Beijing Philistines to Destroy 107-year-old Qinghuayan Station – Remembering it’s opening in 1910

Beijing proves, once again, that it has no interest whatsoever in heritage, preservation or architecture as it decides to bulldoze the 1910 built Qinghuayuan Railway Station (details from The Beijinger here). Words cannot describe how horrible this is – though I do hope that those who email me telling me that heritage is now a priority in China and the destruction has stopped in Beijing (and Shanghai and elsewhere) will realise their errors.

Anyway, as we shed a tear in farewell to Qinghuayuan, which managed to survive 107 years, here’s Frank G. Carpenter, the American travellers, author, photographer and journalist, in 1910 passing along the line between Peking and Kalgan (or Zhangjiakou if you must) when he decided to travel on all of China’s new railways….you can click on it to enlarge….

Anna May Wong’s Black Felt Hat, 1927

I note that the people at SupChina (no, I don’t understand what that means either) made a little video about the life and career of Anna May Wong. Regular ChinaRhyming readers will know that I never miss a chance to post another picture or anecdote regarding Anna.

Here, from 1927, is Anna May (bottom right) wearing one of the new seasons hat – dark black felt….The other millinery models are all aspiring silent movie actresses of the time

The Shanghai Suicide of Beatrice Den Adel, 1928

Reading through the old Shanghai newspapers between the wars it’s shocking how often suicide is recorded. Of course people committed suicide when diagnosed with terrible diseases, when they lost their fortunes, when there was no safety net to support them in hard times. Beatrice’s sucidie in April 1928 seems to have multiple causes – and perhaps, at the end of the day, none of those speculated in the papers….

Beatrice took an overdose of drugs on April 6 1928 in Shanghai. She was at the time described as Shanghai’s ‘only American dancing girl’ which may or may not have been quite accurate. Either way she was American and she was a dancer, though had not perhaps been born Beatrice Den Adel. She was 33 years old and had been dancing in nightclubs and cabarets in the Far East for eleven years reportedly.

The newspapers suggested Beatrice was getting a little old for dancing; that the more recently arrived and younger Russian emigre girls mocked her for her age. They were said to be jealous of her popularity and her ability to speak English. The authorities in Shanghai tried to trace her relatives – she had left $6,000 behind. They had only two clues – she claimed to be from Chicago and that her mail arrived from Denver.

That’s all I know at the moment – I don’t have a photo of her, I don’t know where sh danced in Shanghai or where she originally came from and if the authorities ever tracked her next of kin down.

Unreported World Preview: North Korea’s Reality TV Stars + Panel Discussion – Frontline Club, London – 19/4/17

Lit Hub’s Crime and the City #2 – Melbourne

A quick aside – i am now writing a fortnightly column for The Literary Hub entitled Crime and the City – every fortnight a different city around the world and a look at its crime writing – old and new; novels, true crime and TV; noir, policiers, cosies, oddities….

The first city I visited was Amsterdam; this week it was Melbourne – coming up are Havana, Atlanta, Shanghai and Manila among others….

Formosa Calling: An Eyewitness Account of the February 28th, 1947 Incident

The excellent Camphor Press in Taiwan has just published Formosa Calling in both e-book and paperback…..an account of the horrific events that lay undisturbed in a trunk in New Zealand for fifty years before being published in 1998…

Recently occupied by the Nationalist Chinese regime, Taiwan in early 1947 was a powder keg. Anger at the corrupt misrule of the new government erupted into protests and riots, which quickly became an island-wide uprising. The response from the Nationalists was brutal and overwhelming – a weeks-long massacre in which local leaders and intellectuals were systematically slaughtered. Estimates of the dead range from ten thousand to thirty thousand. The killings became known as the “228 Massacre”, the “228 Incident”, or simply “228”, after the date of the first riots (February 28).

