Shanghai – First Impressions No.13 – Carroll Alcott Arrives to Annoy the Japanese, 1928

Cosmopolis on a Raft – Carroll Alcott – 1928

The station’s star was Carroll Alcott, originally from South Dakota and a former journalist on the Sioux City Tribune and the Denver Post before working his way around Asia for 15 years as the New York Herald Tribune’s Philippines correspondent and a reporter for the Manila Bulletin before finally moving to Shanghai in 1928. He freelanced breaking some good stories, notably about the opium business, German gunrunners, Japanese aggression in China and had once famously dined with a warlord in Chefoo (Yantai) while the blood of his recently executed enemies dripped from the floor above into his noodles and shredded beef. Alfred Meyer, the Managing Editor of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury had snapped him up to cover the Shanghai crime beat, a job Alcott revelled in noting that a typical day involved, ‘…as many as three murder trials, a gang shooting, half a dozen armed robberies, a jewel theft, and a couple of kidnappings.’ (14) In 1933, and by now one of the most widely read journalists on the China coast, he moved over to the China Press as their Cable Editor.

 

In 1938 Jack Horton, who ran the RCA-Victor factory in China suggested to Alcott he might like to replace XHMA’s former announcer Acheson Lucey, who had also been a print journalist on the Post and Mercury before trying his hand at radio. It hadn’t really worked out with Lucey who was heading back to America so a vacancy had occurred. XHMA’s manager Mike Healey thought Alcott would fit right in and all agreed that it was time for Americans to respond to Japanese propaganda broadcasts on the radio. As soon as Alcott arrived at XHMA the old China press corps network kicked in and corps members were regular guests on his radio shows. His reach was substantial through XHMA as both Shanghailanders and Chinese listened while cafes, shops, bars, hotels and casinos all kept the radio on all day for news of the deteriorating situation. The station’s signal reached across China and as far as Japan causing no end of annoyance to the Japanese authorities.

 

Alcott was modestly popular at first when he started broadcasting in July 1938 though as the situation wrosened he became a must listen to radio journalist and one of the greatest enemies of the Japanese in Shanghai. He also attracted a rather large and loyal following among women listeners (receiving 500 letters a month from fans) due to his charm (though he was actually quite fat and not particulaly attractive – a “great face for radio” as they say) and his shows were entirely funded by advertising from brands like Jell-O, Ovaltine and Maxwell House Coffee despite Japanese threats to punish those companies for sponsporing his broadcasts, which they regularly tried to jam. He managed to particularly annoy the sinister Mr Suzuki, who had vowed to run him out of town, with an advert declaring, ‘This broadcast is brought to you courtesy of the Bakerite Company, Shanghai’s leading bakers and makers of better bread. The jam tonight is courtesy of Mr Suzuki and the Japanese Army.’ (15) He was also well regarded by listeners for ignoring the official Japanese press releases but obviously, for the same reason, disliked by the Japanese military command. For the four years Alcott stayed on the air at XHMA he was extremely popular but also lived in fear of assassination the entire time. Indeed it didn’t start well. As Alcott was a well-known Shanghai print journalist his debut on XHMA was advertised widely around town but he was also well known for being anti-Japanese and pro the nationalist government. Three days before he was scheduled to debut on air a bomb was hurled at the studio that didn’t do much damage but did send a message that Alcott’s appointment was controversial with somebody.

Different From Any Other Section Of Time Or Space

Originally I had planned to stay a few weeks in Shanghai, spend a month or two touring China, and then return to the United States to write and talk about what I had seen. Instead, I made the trip and saw so much that I remained almost fourteen years. Old residents of the great metropolis will be able to understand why I did not go home. Others may not. It is enough to say that Shanghai, in the days when I first set foot on that city’s waterfront, was different from any other section of time or space.

It was the most cosmopolitan city on earth. More than sixty nationalities were represented in its population of five million people. Concentrated in an area of less than one hundred square miles was all the adventure, intrigue and novelty a newsman needed to make living a delight. Besides, living was cheap. Even a family in moderate circumstances could and did employ a retinue of servants for the wages of a single maid in New York or London, and perhaps less. During my last few years in the city, for instance, I kept a cook, a chauffeur, a houseboy, and an amah for the equivalent of less than thirty American dollars, and I paid as good wages as any other foreigner there.

