All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Corruption’s nothing new in China; certainly nothing new in Shanghai; and extreme measures to try and deal with it are nothing new either…here from October 1 1948…
We have a new ebook (with paper copies to follow next year) of Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China (1933), the story of the young American expats working for SOCONY selling oil throughout China’s hinterlands. The new edition s being published by Taiwan’s Camphor Press – see the new cover below. If you haven’t read it you really should – there’s also a not-so-great 1935 B-movie adaptation. It was a massive China bestseller in its day – up there with Carl Crow and Pearl Buck – and one of only a couple of China books selected during WW2 as a title for the Armed Forces Editions (see here).
The new reprint made me dig out my own old copy from 1933…
the artwork on the inside back cover
The latest edition to my Zed Books Asian Arguments series is, if I say so myself, timely – though has been in the planning for some years. Sadly however the publication of Francis Wade’s Myanmar’s Enemy Within comes at a devastating time for Muslim minorities in Myanmar….
For decades Myanmar has been portrayed as a case of good citizen versus bad regime – men in jackboots maintaining a suffocating rule over a majority Buddhist population beholden to the ideals of non-violence and tolerance. But in recent years this narrative has been upended.
In June 2012, violence between Buddhists and Muslims erupted in western Myanmar, pointing to a growing divide between religious communities that before had received little attention from the outside world. Attacks on Muslims soon spread across the country, leaving hundreds dead, entire neighbourhoods turned to rubble, and tens of thousands of Muslims confined to internment camps. This violence, breaking out amid the passage to democracy, was spurred on by monks, pro-democracy activists and even politicians.
In this gripping and deeply reported account, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar’s case, some of the most respected and articulate voices for democracy have turned on the Muslim population at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.
Today Google has devoted their search engine to the great female foreign correspondent Clare Hollingworth. Hollingworth was known for her reporting in World War Two and also her trips to China. She ended up deciding to live in Hong Kong. She died back in January at a wonderful 105! I wrote a small tribute to her and her Hong Kong days for The Literary Hub here. Today is her birthday – she was born on the 10/10/11 (what a great day to be born for a China Hand – I hadn’t realised before!!)
So Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel prize for literature. China Rhyming readers will all obviously know his Shanghai-set When We Were Orphans (2000) and know his screenplay for the Shanghai-set movie The White Countess (2006). Ishiguro’s link to Shanghai is that his Japanese grandfather worked for Toyota in Shanghai in the inter-war period and his father was born in the International Settlement. Toyota then was primarily a textiles company.
Toyota Textiles had a rather rocky ride in Shanghai. I’m not sure when Ishiguro’s grandfather arrived in Shanghai. Toyota Mills was first founded in Shanghai in 1920. During the communist-organized strike wave of 1925 in Shanghai Japanese workers were fired upon and the Toyota Textile Mill set alight. Toyota called for Japanese navy vessels to come to Shanghai to protect Japanese commercial interests. In 1925 Japan did not move gunboats to the Whangpoo – of course, at other times they would do just that. However, despite constant strike agitation and various anti-Japanese boycotts apparently the Toyota Textile mills were consistently profitable.
Toyota Textiles are often referred to as Toyoda – the Toyota company was started by the Toyoda family manufacturing automated looms for Japan’s weaving industry. The name change came about in 1936 and was to do with lucky 8s – the number of strokes to write Toyota in Japanese being eight. At its height Toyoda/Toyota Textiles in Shanghai had 40,000 spindles operating and 1,300 looms. They also got to take over the mills of the Chinese Rong family after they were confiscated by the Japanese military in 1937 and handed over to Toyoda (showing neatly the close links between the Japanese army and major corporations in the occupation of Shanghai). The mills were all out in the Western Roads District, the rather lawless Badlands area in the late 1930s and beyond the control of the Settlement authorities. ‘m not sure the actual mill address but I think they were up above what is now Zhongshan Park (formerly Jessfield Park) close to the banks of Soochow (Suzhou) Creek close to Robison Road (now Changshou Road). Toyoda also certainly had mills further to the north-west along Chungshan (or Chungsan sometimes) Road (today’s Chingshan North Road, by what is now the Inner Ring Elevated Road, north of Suzhou Creek in Chapei (Zhabei).
A Shanghai textile mill (but not Toyoda)
An old Shanghai anecdote I came across the other day that I didn’t know previously. It’s from Danish journalist Karl Eskelund’s memoir of his trip back to China in 1957, The Red Mandarins (1959). Eskelund’s an interesting character himself – a journalist in China in the 1930s, married a Chinese woman, his father had been the King of Siam’s dentist.
Anyway, here’s the anecdote – Eskelund is recalling an incident on the Shanghai Bund around 1936. He got into an altercation with a Chinese rickshaw puller over the fare. A small matter but the inevitable crowd of curious onlookers gathered round blocking the street. A Sikh Shanghai Municipal Policeman came over to sort out the incident. Of course he had little interest in the Chinese puller’s side of the argument – even though Eskelund thought the puller’s argument was valid in hindsight. The policeman told the puller to stop arguing and go about his business or he’d ‘confiscate your cushion’, meaning the cushion the rickshawmen provided the passenger to give their rear end some comfort on the journey. Without it nobody would hire their rickshaw.
Eskelund recalls that this was the usual punishment for a rickshaw puller and they would then have to go to the police station to redeem their confiscated cushion for the price of a dollar (Chinese). Obviously a major hassle and so to be avoided. How much the SMP made out of this system I’ve no idea!
Regular readers will know I regularly feature pictures of Chinese parasols in various setting (just put parasol in the search engine to your right). Here, for reasons I know not, is Tom Petty (1950-2017) with a parasol…
The New Journal of Wilmington, Delaware reports the following sign on a gate by the Forbidden City in September 1934….
