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

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

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 Wanderwells in Mukden

And at the Summer Palace in Peking

Aloha Wanderwell

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

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’

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….

Get a new concubine – A Year of the Rooster Tradition Not Much Talked About These Days

Welcome to the Year of the Rooster – or the cock as they used to say till the sniggering got too loud. Many things associated with roosters so the superstitious tell me – leadership qualities, independence of thought etc etc blah blah. But one tradition from the Year of the Rooster seems not to be mentioned much these days, but it’s quite exciting – you may take a new concubine!

1921 was the year of the rooster and Elisabetta Cerruti (below), the new wife of the Italian Ambassador to China, Vittorio Cerruti (who, i think, was a generally OK bloke and later got on the wrong side of Mussolini for being soft on the French, not pro-Mussolini cult enough and decided to retire in 1938 rather than continue), was settling in at the rather sumptuous Italian Legation in Peking. Here’s her version of the tradition:

‘The cock is a malevolent force; yet, in spite of that, on the day he rules, the head of the family may take a new concubine, while the first wife on this day, which must be so disagreeable to her, is advised to weave silk, take medicine, and drink generously of new wine.’

Well…indeed…not sure how much new concubine taking, weaving of silk or supping repeatedly at a decent Merlot has been going on these last couple of weeks in China?

The Great Shanghai Bake Off, 1937

Here is a class of (not so) happy Chinese girls taking part in an “Occidental” baking class for “Orientals” (so the captions ran back then) run by missionaries at the Moore Memorial Church (now the Mu’en Church on Hankou Road) in Shanghai in 1937…the rolling pins, the bowls, the aprons – it’s as if Mary Berry had come to town!!

The Beachcomber (1954)

The other day I mentioned the various film versions of Somerset Maugham’s 1931 short story Vessel of Wrath. One of those is the 1954 movie The Beachcomber starring Donald Sinden, Glynis Johns and Robert Newton. It isn’t, in my opinion, as good as the earlier version from 1938 with Charles Laughton, not least because the later version moves the action from the Dutch East Indies to the Indian Ocean.

Anyway, it’s a rarely shown film nowadays but, if you happen to be in the UK, it’s on Talking Pictures TV today at 4pm….

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…