Discover the strange story of when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performed a major Chinese uprising
Roll up, roll up for historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s exploration of Buffalo Bill’s 1901 Wild West Show. What can a strange yet spectacular re-enactment of an anti-Christian uprising in China tell us about America’s understanding of the country?
English and French troops attack the Boxers. Colour-printed battle scene, China, woodblock printed in the style of a new-year print. Originally published/produced in China, c.1900.
In April 1901, at Madison Square Garden, New York City, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performed a re-enactment of an episode in the Boxer Rebellion, the fierce anti-Christian uprising that had triggered an international invasion of China, involving troops marching behind the flags of eight different nations and empires, including Britain, the United States, Russia, Germany and Japan. The entertainment essentially reworked earlier re-enactments of the ‘Ghost Dance Rising’, with the Native American cast members now playing Chinese militants, and the white cowboys on horseback becoming cavalry from different lands.
Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom digs deeper into this fascinating cultural moment, and compares it to an Earl’s Court re-enactment of related Chinese events that was staged the same spring. He uses examination of these shows to explore the complex and distinctive ways America’s growing interest(s) in China were understood and articulated at the beginning of the 20th century. Some audience members, who had been scandalised by reports of the Boxers’ killing of Christians, were delighted to see the insurgents bested on stage. Others were less comfortable with this version of events, including Mark Twain, who viewed the Boxers as ‘traduced patriots’ and left the opening night performance in disgust. Join Professor Wasserstrom as he tells the story of Buffalo Bill’s imaginary trip to China, and reflect on what this episode teaches about America’s relationship to China, then and now.
Sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library
Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to consumer commodities like nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, the state introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures: smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority.
Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between coastal smuggling and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize and expand regime control. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders to frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai traces how different regimes sought to police maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling shows how defiance helped the state redefine its power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.
John Thomson: Reframing Materials, Images, and Archives
Wellcome Trust Gibbs Building, Euston Road, London
7/6/18 – 9am-5pm
John Thomson’s (1837-1921) large surviving archive has helped to secure his place in the canon of British photography. The archive includes some 600 negatives at the Wellcome collection, as well as an extensive list of published works, surviving glass-plate negatives, cartes de visites, and album prints. With the archive generating interest in Thomson’s photographs as historical and cultural documents, discourse on Thomson’s work remains largely tied to the perceived indexical values of his photographs. This Study Day aims to expand approaches to this unique body of work.
This event is organised in conjunction with the 2018 exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (April-June 2018), Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872: China, Siam and Angkor.
Academics, curators and practitioners will present research and engage in discussion around four specific key themes: The Interrelation and Interaction of Making, Translating and Transforming Images into Objects, Reading and Reframing of Images – Issues of the Archive, and Constructing and Conceptualising East and Southeast Asia. As such, this Study Day will provide an opportunity to contextualise and stimulate new research questions around the materiality and visuality of photography. These discussions also have wider implications within the scholarship of photography across the fields of Art History, Anthropology, Visual and Material Cultures, History, Architecture and Dress History
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan’s new book The China Mission looks very interesting…
Following the success of General George C. Marshall’s leadership of the American army during the Second World War, he was the obvious candidate for the international mission to broker a coalition government between China’s warring Nationalists and Communists. As a US “special representative” Marshall began enacting miraculous change and under his guiding hand, China’s political factions agreed to a ceasefire and settled on the principles of a democratic government. But then the agreements Marshall brokered fractured and civil war came to China.
This fascinating history portrays the incredible beginnings and ultimate failure of Marshall’s high-stakes mission. In spellbinding detail, The China Mission chronicles an unforgettable miss-step in American diplomacy that changed the course of global politics for ever more.
Hosted by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and kubrick
Date: Saturday 21 April 2018
Time: 7:30-8:45
Venue: kubrick (Shop H2, Cinema Block, Prosperous Garden, 3 Public square street, Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon)
FREE ADMISSION | ALL ARE WELCOME
In this Cha Reading Series event “Nostalgia in the Chinese City”, Cha contributors Antony Dapiran and Paul French will discuss nostalgia in their work and in the Chinese cities where they have lived and worked for many years. Moderated by Cha co-editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming.
ABOUT ANTONY DAPIRAN
Antony Dapiran is a Hong Kong-based writer, lawyer and photographer, and the author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong, published by Penguin. He has written extensively on China and Hong Kong business, politics and culture. A contributing editor of ArtAsiaPacific, his writing has also appeared in publications including the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, South China Morning Post, CNN International, Nikkei Asia Review, Hong Kong Free Press, Chart Collective and the LARB China Channel.
ABOUT PAUL FRENCH
Paul French is the author of the New York Times best seller Midnight in Peking (Penguin), currently being developed as a series for TV. He is visiting Hong Kong to launch his new book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir (Penguin), centred on the dancehalls, casinos and cabarets of wartime Shanghai.
