Posted: March 2nd, 2017 | No Comments »
As part of the University of Westminster’s current Difference Festival the Regent Street Cinema is screening the 1919 film Broken Blossoms this Friday (3/3/17) at 5.30pm – admission is free and you get an introduction by Dr Anne Witchard (Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie and Lao She in London) and organ accompaniment by Donald Mackenzie. If you haven’t seen the film (directed by DW Griffith and starring Lillian Gish and Richard Bathelmess) you should – if for nothing else than it is an adaptation of one of Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights stories. Also, if you have visited the marvelously restored Regent Street Cinema this is a golden opportunity…booking (though it’s free) is here…
Cheng Huan is a missionary whose goal is to bring the teachings of peace by Buddha to the civilized Anglo-Saxons. Upon landing in England, he is quickly disillusioned by the intolerance and apathy of the country. He becomes a storekeeper of a small shop. Out his window, he sees the young Lucy Burrows. She is regularly beaten by her prizefighter father, underfed and wears ragged clothes. Even in this deplorable condition, Cheng can see that she is a priceless beauty and he falls in love with her from afar. On the day that she passes out in front of his store, he takes her in and cares for her. With nothing but love in his heart, he dresses her in silks and provides food for her. Still weak, she stays in his shop that night and all that Cheng does is watch over her. The peace and happiness that he sees last only until Battling Burrows finds out that his daughter is with a foreigner.
Posted: March 1st, 2017 | No Comments »
Thursday, 9th March 2017
2:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Shanghai High School Campus
Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center Historical Site Tour and Talk
Speaker & Tour Leader : Betty Barr & Sven Serrano
During World War II, Shanghai’s Japanese occupation forces held citizens of countries allied against Japan in internment centers. Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center (C.A.C.), located on what is now the campus of Shanghai High School, was one such facility.
RAS members, internment camp survivor Betty Barr and Shanghai High School International Division (SHSID) history faculty member Sven A. Serrano, guide an exploration of six surviving internment camp buildings on the campus.
Ms. Barr’s mother Ruth Hill Barr kept a clandestine diary during the family’s years in Lunghua. Titled Ruth’s Record: The Diary of an American in Japanese Occupied Shanghai 1941-1945, Earnshaw Press recently published this piece of living history which includes Betty’s explanations/clarifications and memories.
 Our tour on a school day, coincides with Betty’s annual meeting with SHSID students. The tour ends in the SHSID auditorium where Betty speaks about her wartime experience in the Lunghua C.A.C. and answers questions from students and RAS tour participants.
Address and directions provided to those who RSVP.
RSVP: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
ENTRANCE: Members: 100 RMB Non Members: 200 RMB
VENUE: Shanghai High School Campus; 989 Baise Rd, Shanghai ä¸å›½ä¸Šæµ·å¸‚百色路989å· (near Shanghai South Railway Station Metro Station and Shanghai Botanical Garden)
Posted: February 28th, 2017 | No Comments »
Read quite a number of memoirs of 1930s Shanghai and you’ll come up against the name Freddy Kaufmann. He was a well known figure in the city, the manager of several bars including Sir Victor Sassoon’s Tower Club in the Cathay Hotel. Kaufmann was immortalised in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War when the two met him in Shanghai in 1939 and included him in this great description of the city…
The tired or lustful businessman will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy, or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bathhouses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult in this climate, but there is whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleships. The jeweller and the antique dealer await your orders, and their charges will make you imagine yourself back on Fifth Avenue or in Bond Street. Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations.
Peter Watson (above) was a wealthy Englishman – gay, investing in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine, a knowledgeable art collector. He visited Shanghai briefly in 1937 shortly after the Japanese attack on the city. He ran in to Freddy too – but Peter had known him before, in his previous life, before Shanghai – when he had been an actor moonlighting as the manager of the Jockey Club Bar (below) in Weimar Berlin. The Jockey Bar opened in 1929 in what was then Lutherstraße 2, in the Charlottenburg district of the city. There’s a good history of the Jockey here and a list of luminaries who hung out there – Dietrich, Hemingway, Cocteau – too long to list here. Freddy has decided the Nazis were not good news and lit out for the Orient.
Watson left Shanghai for Hong Kong and then on to America on Christmas Eve 1937…his boyfriend (Denham Fouts – below) stayed on and reportedly got a job working in the Tower Restaurant for a time. He returned to Peter some time later in England…a confirmed opium addict.
