Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown

Scott Seligman’s Tong Wars is an excellent read that shed light on the underbelly of New York’s old Chinatown…..

Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlours or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day, as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons and even bombs. Welcome to New York City’s Chinatown in 1925.

TONG WARS is historical true-crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing their lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate them. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next 30 years.

Scott D. Seligman’s account roars through three decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and drug lords to reformers and do-gooders to judges, prosecutors, cops and pols of every stripe and colour. A true story set in Prohibition-era Manhattan a generation after Gangs of New York (Miramax, 2002), but fought on the very same turf.

China Rhyming Holiday Break – Off to the Beach till the end of July

China Rhyming needs a holiday – manuscripts have gone to editors, scripts are falling into place (more on all that after the summer) and it’s time to recuperate sur la mer for a month or so…

Some good news from Saigon – Banque de L’Indochine to be Preserved

Now it’s always been a worry that the magnificent Banque de L’Indochine branch in Saigon (on Vo Van Kiet Street – though you can’t really miss it), built between 1929 and 1930, has never before been recognised as a national relic. It is a magnificent structure – a great bank and dwarfs the Banque de L’Indochine’s properties on Shanghai’s Bund or Peking’s Legation Quarter (both of which remain).  Since 1957 it’s been the communist’s bank of course…

Here it is in 1955…

and today…with uglier cars and some monstrosity behind it…

Hoggard and Sigler’s, Sassoon Arcade

Hoggard and Sigler’s was one of Shanghai’s best antiques and curio stores. Located in the Sassoon Arcade, (part of the Cathay Hotel), the store was famous for very high quality art works and curios. The American-run company was in business from 1927 through till the war.  They stocked their own sourced antiques and curios as well as representing various specialists such as Nichols Chinese Rugs from Tientsin (Tianjin), which they traded under the name Fette Peking Rugs.

The partners in the business were Clarence Doane Hoggard (who had come to China in 1919 as an auditor for the international YMCA and stayed) and W. Warren Sigler (Sigler died some time before the end of WW2). The shop was partially damaged in August 1937 with the bombing of the Cathay Hotel on Bloody Saturday. Hoggard returned to Shanghai in 1940, salvaged what he could of the stock and left Shanghai once again for America. His ship was near Borneo at the time of Pearl Harbor but eventually made it back to the USA. After the war Hoggard continued to trade Oriental antiques and curios in America – at the time of his arrival back in the USA he mentioned opened stores in both Tuscon, Arizona and St Petersburg, Florida. He did indeed open a new shop at no.9 East Penington Street in Tuscon called “Tjen” (perhaps someone in Tuscon could stroll past and see what’s there now?). Here he seems to have sold the remaining stock of antiques, statuary and curios from his Sassoon Arcade store.

While in Shanghai Hoggard and Sigler seem to have done well from the curios business, owning a nice house from 1931 in the exclusive Columbia Circle  to the west of the Settlement (just off Xinhua Road now). However, they didn’t live there but rented it out to U.S. Harkson, a businessman who, among other interests, owned one of Shanghai’s first radio stations.

Items with a Hoggard-Sigler provenance still come up for auction now and then such the these below that were auctioned at Bonham’s in London quite recently and listed as having been purchased at Hoggard-Sigler around 1936.

Carved and tinted ivory model of a cabbage and insects – Republican period

group of three carved and tinted ivory martial figure – Republican period

A large carved ivory head of Guanyin – Republican period

America’s Roads More Dangerous than China in 1932, so says Floyd Gibbons

These days journalists (sorry media folk) just aren’t trusted much. It would be a brave advertiser that used a hack to endorse a product and expect the public to react well. Not so in the 1930s it seems. Floyd Gibbons was an amazing self-promoter and a journalist. He was a veteran reporter with the Chicago Tribune who had covered the Mexican border war of 1916, the torpedoing by the Germans of the Laconia (on which he was a passenger), the fighting at Belleau Wood in the First World War (where he lost his eye and took to wearing his trademark eye- patch) and the 1921 famine in Russia. In 1932 he headed to China to cover the fighting in Shanghai and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Still, he found time to endorse Goodrich Tyres. His point was that while he was watching the death and destruction in China even more people got killed and injured on America’s roads in car accidents….war correspondent with a mortgage to pay? maybe it’s time to call your agent?

