Protesting the Japanese Invasion of Manchuria…in Los Angeles

A picture today of women at a march in Los Angeles protesting the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the early 1930s….

A Record Night for Tax Receipts – December 27th 1947

The penultimate Christmas of old Shanghai was a big one – December 1947. Perhaps a little excuse for a big party before the lights started to go out?

Will Rogers Has a 1931 Shanghai Christmas

The American entertainer Will Rogers travelled the Far East in 1931 and had a fairly unique take on the place – “I may be all wet, and probably am, but when an American starts telling a Chinese “How to live,” why it’s like a new dude telling an old cowman how to run his ranch.”

Shanghai was a major stop on his tour and he liked Shanghai so much he returned in 1934 travelling again through many countries. Travelling out to Kobe he was on the same ship that brought the legendary jazz man Buck Clayton to Shanghai that year.

In 1931 he wrote back in his regular column to the folks back home about Christmas in Shanghai…

Merry Christmas from ‘The Shanghai Buster’

This was Bill Fairbairn’s Christmas card from the Shanghai Municipal Police Reserve Unit, better known as the anti-riot squad! The Christmas card was drawn for Fairbairn by the great White Russian cartoonist of Shanghai, Sapajou…Fairbairn was, of course, one of Shanghai’s legendary bad-asses who developed the ultimate fighting knife, engaged in hundreds of street fights, formed the Reserve Unit (Riot Squad) and later trained men and women in “gutter fighting” for behind the lines action in WW2….

A Shanghai Christmas 1935

In case you were wondering (as I of course was) just what Christmas in Shanghai was like in 1935…

Merry Christmas from Shanghai, 1945

Posted this last year….but it’s worth a second outing….

Many thanks to an old time Shanghailander, Bill Savadove, who sent me this card originally sent in 1945 from Shanghai by the United States Navy wishing the folks back home a “melly klisimas”…..

Tientsin Settlement Railway Station – early 1900s

An interesting picture of Tientsin (Tianjin) Settlement Railway Station – look closely (or click to enlarge) and you can see the “Settlement” signage – probably early 1900s I think…

Who was Little Miss Shanghai? Quite Somebody Actually….

In 1920 and 1921, “Shanghai Securities & Commodities Exchange” and “Shanghai Chinese Merchant Exchange” started operations. Radio was also beginning to become a force of communication in China. The state of the Stock Market Index was announced hourly on the radio by someone called “Little Miss Shanghai”. Apparently this was Miss Ai-Lien Wu and she stayed on the air reading the stock prices throughout the 1920s broadcasting to a loyal base of money merchants and many who just loved her voice.

But who was she? Well, it seems she was an Australian-Chinese called Alice Lim Kee and her career was far more varied than just reading the stock prices. She left Australia at 21 and travelled to Peking, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Chungking. She seems to have worked in the Teachers College in Peking for a while before finding a job in radio. She claimed to be the first female radio announcer in China, but also wrote for the North China Daily News, was a private secretary to Soong Ai-ling (one of the Soong sisters and wife of H.H. Kung) and appeared in some Shanghai movies – being famous enough to be introduced to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (below) when they visited Shanghai (see my post on that here).

Later she worked in the Chungking government and married Fabian Chow (a well known Chinese journalist at the time) and had a couple of kids. So she pops up under a bunch of names – Mrs Fabian Chow, Alice Lim Kee and her Cantonese name Wu Ai-lien. She’s also referred to in the Shanghai newspapers as  “Miss Alice Wu, elder daughter of Mr. Charles Lim-kee Wu, of Melbourne, Australia.” She visited Australia in 1938 as Mrs Fabian Chow and gave Chinese cookery demonstrations to raise money for China’s Civilian Relief Fund during the war.

Basically there are literally hundreds of stories of Alice…first Australian-Chinese woman elected a member of the KMT, visited Calcutta during the war and in 1943 arrived back in Oz with a personal message to the Australian people from Madame Chiang etc etc but I don’t have the room for them all. But back in 1921 she was the darling of Shanghai radio as Little Miss Shanghai reading those stock prices out on the hour, every hour.