Allan J. Shackleton was a New Zealand officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration assigned to in Taiwan at the time. His eyewitness account of the massacre is an important piece in understanding modern Taiwan’s founding tragedy. Shackleton tried for years to get Formosa Calling published, but it was deemed too politically sensitive during the Cold War when “Free China” was an ally of the Western world. Finally, after Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election, a Taiwanese-American publisher approached Shackleton’s son to publish the book, and it first appeared in 1998, forty years after it was written.

Margaret Mackprang Mackay’s Lady With Jade, 1939

Margaret Mackprang Mackay published her novel Lady with Jade in 1939. Mackay had written a previous novel set in China, but I think Lady with Jade is more interesting to those with an interest in the foreign colony in China between the wars. However, it is hard to get hold off and often quite expensive….

Chinese-American flapper, journalist and author Flora Belle Jan described Mackay as taller than average, svelte, with narrow blue-grey eyes, a wide thin mouth, fair skin which freckles in summer and auburn hair. Helen Foster Snow disliked the novel (the main character is loosely based on Helen Burton who ran the Camel Bell store in the Grand Hotel de Pekin, and for who Helen acted as a mannequin in the 1930s) as too ‘pretty-pretty’…but she wrote this when in her most communistic phase so maybe she mellowed towards the book later (after ditching the awful Edgar)….

from Kirkus, October 1939

Again a background of China, in which the author loses herself a little too completely for eye-comfort, but nevertheless a well-developed piece of characterization and an unusually colorful, exotic backdrop. The story is that of an American, Moira Chisholm, who separates from her husband and stays on in Peking to which she has become rooted. Sybaritic, cold, but vital, she has an excessive passion for beauty per se, for which she finds an outlet in opening a curio shop, working with old brocades and metals, collecting and creating. She withdraws gradually from people, refuses marriage twice over, and finally falls in love profoundly but at the last minute renigues on marriage, realizing that no human relationship will ever be a satisfactory substitute for the immaculate, classic perfection of the jades and objects d’art to which she has given her life, and which, by the close she resembles. Capable portraiture, fascinating material, but overlong.

Kate O’Brien, The Spectator, 18 July 1940

Lady With Jade could almost be described, in theatrical jargon, as a presentation. It is an enormously laborious parade of Peking, of its art curios and its curio trade. A woman called Moira Chisholm is taken with a passion for the surface beauties of Chinese life, and starts a curio shop about eight years before the outbreak of the current Sino-Japanese war. She becomes successful, and a local celebrity ; she collects a set of jewel jade for herself ; she collects and discards a preposterous lover ; she decides to stay in Peking when all other foreigners forsake it. It might be a marvellous story—it is a boring one. The heroine is deadly and, spreads her cold, vulgar deadliness over the whole book, almost even, for the weary reader, over the ancient art of China. In any case, it will be a long time before I want to hear any more about Chinese jewel jade.

Nadia Georges-Picot in Shanghai

Here’s one for the French to see what they can find – Nadia Georges-Picot. Nadia, a White Russian in France later, was born around 1903 as Nadia (or Nadya) Biske. She married Guillaume  Georges-Picot (sometimes just George-Picot and sometimes with the hyphen) in 1932. Guillaume, from a public service oriented family in France, was a diplomat was served between 1937 and 1940 as First Secretary at the French Embassy in China (which, at the time of his appointment, was mostly located at Shanghai due to the Japanese invasion). In 1940 Guillaume and Nadia had a baby in Shanghai, called Olga (below), who went on to become a well-known actress in France before committing suicide in 1997. Guillaume joined the Free French in 1942, serving as a liaison with the USA, and died in 1981 after a long and distinguished di0lomatic career post war at the UN. I’m afraid I do not know when Nadia died.

My interest in her was peaked because no lesser a personage than Elsa Schiaparelli (in her autobiography Shocking Life) refers to Nadia as very stylish and recalls visiting her, after the war, in Washington DC she writes that their home, ‘might have been in Peking or Saigon, so filled was it with all the captivating things she had brought back from China.’