This is the story of Southeast Asia’s natural history collections.Officially established in 1878, the previous Raffles Museum – the oldest in the region – has one of the largest collections of Southeast Asian animals. With the opening of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum at the National University of Singapore in 2015, the original Raffles Museum was ‘reincarnated’ and the loop on its remarkable 127-year history has closed.
Beneath the sleek exterior of the modern museum building lies a saga of titanic struggles and changes. That the collections survived at all—through the multiple challenges of the nineteenth century, the disruption of World War Two, and its potential disintegration in the face of Singapore’s modernization—is nothing short of miraculous. This book is not only an institutional history of the museum but also tells the story of the frustrations, commitment and courage of the numerous individuals who battled officialdom, innovated endlessly and overcame the odds to protect Singapore’s natural history heritage.
Japan’s attempt, begun in 1935, to detach the whole of North China into a pro-Tokyo buffer state was met with anger and protest in Peiping (as Peking then officially was) in early 1936. More on the North China Buffer State Strategy here (I haven’t got the time to run through the whole thing). Anyway, here in pictures is how the Peiping Police reacted to student protests against Tokyo’s attempted annexation in January 1936. Think how cold a Beijing January is and how cold that was! In this instance students got the best of the cops and managed to turn the cold water hoses on them….
This is a great video about the old Nansheng Department Store in Shantou, built in the 1930s and now sadly derelict and decaying after decades of neglect. It’s obviously not going to last much longer, despite being a beautiful building and well constructed originally. Strangely this fascinating video, by Peter Lin and DJ Clark, is released by the China Daily, not a newspaper who’s editors (all good Communist-Nationalists) or sponsors (the Communist Party of China) have ever cared one jot about heritage or preservation in China. It also happens to pop up on the China Daily’s Youtube channel – again strange that a Communist Party newspaper that presumably supports the Party’s ban on Youtube in China itself should have a Youtube channel!! Still, terrific video and let’s hope the building can survive somehow….
Every city has areas that shine for a few decades and then fade away but none so visible as Shantou. In the 1930’s a new commercial district was built with a new shinny department store at its heart. Streets radiated in every direction full of shops and small markets. It stayed the epicenter of this thriving port city until the local government rebuilt the central business district in the 1990s to the west, leaving the store and the streets around it to slowly decay.
If you’d gone to the cinema in America in April 1927 to see Kosher Kitty Kelly you’d have got some newsreel footage of the US Marines parading through Shanghai – they were there to protect the International Settlement as the strikes mounted that led days later to the Shanghai Massacre of 1927….as to whether it was worth bothering to hang around to watch the silent main reel I really can’t say….Irish wit meets Jewish humour?
This newspaper picture shows a Japanese-manned machine gun post close to Peiping (Peking) in early 1938. The city had fallen to the Imperial Japanese Army in July 1937, though resistance continued in the countryside around the city.
A quick, and rather shameless, plug for an article by me that appears in the new issue of The Diplomat – Lingering Ghosts – dealing with how the war’s end brought the end of colonialism, the arrival of communism, and the rise of political dynasties across the continent. Click here.
