Time Out Shanghai’s 6 essential books for your Shanghai bookshelf

Very good company to be in…..https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uh6Gkoy5TcOs9ID3cgR19Q

FIVEONE Car Hire in 1930s Shanghai…

FIVEONE Car Hire was up on Pingliang Road (Pingliang Lu)in Y’Poo (Yangpu) out to the north-east. Sensible place if you got a bunch of cars need to be parked up, i guess. FIVEONE obviously chimed with their phone number. Pingliang Road was always an interesting mix of people – FIVEONE plus a lot of workers’ accommodation (a cluster of narrow lanes, which were still there five or six years ago but looked like maybe it might go) for Shanghai No.10 Cotton Mill workers and staff residences for the Shanghai 1st Knitting Factory and the Shanghai Worsted Mill, some godowns for China Tobacco and some army barracks for the Chinese 7th Battalion. It was the edge of the Settlement but a busy area.

Los Angeles Chinatown…a few random photos…

LA’s Chinatown is an interesting place. Unlike just about every other “New” Chinatown I can think off LA’s was built from scratch so they were able to craft everything from the street names to the doorways. Visiting on a Monday afternoon I have to say the place had the feel of a sort of Chinese themed English seaside resort slightly out of season and also has something of the marvelous large-scale folly about it reminding me, perhaps oddly, of Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion in North Wales (Italianate rather than Chinese, but maybe you get the comparison)….

The ‘Restoration’ of Vertinsky’s old Gardenia Club….

I’m posting these photos taken by Shanghailander Graham Keelaghan of the ongoing building works along Yuyuan Lu (Yu Yuan Road as was) of the building that was Alexander Vertinsky’s Gardenia Club. As the location features in my book City of Devils quite a few people have asked if it still exists, where it was etc – so here you go – head down to the Jessfield Park (Zhongshan Gongyuan) end of Yuyuan Lu and it’s on the southern side of the street, set back slightly…..

As you can see the building has been mucked about with quite a lot – first with the 40 years of total neglect after 1949 then various ‘remodellings’ and ‘refurbishments’ with poor craftsmanship and shoddy materials in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now it’s getting the ‘fresh and new’ makeover (though sans wooden window frames sadly) as Yuyuan Lu emerges as some sort of ‘flat pack hipster’ destination. As you all know – as far as serious preservation goes – there are few hard and fast rules on exteriors and next to none on interiors in Shanghai

Crittall Showroom on the North Szechuen Road, 1930s…

Way back in 2008 – round about when i started this blog – I talked about the sad demise of Crittall windows and door frames in Shanghai. They are an essential element of Shanghai’s art-deco look but invariably are either poorly maintained (meaning they are destroyed by rust eventually despite their excellent longevity) or ripped out by Shanghai’s philistine ‘refurbishers’ and replaced with that most horrid of modern inventions, UPVC. Crittall, a company still very much in business in England, kindly sent me some of their old Shanghai photographs from their company archive – https://chinarhyming.com/2008/12/23/crittall-in-shanghai-some-photos-unearthed/

Then, recently, I came across this 1930s ad for Crittall in Shanghai and their showroom up on the North Szechuen Road (Sichuan Bei Lu now) – hence another post about Crittall in Shanghai.

Remembering Some of the Shanghai Grand Theatre’s Past – Shirley Temple & Ronald Reagan, but not the Lesbian matinees sadly….

I walked past the Grand Theatre on Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing Xi Lu) a couple of months back and noticed this new poster celebrating its past as one of the great cinemas of old Shanghai. Worth showing and some pics of the cinema in its heyday.

Shame they forgot to mention the lesbian hook up matinees the place was famous for back then!! – https://chinarhyming.com/2015/06/09/lesbian-hook-ups-in-the-grand-cinema-on-the-bubbling-well-road/

Dealing with Blocked Noses in 1930s Shanghai….

Who says China Rhyming doesn’t delve deep into the minutiae of inter-war Shanghai life?

A slightly curious 1930s advertisement for a nose blockage treatment produced in Shanghai. The China Biological and Chemical Laboratories is long gone I feel, but once did have offices down on Kiangse Road (Jiangxi Road). What has me slightly alarmed is that Comfortal is advertisied as being between than ‘arsphenamine’ is a derivative of arsphenamine, once used to treat syphilis and yaws (the latter being a tropical infection of the skin, bones and joints caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum pertenue and found mostly, these days at least, in Africa and Papua New Guinea). Seems an odd way to unblock your nose – any ideas sciencey types?

The Untameable, 1923 – Etta Lee on screen

One of the good things about spending the summer working in Los Angeles is going to the movies – not just some beautiful old cinemas but a great range of old Hollywood to see too. Managed to see the 1923 silent movie (with a great live piano accompaniment) The Untameable at Sid Graumann’s 1920s Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard last week…a tale of a woman suffering from dual personality syndrome and being manipulated by her doctor to get her fortune…

What really interested me though was that The Untameable was a big film for Hawaiian-born Asian American actress Etta Lee. I’d read about her but never seen her on the big screen.

Born in 1906 Lee was of Chinese and French descent; her father was a Chinese medical doctor and her mother was of French ancestry. She grew up in California, studied at Occidental College in LA, Lee moved back to Hawaii to be a teacher, and then returned to LA to begin her career as a silent movie actress. In The Untameable she plays Chinese maid named Liu. In a sense this was her break through movie – her next would be The Thief of Baghdad with Douglas Fairbanks Snr. Born around the same time and appearing in a number of early movies together Lee was contemporary of the better remembered Anna May Wong.

Most of her roles were rather stereotypical and exoticised. She herself complained about this and also that she was sometimes passed over for roles as ‘not being Chinese enough’ due to her mixed race heritage. She retired in 1932 after getting married.