In March 1902 the American newspapers were advising against travel to Canton (Guangzhou) due to a severe cholera outbreak in the city and surrounding countryside. It was actually a pandemic that seems to have begun in India and then led to a rapid spread of the infection south-eastwards and eastwards. It reached Burma and Malaya in 1901 by 1902 was spreading over most parts of the Far East as far as China and Manchuria, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.
The paperback edition of City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir is now out in the US and UK from Picador and Riverrun (Quercus) respectively. In the bookshops, airports and train stations just in time for going on your holiday and needing a good read….
if you’re in or passing through Salem, Massachusetts, John Thomson’s album, Foochow and the River Min (1873), will be on view at Peabody Essex Museum until May 2020. From 1870 to 1871, the Scottish-born photographer traveled 160 miles up the Min River to photograph the area in and around Fuzhou. Thomson’s stunning photographs of China are some of the earliest to circulate abroad in books and periodicals. Of the original 46 copies of this album, only ten are left in the world. PEM holds two of them.
A Small Temple at Ku-Shan, 1870-1871
This intimate exhibition features more than 40 striking landscapes, city views and portrait studies that Thomson captured as he traveled in the southeastern Fujian province. Photographs by contemporary artist Luo Dan, who was inspired by Thomson to undertake a similar journey in southwestern China, complement the presentation.
Apologies for being a bit late but, as part of London Art Week 2019, the Martyn Gregory Gallery in St James’s has an exhibition till July 5 of Philippines and South-East Asia: Paintings & Drawings by Eastern & Western Artists, 1800-1950….
Last week I blogged about the Skvirsky Photography Studio in 1930s Shanghai – Skvirsky became the most in-demand wedding photographer to both Chinese Shanghai and Shanghailander foreign society, a friend of Sir Victor Sassoon’s and a noted portrait photographer…
He also, earlier, worked in partnership with a photographer called Sanzetti, a man I knew, and still know, nothing about. However the phenomenal old Shanghai researcher Katya Knyazeva ferreted out a photograph of him – not great quality, but the only one we have to my knowledge.
Just in case you missed it last year – RTHK3 radio in Hong Kong reran my piece on the chaotic visit to Shanghai in 1929 by Hollywood’s darling couple Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr….It’s an abridged version of the same chapter in my 2018 book Destination Shanghai (Blacksmith Books)….https://www.rthk.hk/radio/
On some levels Skvirsky’s was just another White Russian emigre-run photo studio in Shanghai. There were quite a few. Leonid “Leo” Skvirsky had a good address on Nanking Road East (Nanjing Dong Lu). Formerly the company had been Sanzetti and Skvirsky.
Skvirsky was a much-in-demand wedding photographer with both the Russian emigre and wealthy Chinese elite. In many albums of China sojourners or army/Navy Skvirsky photos sit alongside the better known names of Afong (based in Yantai, formerly Chefoo), and Joseffa. He was a popular photographer, it seems, with the US Navy – see his picture of the officers and men of “E” Division of the USS Sacramento, that docked in Shanghai in (the rather tense month of) February 1938
However, Skvirsky also did some really interesting photographs, as you can see below….the portrait of a western woman dressed in a Japanese costume is from the 1930s (possibly a performer in a production of the Mikado).
I believe Skvisky eventually left for the USA and settled in Atlanta.
fourth daughter of the Kwok Bews, a prestigious family in charge of the Wing On Department Store in Shanghai in the early 20th century, Daisy Kwok – photographed on her wedding day by Skvirsky.
An article by me for the Crime Reads web site composed after my March /April tour round China talking to Chinese audiences in various bookshops about crime novels, true crime and gangster movies in the PRC….