Cha Reading Series {http://bit.ly/2fnE9EE} takes the online journal out into the physical world. It brings together poets, writers, translators and artists who are in some way or other affiliated with Cha. Readings will take place in various impromptu locations across the city, in public and private rooms, lecture halls, on park benches, in front of billboards, next to a window scratched by tree branches. They will read their work informally or seriously. They will discuss issues, argue, debate and exchange. We also hope to form dialogue and explore specific pertinent topics that inspire or beset the contemporary world. Suggestions for future events can be sent to t@asiancha.com.
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Mark O”Neill’s Israel and China, a history of the Jews in China from Kaifeng, and all that, through Harbin, Shanghai, emigres, refugees, and all that, to the current state of Sino-Israeli relations…
The Jews first arrived in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) and settled as businessmen, civil servants and professionals. They assimilated into Chinese society and lost their Jewish character. The next wave came in the mid-19th century with the opening of the treaty ports and settled in Shanghai. They went into trading, especially opium, and diversified into property, manufacturing, finance, public transport and retail. Another Jewish community settled in Harbin after the opening of the China Eastern Railway in 1903. They also prospered in trading and business. Both communities built synagogues, schools, social clubs and welfare institutions. During World War Two, 25,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe took refuge in Shanghai, one of the few cities in the world open to them. Many received visas from Asian diplomats who defied their governments to issue them. The Japanese military refused the Nazi demand to carry out ‘the final solution’ of the Jews in Shanghai. After 1945, inflation, civil war and Communist rule made most Jews leave China for new homes in Israel, North America, Australia and elsewhere. The new state of Israel worked hard to establish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic; it became an important supplier of weapons in the 1980s. But it took 42 years for the two countries to sign the ties, in 1992. Since then, relations have blossomed and China has become one of Israel’s biggest foreign investors. In the reform and open-door era, Jewish people have returned to China and form important communities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities. Part of this narrative are remarkable individuals who have left a deep imprint on China – Karl Marx, Sir Victor Sassoon, Silas Hardoon, the Kadoorie family, Henry Kissinger and Sigmund Freud.
To tell this extraordinary story, Mark O’Neill conducted many interviews with rabbis, businessmen, entrepreneurs, professors and journalists in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Israel. It is, largely, a joyful page in Jewish history.
“I believe in God and the hand of providence. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can see God’s guiding hand, and the story of the Jews in China is one of those lucky times. We see God’s guiding hand, we have seen providenceâ€
– Rabbi Asher Oser of Ohel Leah synagogue, Hong Kong
About the Author:
Mark O’Neill was born in London and educated at New College, Oxford University. Mark has worked in Asia since 1978, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, China and Japan, for the BBC, Reuters, the South China Morning Post and other media. He has written eight books: Tzu Chi — Serving with Compassion; Frederick, the Life of My Missionary Grandfather in Manchuria; The Chinese Labour Corps; From the Tsar’s Railway to the Red Army; The Second Tang Dynasty — The 12 Sons of Fragrant Mountain Who Changed China; The Miraculous History of China’s Two Palace Museums, Ireland’s Imperial Mandarin: How Sir Robert Hart Become the Most Influential Foreigner in Qing China and this one. Five have Chinese editions, both traditional and simplified, as well as English. He lived in Beijing and Shanghai for more than 16 years. Now he works as an author, journalist and teacher, based in Hong Kong. He speaks and writes Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), French and Japanese.
Talking City of Devils but with some old foreign press corps tales mixed in at the Hong Kong FCC for dinner on 19th April…
TALK City of Devils:
Warlordism, War, Journalism And
The High Life In Old Shanghai
SPEAKER
Paul French
Thursday, April 19, 2018
6:45pm for 7:00pm – Dinner
7:30pm – Address
1st Floor
Paul French will tell the extraordinary tale of 1940s Shanghai and how it was portrayed at the time in literature and journalism – and in contemporary police reports. The author of the bestselling Midnight in Peking, Mr. French has written a new book called City of Devils that delves into old Shanghai and its glories and sordid disasters. The foreign press corps of old China witnessed the death of a dynasty, the birth of a republic, warlordism, natural disaster, war, occupation and revolution. Their journalism explained China to the world and made some of them famous. Yet their private lives, relationships, interaction with the communities they lived among are distinctly less well-known. The foreign press corps of pre-1949 China have always been sources for Paul French’s writing – both as witnesses to events and as characters. However, the lives they lived, their homes and lifestyles are equally sources of foreign life in Shanghai between the wars. From Edgar and Helen Snow’s sumptuous hutong courtyard home to Emily Hahn’s stylish Shanghai apartment, French looks at the lives behind the headlines and what they tell us about a now vanished old China.
Currently based in London, Paul French lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. He is a widely published analyst and commentator on China. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. Midnight in Peking will be made into an international mini-series by Kudos Film and Television, the UK creators of Spooks, Broadchurch and Life on Mars.
$250 (MEMBERS) Â Â Â $325 (GUESTS)
This event is only for club members, their guest and the media
