The Road to Oxiana Starts in Peking – Robert Byron’s Chinese Sojourn, 1935-1936

I always rather liked Robert Byron as he was an English aesthete who traveled to Peking in the 1930s and didn’t like it!

 ‘…apart from the temples and palaces – all (Peking) is grey, the most positive and emphatic grey you ever saw – all the brick is grey – the landscape is as grey as an engraving – the tiles are grey, so is the air.’

Best remembered now as a travel writer, Robert Byron (1905-1941) was an English writer, art critic and historian. After an Eton and Oxford education he was, as a young man after the Great War (1914-1918) identifiable as one of the so-called Bright Young Things of London. He became a notable traveller-aesthete combining witty observations of placed visited with an appreciation of them through their indigenous art and architecture. Most notably Byron travelled to, and wrote about, Mount Athos, India, the Soviet Union and Tibet. However, it is his writing on his travels to Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan that are best remembered and brought him acclaim as a travel writer, outselling his closest rivals in the 1930s Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh.

His best selling and most critically acclaimed travelogue, The Road to Oxiana, was first published in 1937 and recounts his ten month journey in 19933 and 1934 to the Middle East with the novelist and biographer Christopher Sykes (1907-1986) searching for, what he believed were, the Central Asian roots of Islamic architecture. The pair visited Venice, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan and ending in Peshawar, India. While the book is a recognised best-seller and seen by many as a break out book for both the author and a certain style of travel writer and observation, what is less known is that the book was written during Byron’s 1935-1936 sojourn in Peking while planning a trip to Japan. While his Peking stay does not feature in the book it clearly had an influence on some of his writing and his post-visit impressions of his recent travels. Unlike many other traveller-aesthetes who resided for periods in Peking, such as Byron’s close friend and Oxford contemporary Harold Acton (1904-1994), he disliked the city fairly intensely writing, ‘This (Peking) is a place for cowards who have given up the struggle with the world, and I haven’t quite done that.’ Given Byron’s literary output while in Peking, his impressions of the city and China as well as his interactions with others while residing there, it is useful to look in more detail at Byron’s Peking period, his personal networks of acquaintances and his recorded impressions and thoughts regarding the city and country.

Robert Byron had not planned a trip to China and there are no indications that, among the many near and far east locations he desired to visit, Peking and/or China held much attraction for him. However, he did have a desire to visit Japan. After his journey across the Middle East to Afghanistan Byron appeared to be in no rush to produce his book of the trip, which had been commissioned by Macmillan. After some time spent writing a comic novel in England the Institute of Persian Architecture suggested a lecture tour of the United States. Before leaving London he showed some new drawings of Persia and Afghanistan at the Walker Gallery. In January 1935 Byron went to New York. He returned to England after several months in America but still did not work on the commissioned travel book of his Persian/Afghanistan trip but rather agreed to visit the International Congress and Exhibition of Persian Art and Archaeology that September at the Hermitage in Leningrad (St. Petersburg).

Byron was acquainted with Desmond Parsons who was living in Peking at the time. In Russia he reached as far east as Novo Sibirsk and, with an invitation to visit Parsons, decided to push on to China rather than return to England. His intention was to spend several months with Parsons completing the commissioned book and had the notion to visit Japan afterwards. Problems occurred with both exiting the Soviet Union overland at Vladivostok and also entering China through Manchuria, then occupied by the Japanese and annexed as Manchukuo. His plan to take the train from Vladivostok to Harbin but was unable to and so took a rather circuitous route via a ferry to Korea, a train to Hsinking (the capital of Japanese Manchukuo), from there to Mukden (where he vaguely knew the British Consul’s wife Alice Morland) and then to Tientsin (Tianjin) and on to Peking.

Eventually reaching Peking Byron had some acquaintances. His old Oxford contemporary and fellow aesthete Harold Acton was living in the city but his primary contact was Desmond Parsons. Parsons was born on 13 December 1910, the youngest of three children of the 5th Earl of Rosse, Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland. Parsons attended Eton and was a “Bright Young Thing” in London after the Great War, along with Byron and Acton. Indeed it was Acton who encouraged Parsons to travel to China. He established himself in Peking, acquiring a courtyard house to the northeast of the Forbidden Palace, 8 Cuihua Hutong, off Morrison Street. Parsons embarked on a course in Chinese language while also translating a collection of Chinese folk tales from German into English. He taught at Peking University and wrote a column for the Peiping Chronicle newspaper. Inspired by Aurel Stein’s excavations at Dunhuang he journeyed there in 1935 producing a photographic record of the caves, despite attracting the ire of the Chinese authorities who, after Stein had removed many manuscripts and frescos, watched the caves closely for looters. However, Parsons had been suffering health problems, which were diagnosed as Hodgkin’s Disease (then believed to be non-fatal). Byron arrived to stay with his old friend in November 1935. However, it was decided that Parsons should travel to England for treatment that Christmas. He hoped to return to Peking and asked Byron to stay on and look after his courtyard house. Byron agreed.

From the start Byron and Peking seemed not to agree. Distraught at Parsons’s medical condition and departure he found trouble communicating with the Chinese (not yet speaking any of the language), came down with a severe bout of flu and probably a case of exhaustion after his recent travels in Russia. He spent January 1936 in a state of collapse but rallied in February and at last began work on The Road to Oxiana. His collection of notebooks from the long trip to Persia and Afghanistan (five or six diaries, a few odd sheets of notes and a batch of typescript) had by this time arrived safely from England, dispatched by his father.

