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

RAS China Journal 2017 – Call for Submissions

You may know that RAS China publishes an annual journal which combines a scholarly approach with an easily accessible style

(http://www.royalasiaticsociety.org.cn/publications/). 

A new editorial team has recently been appointed, composed of myself as the Journal’s editor and my colleague Dr. Ines Eben v. Racknitz, an historian at Nanjing University, as deputy editor. My own background is as a scientist; I am an astrophysicist at Peking University, where I have been employed full-time for the past 7 years. I have more than 10 years of experience in journal editing in my own research field, first as Scientific Editor of The Astrophysical Journal (6 years), followed by my current role as deputy editor in chief of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Simultaneously, I have been freelancing as language editor in the sciences for a number of different publications cations. These experiences form the basis of my new role as the editor of the Journal of the RAS China, where I will be handling both the managerial and the linguistic aspects.

However, Ines and I cannot populate the journal with interesting articles on our own. This is where you, the RAS China membership, playa crucial role! The Journal is only as good or as bad as the articles submitted to the editors for publication. Please consider contributing one or more articles and feel free to get in touch with us to discuss options, either peer reviewed or non-peer reviewed. We are open to suggestions and will work with you to benefit the Society as a whole.

Allow me to introduce our publication philosophy:

The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China is a scholarly journal which aims at publishing articles that are accessible to a broad cross-section of the culturally literate public. The Journal’s publication frequency is once annually, both in print and online. It publishes original research articles of up to 10,000 words (although shorter articles are certainly also welcome; please check with the editorial team) on Chinese culture and society, past and present, with a focus on Mainland China. Original articles, which may be peer-reviewed (in consultation with the honorary editor), must be previously unpublished, and make a contribution to the field. Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the honorary editor or the deputy editor (contact details below) to explore the suitability of their potential contributions. Peer-reviewed articles, assessed by a minimum of two independent reviewers, will be marked as such in the Journal.

The Journal also publishes timely reviews of books on all aspects of Chinese history, culture and society. Again, prospective authors are strongly encouraged to contact the editorial team prior to embarking on any writing project.

The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China is a continuation of the original scholarly publication of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, published 1858–1948. Through its collection of peer-reviewed articles, the Journal proudly maintains the level of academic standards and innovative research that marked its standing as the pre-eminent Western Sinological journal in China for nearly a hundred years.

Prospective authors should follow the style recommendations in the Chicago Manual of Style, but articles must be submitted in British English. (Nevertheless, the editorial team will work on submissions that need some standardization.) All articles should include an abstract of up to 250 words and provide references (citations) to any external material consulted. Colour figures may be possible but this is not guaranteed (to be determined). An edited page proof will be provided prior to publication. Authors are required to return any corrections to their proofs within a week of receipt. Only proposed corrections to factually incorrect information introduced during the editing process will be considered; issues affecting the Journal’s style are illegible for correction. Word documents are preferred, although submissions in LATEX format can also be handled.

Inquiries may be sent to the Journal’s Editor, Dr Richard de Grijs (Peking University), grijs@pku.edu.cn, or to the Deputy Editor, Dr. Ines Eben v. Racknitz (Nanjing University), ines.evracknitz@gmail.com.

Thanks for your consideration and your patience in reading this far! We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Submission deadlines:

– Peer-reviewed manuscripts: 1 March 2017

– Non-peer-reviewed manuscripts: 1 May 2017

Publication: August/September

Chan Kee Furs of the Szechuen Road

There were many fur shops and furriers in old Shanghai – not least the well-known Siberian Fur Store on the Avenue Joffre (see my post on them here). Chan Kee was less famous but still seems to have had a good selection – sable, leopard, ermine, squirrel and beaver. This ad for the store is from 1930….

The Willow-Fluff of Peking Under Threat – Leave the Poor Wandering Souls Alone

I read a story the other day that the Beijing government is planning to poison the city’s female poplar and willow trees – the ones that produce the floating cottonwood, or catkins, that suffuses the air of the city in early Spring. Now I know a lot of people don’t like it and it upsets their nasal passages etc, but personally I love it and see it as an essential part of Peking. The plan involves injecting poison into the trees.

I’ve mentioned this before and one irate reader contacted me to say that I shouldn’t care about the poplar and willow trees as they were all planted in the 1960s by the communists and I don’t like them so I shouldn’t like the trees. Well, it may be true that I don’t much care for communists but it’s not quite the case about the trees – there was indeed a bunch of new plantings in the 1960s but the willow and poplar go back much further and have been an integral part of Peking’s exit from a harsh winter into a mild spring for a lot longer.

Nowadays people do mostly moan about the drifting cottonwood but they used to think very differently – here’s that old Pekinger Harold Acton on the subject:

‘The air was full of willow-fluff that blew up from the trees on the southern side of the (Tartar) Wall (the Chinese will tell you that each of those flakes is a wandering soul).’

So next time you feel inclined to moan about the cottonwood remember that each tuft may just be a wandering soul….

The Peking Cocktail of the 1930s? The Gloomchaser

I was rereading Harold Acton’s Peonies and Ponies last week and he notes that the cocktail everyone was drinking in the late 1930s in Peking was the Gloomchaser – Japanese incursions, war threats, dust storms, depleted numbers in the foreign colony, and then the horse racing at Paomachang got cancelled – who wouldn’t need a Gloomchaser? So here you go – a generous measure of Grand Marnier, the same of Triple Sec, slightly less of lemon juice, a dash or two of grenadine and some ice – shake and serve…it was all the rage in Peking in 1937….

Acton in Peking

25 Walks in Myanmar: Exploring the Historic Landmarks of Myanmar

Heritage walking in Burma with Kenneth Barratt…

Myanmar, also called Burma, is one of Asia’s least-known destinations—a situation that is rapidly changing now as the country welcomes increasing numbers of foreign visitors. This is the first walking guide to present all the important heritage attractions and historical sites in the country. Author Kenneth Barrett not only takes you there, but explains in loving detail how each district and building evolved, who built what, and the special significance of the fascinating sites encountered along the way—everything you’d want in a Myanmar travel guide.

25 Walks in Myanmar helps you discover this ancient land by guiding you on foot through the old neighborhoods and bringing them to life. The works of great Burmese kings, the grand trading houses and colonial offices built by the British, the temples and mosques erected by Indian and Chinese traders—all are preserved in this time-locked land, and each tells a unique story.

Written from a highly personal viewpoint, 25 Walks in Myanmar is your companion in a series of urban strolls that open up new worlds which would otherwise remain unknown. Now is the time to explore Myanmar and Kenneth Barrett is your knowledgeable guide to an unforgettable journey through Asia’s most fascinating land.

Catch the Results in Reno at Shanghai Lows

Shanghai Low was a very famous Chinese restaurant in Reno, Nevada. They were based down on North Center Street. I’ve blogged about the restaurant before and it’s rather east-west Thanksgiving menu. Shanghai Low was always coming up with new ways to attract custom – such as this attempt in 1924 to sell you drinks and food while you listened to the wireless reports of the Presidential Election. Presumably those that voted for Coolidge stayed for the dancing; those who voted for the Democrat John W. Davis or the Progressive Party’s Robert La Follette went home early. I’m sure if Shanghai Low were still on business they’d have an inauguration day special on the menu!