Talking of the Uchiyama Bookstore…..

Blogged a couple of days ago on Shanghai’s Rokusan Gardens in Hongkew (here and here). Just along from the Gardens was the famous Uchiyama Bookstore but I don’t have a picture of it….has anyone got a photograph of that famous store where Kanzo Uchiyama sold books and brought avant garde Shanghai and Japanese Shanghailanders together? See yesterday’s post for the location up at the northern end of the North Szechuan Road (Sichuan Road North nowadays) I only have images of the building as it is today….

Uchiyama with Lu Xun in Shanghai

RAS Shanghai – The History of the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai Library – 27/1/15

RAS LECTURE

Linda Ferguson:
The RAS Shanghai Library 

Locating Shanghai’s Rokusan Gardens

I blogged at the start of the year on the little known and not much remembered Rokusan Gardens that once existed in Shanghai’s Hongkew (Hongkou) District – Little Tokyo. They were small and don’t really appear on many maps – at least not ones I’ve seen. But here is a map of Hongkew that does give an indication of where the Gardens were roughly by identifying both the Shinto shrine (Shanhai Jinja – 12 on the map below) that was in the Gardens and the famous Uchiyama Bookstore (13 on the map below) run  by Uchiyama Kanzo in the 1920s and 1930s, probably the most important bookstore Shanghai ever had.

Picturing 1950s-1960s Taiwan – Canberra, Australia National University – 6/1/15-3/4/15

The lucky folk of Canberra have this exhibition to attend….

This exhibition is made possible through the generous loan of works from the National Museum of History, Taipei. The Australian Centre on China in the World also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Culture, ROC (Taiwan), and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Australia.

Josef von Sternberg Week #5 – Keye Luke’s Murals for The Shanghai Gesture

Von Sternberg’s 1941 The Shanghai Gesture is, without doubt, the most hyper real portrayal of old Shanghai’s casinos and Badlands. I must have watched the film a hundred times. What I didn’t know till the other day is that murals that dot the walls of the casino and Mother Gin Sling’s (Ona Munson in yellow face) casino and rooms were done by the Chinese-American actor Keye Luke. Canton born Luke was about the best known Chinese face in cinema before the war in all those Charlie Chan and Mr Moto movies and had a career that went on long after too. He was also a talented painter. In fact, after growing up in Seattle, he first worked in the film business as a commercial artist and a designer of movie posters. He did a lot of murals including some for the inside of Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. Luke was hired by von Sternberg to do murals for The Shanghai Gesture and commented that,

‘…it was like painting the Great Wall of China. It was a huge room – a dining room – and there was four sides and one a plate glass mirror. It was very, very effective.’

Here then some scenes from the movie with the mural in the background….

Josef von Sternberg Week #4 – Harry Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call, 1925

I blogged yesterday on Harry Hervey, the man who wrote the original treatment for Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express and a number of other Far-East and China related movies. He was also a writer and his book Where Strange Gods Call – Pages Out of the East, from 1924, is now largely forgotten – but well worth remembering. The book is an account of the author’s travels in Hawaii, Japan, China (though I don’t think he actually visited Shanghai), the Malay Archipelago, Indonesia and the South Seas with vignettes portraying the exotic people, sights and cultures he found there accompanied by illustrations from Christopher Murray (about whom I know nothing).

Josef von Sternberg Week #3 – Harry Hervey – The Man who Wrote Shanghai Express

Re-reading Josef von Sternberg’s very funny autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, the other day I was reminded that the notion to make the film Shanghai Express came to von Sternberg from a one page idea from the writer Harry Hervey (1900-1951). As it’s such a great film, a Shanghai film, the film where Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong appear together, and where Marlene immortalises Shanghai Lily, it seems worth knowing a little more about Hervey.

Harry Hervey

Hervey had a strong interest in China and Asia related stories – his film credits, and he dated back to the silent era, as a story outliner and writer include Madame Butterfly (a Japanese set police story featuring a very young Cary Grant), The Road to Singapore (with Bing and Bob obviously), Night Plane from Chungking, and Peking Express (Joseph Cotten fleeing the Commies).

Hervey also wrote novels – several also set in Asia – most notably Congai: Mistress of Indo-Chine, the story of an Indo-Chinese girl (congai in Vietnamese). Hervey had travelled extensively in French Indo-China in the mid-1920s and written it up in his travelogue Travels in French Indo-China. He also visited China – photographed in 1926 (below) looking far more dapper than most visitors to Beijing these days (reminding  us how fleece, Gortex and trainers have cheapened our world immeasurably)..

Josef von Sternberg Week #2 – Did Josef von Sternberg Meet Count Leopold von Sternberg in Shanghai?

I’ve found that one of the most useful aspects of having a blog like this is that I can occasionally throw out questions and conundrums I’ve been unable to solve and find people who know the answers. Here’s one I’ve not got very far with…

The film director Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg in Austria in 1894 to a Jewish family. He obviously became a film director and crops up repeatedly on this blog for his excellent autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry and his movies Shanghai Express, The Shanghai Gesture and Macao. He added the “von” to his name in 1925 when he was starting out in the film business.

In his autobiography he recounts that “many years later” he met the Count Leopold von Sternberg in Shanghai – a Czech and the most well known genuine von Sternberg in the world at the time. The Count apparently asked to meet Josef in Shanghai to thank him for making his name famous. However, I can’t find any reference to the Count visiting Shanghai. His wife, Cecilia, wrote an autobiography of her life with the Count, The Journey (1977) but doesn’t mention China or Shanghai at all. The photo below shows the Count and Countess in 1934 (“some years later”) relaxing on the beach at Waikiki, Hawaii in 1934 on what was supposedly their first “American stop” on a trip from Europe to the USA. This indicates that they came via Suez and Asia to America, rather than across the Atlantic and then overland, and so could well have previously stopped in Shanghai and met Josef as he claims in his autobiography. I like the picture below as it features a Chinese parasol, another favourite motif of this blog.

If anyone has anymore information on the Count in Shanghai I’d love to know?

on the beach at Waikiki, 1934

Count Leopold, Countess Cecilia and their daughter Diana