Macao – People and Places, Past and Present

Jason Wordie’s new book Macao – People and Place, Past and Present is now out and available from his web site…

Macao – People and Places, Past and Present
by Jason Wordie

Photography by Anthony J Hedley and Colin Day

With 22 original hand drawn maps by Wee Kek Koon

Macao contains abundant corners of appeal and fascination, and enduring links to the past in spite of considerable transformation, and rapid change in recent years.  A compelling, multi-layered social history, Macao – People and Places, Past and Present with stunning photographs by Anthony J Hedley and Colin Day – takes the reader on a series of journeys across physical, geographical, chronological and cultural space and time from the Barrier Gate in the north to Coloane in the south. In the process, Jason Wordie reveals the many dimensions that make Macao the uniquely special place that it is – and has always been.

Anthony J Hedley - A specialist in preventive medicine and public health, Anthony Hedley has worked in six medical schools and in 1988 became Chair Professor of Community Medicine in the University of Hong Kong.  He has collected cameras and photographic memorabilia since his teens and has photographed landscapes in the Asia Pacific region since 1964.

Colin Day - An academic publisher, Colin Day worked in Britain and the USA before becoming Publisher of Hong Kong University Press and latterly consultant to the Instituto Cultural do Macao. Finding both Hong Kong and Macao highly photogenic, he has devoted many hours in both cities to capturing both the grand sights and the back streets.

485 pages with more than 350 original colour images

Published by Angsana Limited

Shanghai’s Egg Trade, Kusel Behr and a Murder in London

It’s odd to think it now but once Shanghai was at the centre of the global trade in eggs. One company that was a major player in that trade was Behr and Matthew, who had an egg factory on the Yangtszepoo Road in Shanghai’s Yangtszepoo (Yangpu) District. As well as Shanghai, the company had branches and factories in Berlin, Paris, Hamburg and London. Chinese eggs were imported to all these locations and sold as egg powder, shell and other variations. Kusel Behr was born in Lithuania to a Jewish family around 1878 and eventually, after spending time in Shanghai in the egg business (where he had come to appreciate Chinese tea particularly), settled in London having made a sizeable pot of money in partnership with the Matthew family since 1916 in the Shanghai-Europe egg trading business. The Matthew’s had been in the China egg trade for some time but Behr bought them out in 1920. Behr then moved to London with his wife and four children and lived in a large house in Hampstead overseeing the business and with few money worries. The Shanghai egg business had been good – he had a Russian governess for the children and a cook and, at his death, left the large sum of 20,000 pounds.

However in 1926 Kusel Behr died at his home in London, though doctors were unable to establish the cause of his death until they found it was strychnine poisoning. The story of the investigation into Behr’s death is told in Jonathan Oates’s book Unsolved London Murders: The 1920s and 1930s. Nobody was sure how he had come to take the strychnine – perhaps mixed in with his occasional gin, though who had brought the strychnine into Behr’s house was unknown. He had drunk Chinese tea and that seemed the only likely cause, though so had Annie, the parlour maid and Mrs Behr – they became the prime suspects. His will revealed that his fortune was split between his children and held in trust for them until they reached the age of 30. It was recorded that Mr and Mrs Behr fought a lot and Behr sometimes behaved like a “madman”.

It also transpired that, after one particularly violent, quarrel in 1925 Mrs Behr had travelled back to Shanghai from London with the intention of selling some properties in Shanghai owned by the Behrs. She left without telling Behr she was going. She was unable to transact the business due to political instability in Shanghai at the time, what has become known as the May Thirtieth Movement. She returned to London. Nobody was ever formally charged with the murder – suicide, murder by his wife, Annie the maid or someone else was never determined.

What started in Shanghai with the profitable egg business ended in North London in murder…

New Exhibition – Early Photographs of Hong Kong c.1862 – 1900

The Jonathan Wattis gallery in Hong Kong has an unerring ability to get me to do that rarest of things, take out my wallet….their new exhibition of Hong Kong photos is no exception….

Early Photographs of Hong Kong c.1862 – 1900

A collection of original albumen and gelatin silver prints

 

Happy Valley, Race Day 1880 by AFong

28^th November 2013- 21st December 2013, and

2nd – 28th January 2014

Illustrated booklet available

The American Military in China and their Secret Weapon – Bring on the Camels Lads!

In these days of heightened concerns over American reaction to China’s ADIZ, it’s a face off. But Beijing should remember that America has got a history of active military service in China and while Beijing may think they are prepared for anything we have to ask whether they have remembered how to deal with the United States Camel Squadrons??

 

This is a Qing dynasty era picture of an American army sergeant in Peking at some point around the time of the Boxer Rebellion. He’s looking after a team of camels used for hauling items for the military. There seems to be very little written about the US military’s use of camels in China and they seem not to have been part of the army’s official Camel Corps which had pretty much died out by the Civil War (the American one, as opposed to any of the Chinese ones). Still, there’s an American officer with some camels! If anyone knows any more about American soldiers and their fondness for camels I’d like to hear (and yes, I’ve heard all the jokes)?

RAS Beijing – 4/12/13 – Steven Schwankert on Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine

The RAS Beijing is truly up and running now (and has an excellent web site too – where you can sign up for their newsletters)….Their next event…..

