Thinking of Wuhan lately obviously and remembering that in the first half of the twentieth century it was invariably referred to in the American newspapers as the ‘Chicago of China’ – apt really being an inland entrepot, industry city with iron steel, stockyards, canning etc, population of around a million, a city of largely business rather than politics or culture.
I believe the first use of the term was by Collier’s magazine in 1900 in an article on China’s ‘boom town’ (then the three cities of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang that became known as Wuhan) that likened Wuhan to both Chicago and St Louis. Certainly by the late 1920s it was being regularly used as the articles below show….
A piece by Kate Whitehead in the South China Morning Post noting the predictions of Dean Koontz and other virus-related issues in Wuhan, including me, briefly, on Japanese biological warfare remnants in the city from WW2….click here
The Chinese in Britain is one of the fastest growing communities. It is estimated the total number of Chinese has reached 500,000 by 2015. Approximately two-thirds of Chinese in Britain were born outside UK, with the majority coming from Hong Kong, China and Southeast Asia. The past two decades has witnessed a steady rise in the number of people from mainland China, including professionals, skilled workers, investors and young people who come to study in UK’s schools and universities. There is an urgent need to document and conceptualise this important demographic and cultural shift, not only for a better understanding of the new development of Chinese communities in the UK but also for the benefit of Britain whose future is increasingly built upon its understanding of and relations with the rest of the world including China.
This conference is aimed at addressing this
gap by bringing together researchers, Chinese language teachers,
community leaders and policy makers to identify and examine the changing
linguistic and cultural landscape of the Chinese in Britain. After the
keynote speeches, the conference is organised around four sessions:
Session 1: Negotiating and articulating Chineseness in a changing Britain
Session 2: Speaking Chinese in multilingual London
Session 3: British Chinese as a Transnational Subject
Session 4: Theorising and doing British Chinese heritage
The conference is hosted by HOMELandS (Hub on
Migration, Exiles, Languages and Spaces) in collaboration with the
Contemporary China Centre of University of Westminster. It is supported
by Language Acts and World Making Small Grant Scheme, AHRC Open World
Research Initiative (OWRI).
With contributions from:
Freya Aitken-Turff, Eona Bell, Harriet Evans,Jing Huang, Paul Kendall, Denise Kwan,Jackie Jia Lou, Xiao Ma, How Wee Ng, Giulio Verdini, Natalie Vujasin, Gerda Wielander, Anne Witchard, Maggie Hoi Lam Wong, Yan Wu, Lini Xiao, Chen Yang, Diana Yeh, Vanessa Yim.
More details and tickets (free but need to rsvp) click here
Regular readers will know I do like posting shots of Chinese parasols in various settings – the search box will bring them all up. Here some Victorian schoolgirls in Hastings with their teacher display their parasols, for some long lost reason….
A few years ago a newspaper (which shall remain nameless to spare their blushes) ran a review of a book by me and showed a picture of a line of old Shanghai taxi dancers waiting for partners in a dancehall – probably in the early 1930s. The Picture Editor simply captioned the photograph ‘Shanghai Prostitutes’. Those poor women must have been spinning in their graves…
Except of course the ones who did a little off-the-books work. That’s the thing about old Shanghai taxi dancers – they come in many forms. Some did arange liaisons with dance partners for later and money was exchanged. But most were simply dance partners for hire and many (not just in Shanghai of course, but globally) also gave dance lessons or dance exhibitions with male partner, either privately for arranged by the nightclub or ballroom. If men couldn’t dance then ballrooms would pretty quickly go out of business.
And so here, from 1927, is a Shanghai taxi dancer giving a lesson to a customer (who is a rather dapper chap and perhaps also an exhibition danceron) of the foxtrot…
I write a lot about the Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai but I found this stat from truly mind blowing in its enormity – it really brings home the scale of the Japanese attack on the city….and remember this is December 1937 and at this point only the Chinese-controlled portions of the city have been attacked. Effectivaly from Bloody Saturday (August 14th 1937) to the end of the year over 40,000 war-related deaths were recorded.
