US Marines in First March Through Shanghai – followed by Kosher Kitty Kelly!

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?

Shanghai – A Glamorous City

And indeed it was once – this from 1937…(click on it and it should expand)….

A Hell-Hole Can be Heaven in Shanghai

I suspect many China Rhyming readers will agree with Spencer Tracey that “a hell-hole in Shanghai” can be a sort of heaven?

Japanese Machine-gunners Close to Peiping, 1938

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.

Lingering Ghosts: World War II and the Shaping of Modern Asia

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.

Doug Clarke’s 3-volume Gunboat Justice now Available….A Must Have for any old China Researcher

It’s unlikely any books of more use to anyone researching old Shanghai will be published anytime soon that surpass Doug Clarke’s three volume Gunboat Justice, now published by Earnshaw Books. Having read them I can honestly say they are very important and tell one of the most important stories of that period – extraterritoriality and the foreign courts system. All three volumes are now available as e-books on Amazon here.

When the Hacks on the Winter Olympics Beat Get Bored They Can Always Look for the Pioneers’ Inn

As journalists start to wonder about Zhangjiakou (where a chunk of the 2022 Winter Olympics will be held) they may want to know that in the old days the only place in town to get a drink and a room was the then legendary Pioneers’ Inn. The Pioneers’ Inn, the only European-style hotel in Kalgan, features in just about every memoir of every gunrunner, smuggler, ne’erdowell, spy and foreign adventurer ever to head into northern China. Every foreigner of a slightly suspicious bent pitched up at the Pioneers’ and ordered a chota peg (whisky and soda, the house drink). Others of interest also stopped there – Walter Granger, the great paleontologist stopped there in 1928 while the American reporter, spy, film maker, and translator Maguerite Harrison stopped there overnight in the early 1930s describing the rooms as “fairly clean”. Perhaps most famously the French cross-China expedition La Croisière Jaune, organised by Citroen, stopped there in 1932 for a while.

If anyone could track it down it would be the single thing about the Winter Olympics 2022 that would remotely interest me….

As to location that’s a bit tricky –

it was on the western edge of Kalgan

it was a brick built building

outside was rattan chairs and tables for a drink on a warm day

it was owned by some Swedes

It also had warehouses close by where people embarking on expeditions could store their gear

By 1935 it appears to have closed and been deserted

bon chance!

Kalgan’s Mongol Gate in 1935

I’m a little out of my knowledge zone here but as Zhangjiakou (aka Kalgan as used to be known) is now to be hosting much of the 2022 Winter Olympics I guess this will all get resolved. This 1935 picture is described as the “Mongol Gate” in Kalgan – i.e. it led towards Inner Mongolia. I think this gate was sometimes referred to as the “North Gate”, as it was north of Peking (and so coming from Mongolia was the northern entrance to the greater Beijing area) and is now the Dajing Gate (with a few adornments that were not originally there on top and at the sides).  The explorer Roy Chapman Andrews recalls having no end of trouble with the police trying to get through the gate back in the 1920s…hopefully the world’s bobsled and curling teams won’t have as much trouble in seven years time….

Then….

Later – with a bit of build up around the sides and on top?