The Worrying Fate of Manila’s El Hogar Building

A slight diversion to the Philippines today to look at the El Hogar building which is, according to Filipino preservationists, currently under threat. The El Hogar was Manila’s first “skyscraper” built in 1914 in the beaux-arts style, popular during the American occupation of the archipelago, and designed by local architects. It was actually constructed as a wedding present for a daughter of the powerful Ayala family. It fronts impressively onto the Pasag River and forms a crucial element of Manila’s skyline still.

To say it is a treasure for Manila is to understate the buildings grandeur and it is preserved supposedly as part of the historic Binondo District and Escolta Street. Preservationists are worried that the building’s new owners have not been named and their intentions are unclear. The city government appears somewhat reticent to say whether a demolition permit has been issued or not. More from the Philippines Daily Enquirer here. Important to note that the Pacific Commercial Company Building nearby and erected in 1922 has been praised as a great example of “adaptive reuse”. The same is clearly possible for El Hogar. Here’s hoping and supporting the Manila preservationists.

RAS Shanghai Film Club – “Street Angel,” 1937

RAS FILM CLUB

Sunday 30 November

Time: 6.30pm for 7.00pm

 Chai Lounge at Chai Living Gallery, 370 Suzhou Bei Lu. It’s in the Embankment Building close to Henan Lu.

 河滨大楼，苏州北路370底楼 （在四川路河南路之间)

  

“Street Angel,” “Malu tianshi,” 1937

Directed by Yuan Muzhi

Written by Yuan Muzhi

Produced by Mingxing Film Company

Mandarin with English subtitles

Cinematography: Wu Yinxian

Original music: He Luting, lyrics by Tian Han

Cast: Zhou Xuan (Xiao Hong), Zhao Dan (Xiao Chen), Zhao Huishen (Xiao Yun), Wei Heling (Wang)

One of China’s early sound films, loosely based on Frank Borage’s 1927 silent film “Seventh Heaven,” “Street Angel” is considered a great classic ‘leftist’ melodrama made during Shanghai’s Golden Age of cinema. The story revolves around two sisters (Xiao Yun and Xiao Hong) who have fled the war with Japan in the North to land in Shanghai’s underworld. They live together in a teahouse amongst the slums and barely earn their keep by singing and, for Xiao Yun, prostitution. Xiao Hong is befriended by a street musician, Xiao Chen, who determines to rescue her from her fate of being sold into marriage (and probably prostitution) with the wealthy Mr Gu. An astounding mixture of satire, social realism, slapstick comedy and music, “Street Angel” provides a portrait of street life in 1930’s Shanghai and a glimpse of the creative talent within Shanghai’s film industry.

 “Street Angel” launched the career of its leading lady Zhou Xuan whose voice became synonymous with Shanghai popular music of the day. In the film she sings two of her most famous hits, Song of the Four Seasons and The Wandering Songstress, both of which reference the political turbulence of the late 1930’s through Tian Han’s lyrics. The innovative use of music as a device to convey political messages to the audience and to add to the character of the actors set this film apart from its predecessors.

 Perhaps most often cited for its opening sequence in which Yuan Muzhi made use of the montage technique popularised in the Soviet Union to create a visual and musical portrait of the social conditions prevalent in Shanghai. A travelling night scene in the city, punctuated by a dizzying array of neon signs in English and Chinese accompanied by frenzied music conveys the electrifying energy of Shanghai nightlife. Dissolving into daytime, the camera tilts upwards as it pans an art deco building to rest on a western clock, the icon of modernism. Scenes of automobiles, buses, ships and colonial monuments culminate in a slow shot of the Hong Kong Bank and the Customs House on the Bund. Different types of religious buildings shift the focus from commercial life to spiritual life whilst retaining the influences from all over the world on Shanghai life.

 As clocks continue to chime and dusk falls fireworks cascade over pleasure seekers filling the dance halls and the increasingly frantic musical accompaniment collapses into silence over the title of the film. The result is a feeling that Shanghai, full of competing influences and rushing forwards is fighting against time to shake off its colonialism and to modernise. The perspective and the pace then shifts to street level as the camera follows a traditional Chinese wedding procession into the lanes of Shanghai and away from decadence. Here the houses are densely populated and low-rise. People are lining the street and hanging over balconies to watch the procession with the bride in a palanquin. Amongst the crowd, playing a trumpet appears our first glimpse of Xiao Chen and above him on the balcony emerges Xiao Hong and the dialogue begins. As in the theatre that preceded cinema, the female looks down onto the male actor and catches his attention, drawing the audience into the story. This is the first of several references to theatre that Yuan Mizhu uses within the film to dramatic effect.