But it was not by any means the attraction of cheap living, the idea of being waited upon by cooks, amahs, houseboys and coolies, that caused many of us to miss a lot of homeward-bound boats. It was the city itself.

Many volumes have already been written about Shanghai. Many more thousands of words on the same subject will be written in years to come. Much of this material will be new to the Occident, and all of it will be interesting, for no one man can adequately present in a single book, or even a dozen books, the story of Cosmopolis on the Whangpoo. Many writers have tried, and I think they have all failed. The best I can hope to do in a few chapters is to offer a handful of impressions.

 

To begin with, the scene in Shanghai changed from day to day, and though there were times when I found the city depressing, and even boring, that was because of my own mental condition. It wasn’t Shanghai’s fault. The very constitution of its people – its thousands of exiles from all parts of the world-the complex variations of its structure – the foreign and Chinese courts; crime and political terrorism; British, French, Japanese, Annamite, Indian and Chinese policemen; great wealth and extreme poverty; gaiety and hunger-presented an almost endless stream of human interest stories and new aspects to the business of living. Here you could see the struggle for existence stripped of all pretense and social niceties. Hunger dispenses with such matters, and there was always hunger in Shanghai. Yet there was a life of pretense, too, and great display of riches. This contrast was forever present. It was impossible to walk a block without seeing it.

My first day ashore in the city drove home to my mind the great importance of the rice bowl in Asia. I learned during the course of a few hours’ stroll that all the other problems of the Orient, even war, floods, earthquakes and every other calamity, fade into insignificance beside the business of eating. This fundamental human condition was not so apparent in the Philippines, where the natives’ standard of living has been raised as one result of the American occupation. The Filipinos drew larger wages and lived better than other Orientals. You had to visit the mainland of Asia to find out what real hunger meant.

 

On that memorable June day of my arrival, I paused on the sidewalk for a moment to enjoy my first sight of crowded Shanghai going home from work. It was a study in traffic jams, labor and ease, rags and fine silks. The streets were congested with all sorts of vehicles: automobiles, wheelbarrows, rickshaws, handcarts, bicycles, motorcycles, buses, trams, and ancient Victorian carriages drawn by Mongolian ponies. The latter conveyances were called “brokers’ hacks,” a nickname derived from the fact that they were used largely by the foreign financial leaders of the city. To ride about in such a contraption was a sign of affluence.

As Shanghai was a city of jaywalkers, native pedestrians gave scant attention to the crowded pavements and left the sidewalks to cross the streets at any point that suited their fancy. Old men and women, schoolgirls and children, darted in and out of traffic, crossing in front of automobiles and speeding bicycles. They blocked the way of handcarts and wheelbarrows and shouted curses at sweating coolies who refused to stop for them.

Because of this disregard for traffic regulations, casualty lists in street accidents in the larger cities of China mounted to terrific levels when automobiles appeared in the Orient. But even this fact failed to make much of an impression on the peasant and coolie classes. At least, I could notice little improvement even at the end of my fourteen years in the country. There were few days during that long period when I did not personally witness some accident in which a Chinese man or woman was killed by a truck or automobile. And such incidents were seldom the fault of the drivers.

 

The first of these tragedies that 1 saw was at the corner of Peking Road and the Bund, on my first day in the city. An aged Chinese woman was the victim. Carrying a large bowl of rice sprinkled with slices of pork, probably her evening meal, she stumbled and fell. The bowl broke and its contents were spilled on the pavement. Crying as though she had lost everything she owned in this world (and that might well have been the case), she struggled to her hands and knees. Then followed a sight 1 shall never forget, though I have seen it repeated many times since.

Using her cupped hands, the old woman proceeded to scoop up from the macadam pavement all she could salvage of the rice and pork, and with it came a good deal of coal dust, horse dung, and other filth. The whole of this foul mess she placed in a dirty cap removed from her head.

This was the first time 1 had ever seen real hunger, hunger so intense that it caused a human being to scrape up the filth of the pavement for a dinner. Giving no heed to the big limousine bearing down upon her, the old woman carried on with her task, tears streaming down her face. The meal had been ruined but she would eat it anyway. She wouldn’t go to bed hungry.

