Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill Reissued

Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill is a great tale of a “white flower of the China coast”, lost in Shanghai and falling into prostitution. It’s not as widely read these days as it should be, either as a classic of Shanghai-based literature or as part of Hahn’s body of work. So good to see it’s been republished as an e-book for those who don’t know it….

PS: I’ve blogged in a little more detail about the novel previously here…

Author of such celebrated and acclaimed works as THE SOONG SISTERS, CHINA TO ME, and FRACTURED EMERALD: IRELAND, Emily Hahn has been called by the New Yorker as “a forgotten American literary treasure.” Now, E-Reads continues to reintroduce Hahn to a new generation of readers, bringing to light her richly textured voice and unique perspective on a world that continues to exist both through history and fiction.

Meet Miss Jill, a young woman pursuing the oldest profession in pre-war Shanghai. At 15, blonde, and with a somewhat empty-headed prettiness, Jill begins her career as a mistress of a Japanese banker. Soon after, she becomes a European prostitute in the house of Annette, and believes that marriage will come soon from a privileged Count. Yet none of her adventures prepares Miss Jill for the war and her subsequent internment. Here is Emily Hahn at her richest, portraying a period in time with great authenticity and empathy. MISS JILL, like its titular protagonist, is a novel with charm and personality.

University of Missouri Graduates Living in Shanghai, 1932

Amazing how many foreign journalists in Shanghai in the interwar years were University of Missouri graduates – Carl Crow too (and details of him and many of these in my book Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand) but also others working in newspapers and elsewhere:

• Arthur Bassett – lawyer and District Attorney to the US Court for China at Shanghai
• Gilmore Bradford – representative in the Far East for the Frigidaire Company
• Susan Willard Brown – a doctor (medical) at the Margaret Williamson Hospital, Shanghai
• AU Buschman – I believe was something in finance and banking
• Gustaf Axel Hellstrand – I believe something in mining and metallurgy
• YP Wang – manager of the Shim Pao and China Times
• Victor Keen – correspondent for the New York Herald- Tribune
• JB Powell – editor of the China Weekly Review
• Maurice Votaw – professor of journalism at St. John’s University
• David W Lucas – employee of Standard Oil
• Margaret Cecile Powell – Wife of JB above and writer on the China Weekly Review
• Stuart Robinson Price – not sure – there was a Stuart Price who was a casino operator in the early years of the century and was American but this is a different one I think
• Edgar Snow – Journalist and Red Star Over China author
• Hollington Tong – newspaperman, adviser to Chiang Kai Shek and later Taiwanese Ambassador to Japan and then USA
• Grace May Ware – not sure what she was doing, but was daughter of missionaries
• Pei-Yu Chien – journalist
• Morris Harris – Associated Press Bureau Chief in Shanghai
• Kan Lee – head of publicity for the Chinese Ministry of Finance in the Nationalist government
• Louise Wilson – editor of the Women’s Section of the North-China Daily News
• Thomas Millard – newspaperman, founder of Millard’s Review of the Far East and the China Press, later adviser to the KMT

Fenton, Wong, Tsang, Nicholas and Nee are unfortunately unknown to me – any ideas?

A Most Gruesome Japanese Flag in 1932 Shanghai

This rather gruesome story comes from the Decauter Daily Review in December 1933…

Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948

Harold Tanner’s history of the Chinese Civil War in Manchuria and the push of the Communists against the Nationalists is a good retelling of that campaign and how Chiang Kai-shek saw the tide turn against him and his embattled forces by the fresher Communists…..

The civil war in China that ended in the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong s Communist forces was a major blow to US interests in the Far East and led to heated recriminations about how China was “lost.” Despite their significance, there have been few studies in English of the war’s major campaigns. The Liao-Shen Campaign was the final act in the struggle for control of China s northeast. After the Soviet defeat of Japan in Manchuria, Communist Chinese and then Nationalist troops moved into this strategically important area. China s largest industrial base and a major source of coal, Manchuria had extensive railways and key ports (both still under Soviet control). When American mediation over control of Manchuria failed, full-scale civil war broke out. By spring of 1946, Chiang Kai-shek s Nationalist armies had occupied most of the southern, economically developed part of Manchuria, pushing Communist forces north of the Songhua (Sungari) River. But over the next two years, the tide would turn. The Communists isolated the Nationalist armies and mounted a major campaign aimed at destroying the Kuomintang forces. This is the story of that campaign and its outcome, which were to have such far-reaching consequences.”

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