China Rhyming’s Most Desired Christmas Decorations – Yes, There’s Actually Something Called a Chinese Lantern Tree Plant!!

This ad from 1897 from John Lewis Childs of Floral Park, New York. The ad proclaims, “Most ornamental window or garden plant known, and a delicious fruit”. Sometimes a rather meek orange plant, a proper Chinese Lantern plant should be Physalis alkekengi, a relative of the gooseberry, and often referred to as Chinese Lantern or Japanese Lantern (the Japanese call the plant hozuki). Despite its name it’s actually a native plant to southern Europe that spread to Asia and was cultivated there due to its resemblance to traditional lanterns.

Physalis alkekengi

Broken Blossoms Outake Lobby Card from 1919

DW Griffith’s 1919 silent film Broken Blossoms was based on a short story (The Chink and the Child) set in London’s old Chinatown of Limehouse from Thomas Burke (part of his Limehouse Nights). While the movie was shot in the US it was meant to be in London’s East End and the sets were considered quite realistic (see Anne Witchard’s Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie). “The Yellow Man” falls in love “The Girl” who is abused by her father the pugilist Battling Burrows. Plenty of yellowface from Richard Barthelmiss as a Chinese and a lot of pouting from Lillian Gish. However, the film begins in China: “At the turn-stiles of the East – The bund of a great Chinese treaty port” with some sailors out on the town. Here then is a colour lobby card for the movie (which was obviously shown in black and white) and uses a scene I think cut from the final edit of the movie….

An Uncommon Journey: From Vienna to Shanghai to America a Brother and Sister Escape the Nazis

Another Shanghai Jewish memoir of the late 1930s and ’40s to add to the slightly groaning shelf of what was, thanks to the Nazi bastards, a rather too common journey for many….

It’s Septemer 1939 and Nazi Austria turns on their Jews with a vengeance.  The family Wacs flees Vienna, saving their lives. Destination:  Shanghai; alien to them – different language, people, culture.  Had they not escaped, one week later war broke out, and this family’s fate might have been quite different. An Uncommon Journey addresses several universal issues – persecution and the will to survive.  This unique memoir by a sister and brother born ten years apart shares different memories, often of the same events.  The truth becomes a mosaic with many facets, creating a moving portrait of a family uprooted.

A Little More Lao She on London’s Foul Air in the 1920s

The terrible fogs that smothered London in the 1920s were clearly one of the things Lao She remembered most vividly from his time in London. In his classic (and recently republished courtesy of Penguin Modern Classics) London novel Mr Ma and Son (1926), old Mr Ma, recently arrived from Peking in the English capital ruminates on the thick smog he encountered in what was obviously also the author’s experience of the city then….

“Even the weather in London grew busier. It was either windy or raining, and if it was neither of those, there was a fog. Sometimes, when the fancy took it, it’d be both rainy and foggy. London fog’s fascinating. Just take its colours, for instance. It may be several all at once. In some parts it’s light grey, and you can still see things within a range of forty or fifty feet or so. In other parts, it’s such a dark grey that there’s no slightest difference between night and day. In some places it’s greyish yellow, as if the whole of London City is burning damp wood that’s giving off a yellow smoke. In yet other places, it’s a reddish brown, and when the fog gets to such a state, you can forget about being able to see anything any more. All you can see if you’re standing indoors looking out at it through the window-pane, is the reddish brown colour. And if you walk in the fog, it’s dark grey just ahead of you, and not until you raise your head and make an actual effort to pick out a lamp shining somewhere, can you see the faintest yellow tinge to it. That sort of fog doesn’t come in wisps, but in one whole piece, and makes all the world except yourself a fog.

As you walk, the fog follows you. You can’t see anything, and nobody can see you. You don’t even know where you are. Only the fiercest-burning gas- lamps float forth any slightest light upon the air, and all you can distinguish is the wisps of steam that your own breathing hangs before your lips. All else is hazy and unidentifiable. The big vehicles crawl along so slowly, step by step, only declaring their presence to you by the sounds of their horns. But for those horns, you might feel really afraid, thinking perhaps that the whole world had been suffocated by the fog. You’re conscious that there are things to the right and left of you, and in front and behind, but you simply can’t pluck up the courage to move in any of these directions. That object in front of you may be a horse, or a car, or perhaps a tree, but unless you put your hands on it, you won’t know which one of those it is.

Mr. Ma was London’s leading man of leisure. When it was rainy, he didn’t go out. When it was windy, he didn’t go out. And when it was foggy, he stayed at home.”

Fog in Charing Cross in the 1920s – note the hastily erected acetylene lamp to help the police direct traffic

Chinese traffic police this week wonder whether they can get an old English acetylene lamp on ebay?