She was destined not to go to bed at all. The driver of the limousine saw her too late to stop. He shoved on the brakes, but the car slid ahead and over the body of the woman on the street. She was dead when they picked her up. Her back had been broken.

At the time, I thought it was one of the most horrible accidents I had ever seen. To my fellow witnesses, however, it seemed to bring no unusual amount of excitement or pity. I did not know then that such tragedies were commonplace in Shanghai, and I rather expected to see a reporter and photographer appear. I could picture the headline: “MILLIONAIRE’S CAR KILLS AGED WOMAN AS SHE SCOOPS DINNER FROM THE STREET.” Later I learned that Shanghai newspapers were not deeply interested in events of that sort. They had a dozen or more traffic accidents to cover every day, and unless the victims were people of prominence, a small roundup story stating the number of persons killed and injured was about all that got into print.

After several minutes a Chinese constable appeared on the scene, took the number of the car and the name of the chauffeur. Another Chinese, apparently the owner of the limousine, poked his head out of a rear-door window and wanted to know what had happened. Upon being told, he identified himself and settled back on the cushions. Neither his face nor his manner betrayed any evidence of concern. A few minutes later, not a sign of what had happened remained in the street. The body of the old woman had been removed to the morgue, and the limousine had disappeared into traffic.

In the moments following that accident, I was not sure that I was going to like Shanghai. You have to be callous, and perhaps just a trifle cruel, to stand the sort of thing I had just witnessed. I wondered whether I was tough enough to become accustomed to such incidents and take them in my stride. I found the answer to that query the same afternoon, only a few minutes later.

With my appetite for dinner completely gone, I continued my stroll, turned down the Bund, and walked across that picturesque thoroughfare to the customs jetty. I wanted a leisurely look at the Whangpoo River. It might, I thought, help to erase from my mind the picture of the old woman and her ruined dinner.

There was much to see on the river. Battleship Row with its warships of all nations was directly to the right. The men-of-war were there to protect foreign trade and shipping, by right of treaty with the Chinese Government of another day. Across the stream was Pootung, with its British cotton mills and busy docks. Downstream, the waterfront was lined with more docks, British, Japanese and American. The German, American and Japanese Consulates stood back from the foreshore just beyond the bend in the river.

The stream itself was crowded with traffic. Chugging tugboats hauled an almost endless procession of heavily laden barges. Big ocean-going liners and freighters, some headed out to sea, others just coming into port, gave evidence of the great importance of Shanghai as a commercial center. Here was industry and trade on a scale almost unparalleled elsewhere in the Orient. In the great activity of the waterfront and the river, the pitiful traffic accident that I had just seen lost its importance. I was beginning to feel hungry. My appetite had returned.

While I was pondering over the greatness of this metropolis in which I had just arrived, my attention was suddenly diverted to an old woman squatting on the river bank at the edge of the jetty. She seemed to be washing something, and it wasn’t clothing. It appeared to be some sort of stringy substance. Curious, I walked forward for a better look.

At her side was a small basket filled with what at first glance looked like small cords covered with coal dust. In front of her was a large bowl. Dipping a hand into the basket, she removed some strings and washed them in the dirty water of the Whangpoo. Then she placed them in the bowI. I noticed that when she had finished each operation the strings were a sort of muddy yellow color.

But they were not strings. Closer examination revealed that the old woman was scrubbing her dinner. The strings were noodles, covered with coal dust and filth. An American member of the Whangpoo River Police was standing nearby and I approached him for an explanation.

“The old girl is washing noodles she picked up from the streets and alleys,” came the casual reply. “Don’t let it turn your stomach, mister. She does it every day. That’s the way she lives. What she doesn’t eat she sells to street urchins for a few coppers.”

I wanted to know if such practice was general in the city, or elsewhere in China.

“I don’t know about the rest of the country,” he said, “but you’ll find many more along the Whangpoo about this time doing the same thing. Food hawkers drop the noodles in the streets while they’re hustling for business, and they get black because the coal trucks run over them. Not very good eating, I suppose, but in this country lots of folks eat what they can get and like it.”

