All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Came across this 1951 advert for Cadbury’s Cup Chocolate from 1951. Cadbury’s were clearly keen to establish drinking chocolate as an English tradition and luxurious habit and so chose to show chocolate being drunk from a couple of lovely Chinoiserie willow pattern cups and saucers…..
Philip Bowring has published a book about his ancestor John, the Governor of Hong Kong for most of the 1850s….
Reformer, intellectual, colonial governor, Sir John Bowring (1792–1872) was the archetype of the ambitious men who made Britain the leading global power in the 19th century. Born to a modest trading family, he showed an aptitude for languages which led him to literature, then to radical politics in the struggles for liberty in France, Spain and Greece. Taken up by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, he became a figure in the literary world. But his emphasis was on action rather than theories. He became a high-profile advocate of free trade and a liberal foe of Karl Marx. As member of parliament he supported full suffrage and other radical causes. He modernized Britain’s public accounts, invented the florin as a first step to decimalization, and became an industrial entrepreneur. Losing his money in the 1848 slump, he took a job as consul in Canton, which led to the governorship of Hong Kong. As Britain’s plenipotentiary in East Asia he negotiated a key treaty with King Mongkut of Siam but also started a war with China. His term as Governor of Hong Kong (1854–59) was plagued with problems. But there as elsewhere he left a legacy of liberal ideas.
Bowring’s impact was spread over so many fields that his name has been eclipsed by those with a narrower focus. This book brings his life and disparate achievements together, with a particular emphasis on his role in promoting free trade and his much criticized career in Asia.
Philip Bowring is a journalist based in Asia since 1973 variously as correspondent for the Financial Times, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, and columnist for the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal and South China Morning Post. He is distantly related to Sir John Bowring.
Those Peking loving Danes, Lars Ulrik Thom and Simon Rom Gjeroe, that run the excellent Beijing Postcards store on Nanluoguxiang, keep coming up with intersting ideas for talks exploring the city’s history. The latest is this Saturday at The Hutong….
Peking – City of Segregation
Did you know that Beijing was once a deeply segregated city? People from the South of town could not freely marry people from the Northern part. This did not change till 1902.
Beijing during the Qing dynasty was a city under occupation. Around the palace lived the Imperial clan and the soldiers of the 8 banners, and below them the Chinese civilians. These two societies were divided both by law and physically by Walls and gates.
The reason for this was that the rulers were afraid of losing their ethnic identity. Because the Qing rulers all belonged to a conglomeration of tribes called the Manchu’s. These were people of the plains that culturally were very different from the Han-Chinese. The women of the Manchu’s for instance did not bind their feet and rode horses. Culturally the Manchu’s felt a much closer bund to the Mongolian’s. But despite their vigorous efforts the virtues of nomadic living eventually proved difficult to preserve…
“City of Segregation†is the story of how the Manchu’s occupied the Capital of Beijing for an impressive almost 280 years, how they changed the city and still strongly helped influence our notion of “old Beijing†today. Very likely the ancestors, of your small talking bird-raising Beijing neighbor, originally belonged to a whiplashing nomadic people of the plains.
Date: August 30, Saturday, 15:00
Price: RMB 100
If you want to sign up please click here.
Beijing Postcards is a company that is dedicated to modern Chinese history, with an emphasis on Beijing. It can be difficult to understand the complex nature of Chinese society today. To help, Beijing Postcards offers a large variety of talks presenting interesting subjects on Beijing and China’s history and culture in an easily accessible way. They also offer tailor-made talks for corporate events, clubs, private gatherings, and more. Beijing Postcards owns a large collection of old photographs from China which has been collected from all over the world. These are actively used in their presentations. The name, Beijing Postcards, symbolizes the passing on of Chinese history and culture in a way that everybody can understand and appreciate it.
Just a week or so ago no the sad news of Lauren Bacall’s death I noted that her one China feature – Blood Alley – was not as good unfortunately as the Steve McQueen movie The Sand Pebbles, which has a slightly similar plot. Well, now, sadly, Richard Attenborough has died, one of the stars of The Sand Pebbles. The movie, released in 1966, was adapted from the Richard MacKeena novel and is a great film (in my opinion). Engineer Jake Holman (McQueen) arrives aboard the gunboat U.S.S. San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the “rice-bowl” system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat’s presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission. And Candice Bergen happens to need rescuing too!! There’s some spectacular location shooting in Taiwan too.
Arguably the best supporting role in the film is Attenborough’s as Frenchy Burgoyne who spends plenty of time in a Chinese whore house, marries a whore and eventually comes to a rather rum ending. The bar room scenes, including a good brawl, are all signature Attenborough moments in the movie for which he got a Golden Globe but missed an Oscar….Worth a watch on DVD if you can find a copy….
Frances Wood’s addition to the growing Penguin China & World War One series (which includes my own Betrayal in Paris) is now available – Picnics Prohibited (here on Amazon.co.uk and here on Penguin Australia)….
