The China Rhyming Annual Round Up of Popular Culture Opium References – 2014

Another year, another round up of references to opium in popular culture (see the 2013 and 2012 roundups for previous dope in popular culture).

Tommy’s off the dope it seems – no wonder he’s getting a bit violent with those Sabini boys

Lucy Worsley’s BBC series A Very British Murder, on the history of popular fascination and books about murder in Britain, kicked off with the presenter in Thomas de Quincey’s old place in Grassmere, in the lovely Lake District, showing us his opium paraphernalia. In Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner we also found out that the artist partook of a drop of laudanum for his ailments. Elsewhere on TV series 2 of Peaky Blinders was excellent, but Tommy Sheridan appears instantly cured of his series 1 opium addiction and Birmingham Chinatown didn’t feature again – still, this time round, we got swells tooting coke in a Sabini-family-run London 1920s nightclub, so all was not lost! (and see my post on tooting ‘Tokyo” in 1920s London here). Showtime and Sky’s Penny Dreadful did not disappoint and had us in a candlelit East End opium den within the first fifteen minutes of episode 1 and poor sweet Brona Croft (Billie Piper) on the laudanum later!! At the theatre Lynn Nottage’s play Intimate Apparel played in the UK to good reviews. Centred around a seamstress in 1905 New York, she ends up married to an opium addict.

Penny Dreadful’s Sir Malcolm Murray steps into a Limehouse dope den

In books London historian and novelist Peter Ackroyd had some mentions of Limehouse as a slum in the 1960s and as a rookery of opium dens back in the day in Three Brothers while Laura Wilson’s DI Stratton had a morphine murder during World War Two London on his hands in An Empty Death. Robert Edric’s The Monster’s Lament saw good old Aleister Crowley on a little dope in war-time London (and make a couple of mentions of his Shanghai sojourn too). According to The Monster’s Lament Crowley’s preferred tipple was ten grains of opium taken with brandy! Opium also makes a small appearance in Adrian McKinty’s interesting The Sun is God, a tru-ish story of a murderous German cult living on the Kaiser’s far flung Pacific island colonies at the start of the twentieth century. Somewhat of a curiosity from McKinty (who usually does more modern noirs about Northern Ireland and Irish-New York), but a fascinating tale all the same. Sarah Waters hinted at 1920s London cocaine party goings on in The Paying Guests, and Lawrence Osborne had a washed up English gambling addict sucking the pipe for relief on Lamma Island in his excellent The Ballad of a Small Player. And, last but never, ever least, the excellent James Ellroy opted to include a few opium den scenes in just pre-war 2 LA in Perfidia, 

A Christmas Card from Shanghai – 1945

Posted this last year….but it’s worth a second outing….

Many thanks to an old time Shanghailander, Bill Savadove, who sent me this card originally sent in 1945 from Shanghai by the United States Navy wishing the folks back home a “melly klisimas”…..

A Very Merry Chinoiserie Christmas to One and All

Shanghai Honeymoon, 1926

Aaahh, how lovely – Shanghai Honeymoon, a minor hit of 1926 with words and music by William l Shockley, Charles J Hausman and Lester Melrose and with the tagline, “The First Original Melody in Years”. The singers, pictured in the moon, are Esther and Cecil Ward, who both happened to be adept on the Hawaiian guitar and were big on the American radio bran dance circuit.

Esther and Cecil with their Hawaiian guitars

Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life

Jie Li’s Shanghai Homes looks like a useful read and remiss of me not to have mentioned it previously – just made the Guardian’s Top Ten City Books for 2014….

In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account — part microhistory, part memoir — Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life — territories, artifacts, and gossip — Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former “International Settlement.” Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai’s labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city’s population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.

Street Photographer Bon Wen Captures the Sad and Sorry Demise of the old Jiangwan Shanghai Library

Thanks to Shanghai street photographer Bon Wen for sending me a link to his excellent photos of the old Shanghai library – not the better known old race course building (on the corner of Nanjing West Road and Huangpi Road), which was, for a long time, the Shanghai library, or the monstrosity they built on Huai Hai Road which resembles a courthouse-cum-maxi-prison and is largely designed to discourage anyone wandering in and looking for a book. No, this is the Shanghai library in Jiangwan, built in 1934-35, and part of the futuristic planned civic centre for China-administered Shanghai. If you’ve not been (and surprisingly few people do) then go immediately – subway line 10 to Jiangwan Stadium.

Now the inevitable sad story of the building – first a library built by the Nationalist government and stocked full of books – good thing. Then the communists took out all the books (too many they disagreed with) and turned it into Tongji Middle School – shame about the books but worse things than a school. Then the post-communist leaders of today’s philistines threw the school out and let the building rot.

Click here to see Bon Wen’s photographs of the dereliction of the once fine structure and some images of the original (as below)…a real shame.

How Shirley Temple Helped Pioneer Mandarin

There was a time (the 1930s) when cinema audiences queued around the block to see a new Shirley Temple movie. There was also a time (also the 1930s) when the Chinese Nationalist Government launched a concerted effort to make Mandarin, the language of the Peking court, the national language. Interestingly the Nationalists in China roped in little Shirley Temple in Hollywood to help their cause. I blogged earlier this year, noting her death in February, about Shirley Temple’s one cinematic outing to China – the 1936 movie Stowaway in which she played Barbara “Ching Ching” Stewart, an orphan stranded in China. She is saved from bandits and taken to Shanghai where she meets a rich American playboy wasting his time in the city’s nightclubs and stows away aboard his ship back to America. In the film she has a pet Pekingese dog, Mr Woo, which Temple later kept for herself as a pet renaming it “Ching Ching”.

So here’s how she was roped in to promote Mandarin. Hewaring of the movie (filmed entirely in Hollywood of course), the Nationalists dispatched a certain Paul Fong, originally from Canton (Guangzhou) but a Mandarin speaker (and University of Missouri graduate – China’s history is littered with them!) to California as a Chines language expert to 20th Century Fox. The studio agreed to use Mandarin in the movie, but had a problem as the vast majority of the Chinese extras they regularly used in such movies were native Cantonese speakers and spoke little to no Mandarin. So, organised by Fong, Shirley started Chinese classes alongside the extras who also needed to learn Mandarin. In the movie she uses about 400 words of Mandarin and sings a little song in Chinese too. All thanks to Fong who hired Bessie Nyi, a Shanghainese in LA who had studied at the University of Southern California, to teach Shirley while he himself taught the extras – 900 of them in all. It was a dedicated process and Mandarin is spoken even in several scenes set in Hong Kong!

And so America got to hear Shirley speak Mandarin and the movie got released in China to encourage kids to learn Mandarin too. Seems everyone was happy, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for Sunday, December 20th, 1936.

The Penguin China World War One Series is Complete – It’s over by Christmas!!

The Penguin China WW1 series is complete and now available as e-books – unlike the actual First World War the series is over by Christmas and all are now out….available on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com and good bookshops in Hong Kong, China and Australia (paperbacks in those places)….

Here they are in a kind of order….