I thanked the officer and started to walk away. He stopped me to volunteer a bit of added information:

“We pulled a corpse out of the river just a few yards from where the hag is washing her chow,” he said. “That was about an hour ago. We get about seven or eight dead bodies from this stream every day and the sewage and refuse of the whole area is dumped into it. Not a clean place to wash a meal.”

I took another look at the Whangpoo. It was a dirty stream; filthy, as a matter of fact. A few feet from shore a sampan coolie, squatting on the stem platform of his bobbing little boat, was brushing his teeth. Some missionary, perhaps, had taught him the habit, but it was difficult to understand how Whangpoo River water could be much of a cleansing agent.

I left the jetty and returned to the sidewalks of the Bund. To my surprise I was still hungry. It was then that I knew I was going to like Shanghai.

Carroll Alcott, My War With Japan (Henry Holt & Co., 1943, New York)

The Peking Badlands Old and New

Some queries from people wanting to get to the old Peking Badlands (that’s to say get there physically as opposed to in literature – which would require my e-book The Badlands – and that’s a convaluted plug!!)

Anyway, here’s two maps – one of the Badlands as were (and created by Jason Pym) as best as I can work out – and a google map of the area today for anyone wanting to get down there before it all goes…..

Chuanban Hutong in Happier Times

As I noted yesterday it seems the bulldozers have finally gone into the old Peking Badlands and are taking down Chuanban Hutong, at least the western end of the lane which housed many of the most notorious dives of the old days. However, all that sin and depravity, dope dens and flop houses was shut down in 1949 and the old denizens of the Badlands either died, drifted off or were thrown out – the last people associated with the Badlands still around after 1949 that I know of were sent back to the Soviet Union (unable to get visas or passports for anywhere else and not a good fate as they were all White Russians, a group Stalin was not overly enamored with) in the mid-1950s. In the 1950s the area was populated by construction workers largely tearing down the city walls and building the Beijing Railway Station, track and access roads. This, along with the redevelopment of the old Hataman Street (Chongwenmen Street) left the old Badlands of Chuanpan and Hougou Hutongs rather isolated.

Slightly later the area filled up again as a community – mostly Xin, or New Beijingers – I’ve never found anyone around there who goes back further than the late 1950s. The area’s rather run down nature (though by no means were/are most of the properties on Chuanban and Hougou Hutongs slums at all – many are good solid structures built well in the late 1920s or 1930s – overcrowded perhaps, but not wrecks) and proximity to the Railway Station meant that the area has had its share of transients and been home to cheap hotels and the like. Just as in the 1920s and 1930s the hutong just to the north (and also one assumes now under threat), Suzhou (formerly Soochow) Hutong, was and is a haven for street food lovers. Here’s some photos from Chuanban Hutong in happier times a few years ago before the evictions and demolition.

The End of the Peking Badlands? Chuanban Hutong for the Chop is Seems

Reports reach me from Peking that a number of buildings dating back to the 1920s and 1930s have been razed on Chuanban Hutong to make way for a new high rise concrete block of some sort. As readers of Midnight in Peking, or my subsequent e-book The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking, will know Chuanban Hutong, formerly Chuanpan Hutong, was, along with Hougou Hutong, the epi-centre of the old Peking Badlands on the edge of the Legation Quarter and nestling into the eastern Tartar City.

One of the buildings to come down is the former No.28 (renumbering occurred later after the road was truncated with the construction of Beijing Railway Station, associated access roads and the destruction of the ancient wall in the 1950s. Readers of Midnight in Peking will of course be familiar with that location (below) and its rather horrendous history. Also now lost to us are buildings that once housed White Russian run bars and lodging houses. However, what will remain of Chuanban Hutong remains to to be seen – perhaps of most immediate architectural concern would be the former Asbury Methodist Church (established by American missionaries) on Hougou Hutong and once known as “The Island of Hope” – it is now the Chongwenmen Protestant Church (though appears on Google Maps, rather wonderfully, as The Asbury).

So, if you don’t know the old Badlands, sandwiched between Chongwenmen Outer Street to the west, Beijing Station Street to the south and east and Suzhou Hutong to the north (a good food street), get down there as soon as…there’s a map here or you can use the Midnight in Peking Audio Walk, downloadable from here.