The Royal Navy submarine HMS Poseidon sank in collision with a freighter during routine exercises in 1931 off the Chinese coast. Thirty of its fifty-six-man crew scrambled out of the hatches as it went down. Of the twenty-six who remained inside, eight attempted to surface using an early form of diving equipment: five of them made it safely to the surface in the first escape of this kind in submarine history and became heroes. The incident was then forgotten, eclipsed by the greater drama that followed in World War II, until news emerged that, for obscure reasons, the Chinese government had salvaged the wrecked submarine in 1972. This lively account of the Poseidon incident tells the story of the accident and its aftermath, and of the author’s own quest to discover the shipwreck and its hidden history.

Steven R. Schwankert is an editor and award-winning reporter with seventeen years of experience in Greater China. He is the Asia chapter chair of The Explorers Club, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and founder of SinoScuba, Beijing’s first professional scuba-diving operator. In 2007, he led the first ever scientific expedition to dive Mongolia’s Lake Khovsgol. He regularly guides divers to the Underwater Great Wall and a Ming-dynasty city that lies beneath a lake in China’s Zhejiang Province. 

When: Wednesday 4 December 19:30-21:00

Where: Shijia Hutong Museum at #24 Shijia Hutong, Dongcheng district north of Jinbao Jie (see Map)

Cost: Members 30 RMB; Non-members 60 RMB

We hope to see you there!

Elgin Watches Uses China to sell Pocket Watches in 1922

Here’s a 1922 advert from the Saturday Evening Post in America for Elgin Watches that uses a Chinese scene. The hook is apparently that Confucius said “give it time” to an impatient disciple. Elgin (so called as it was based in the town of Elgin, Illinois) itself dates back to 1864 as an American watchmaker, not quite as far as Confucius, but good going for that side of the pond. However, their use of China might be considered a bit odd as they sold watches under the brand names Lord Elgin and Lady Elgin – of course James Bruce, the Eighth Earl of Elgin, was the man who infamously torched the Summer Palace in 1860, perhaps not such a jolly image of China as this ad might suggest! Elgin, the town, got its name from a Scottish psalm apparently….

RAS Shanghai – 7/12/13 – Walking Tour through Jiading Old Town with Kate Baker

RAS Shanghai – 7/12/13 – Walking Tour through Jiading Old Town with Kate Baker

On Saturday December 7, Kate Baker, author of “Beyond the Concessions:  Six Walks Exploring Shanghai’s Other Districts” will lead us through the Confucius Temple, Imperial Examination Museum, and Huilongtan Park, weather permitting.  We will meet at 10:00 in the Jiading Information Center for coffee/tea and a 15 minute talk about the history of Jiading.  We will then proceed to the temple, museum and the center of Old Jiading.  Lunch at 12:30-1:00 will be held at the Jiading Hotel.  It is a Chinese buffet which will be freshly cooked for us

You can stay for as short as 3 hours or spend the whole day. Jiading is a 40 minute metro trip from Jiangsu station or can be reached by car or taxi in about an hour.  If you have a copy of “Beyond the Concessions”, it will be useful to bring it along.

Jiading History: A prosperous town in the thirteenth century, Jiading was a commercial town rich with trade in cotton and other goods.  The literary class produced many Imperial Examination scholars who in turn enriched the town with culture in the form of classical gardens, bamboo carving, painting, calligraphy, and poetry.  A gracious restoration of the town’s historical relics began in the 1980s and continues to this day.

Cost: RMB 100 includes lunch.  

 

Spaces are limited so RSVP is required!

Please RSVP by December 5 to adhocstudygroup@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

 

Address of Jiading Information Center:  68 Shaxia Lu, Jiading Old Town

上海嘉定沙霞路68号。

Information Center Phone:021-59912999

Wilkie Collins, No Name and the Opportunity of China in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Andrew Lycett’s new biography of Wilkie Collins, A Life of Sensation is now out. Wilkie Collins and China? Any connections? Appears there is a small one (so perfect for this blog). Collins’s No Name was published in 1862 after he had found success with The Woman in White. It handles the subject of illegitimacy, a serious subject in the mid-nineteenth century of course. The reviewers didn’t like it (a bit scandalous for the times), the public loved it. The plot concerns a young girl, Magdalen Vanstone, who becomes engaged to a rather feckless young man, Francis Clare. Clare is sent off to China to make his fortune.

No Name is actually quite instructive of attitudes to working in China in the 1840s (the book is set 15 or 20 years prior to its publication). Clare works for a firm of traders in the City of London and is to be sent to their “correspondents” in China to familiarize himself with both the tea and silk trades for five years. He is based in Shanghai and arrives in 1846/47. He will return, it is expected, to a position of some rank thanks to his China knowledge and experience. The job is seen as a “banishment” by some of his family but as a means of making good money and eventually establishing his own trading company at some future point by others. It is suggested that while in China opportunities will afford themselves for him to make his fortune. As he is engaged the marriage will have to wait though it is suggested that in one year in the East he will make enough to pay for the dowry and be able to afford to marry.

Also interesting is the role of China in the book in terms of objects. Others who have been to China have returned with objects – Collins describes one house as containing, “Stuffed birds from Africa, porcelain monsters from China, silver ornaments and utensils from India and Peru, mosaic work from Italy and bronzes from France…” Another character heading to China promises to bring back a China shawl and a chest of tea.

Collins’s No Name is not essentially a book about China – China exists as a place far away to which a man may, or may not, go to make, or not make, a fortune but it is a neat literary example of how China was often central to many British families experiences in the mid-nineteenth century and an essential part of Britain’s international trade.