Tyler Kent’s Newchwang Origins

Tyler Kent (1911 – 1988) was an American diplomat who stole thousands of secret documents for a pro-German organization while working as a cipher clerk at the US Embassy in London during the Second World War. He had a long history of treachery – he’d been suspected of spying for the USSR while in Washington but the US Diplomatic Service couldn’t prove anything and so posted him to….London…..in 1939!!!…Thanks guys! Anyway, if you don’t know Tyler Kent’s story it’s here. He carried on being suspected of working for the USSR, even after he was released and deported back to America after the war and proclaimed himself an ardent anti-communist. He died in poverty in a Texas trailer park in 1988.

What I didn’t know until recently reading up on Kent was that he was born in the Mission Hospital in Newchwang (now Yingkou) where he was the son of the US Consul to the then most northerly of the China treaty ports, William Patton Kent. His family were part of America’s oldest elite, descendants of English settlers who had come to Virginia in 1760. His father left to be US Consul at Leipzig in 1914 (good timing!) and finished out his career in Belfast (great postings!!). Tyler also left Newchwang early to be schooled in America but anyway….

Newchwang Railway Station

A Newchwang Street

Emily Post – A China Best-seller

This small article tells us two marginally interesting things – 1) Emily Post’s famous book of manners, “Etiquette” was used by American diplomats in China before the war to settle the myriad of tricky issues they had to deal with and 2) it was a best seller in China….

British and Germans Clash over the Kaiser in 1915 Treaty Port China

Obviously the advent of the Great War caused bitter divisions between British and Germans in the Chinese treaty ports. This article from 1915 points out that cartoons mocking the German and Austro-Hungarian Emperors shown at cinemas in Peking rather excited the Germans while Germans in Shanghai were kicked out of British-dominated clubs….but the Germans stole back cups and trophies they’d won and threatened to melt them down unless their dues were refunded. Not quite the Western Front but still a battle line….

RAS Shanghai – Peter Hibbard Musing on Shanghai and, eeerrr, Yorkshire – 21/7/15

RAS LECTURE  

Tuesday 21 July  2015

7:00 PM for 7:15 PM start

Radisson Blu Plaza Xingguo Hotel, Tavern Bar

78 XingGuo Road, Shanghai

Peter Hibbard on

Musings on Shanghai and Yorkshire

Peter Hibbard made the monumental move from the centre of Shanghai to Holmbridge, a small village in West Yorkshire, in July 2013. Two years on he is back – to take all those pictures he never thought worth taking and to gather material for a new edition of his book The Bund: China Faces West – but most importantly to visit family and friends. Please do join him this evening for a long overdue get together and a richly illustrated talk on some connections between his old and new homes.

Yorkshire, a proud and beautiful place, is known to many as “God’s own country.”* It certainly produced some ecclesiastical giants. Foremost among them was James Hudson Taylor who founded the China Inland Mission in 1865. Their headquarters were in Shanghai before liberation. Yorkshire’s magnificent countryside and fine architecture, including its numerous churches, was the topic of an illustrated talk given by the much-admired Rev. C. E. Darwent to the Shanghai public in January 1913. Darwent took up his post as Minister at the Union Church in Shanghai in 1899 following many years in Yorkshire. He was an active RAS member, founder of the Shanghai Photographic Society and author of a renowned guidebook to the city.

Tonight Peter will reveal how Barnsley is promoting Hudson Taylor’s heritage to attract Chinese tourists, retrace Darwent’s colourful Yorkshire journey and look at some historical commercial links between Bradford and Shanghai. He will also contest Noel Coward’s claim that Shanghai was ‘a cross between Brussels and Huddersfield’.

* = just for the record the operator of this blog does not in any way endorse the ridiculous idea that Yorkshire (or anywhere within 100 miles of it, is “God’s own country” or believe that anyone in their sane mind would contest anything Noel Coward ever said or has any idea what the Shanghainese is for “ecky thump”.

