Summer Holiday PhotoFest #4 – Broadway Mansions

Broadway Mansions, the Garden Bridge and the Soviet Consulate, Shanghai……

Summer Holiday PhotoFest #3 – the Best Bus Ride in the World

Jessfield Park (Zhongshan Park) to Hongkew Park (Lu Xun Park)…

Summer Holiday PhotoFest #2 – Rickshaws

Rickshaws racing across Chongqing (I think)…

Summer Holiday PhotoFest #1 – Shanghai Milkshakes

Quite simply I’m on holiday for a fortnight or so…so all you’re getting for the next two weeks are photos of 1930s China….

girls drinking milkshakes in 1930s Shanghai

Miss Fisher’s 1920s Parasols on the beach at Queenscliff

I’m off on my summer holidays today so nothing serious and a break from grisly murders up Shanghai lilongs or horrid debaucheries down dark Peking hutongs for a change…

Regular readers will know that I occasionally like to post a Chinese parasol picture or three – we’ve had parasols in the silent movies, parasols on the French Riviera, down at Bournemouth, at the Folie Bergere, in the lovely hands of Adele Astaire, covering Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald from the French sun, on a saucy French postcard and sported by Kay Francis in Mandalay…

But the queen of the parasol is perhaps Melbourne’s own lady detective Miss Fisher (Essie Davis of Miss Fisher Investigates). And here she is sporting a range in a lovingly 1920s recreation of the seaside town of Queenscliff, Victoria….

China’s Foreign Office in Buildings

First there was the Tsungli Yamen, founded in 1861, pictured here in 1878, on Dongtangzi Hutong in Doncheng….(wonderfully it is still there and in good order-ish)…

Then came the Foreign Office (Waiwubu) in 1901 – China didn’t have much choice as this change was mandated in the Boxer Protocols (article XII) – this also meant a new, grander, more European building…

And then, jumping a few other buildings in the rather chaotic times, the PRC built its own Ministry of Foreign Affairs Building in Chaoyang…regular readers will know that I could not possibly comment on a building such as this, it would be far too aesthetically painful!

The Russian Consulate – Tientsin, 1912

Russia gave up its treaty port rights in Tientsin (Tianjin) after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in 1920 having had a concession in the city since 1867. This is the Russian Consulate building in 1912 (it was built in 1904).

I believe the building still stands, just across the completely bizarre faux European Daguangming Bridge.

Parasols in Mandalay, 1934

I haven’t posted a parasol picture for a while – in the past we’ve had parasols in the silent movies, parasols on the French Riviera, down at Bournemouth, at the Folie Bergere, in the lovely hands of Adele Astaire, covering Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald from the French sun and ion a saucy French postcard from the nineteenth century (the search box to your right will offer up any of those goodies).

Today I thought a shot of Kay Francis from the 1934 movie directed by Michael Curtiz, Mandalay – it’s got just about everything you could want in a story – a nightclub, an abandoned White Russian beauty Francis), a steamer to the tropics and a villain. It looks great (and is on Youtube here) but was sadly not Rangoon and Mandalay but the Warner Bros lot in Burbank and the San Jaoquin River for the steamer shots.