A lovely new book by Kate Bailey from the Royal Horticultural Society on John Reeves, East India Company tea inspector and plant collector….
This is the story of the Reeves Collection of botanical paintings, the
result of one man’s single-minded dedication to commissioning pictures
and gathering plants for the Horticultural Society of London.
Reeves went to China in 1812 and immediately on arrival started sending
back snippets of information about manufactures, plants and poetry,
goods, gods and tea to Sir Joseph Banks. Slightly later, he also started
collecting for the Society but despite years of work collecting,
labelling and packing plants and organising a team of Chinese artists
until he left China in 1831, Reeves never enjoyed the same degree of
recognition as other naturalists in China.
This was possibly
because he had a demanding job as a tea inspector. Reeves himself never
claimed to be a professional naturalist and the plant collecting and
painting supervision were undertaken in his own time. Furthermore, fan qui
(foreign devils) were restricted to the port area of Canton and to
Macau, so that plant-hunting expeditions further afield were impossible.
Furthermore, Reeves never published an account of his life in the
country, unlike Clarke Abel and Robert Fortune, but he left us some
letters, notebooks, drawings and maps.
The Collection is held at
the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library in Vincent Square,
London. It is a magnificent achievement. Not only are the pictures
accurate and richly coloured plant portraits of plants then unknown in
the West, but they stand as a record of plants being cultivated in
nineteenth-century Canton and Macau. In John Reeves: Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art,
Kate Bailey reveals John Reeves’ life as an East India Company tea
inspector in nineteenth-century China and shows how he managed to
collect and document thousands of Chinese natural history drawings, far
more than anyone else at the time.
Whitworth’s on Kiangse Road offered “proper shampooing”, or at least could sell you Palm Tree of Cocoa-nut oil shampoo. Leonard Whitworth, originally from Manchester, was a sales agent for mostly textile companies, but obviously diversified. He’d worked in textile engineering in India and Japan before the First World War before settling in Shanghai working for Calder, Marshall & Co around 1919. He was also the proud Chairman of the Shanghai Lancastrian Association (sadly now defunct I believe!!)…
A new book from Alan Ogden that sheds more light and detail on Fleming’s activities in China, and especially in the wartime capital of Chungking, in WW2…..
Master of Deception is a biography of Peter Fleming, elder brother of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Peter Fleming worked as a travel writer and journalist, serving with distinction throughout World War II and played a crucial role in British intelligence operations in the Far East. This biography ranges from the personal life of Fleming such as his marriage to Celia Johnson, a famous actor of the time, to his extensive military intelligence career which took him from Norway and Greece to the Far East. Framed through the life of Peter Fleming this book offers an in-depth study of British intelligence operations in the Far East during World War II.
French author Francis Carco’s novel Perversity (sometimes called Depravity) was first published in 1928 and translated into English by Jean Rhys. It’s set in the Paris underworld, where a prostitute and her pimp live n the same house as her sexually immature brother. A situation that doesn’t end well.
Interestingly, for this blog, the book, which is set mainly along Paris’s Boulevard de Crenelle. Several times in the novel Carco mentions that the Boulevard de Crenelle, in the 15th arrondissement to the south west of the city, was particularly popular with Chinese and other foreign workers in the city at the time, as well as other minority groups. I don’t know if this is true, or if it’s just Carco using the imagery of the Chinese to exoticise the world of Pervesity. Of course he is also suggestign that these women have fallen so low – indeed are ‘hatless!’ (often a sign of low class) – as to sleep with foreign men (or anyone not French basically)…
‘Sometimes they would watch the procession of men who were hunting for a woman, Chinese, Arabs, Negroes.’
‘Many of his neighbours promenaded hatless young girls, and under their caps their faces were ravaged. There were many foreigners amongst them: swarthy Arabs, Chinese, Italians with short black moustaches, filthy Spaniards, Russians with reddened eyelids lacking eyelashes, Germans, fat Belgians.’
Carco, born in New Caledonia, did like to exoticise his writing and was part of the French Fantaisiste school of writers and artists.
The 250-seat Hongkew (Hongkou) Theatre, China’s first professional cinema dates back to 1908, though this picture is from 1915. It was one of the cluster of cinemas on the North Sichuan Road, including the Isis (which I’ve blogged about several times before). The Hongkew was founded by Spaniard Antonio Ramos (who ran a lot of cinemas and amusement arcades around Shanghai at the time) and, after 1945, became an opera house. A beautiful building, a wonderful cinema, pure Shanghai heritage – and so of course the site was demolished in 1988 to make way for the expansion of Haining Lu!
Fine antique maps from 16th to 20th century including the Robert Nield Collection of early charts and maps of Macau and the Pearl River
Thursday 5th September 2019 to Saturday 5th October 2019 Wattis Fine Art Gallery 20 Hollywood Road, 2/F, Central, Hong Kong Tel. +852 2524 5302 E-mail. info@wattis.com.hk