 Within these opening moments the director succeeds in displaying Shanghai’s history, it’s social complexity and it’s physical distinctions between colonial and neighbourhood spaces before focusing upon a story that revolves around two related social issues of the time, migration and prostitution.

Running time; 91 minutes

Our evening will be hosted at CHAI Living Gallery.  They kindly provide the venue, equipment, a discount on the menu AND specially prepared popcorn for RAS members to enjoy while watching the movie.

Donation suggested: RMB 20.00 (RAS members) and RMB 50.00 (non-members). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Film Club viewing. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

RSVP: “Reply” to this email or write to filmclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

RSVP ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED!

RAS MEMBERS WILL RECEIVE PRIORITY BOOKING UNTIL FRIDAY November 28

Maurice Sachs – One Man who Wanted to get to Shanghai

For reasons I surely do not to elaborate for China Rhyming readers Shanghai was a magnet in the 1930s for those looking to escape from criminal pasts in Europe, who needed to get themselves gone. In the run up to the Second World War Shanghai was of course a paradise for gangsters, adventurers, crooks, conmen and the generally shifty as well as a port of last resort for refugees from war torn Europe, Bolshevik Russia or Nazi antisemitism.

Interestingly throughout the war Shanghai maintained itself as a far off distant dream for many who needed to escape Europe for one reason or another, even after the International Settlement fell to the Japanese following Pearl Harbor (and remembering that the French Concession remained open to many and controlled by the puppet Vichyite government of occupied France).

One who longed to get to Shanghai has interested me for a while since I first heard of him – Maurice Sachs. Sachs was a quite incredible figure, though not a particularly admirable one. He was a Parisian, born in 1906 of Jewish descent. He had spent some time in London and spoke good English. He converted to Catholicism though it didn’t stick and his fairly openly gay lifestyle rather jarred with his adopted religion, so he largely dropped it (the religion, not the lifestyle). He was a conman before the war – masquerading as an art dealer in New York and a jewelery dealer in Paris. He served in the French army briefly at the start of WW2 but was kicked out for his sexual choices. His memoir of the war years, where he manage to stay at liberty in Paris for some time despite his criminal activities and Jewish ancestry – The Hunt – are a fascinating record of the city’s underworld – both bohemian/gay and criminal – during the Nazi occupation. He dealt illegally in gold, smuggled Jewish families out of the city and may have betrayed others to the Gestapo. Being somewhat contrarian he moved to Hamburg when forced to flee Paris – a not necessarily obvious choice in 1942 for a gay criminal French Jew!!

Reading his letters from his Hamburg years he became obsessed with moving on to China, specifically to Shanghai. He imagines Shanghai as a city that would suit him perfectly, forgive his transgressions and allow him to live the lifestyle he liked and provide ample opportunity for grifting and cons. He longed to sail to Shanghai and did actually investigate ways that he might be able to earn the passage and take ship.

To be fair Sachs might well have prospered in Shanghai – plenty like him did. However, before he could make the trip from Europe to Shanghai he was arrested by the Gestapo. Imprisoned, when the British approached, the Germans forced him and other prisoners to walk in atrocious conditions away from the advancing Brits. Sachs was too weak to continue, was shot through the neck and dumped by the side of the road by the Nazis.

Sachs cared little for the Jews, for the fate of France or for anyone really..except whichever man he was infatuated with at any given moment. But in 1945 Shanghai he just might have found a ready reception for talents!!

aurice

Tientsin’s Hotel du Nord

Came across this photograph the other day of the Hotel du Nord in Tientsin – it’s dated about 1900 and the picture appears to be of a frontage gate opening onto a courtyard type hotel. Given the presence of a curio shop next to the hotel entrance (very common at hotels where foreigners stayed and needed presents) and its Gothic and German signage I’m assuming this is in the German Concession. Of course the Hotel du Nord in Peking was much better known and features in any number of memoirs and reminiscences of the city but I can find no references to anyone staying in the Hotel Du Nord in Tientsin – perhaps it was just a fake hotel ripping of the better known Peking brand? Still there’s a huddle of rickshaw pullers outside so someone must have been staying there. Any information greatly received….

Jim’s Terrible City – Photographs inspired by JG Ballard’s Shanghai

Photographer James H Bollen’s Jim’s Terrible City (a list of stockists here if you don’t do online) is a collection of photographs inspired by reading JG Ballard’s work and his reminiscences of his birthplace Shanghai – with an introduction by Ballard’s eldest daughter, Fay……

Shanghai-based photographer James H. Bollen shares a selection of images from his new book exploring the author’s relationship with his birthplace

“J.G. Ballard believed that human beings are inherently violent. This stemmed from his time in Shanghai, where as a boy he witnessed brutality before and during the period he and his family entered an interment camp in Lunghua, where they were held from 1942 to 1945,” photographer James H. Bollen states in the introduction to his book, Jim’s Terrible City.

