All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
My new long-read at the South China Morning Post weekend magazine – An 1880s Sino-Russian Gold Rush – Tales from old Zheltuga: the rise & equally abrupt fall of the lawless C19th self-declared republic of the hopeful, the gold dreamers & the lost on the Russo-China frontier…Click here
Book #54 on the Sinica Podcast Substack Ultimate China Bookshelf – the first of 3 Maoist-era village memoirs – the once incredibly influential William Hinton’s Fanshen (1966)….click here
Weekend find – a very strange book published in 1897 and written by a very strange looking chap….
Yesterday I posted a portrait of a British military officer in Hong Kong, Francis Festing, from about 1945-1949. The most striking thing about the portrait was the hardwood carved frame. I think the frame was from a company called Tai Loong.
These fairly average Chinese pictures showing various seasons below, dated from the 1930s, are also in hardwood carved frames. These ornate hardwood frames are identified as being made by Tai Loong Furniture and Picture Frame Makers of 873-875 Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing Xi Lu), Tel 35694, Shanghai. I think Tai Loong also produced silk screens and in the late 1940s I think moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong.
An interesting portrait – especially for the frame – of Sir Francis Festing (1902-1976) by Claude Harrison (1922-2009). Festing was a senior British Army Officer who was the Commander of British Forces in Hong Kong from 1945-46, and 1949. It is believed to have been it painted around this time. The frame is large Chinese hardwood carved around the outside with dragons and bats.
Harrison was from Lancashire, trained at Preston College of Art and Liverpool College of Art before service with the Royal Air Force service in India, Burma and China in World War Two. He most likely painted this portrait towards then end of that service in Asia. Afterwards he studied at the Royal College of Art.
Worth mentioning Ian Buruma’s The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II (Atlantic Books) as, of course Buruma is always worth reading on Asia matters, but also one of the collabos featured in the book is the Manchu princess/Japanese spy Kawashima Yoshiko…
On the face of it, the three characters here seem to have little in common – aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point.
Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur – Himmler calling him his ‘magic Buddha’. Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a traitor and a con artist, he is still regarded by supporters as the ‘Dutch Dreyfus’.
All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat tale of angels and devils. In telling their often-self-invented stories, The Collaborators offers a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these fantasists and what will always remain out of reach. It is also an examination of the power and credibility of history: truth is always a relative concept but perhaps especially so in times of political turmoil, not unlike our own.
Just a reminder that i’m on instagram posting old China @oldshanghaipaul
HMS Terrible was a Royal Navy Cruiser commissioned in the 1890s. She served on the China Station in 1900 supporting the suppression of the Boxer Uprising in northern China. Upon Terrible‘s return home in 1902, she was refitted for two years and was then placed in reserve, sporadically being activated to ferry replacements to Hong Kong and China. She later served as a troop transport in World War One, then a training ship, and then sold for scrap in 1932.
At some point in 1904 into 1905 Terrible visited Hong Kong (and Weihaiwei). A member of the crew took the photographs below…