Auguste Borget at the Macao Museum of Art

Excellent news that Macao’s Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the work of Auguste Borget (more details on times, venue etc here). For many of us it is George Chinnery who we associate with portraits of Macao, but Borget was almost as equally prolific as well as painting Hong Kong and southern China. Just as Chinnery left London and Dublin so Borget left Paris and pitched up in China, in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1838. He remained in southern China for nearly a year and did indeed know Chinnery – the two went on sketching expeditions together.

Borget went on to visit Manila, Singapore and India before returning to Paris – Chinnery of course remained a lifelong ex-pat. His best works are gathered together in his 1842 book Sketches of China and the Chinese. Borget’s work is now scattered among private collections and museums in Hong Kong, France, Hawaii (where he also stopped and painted) and Singapore. If you can get to Macao the exhibition runs till October 9 this year.

Borget’s work, like Chinnery’s, give us a pre-photographic view of Hong Kong, Macao and southern China in close detail, a quite fantastic pictorial record of the place, people and times….

Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China

Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China has been out for a few months, but I wanted to make sure it was available globally before mentioning (as people sometimes complain they can’t get books in various territories)….but it is now on all the usual online vendors and good bookstores (here at Amazon UK and here at Amazon US). I suppose I shouldn’t really need to recommend a new Lynn Pan book to China Rhyming regulars who I expect will be familiar with all her previous work….

Most people suppose that the whole world knows what it is to love; that romantic love is universal, quintessentially human. Such a supposition has to be able to meet three challenges. It has to justify its underlying assumption that all cultures mean the same thing by the word ‘love’ regardless of language. It has to engage with the scholarly debate on whether or not romantic love was invented in Europe and is uniquely Western. And it must be able to explain why early twentieth-century Chinese writers claimed that they had never known true love, or love by modern Western standards. By addressing these three challenges through a literary, historical, philosophical, biographical, and above all comparative approach, this highly original work shows how love’s profile in China shifted with the rejection of arranged marriages and concubinage in favor of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love.

Lynn Pan was born in Shanghai and educated in London and Cambridge, England. She is the author of more than a dozen books on China and the Chinese diaspora, including Shanghai Style; Tracing It Home; and Sons of the Yellow Emperor, the winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize.

‘This book, Lynn Pan’s best to date, adds a wonderful new angle by encouraging us, via comparison, to better appreciate how unusual, even in some ways exotic, a part of the Western past we take for granted, as though it were natural, actually is. While the reader will learn a great deal about Chinese literary and cultural traditions from this book, if read with an open mind the Western reader may end up rethinking things about his or her tradition just as deeply.’
—Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California at Irvine

‘Nobody writes about China quite as brilliantly as Lynn Pan, who in this new, illuminating work on love showcases her trademark erudition entwined with a novelist’s sensibility. Pan’s rare skill makes the book a treat from start to finish; a sumptuous, deft and moving analysis of China’s relationship with love.’
—Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang and The Other Side of Light

First Class Ticket for the Peak Tram, circa 1930s

Opening an old book the other day I found this ticket for the Peak Tram in Hong Kong circa 1930s. This one could get you from the Lower Terminus on Garden Road or the station at Kennedy Road up to Plantation Road (now the Barker Road station I think) or the Upper Terminus (now a ghastly shopping centre). You’ll note this is a first class ticket – first class was for colonial officials or residents of Victoria Peak only (second class was for military and Hong Kong Police personnel) and third class for everyone else and animals.