When he had first arrived in November 1935 he had embarked, with Parsons when his health permitted, on the usual round of tourist sights, such routine Peking pleasures (such as having tweed suits, an evening suit and a number of shirts made for a fraction of the cost of London) and day trips including to the Great Wall. Parsons’s courtyard home was palatial, central (technically in the Eastern City District) and comprised of several courtyards with bamboo trees. He was housed in one pavilion with its own bathroom. Parsons also had other houseguests, Anne and Michael Parsons (Count and Countess of Rosse/Lady de Vesci respectively), his parents who were to depart for England with the ailing Desmond at Christmas.

He wrote at a large desk with a green leather top he had purchased and retained one servant and a head houseboy. He planned to write for two to three months to finish the manuscript. He was hoping to perhaps pick up some freelance journalistic work and indeed did being commissioned to write two articles on Siberia by Ralph Deakin, the Foreign News Editor for the London Times. Worried that his communication skills were poor he enrolled for Chinese lessons, noting the advances in the language made by both Parsons and Acton since their arrival in China. As a guest of the Parsons Byron was introduced to many leading British citizens in China including Sir Frederick Leith Ross, the chief economic adviser to the British government who happened to visiting the city at the time for the “Leith-Ross mission” in 1935, attempting to persuade China to reform its currency.

Already though, after only a few weeks in the city he did not feel impressed by Peking. Writing to his sister Anne (known in the family as Mibble) he declared in November 1935,

‘As for Chinese art and the beauty of Peking – I must wait for it grow on me, or not to do so. But of architecture in the real sense of the word, there is nothing. That I can see straight off. They can build a wall, and make it very big – they have an exquisite capacity for space and layout, both large and small – but cubically and intellectually it is all a vacuum.’

 

Mayor Hsiao Chen-ying – A Most Enlightened Mayor of Tientsin

If China’s city mayors these days aren’t on the take or spending most of their time with their multiple mistresses then they’re prudes who spend their time locking up young feminists or banning old ladies from dancing in parks. Wonder then at the remarkably liberal and practical views of 1936 Mayor of Tientsin (Tianjin) Hsiao Chen-ying. Hsiao, faced with quite a few streets of sin and red light areas in his town, took a somewhat different approach to the previous “Moral Mayors” who had tried to suppress the drugs, girls and gambling. His basic idea was that if the foreigners in their concessions in Tientsin could have gambling, horse racing and lotteries, then why shouldn’t the Chinese in their portion of the treaty port? Simply license these activities, tax them and use the money to support the building of roads, bridges and schools. Let people smoke opium and pay a tax. And, by the way, by liberalising the whole scene you’d stop corrupt coppers taking squeeze from the brothels and casinos.

Hsiao, is seems, was as good as his word, allowing 50 opium dealers to commence business. Still, apparently a rather bunch of strait-laced students objected and protested. The Japanese turned a blind eye, shrugged their shoulders and invaded the city anyway the next year.

Historic Newspaper cover of the day – today being June 4th

Regular readers will know I often post newspapers articles from the past highlighting events in Chinese history….Here’s the only one to really post today….

The Mandarin at Sadler’s Wells, London – April 28, 1790

A feast of Chinoiserie entertainment in store for the patrons of Sadler’s Wells in April 1790….

Fresno’s Old and New Shanghai Cafes

The Old Shanghai Cafe stood at 1405 Kern Street in Fresno. This ad is from Christmas 1935 and the place was still in operation a decade later advertising in the 1946 edition of the California Police Officers Journal. Now, I just found the ad, I’m afraid I don’t know Fresno at all. Still, it did have a Chinatown – Tulare Street was the heart of it along with G Street, F Street, China Alley and Kern Street. Competitive too it seems – Johnnie Gee had the Old Shanghai Cafe and round on Tulare was the New Shanghai Cafe (might be the same folk owning them though) and plenty more Chinese restaurants too…..

Nicholas Kitto’s Photographic Record of China’s Treaty Ports

Photographer Nicholas Kitto has spent the last seven years visiting all the larger former Treaty Ports to photograph the remaining buildings from that era. At the same time he’s been seeking to track down the homes and offices of various members of his family who were in China from the 1860’s until 1945.

He has generously made all these photos available at his Treaty Port Galleries website – here – well worth a browse…

Mark Twain in China

Selina Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China sheds light on Twain’s interest in China and that country’s interest in him….

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people both at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not come to an end, for his body of works continued to travel through China in translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied and admired there, and that “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contexts–his response to events involving the American Chinese community and to the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through translation, and China’s reception of the author and his work, “Mark Twain in China” points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as “race,” “nation,” and “empire,” and helps us rethink their alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.

James Ricalton’s China Stereoscopes

I first came across early American photojournalist James Ricalton’s (below looking like a fascinating chap) stereoscopes of China while researching my history of foreign correspondents in China, Through the Looking Glass (yes, Metropolitan Museum of Art – I already did that title!). Here though is an essay – China Through the Stereoscope – on Ricalton’s stereoscopes by Lissa Mitchell (I think there’s meant to be two S’s?) in New Zealand’s Off the Wall from 2014 (that I somehow missed when it first appeared). Well worth a look and a read.