This is a great video about the old Nansheng Department Store in Shantou, built in the 1930s and now sadly derelict and decaying after decades of neglect. It’s obviously not going to last much longer, despite being a beautiful building and well constructed originally. Strangely this fascinating video, by Peter Lin and DJ Clark, is released by the China Daily, not a newspaper who’s editors (all good Communist-Nationalists) or sponsors (the Communist Party of China) have ever cared one jot about heritage or preservation in China. It also happens to pop up on the China Daily’s Youtube channel – again strange that a Communist Party newspaper that presumably supports the Party’s ban on Youtube in China itself should have a Youtube channel!! Still, terrific video and let’s hope the building can survive somehow….
Every city has areas that shine for a few decades and then fade away but none so visible as Shantou. In the 1930’s a new commercial district was built with a new shinny department store at its heart. Streets radiated in every direction full of shops and small markets. It stayed the epicenter of this thriving port city until the local government rebuilt the central business district in the 1990s to the west, leaving the store and the streets around it to slowly decay.
If you’d gone to the cinema in America in April 1927 to see Kosher Kitty Kelly you’d have got some newsreel footage of the US Marines parading through Shanghai – they were there to protect the International Settlement as the strikes mounted that led days later to the Shanghai Massacre of 1927….as to whether it was worth bothering to hang around to watch the silent main reel I really can’t say….Irish wit meets Jewish humour?
This newspaper picture shows a Japanese-manned machine gun post close to Peiping (Peking) in early 1938. The city had fallen to the Imperial Japanese Army in July 1937, though resistance continued in the countryside around the city.
A quick, and rather shameless, plug for an article by me that appears in the new issue of The Diplomat – Lingering Ghosts – dealing with how the war’s end brought the end of colonialism, the arrival of communism, and the rise of political dynasties across the continent. Click here.
It’s unlikely any books of more use to anyone researching old Shanghai will be published anytime soon that surpass Doug Clarke’s three volume Gunboat Justice, now published by Earnshaw Books. Having read them I can honestly say they are very important and tell one of the most important stories of that period – extraterritoriality and the foreign courts system. All three volumes are now available as e-books on Amazon here.
As journalists start to wonder about Zhangjiakou (where a chunk of the 2022 Winter Olympics will be held) they may want to know that in the old days the only place in town to get a drink and a room was the then legendary Pioneers’ Inn. The Pioneers’ Inn, the only European-style hotel in Kalgan, features in just about every memoir of every gunrunner, smuggler, ne’erdowell, spy and foreign adventurer ever to head into northern China. Every foreigner of a slightly suspicious bent pitched up at the Pioneers’ and ordered a chota peg (whisky and soda, the house drink). Others of interest also stopped there – Walter Granger, the great paleontologist stopped there in 1928 while the American reporter, spy, film maker, and translator Maguerite Harrison stopped there overnight in the early 1930s describing the rooms as “fairly clean”. Perhaps most famously the French cross-China expedition La Croisière Jaune, organised by Citroen, stopped there in 1932 for a while.
If anyone could track it down it would be the single thing about the Winter Olympics 2022 that would remotely interest me….
As to location that’s a bit tricky –
it was on the western edge of Kalgan
it was a brick built building
outside was rattan chairs and tables for a drink on a warm day
it was owned by some Swedes
It also had warehouses close by where people embarking on expeditions could store their gear
By 1935 it appears to have closed and been deserted
