Langston Hughes in Shanghai, 1933

The poet, playwright, memoirist and activist Langston Hughes was born this week in 1902. In 1933 he spent three weeks in Shanghai – wandered the city, met some poets, took in the Canidrome Ballroom and recalled his arrival in the city in his memoir I Wonder as I Wander…

Taboo – All Roads Lead to China

Naturally there’s been some moaning and quibbles but generally the reviewers seem to like the new Stephen Knight drama starring Tom Hardy on BBC1, Taboo….I have to confess that I LOVE it personally….here’s the synopsis….

Adventurer James Keziah Delaney, long believed to be dead, returns home to London from Africa in 1814 in order to inherit his late father’s shipping empire. All is not what it seems, however, as Delaney encounters numerous enemies intent on making his life back in the United Kingdom very difficult. Focused on building a shipping empire to rival the imperious East India Company, Delaney’s other wish to seek vengeance for his father’s death means conspiracy, betrayal and bloodshed are also in the cards. As he works to accomplish that, Delaney must also navigate increasingly complex territories in order to avoid his own death sentence.

I make note of the programme here because China Rhymers may like to know that ultimately Delaney’s ambitions, his fights with the perfidious East India Company, the British Government, those pesky American rebels, and all manner of other strange types, are all in the service of securing a monopoly on the tea trade between Canton and the new United States of America….

Somerset Maugham’s The Beachcomber Gets a Pulping

Talking of publishing pulp version of more serious books yesterday, here’s W. Somerset Maugham’s The Beachcomber. Never heard of it? Not surprising – it’s actually Maugham’s short story Vessel of Wrath (1931), which is to be found in his 1933 collection of short stories Ah King. It is quite a racy story (Maugham did do plenty of racy) about a missionary couple on some remote islands of the Dutch East Indies. they have to suffer a man called Ginger Ted who is a drunk, scourge of the Dutch authorities and a womaniser (cavorting with local women no less!). One of the missionaries, Miss Jones, who obviously hates Ginger Ted, finds herself stuck with him on a broken down boat. She is sure that he will rape her, though in the morning her virtue is intact. Ginger Ted is outraged by the idea that he would have raped her; he never thought about it; it was all in the prim and proper Miss Jones’s mind. Eventually Ted does give up the drink and also comes to God. it’s a good story to contrast with Maugham’s short story Rain (1921) where missionaries and libertines clash with a very different outcome. Two films were made of the book – one in 1938 and another in 1954 and both called The Beachcomber.

Anyway, clearly the idea of a man and woman stuck together for a night in the middle of nowhere appealed to the pulp people who also opted for The Beachcomber rather than The Vessel of Wrath which is a rather obscure Bible reference.

The book was a success to the point that it seems the pulp publishers decided to pulp the entire Ah King collections of short stories as all rather ribald and saucy (which, read in a certain light, several of them indeed are)…

Robert Ford, Prisoner of the Communists in 1950s Tibet, Gets a Pulping

Robert Ford (1923- 2013) was a radio operator and British diplomat who worked in Tibet in the late 1940s. He was one of the few Westerners to be appointed by the last independent Tibetan government before the 1950 Chinese communist takeover. Ford was arrested in 1950 by the advancing Chinese army, accused him of espionage and spreading anti-communist propaganda. He spent nearly 5 years in jail, in constant fear of being executed, and was subjected to interrogation. Only in 1954 was he allowed to send a letter to his parents. At the end of 1954 his trial was held and he was sentenced to ten years jail. He was eventually released and expelled in 1955. In 1994, he declared that during the five years he spent in Tibet, he “had the opportunity to witness and experience at first hand the reality of Tibetan independence.” In 1957, he published a book, Captured in Tibet (U.S. title Wind Between the Worlds), about his experience.

What I didn’t know is that later, to reach a wider audience, a pulp cover version of the book was also published….

Pearl Buck Covers – Her Chinese Women

Browsing copies of various Pearl S Buck novels the other day I thought there must be a Phd for someone in differing representations of Chinese women on her covers….

The Shanghai Times Print Shop

In the 1930s The Shanghai Times newspaper ran a nice sideline in custom printing – stationery, business cards etc etc….all out of their print works down on old Shanghai’s  “Newspaper Row” at the Bund end of Avenue Edward VII (Yanan Road). Be wary though….The Shanghai Times, though English language, was known for its overtly pro-Japanese line was generally considered questionable by most of the foreign press corps.

