s getting a heritage plaque in Edinburgh – well done Jamie Carstairs of the Visualising China project at Bristol University for nominating him….more on Thomson and the plaque here
Manchu lady and child. Photograph by John Thomson (negative number 701). Credit: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain
Miss M. Moohina was a young Russian emigre woman who lived on Rue Maresca (Wuyuan Lu) in the French Concession. By day she worked as a clerk in an office in Shanghai. Some time around the Christmas holiday in 1940 four robbers burst in, tied her up, stole her diamond ring and her gold watch. They then wanted to open the office safe. But Miss Moohina was too canny for them – she fell into a supposed feint and lay still. Thinking there was no way they cold now get the combinatioin in any quick time the robbers took off. Miss Moohina saved her boss a few thousand dollars – hope the ring and watch were insured!
An ideal book for someone who writes popular Chinese history, but used to run a market research company in Shanghai!! Making it Count by Arunabh Ghosh…out this March….
In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest
challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how
much they did not know. The government of one of the world’s largest
nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and
economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable
statistical data about their own country. Making It Count is the
history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.†Drawing on a
wealth of sources culled from China, India, and the United States,
Arunabh Ghosh explores the choices made by political leaders,
statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures
in attempts to know the nation through numbers.
Ghosh shows that
early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration
became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented
and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the
Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random
sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great
Leap Forward (1958–61), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were
rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise.
By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, Ghosh not only revises
existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider
developments in the history of statistics and data.
Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, Making It Count offers fresh perspectives on China’s transition to socialism.
In my article for CNNi on the history Wuhan I suggested that the earliest use of the term ‘China’s Chicago’ for was a 1900 piece on the city in Collier’s magazine. But, my thanks to blog reader “Mark S” who found this earlier mention in chapter 3 of vol. 2 of The Story of the China Inland Mission, by Mary Geraldine Guinness (and with an introduction by the missionary J Hudson Taylor, also Guinness’s father-in-law), dated 1893. One chapter is entitled “The Chicago of China” and Mark also notes, it is Wuchang rather than Hankow is given prominence whereas later references invariably refer largely to Hankow, where most of the city’s fopreign prescence was clustered.
