All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French

They Don’t Make Beijing Shop Signs Like They Used to

Posted: February 15th, 2017 | No Comments »

A marvellous old Peking street sign on Ta Tou Fu Hsiang (Ta meaning the big end of the street) for a slaughterhouse – the sign is a couple of dozen inflated pig bladders. One can only imagine the stench but looks interesting….


Hardy Jowett – A Little footnote – Home to Peking from School via a Soviet Gaol

Posted: February 14th, 2017 | No Comments »

Yesterday I blogged about an old Pekinger Hardy Jowett who went from missionary in the 1890s to an officer with the Chinese Labour Corps in WW1 to a British official in Weihaiwei to an oil executive in Peking….and there was a little story I cam across that was interesting too…from 1930…

The London Guardian reports that Hardy’s son, Christopher, had a bit of an ordeal at the Sino-Soviet border, at Chita, when he was just 18. Here he was, returning from school on England, in October 1930, to Peking. But it seems he lost his passport and, rather unfortunately and no doubt alarmingly for his parents, ended up in a Russian Commie jail without warm clothing or food. It seems he did get moved to a hotel and the whole snafu eventually worked out but among the long list of ‘a funny thing happened to me on the way from school’ stories this must rank pretty nightly….


CLC Centenary – Hardy Jowett and the Crossing

Posted: February 13th, 2017 | 6 Comments »

As it is the centenary of the formation, recruitment and deployment of the Chinese Labour Corps in WW1 I’ve been putting up the odd post as we move through the year noting highlights of events. If you’re interested just put ‘CLC centenary’ in the search box on this blog and they’ll all come up.

I want to give a quick mention to Hardy Jowett, an old time and long time Pekinger. Hardy Jowett is one of those people who pops up all over the place in China, especially Peking, in the first half of the twentieth century. I have long known him as the man who wrote the introduction to the excellent 1927 guide travel guide Sidelights on Peking Life by Robert W. Swallow. In that introduction Jowett describes himself as an old resident of Peking.

Jowett, from Bradford in Yorkshire, had originally gone to China in 1896 working for S. R. Myers and Co. Ltd., of Colliergate, Bradford. He began mission work in Hankow as a lay worker with the Wesleyan Methodist Society, was ordained and became a missionary.

He sailed with a detachment of the CLC recruits across the Pacific to Canada – when he was nearly 40 (so too old for active service). This means it must have been some time after the dreadful sinking of the Athos (post to come on that) by German submarines – many Chinese drowned in that disaster. The British then stopped using either the Cape of Good Hope or via Suez routes to Europe and opted for the Pacific to Vancouver, train across Canada to Halifax and then a second ship to Europe. This is the route Jowett took. In France he was initially given the rank of Technical Officer and then Second Lieutenant. at the end of the war he transferred to G.H.Q. as a Staff Captain in 1920.

Anyway, he made it through the war, became a colonial official, District Officer and Magistrate, in Weihaiwei for time and then worked for Asiatic Petroleum  as their Peking manager till 1933. Along the way he married an artist (Katherine Jowett nee Wheatley – an example of her great block prints below), couple of kids and died, in China, in 1936. His name crops up all the time in research – he was involved in so many things: Rotary Club, Toc H, the China International Famine Relief Commission, the Peiping Institute of Fine Arts, the College of Chinese Studies, the British Chamber of Commerce and the Famine Relief Commission.

Gate of the Rising Sun, Peking – Katherine Jowett

 


Hong Kong Exhibition – Echoes of the Manila Galleon c.1584 – 1815 – from 21/2

Posted: February 12th, 2017 | 2 Comments »

Echoes of the Manila Galleon c.1584 – 1815

A collection of original antique maps and prints

which ties in nicely to a new Penguin China title:

The Silver Way

China, Spanish America and the birth of globalization

1565 – 1815

by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales

The show continues until Saturday 11th March 2017

Wattis Fine Art Gallery

2/F 20 Hollywood Road

Central, Hong Kong

Tel +852 2524 5302 E-mail info@wattis.com.hk


25/2/17 – M on the Bund, Shanghai – The Launch of the New Edition of Norwood Allman’s Classic Shanghai Lawyer

Posted: February 11th, 2017 | No Comments »

Wonderful to see Earnshaw Books republishing this great classic of old Shanghai…

Diplomat, lawyer, judge, soldier, spy, spymaster: just a few of the positions American, Norwood Allman, held in his 30 plus years in China. Shanghai Lawyer is Allman’s first-hand account of his amazing 27 years in China from 1914 to the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1941.

Douglas Clark, himself a “Shanghai Lawyer”, has annotated Allman’s classic bestseller to dig up dirt, name names and tell tales. Over 200 hundred contemporaneous photos, cartoons, clippings and historical papers illustrate Allman’s story in full. Doug will take us along Allman’s extraordinary life in China as well his later life as a spymaster in the OSS and CIA.

The book has been edited and annotated by Doug Clark of Gunboat Justice fame too….

more details, booking and all that here

 


The Intrepid Wanderwells Run into some Trouble in Mukden

Posted: February 10th, 2017 | No Comments »

In 1921, Walter Wanderwell was capturing headlines with the Million Dollar Wager, a round-the-world endurance between two teams racing Ford Model Ts to see which team could visit the most countries. He took his young bride along with him – Idris Galcia Welsh – who took the name Aloha Wanderwell. In 1924 they got to Tientsin from Singapore and pitched up in Mukden (Shenyang) where they found warlord battles were raging and they found fuel a little hard to procure. Eventually they did some though and off they went – Peking, Shanhaikwan, up to Harbin and then over the border into the USSR and on their way.

the_philadelphia_inquirer_sat__nov_8__1924_The Wanderwells in Mukden

And at the Summer Palace in Peking

Aloha Wanderwell

 


As it would be Wellington Koo’s 129th Birthday this week….

Posted: February 9th, 2017 | No Comments »

Here’s a cartoon of him by the great Shanghai-based White Russian artist Sapajou from the front page of the North-China Daily News on the 13th November 1926…

For those not intimately concerned with Sino-Belgian affairs (tut, tut), China had attempted to revise the Sino-Belgian Treaty of 1885 to an agreement with greater fairness and reciprocity. Brussels wasn’t having any of it (and didn’t even have the courtesy to reply to Peking) so Wellington Koo tore up the treaty….


A Tense Week in 1939 in Soochow – ‘NO TRESPASSING ON US PROPERTY’

Posted: February 8th, 2017 | No Comments »

This week in 1939 there was trouble in Soochow (Suzhou)….American church schools in the city were being seriously pressured by the Japanese. The US Consulate (presumably in Shanghai) issued seals declaring the schools US property and stating ‘No Trespassing’. New Stars and Stripes were provided to be flown over the schools so as no mistake could be made. Against Japanese wishes the missionaries who ran the schools refused to teach with Japanese supplied textbooks….