December 1924 – Lao She, Harriet Monroe and Huang Zunxian on London’s Smog

China is enveloped in smog. Of course it wasn’t always that way. In 1924 the young writer Lao She came to London to teach and was shocked by the London smog caused by the dirty air and filthy coal. December 1924 was bad but London had been suffering terrible smogs for decades, as the poet Huang Zunxian recalled in verse after his visit during a London “airpocalypse” in 1890. This section below from Anne Witchard’s RAS China Monograph Lao She in London recalling both their experiences and their shock at having come from the relatively clean skies of Peking back then…

Piccadilly in December 1924 during one of London’s worst ever “pea soupers”

“Lao She stayed (in London) through the winter of 1924 which saw the worst fog recorded for 34 years, paralysing the entire city. The very idea of London then was inextricable from its ‘pea-soupers’, or ‘London Particulars’, as they were called. Lao She would have probably been familiar with the poem Heavy Fog by China’s renowned poet and Hundred Days reformist, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), composed during London’s previous record-breaking fog in 1890, when Huang had been attached to the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place:

I sit by myself and write words in the air.


The fog is so dense, London is blacker than lacquer;

The cold is so bitter, it dims my fire.


I raise my head to gaze at a wild goose,


Soaring high in the sky, it rides the wind homeward.

Huang was homesick and Harriet Monroe, visiting London that month, couldn’t wait to leave either: ‘I could not endure the thoughtof life by candlelight in that sooty, cheerless capital where for three weeks I shivered in cold rooms and never once saw the sun.’ Until the Clean Air Act of 1952, each London fog plunged the city back into Victorian gloom. At midday on 9 December 1924, a clammy, yellow, blanket of fog dropped over London with the suddenness of a descending theatre curtain.

For almost a week, the street lamps, electric signs and the headlights of traffic, shed their ineffectual beams as people moved forward using their hands as antennae, like insects. Lao She had a tedious Northern Line commute on ‘the tube’, from High Barnet to Moorgate station, the stop nearest the School of Oriental Studies. He could not afford to buy winter tweeds so made do with the khaki, putting on the additional cardigan ‘only when it was really cold’.”

RAS Shanghai 10/12/13 – The Allure of the Lotus: Bound Feet as a Social and Historical Metaphor

The Allure of the Lotus: Bound Feet as a Social and Historical Metaphor

Dr Sheena Burnell

Tuesday 10 December: 7 pm for 7:30 start

RAS Library at the Sino-British College

1195 Fuxing Zhong Lu

  

SHEENA BURNELL on

“The Allure of the Lotus: Bound Feet as a Social and Historical Metaphor”

 

Today the subject of foot-binding evokes a mixture of fascination and revulsion and is the subject of a large amount of misinformation. However it was a practice carried out on a large scale by a very sophisticated and complex society for approximately a thousand years, and as such cannot be dismissed as an oddity. Understanding what was more than just a passing whim of fashion provides a window onto a closed and little-discussed period of Chinese history and allows a deeper understanding of the social, religious and historical pressures which affected all of Chinese society throughout several dynasties, especially its women.

 

This lecture will explore the historical and philosophical roots of the practice of foot-binding as well as elaborating upon the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of the shoes themselves.

Dr Sheena Burnell is an Australian-trained anaesthesiologist currently living and working in Shanghai. From an early age she has been drawn to Asia and the exquisite beauty of Asian art forms, and began collecting Japanese woodblock prints as an initial foray into this area. She subsequently developed her interest to include Chinese and Tibetan art and in particular Chinese textiles and embroidery. This further developed into a fascination with Chinese costume and dress accessories, particularly bound feet shoes and the extraordinary social history they embodied. Subsequently her interest in the area expanded to encompass Qing Dynasty kingfisher hair ornaments and more esoteric aspects of Chinese costume including theatre and post-Qing costume.

 

Dr Burnell has been invited to lecture on these collections both in Australia and Hong Kong as well as appearing on Australian television. Her current collecting interests are ethnic Chinese tribal jewelry and Tibetan gau boxes.

RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

  

ENTRANCE CONTRIBUTION: Members 30 RMB  Non-members 80 RMB. Includes a glass of wine or soft drink. Priority for RAS members. Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption.

 

MEMBERSHIP applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

 

RAS MONOGRAPHS – Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. 100 rmb each (cash sale only)

 

WEBSITE: www.royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

‘Chinese Baroque’ Restorations in Harbin

Among the talk of traditional architecture in China and the destruction of modernist and art-deco structures in various cities we rarely hear much about the ‘Chinese Baroque’ style, largely because there wasn’t much of it, much of what there was has been torn down, and it’s almost exclusively up in Manchuria.  Chinese Baroque is quite striking – a combination of the Baroque style and Chinese elements such as cranes and peony designs. The outsides can look western in a Baroque style surrounding more traditional Chinese courtyard interiors. Harbin (home to most surviving Chinese Baroque architecture) at least, it appears, is looking to restore several buildings that should hopefully allow us a glimpse of the insides and to look at the wonderful exteriors free of signage and “additions”.

A Touch of China Used to Sell Americans Buicks in 1962

This 1962 advert for the Buick Skylark Convertible opted to go full on with the Chinese theme . I’m afraid I don’t quite why they used such heavy Chinese imagery, including the lantern (well, I would notice the lantern wouldn’t I given recent obsessive behaviour on this blog regarding Chinese lanterns). The text makes no reference to China or anything Chinesey….