All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
This ode to Shanghai’s Nanking Road appeared in 1933 and is penned by a certain Ellen Dickinson, resident of the city. I know nothing at all about Miss Dickinson I’m afraid…but here’s a small poem anyway….
I posted yesterday regarding Reuters’ offices on Avenue Edward VII (now Yanan Road) – by 1940 The Avenue Eddy and the cluster of newspaper and wire services offices, known as “Newspaper Row”, were a frontline in Shanghai – both as various sides threatened to bomb and snipe at the offices as well as being the border between the Settlement and Frenchtown – as you can see precautions were taken….
A letterhead for the Reuters news agency from 1937 Shanghai – headquartered on “Newspaper Row” aka Avenue Edward VII (The “Avenue Eddy” and now Yanan Road East). Especially handy as the traffic offices for cablegrams out of and into Shanghai were at 34 Avenue Edward VII too. However, some tensions may have been apparent as Japan’s Domei news agency was in the same building as was the German Trans-Ocean News Service.
In 1935 American journalist Sam R. Leedom undertook a round the world reporting trip for the Californian newspaper, The Fresno Bee. He stopped off in Macao around March that year and sent back some photos…
The shelf of Taiwan-US relations has got noticeably longer in recent years. Here’s another addition – Hsiao-ting Lin’s Accidental State...
Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the “Two Chinas” dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. This is the conventional narrative that Hsiao-ting Lin challenges in Accidental State. Drawing on recently declassified archives, he shows that the creation of a Taiwanese state in the early 1950s owed more to serendipity than careful geostrategic planning. It was the cumulative outcome of ad hoc half-measures and imperfect compromises, particularly when it came to the Nationalists’ often contentious relationship with the United States. Taiwan’s political status was fraught from the start. The island had been ceded to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, and during World War II the Allies promised Chiang that Taiwan would revert to Chinese rule after Japan’s defeat. But as the Civil War turned against the Nationalists, U.S. policymakers reassessed the wisdom of backing Chiang. Cold War realities and the fear of Taiwan falling into Communist hands led Washington to recalibrate. Yet American support of a Taiwan-based Republic of China remained ambivalent, and Taiwan had to eke out a place for itself in international affairs as a de facto, if not fully sovereign, state.
Anne Witchard has a Q&A with James H Bollen on the Los Angeles Review of Books China Blog regarding his new book of photography, Wallpaper: The Shanghai Collection. I’ve written about James’s previous book that dealt with the Shanghai imagery of JG Ballard here. In his new book Bollen juxtaposes images of architectural destruction in Shanghai with quotes from William Morris. The Q&A and some images from the book are here….details of how to get the book are on Bollen’s website here….
David Leffman’s The Mercenary Mandarin, the life of William Mesny, is all new to me…so thank you Blacksmith Books for publishing….
Jersey-born William Mesny ran off to sea as a boy and jumped ship at Shanghai in 1860 when he was just 18. Amid the chaos of foreign intrigue and civil war in 19th-century China, he became a smuggler, a prisoner of the Taiping rebels, a gun-runner and finally enlisted in the Chinese military.
After five years of fierce campaigning against the Miao in remote Guizhou province, Mesny rose to the rank of general and used this privileged position to travel around China – to the borders with Burma, Tibet and Vietnam – writing opinionated newspaper articles, collecting plants and advising government officials on the development of railways, telegraphs and other modern reforms.
Mesny eventually settled in Shanghai with a 16-year-old concubine and published Mesny’s Chinese Miscellany, a weekly magazine about his experiences. But his story was not to end well. After his implication in an illicit arms deal, his fortunes never recovered, and when he died in 1919 he was working as a desk clerk.
David Leffman has spent over 15 years footstepping Mesny’s travels across China, interviewing locals and piecing together his life story from contemporary journals, private letters and newspaper articles.
Some extreme nationalists reacted very angrily to the new, more racey, fashions of 1934 Shanghai. It seems some “patriots” got very annoyed by imported foreign fashions, particularly silk stockings and high heeled shoes. A spate of nasty acid throwings hit the city in April. The problem spread to other cities – a Chinese woman in new foreign clothes a Hankow cinema had nitric acid thrown into her lap in the dark – her assailant escaped. The rather vile craze seems to have passed swiftly but left some women badly scarred.