Photographing Shanghai, the novelist’s city of birth, Bollen turns his lens on some of the leitmotifs that emerge through Ballard’s work – mannequins, birds, surveillance – as he addresses the landscape of the author’s upbringing, a cityscape dotted with empty and run-down hotels and apartments, abject poverty and extreme violence in Ballard’s day.

What Bollen captures is a version of Shanghai where “the inner world of [Ballard’s] literature and the reality of the outer world of the city meet and merge”, merging and tentatively exploring the threads between the author’s life and his work, removed three-score years, modernised and cultivated

China 1945: Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice

Richard Bernstein’s China 1945 on Sino-American relations in 1945 and how both sides mis-managed their relations with the other…..

A riveting account of the watershed moment in America’s dealings with China that forever altered the course of East-West relations

As 1945 opened, America was on surprisingly congenial terms with China’s Communist rebels—their soldiers treated their American counterparts as heroes, rescuing airmen shot down over enemy territory. Chinese leaders talked of a future in which American money and technology would help lift China out of poverty. Mao Zedong himself held friendly meetings with U.S. emissaries, vowing to them his intention of establishing an American-style democracy in China.

By year’s end, however, cordiality had been replaced by chilly hostility and distrust. Chinese Communist soldiers were setting ambushes for American marines in north China; Communist newspapers were portraying the United States as an implacable imperialist enemy; civil war in China was erupting. The pattern was set for a quarter century of almost total Sino-American mistrust, with the devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam among the consequences.

Richard Bernstein here tells the incredible story of that year’s sea change, brilliantly analyzing its many components, from ferocious infighting among U.S. diplomats, military leaders, and opinion makers to the complex relations between Mao and his patron, Stalin.

On the American side, we meet experienced “China hands” John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service, whose efforts at negotiation made them prey to accusations of Communist sympathy; FDR’s special ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, a decorated general and self-proclaimed cowboy; and Time journalist, Henry Luce, whose editorials helped turn the tide of American public opinion. On the Chinese side, Bernstein reveals the ascendant Mao and his intractable counterpart, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek; and the indispensable Zhou Enlai.

A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines the first episode in which American power and good intentions came face-to-face with a powerful Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations.

Shanghai’s Russkiye Zapiski (Russian Annals) online (in Russian)

Earlier this month I blogged on the rather obscure White Russian journal based in Shanghai and funded out of Paris called Russkiye Zapiski (Russian Annals). My thanks to a Russian speaking China Rhyming reader who pointed me to an online archive of selected issues of the journal….click here

City of Darkness Revisited – Kowloon’s Walled City

Greg Girard’s well known and much sought after photo book of the old Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong has been reissued due to popular demand. It’s a classic and the pictures are stunning if yoiu don’t already know it….and here’s a review from the Asian Review of Books…

For nearly 50 years, the extraordinary community of Kowloon Walled City cut a dark presence in the heart of Hong Kong. Yet without legislation and with little regard for basic services, planning regulations or building standards, the City not only survived, it positively thrived. But how could such a place exist in a modern metropolis without administrative oversight – ‘triply neglected’, to use a Hong Kong term – by the British, Chinese and Hong Kong Governments? Who would choose to live there? And why? Some of these questions were answered in our book City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, but for various reasons a number of key elements were left out. City of Darkness Revisited fills in these gaps and brings the story up to date, mixing photographs and interviews found in the original book with a wide range of new material that has come to light over the past 20 years, in the form of new photographs, drawings, maps, documents and essays, many previously unpublished. City of Darkness Revisited explores in greater detail than ever before the Walled City’s dramatic growth between 1945 and 1990, while at the same time looking into the darker sides of its past and exposing the truth behind many of the myths that gave the City its abiding sense of mystery. We explain how the City’s clearance came about and shine a light on why previous attempts to rid Hong Kong of this notorious enclave always failed, stymied over the matter of its dual jurisdiction. Bringing the story up to date, the book also discusses how perceptions of the City have changed so dramatically in the 20 years since its demolition – shunned by most Hong Kong residents during its lifetime, but now seen as part of the city’s rich cultural and architectural heritage. And finally, we explore how the City and the myths that swirl around it have infiltrated architectural debate and popular culture through film, literature, Japanese manga, video games, art and design. City of Darkness Revisited offers a unique insight into the remarkable community that was Kowloon Walled City, home to some 35,000 people at its peak and by far the most densely populated neighbourhood the world has ever known.