At the time of the First World War, the Chinese republic was in its infancy. It had joined a number of international organizations and ratified the Hague Conventions, but found its diplomatic efforts hampered by its young, inexperienced leadership, its factional and regional divisions and the foreign-held treaty ports and concessions held over from the imperial period. The foreign powers treaded a fine diplomatic tightrope, caught between carrying out their patriotic duty to support war efforts and making sure their ‘hosts’, the Chinese, did not take advantage of the turbulence to gain the upper hand against the imperialists. For the Americans, British, French, German and Japanese, the legation quarters became a microcosm of the intrigues and conflicts back home.
Alexandra Needham’s Go West! seems to be a good round up of the British nutters who went West and got themselves into all sorts of trouble….
Between Marco Polo in the late 13th century and French priest Abbe Huc in the 1840s, practically no European set foot in western China – then considered one of the most difficult regions in the world for road, rail and river navigation given its formidable topography of high mountains, deep valleys and great rivers. This isolation gave western China somewhat of a reputation amongst westerners as a hidden El Dorado – a place of great wealth and fertility. From the 1850s onwards, as the Victorian age was in full swing, Britons – and other westerners – began to develop a taste for overseas adventure, exploration and trade as the British Empire expanded its reach across the globe. Britain already had a strong hold in Hong Kong and was present in coastal treaty ports in China, but the Chinese market had not yet produced the massive increase in trade that many colonial expansionists had hoped for. A few adventurous souls began to believe that if access could be gained to the whole of China, through its inland ports, then access could be gained to the world’s largest market with some 400 million people – the size of the whole of Europe. This was not only access for trade purposes. Missionaries believed that the scope of the work they could do in inland China was endless, with a huge population most of whom had never heard of the word of God; and botanists and natural scientists wondered at the myriad exotic and as yet unknown species which flourished in China’s sub-tropical south-western corner. Others were just curious and had an appetite – and the budget to match – for visiting foreign faraway lands and the challenge of the unknown.Politically, opening up inland China was important to the British. Their aim was to develop a trade route from British India and Burma through China to British settlements in China’s coastal cities such as Canton and Hong Kong, as part of the competition between western powers for influence in Asia known as the Great Game. The French in particular were Britain’s adversaries for influence in western China, given the existing French stronghold in Indochina. French hopes were to reach the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan via the Mekong river through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. On the basis of these dreams, hundreds of British travellers and explorers set their sights on the Yangtze River – the main access route to the heart and western regions of China – and in particular the region of Chongqing (then known as Chungking) in the western Chinese province of Sichuan – the biggest metropolis of western China. It was – and still is – a gritty inland city, worlds apart from the relatively cosmopolitan cities of China’s eastern seaboard. This book tells the story of their lives in this inland treaty port city, and surrounding region, from the 1870s to just after the Second World War when, for several years, Chungking served as the capital of China. It details the achievements and lasting impact of the British in western China in the fields of diplomacy, trade, culture, science, education and religion. This includes introducing cricket and the first football match to the region; the printing press and the camera; the first steamship to sail through the treacherous Three Gorges – now tamed by the world’s largest dam; and the inspiration for the longest book on China ever to be written in the English language. The idea for this book came during my own time spent living in Chongqing from 2007 – 2010 as Political Consul at the British Consulate-General in the city. Chongqing was not the easiest of diplomatic postings. I started to wonder about the Europeans who came to Chongqing 150 years before me, and the city they must have experienced. This book stands as a record of Chongqing’s European past and the contributions of many foreigners to the city’s development, lest it should all soon disappear amidst China’s rush to develop.
When I compiled my history of the foreign press in Shanghai (Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Press Corps from Opium to Mao – in English here and Chinese here) I didn’t include the China Digest. As far as I know (and I don’t know much) the Digest was edited by an American, Mr. Carroll Prescott Lunt (born 1889), and was published after the Sino-Japanese War had broken out in Shanghai during the “Solitary Island” period” (1937-1941). Lunt was notoriously pro-Japanese, a regular visitor to Japan after 1937 and who had briefly edited the pro-Tokyo Far Eastern Review in Peking and was also one of the editors of the China’s Who’s Who. Lunt had previously been a poetry buff, publishing a novel called His Chinese Idol in 1921 (which got a rotten review in the New York Times) and then a collection of translated Chinese poetry, Jade Chips, in the 1920s. He also published a self-help book, How to Live with Epilepsy The magazine was generally considered to be pro-Japanese and was supported largely by adverts from Japanese companies in Shanghai during its run. Spotlite was an incorporated supplement within the Digest I believe. It was generally considered to be well edited and printed fetauring news articles from a variety of foreign media in Asia, Europe and America. It declared itself neutral though observers at the time (including the influential China Critic publication) questioned this, given its advertising base.
Spotlite had its offices at No.18 Bund. No.18 was the Chartered Bank of India Building, home to what is now Standard Chartered Bank (built 1923) and now a confection of ridiculously over-priced shops and restaurants. While the magnificent staircase still exists the vast majority of the interior has been long gutted to provide a home to nonsense like Bar Rouge and other wanna-be locations.
I’ll be north of the border up in Scotland over the first weekend of October at the Wigtown Book Festival. Wigtown, in Dumfries & Galloway, is Scotland’s National Book Town, a designation that reflects its dozen or so secondhand bookshops and annual literary festival. So obviously I’m keen to visit and it’s a great line up (see the festival’s website and the whole festival programme here)
I’ll be up on October 3 at 6pm talking Midnight in Peking – more details of the event here