The Old Pavement Fair of Shanghai – A New Year Tradition Once

I read a guide to Peking’s temple fairs at New Year the other day in The Beijinger by Jeremiah Jenne. During my lengthy China sojourn the temple fairs were slowly resurrected and are now pretty major again – not quite the 1930s when the Peace Preservation Corps of volunteer police would be mobilized to control crowds and catch thieves, but still…

However, sadly the old Chinese New Year tradition of the Shanghai Pavement Fair appears to have died out and not been resurrected. However, Osbert Sitwell in his 1939 book Escape With Me! has a quite lengthy and detailed description of Shanghai and the Pavement Fair at Chinese New Year in 1934 (ushering in the year of the dog, by the way). Here then is your Chinese New Year read from China Rhyming this year….it was Sitwell’s first encounter with China, a stopover in Shanghai before travelling on to Nanking, Tientsin and finally Peking…

‘The next morning was grey, and a bitter, knife-edged wind swept through this strange city, falling like a flail down the great modrn boulevard which leads from the Liverpool-like wharfs and river-front, past the crooked, tortuous streets of the Chinese town, with its zigzag bridges and alleys choked with people, to the racecourse. The whole of this thoroughfare has, on one side, a pavement pitched above the road and nearly as broad as the road itself. Ordinarily no block of people would have been permitted to assemble on road or pavement here, but today citizens were allowed to stroll and watch, to such a degree that progress was scarcely possible. Knot after knot, group after group, of Chinese, in European clothes and caps, in nondescript rags, or in their own quilted, padded winter robes, topped with fur caps, waited, laughing and talking, round the numerous attractions until the wide pavement had become a mile-long stage, for actors, acrobats, mountebanks and charlatans of various descriptions. The scene must somewhat have resembled a less elaborate Venetian carnival, save that here was no architectural frame, and that this grey blanket of cloud above us was substituted for the blue, autumnal, transparent sky of Italy. Down upon audience and performers, as in the ballet Petrouchka, drifted a few sad flakes of snow, occasionally increasing to a fine veil, melting on hats and shoulders. The noise was immense, actors and female impersonators, singers, clowns and ventriloquists, all ranted and vociferated; conjurors shouted as loud as they could, to divert public attention momentarily from the movement of their hands contriving the crucial sleight, and jugglers yelled in order to indicate their prowess. The yellow, naked trunks of wrestlers gleamed sweating through the thin snow, as they clutched each other round the waist, the muscles of arm and neck and shoulder standing out , and issued fake cries of rage or pain. Two men in long blue robes with fur collars, one of them blowing a trumpet, were leading along on a chain a heavily furred bear, which growled and groaned and grumbled as it trod heavily from side to side on two cruelly clawed feet that were yet too delicate for its weight. Some of the turns were elaborate, a scene from a well-known play acted in the proper dress; two actor-warriors, representing armies, clanging their swords, one against the other; a gang of eight or nine acrobats turning co-operative somersaults, or forming themselves into pyramids and towers. In the middle of another inquisitive cluster, a man in a black robe and a conical hat was giving an exhibition of the painless extraction of teeth (a very old Chinese art, which I do not pretend to understand, but to which, nevertheless, I constantly refer my dentist in London). There were, too, stalls devoted to the wonders of Chinese medicine, to witches’ brews of beetles, sea-slugs and noisome verdure, sealed up in huge jars (concoctions which, though unappetizing, have, it is said, some of science in them, effect their cures, though the healing art in China has been very little studied by the West), Professional storytellers banged their drums vigorously in several corners. Then there were singers, wailing to an accompaniment of lutes, and, for the children, Punch and Judy shows and marionettes, the booths decorated in red for the New Year. These last were surrounded entirely by the mothers and fathers, while their small boys of six or seven, in clothes padded like those of their elders, found themselves obliged to dart about beneath parental elbows in a vain struggle to see…This was my first experience of a Chinese fair, and though in the course of the next few months I was fortunate enough to witness many of them, in the courtyards of temples, or outside their gates, or in ruined palaces, none remains more vividly in my memory than this New Year pavement fair at Shanghai.’

Osbert Sitwell (by Cecil Beaton, 1926)

CLC Centenary – Major Purdon’s Phrasebook

2017 is the centenary of the deployment in Europe of the Chinese Labour Corps (see my previous blog posts on the appointment of Lieutenant-Colonel Bryan Fairfax as Commander of the CLC and the opening of the recruiting office for the CLC at Weihaiwei). Following Fairfax’s appointment it was announced that Major R.I. Purdon was appointed his second-in-command. Purdon eventually succeeded Fairfax in 1918 as Commander of the CLC and promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. Purdon produced a phrase book for those working with the CLC – the chief attributes of which are that it takes on board the various dialects spoken and also the importance of hierarchical relationships both within the CLC and among the men themselves.

Here then is the cover of the book….

image courtesy of Roy Delbyck