(BTW: Although i have heard many stories and reminiscences of Kaufmann I had not heard the Peter Watson connection until reading Adrian Clark and Jeremy Dronfield’s excellent biography of Watson, Queer Saint)
Posted: February 27th, 2017 | 1 Comment »
I’ve blogged quite a bit about various curio stores in old Shanghai and Peking run by foreigners (Hoggard-Sigler, Jean Lindsay, Western Arts Gallery in Shanghai and The Golden Dragon, and of course The Camel Bell in Peking). Here though, from the 1930s is a Japanese run curio store in Shanghai – at 270 Kiangse Road (now Jiangxi Road) at the corner with Ezra Road (Shashi No.2 Road) – that also sold silk shirts. Most of their curios appear to be Japanese – Satsuma etc – though they also sold Chinese curios. I’m afraid I know very little about the shop except that it was run by Mr Toyo Murakami. I have no more leads on the store or the owner – sadly I don’t read Japanese and Toyo Murakami appears to be a very common name and so you can’t pin any of the leads down.
Posted: February 25th, 2017 | 1 Comment »
Walter Medhurst is remembered in this new biography of the intrepid missionary, adventurer, printer, writer, translator, teacher and nineteenth-century pioneer to China by John Holliday…
The early 19th-century was a time of great change in English society. The growth of Humanism brought debates about slavery, workers’ rights and suffrage, while Britain’s determination to build an empire offered ambitious young men the chance to make their mark. Against this backdrop, 19-year-old Walter Medhurst was finding his way in the world, becoming an apprentice printer when family financial problems forced an abrupt end to his studies at the prestigious St Paul’s school. A chance encounter with an inspiring preacher in his hometown of Gloucester, at a time when Evangelical Christianity was starting to fire the public’s imagination, brought about Walter’s conversion, and the picture was complete.
Walter Medhurst – printer, missionary, adventurer – was primed to embark on the mission of a lifetime: to take the Lord’s word to the people of the exotic Far East, and change the world forever. China was a closed society by order of its Emperor and, even then, its trade potential highly prized. Walter and wife Betty – a beautiful young Anglo-Indian widow and officer’s daughter with whom Walter fell in love and married during a three-month stop in Madras – would spend more than 20 years working with Chinese communities throughout Asia before Walter reached China’s shores in 1835. When the Medhursts finally settled in Shanghai in 1843, they were delighted to find – contrary to popular belief – an outgoing and resourceful people more than willing to interact with them. Dealing with Chinese authorities, however, required great diplomacy and tact and the formidable Medhursts employed every skill in their considerable arsenal to achieve their goal, establishing the LMS Mission Centre in Shanghai.
When he died in 1857, Walter Medhurst left behind a great legacy that included the Parapattan Orphanage, All Saints’ Jakarta, Renji Hospital, the Shanghai Mission Press and a Chinese Bible that was used for more than 70 years. But Walter’s greatest achievement was surely the opening up of China to the West, a lasting legacy that affects our world even today.
John Holliday served in the Royal Air Force before going into the IT business in the UK and then Australia. A visit to a still-functioning orphanage in Jakarta founded more than 180 years before by his ancestor, Walter Medhurst, kindled his interest in recording Walter’s life.
Posted: February 24th, 2017 | No Comments »
Chinese feminists have been having a hard time of it lately, but then it’s never been easy. Here’s an illustration of Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) in 1943 talking about the issue of women in China….
Posted: February 22nd, 2017 | No Comments »
The Shanghai Daily tells me that the old 1932 Rubicon Garden Villa (at 2409 Hungjao Road, now renamed 2310 Hongqiao Road) was, the former home of Sir Victor Sassoon, has been ordered to change a vegetable patch back to a heritage British flower garden. Destroying the garden (which survived warlords, Japanese invaders and red Guards but not a consulting company called Kamel who inhabit the site) were growing vegetables and raising chickens who would want their invetsment advise!) having trashed what was a heritage protected flower garden.
The villa was one of Shanghai’s supposedly protected cultural units since September 1989. This cultural protection included the maples and poplar trees oriignally planted around the property.
Rubicon, by the way, was an amusing name given to a small creek in the area that the paper chase hunters used to jump on horseback and is close by. Rubicon Road (now Hami Road, as anyone who has had to endure the compulsory Shanghai medical test for foreigners will know well) connected with Hunjao Road as part of the linking system that allowed the spread of the Western External Roads out towards Hungjao (Hongqiao) with its market gardens, farms, golf course, villas and aerodrome.
During WW2 the Japanese Navy took over the building. After Sassoon left Shanghai for good in 1950 a Ningbo tycoon bought the villa. After the revolution in the 1950s the villa was a sanatorium for workers of the Shanghai Textile Industry Bureau, as well as a retreat for the Gang of Four in the Cultural Revolution. I seem to remember visiting it once in the 1990s when it was the offices of BP, but I may be misremembering that – certainly it was a villa out Hungjao way.
Posted: February 21st, 2017 | No Comments »
Here an advert for the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company Ltd from 1930. The company dates back to the 1870s and was part of the Jardine Matheson empire. The main service from Shanghai ws up the Yangtze to Chungking….
BTW: their offices at 27 Bund were the offices of Jardines in Shanghai. You can read a history of that building by the writer and old China Hand Adam Williams here.