Peter Hibbard MBE, an urban planner and sociologist, turned his attentions to the development of the Chinese tourism industry in 1983. He was a Visiting Scholar at Hong Kong University’s Centre of Asian Studies in 1985/86 and lectured in tourism studies at the Beijing Institute of Tourism thereafter, before moving to Shanghai in 1991. He has devoted much of his life to researching the historical development of Shanghai and of tourism in China. Peter is very much concerned with promoting links with the past and with fostering awareness, understanding and appreciation of Shanghai’s unique historical inheritance. He was President of the re-convened Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai from to 2007 to 2011 and is the author of “The Bund Shanghai: China Faces West”, “Beyond Hospitality: The History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Ltd.” among other works.

Talk Cost: RMB 70.00 (RAS members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members). Includes glass of wine or soft drink. Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption.

Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.  Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption.

RAS Monographs: Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. RMB 100 each (cash sale only).

To RSVP:  Please “Reply” to this email or write to

 RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

Malraux’s Modern Canton – Mid-1920s

Speaking yesterday of Malraux’s description of Raffles Hotel in Singapore in The Conquerors, I also rather like his description of the modern portions of Canton in the mid-1920s…Canton’s modernism gets rather crowded out by all the hoopla over old Shanghai (yea, I know – guilty as charged) but is worthy of more study and comment….

“At Canton, where once were ancient pagodas, there are now California hotels, shops with thirteen stories, and those terrible skyscrapers, which have a cinema on the ground floor, a theatre on the first, all manner of amusements on the second – automatic machines, bowls, acrobats, gladiators, dancers; on the third, a smoke-room; on the fourth a tearoom; on the fifth, a select brothel; on the sixth, offices. Higher still, flats occupied by ladies of doubtful reputation, and higher yet, more offices. On the roof, a garden and a Russo-European restaurant.”

The Canton Bund and Daixin Department Store, 1920s

Singapore – Raffles’s “Shaddock Flavoured Lemonade”

Happened to be re-reading Andre Malraux’s The Conquerors at the moment which has a mention of Raffles Hotel in Singapore around 1925 (and published in 1928)….am intrigued by “shaddock flavoured lemonade”….

“…the Raffles Hotel, with its stiff, bare garden, its palms from the Botanical Gardens, its Sikh porter and its Chinese “boys”. Its lemonade with a shaddock flavour is the best in Asia…”

Shaddock, by the way, is I think better known these days as pomelo (citrus maxima), and looks rather like a big grapefruit. I am now seeking one out to squeeze into some lemonade.

Jacques Henri Lartigue’s Chinese Parasols

A few more Chinese parasols today (A common theme on this blog now and then as regular browsers will have observed, such as just this week on parasols in 1930s Bournemouth). As I’m on my holidays in France this week we’ll have the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, who snapped the denizens of the French Riviera for years, starting in the early years of the century through to be about 1949. He was a man who loved his Chinese parasols – they feature repeatedly in his work. Here though some with really big, and very cool, parasols….

Chinese Parasols in 1930s Bournemouth

I love the site www.flashbak.com – always something interesting there. Recently they uploaded a bunch of photos of the Tollard Hotel in Bournemouth. Now Bournemouth is lovely, but the weather often leaves a little something to be desired compared to, say, the South of France or the Italian Riviera.  The Tollard Hotel though came up with a rather good idea – a solarium and indoor beach. The hotel is now flats, so someone lives in the old solarium! All the photos of the amazing place, and the people who went there, are here

However, it’s been a while since we’ve had a Chinese parasol picture (though we’ve had loads before – at the Folies Bergere, Adele Astaire, Zelda Fitzgerald, Count Leopold von Sternberg, and some old French porn – so here’s some guests at the Tollard Solarium and indoor beach in 1930…

31st March 1930: A family relaxing together in the solarium of the Tolland Hotel, Bournemouth. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)