I’ll post some pictures of Chuanban Hutong in happier times tomorrow…

The former No.28 – now sadly gone

The entrance to the old Asbury Church and missionary compound – now a bit uncertain (should be OK – but this is Beijing!) and definitely about to be surrounded by high rises in what has been a rather low rise area for all of recorded history until now

Shanghai – First Impressions No.12 – The Lefties Are Coming, Freda Utley, 1928

Off to the East – Freda Utley – 1928

A leading “Last Ditcher” (those who stayed in China into the war years) was the London-born socialist Winifred “Freda” Utley (1899-1978). She had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and had also been close to the Fabians and George Bernard Shaw. She’d become entranced with the USSR and moved to Moscow where she married a Soviet citizen. Her husband got himself caught up in Stalin’s purges, was sent to a Siberian gulag and died without ever making contact with her again. She left Moscow, surprisingly not totally disillusioned with Stalin’s Russia, and went to America where she freelanced for Reader’s Digest.

In her memoirs, Odyssey of a Liberal, Utley was as keen to report the political situation in China when she arrived in 1938 (she had briefly been to Shanghai ten years previously carrying messages for the Comintern) as she was to report that she was incredibly beautiful and highly desirable. She did however admit that the lack of available white women in the war zones of China combined with the testosterone-fuelled reporting environment probably contributed to her self-proclaimed popularity among her male colleagues. She soon formed an attachment based on gender and politics with the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent Agnes Smedley and Anna Louise Strong, basically the only other unattached white women around the journalist community in Hankou (though most men admitted to being afraid of them!) along with Ilona Ralf Sues who was now working for Holly Tong’s government propaganda ministry.

Utley was to become well known as a journalist and political activist in China based in Hankow in 1938 etc but she first visited Shanghai ten years earlier in 1928 carrying letters from Moscow for the Comintern to the Chinese communist underground and Soviet agents. Naturally Utley’s arrival at Shanghai was somewhat more cloak and dagger than most.

Utley was right to note how tense things were – months later thousands of communists, leftists and trade unionists were slaughtered.

Secret Hideouts

Eventually I got a ship to Shanghai where, according to my instructions I registered at the Palace Hotel (1) and telephoned to a business office asking for a gentleman with a German name and telling him I had arrived with the sample of silk stockings he was waiting for. “Herr Doktor Haber,” as he then called himself, came over at once and I handed over to him with considerable relief the sealed and silk encased package that I had concealed so long on my person, and which contained I know not what secret instructions for the furtherance of communist aims in China.

Some days later I was permitted to meet with the leaders of the communist underground in Shanghai in one of their secret hideouts. Our rendezvous was at midnight in a whitewashed cellar somewhere off the Nanking Road in the British concession, to which I was conducted by a devious route left anyone should be following me. It was very conspiratorial and thrilling and reminds me today of a Hollywood spy movie. For my Chinese companion it was deadly earnest since the British authorities in the International Settlement, as well as Chiang Kai-shek’s newly established government, were intent on rooting out and exterminating the remnants of the Moscow directed Chinese Communist party.

I was probably safe from anything worse than deportation from China, but others were risking their lives.

Freda Utley, Odyssey of a Liberal, (Washington National Press, 1970, Washington DC)

 

 

1) Now the South Wing of the Fairmont Peace Hotel at NoThe Bund.

 

On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta

Some authors are cleverer than me – instead of walking round mouldy old hutongs at 7am on freezing cold Peking mornings looking for traces of dead girls they choose a subject like food and find an excuse to go to Rome! Jen Lin-liu is clearly one such cleverer author. Her new book On the Noodle Road does indeed reach from some of the nicer hutongs of Peking to Rome – as they say “all roads lead to Rome”.

And she’s talking about her journey and food for the Royal Asiatic Society’s new Beijing Chapter (sadly they’ve opted for “Beijing” rather than “Peking”) on September 4th – details below

Shanghai – First Impressions No.11 – Vincent Sheean Gets to Shanghai, 1927

Fantastically Artificial – Vincent Sheean – 1927

Vincent Sheean (1899-1975) was only 27 when he arrived in China but already knew that China would be a stepping stone to greater things and had already cultivated the air of the ‘roving reporter deluxe’

Sheean himself pitched up in China in 1927 (when he was just 27) also intending to cover events in Guangzhou. He had dropped out of Chicago University and taken a job at the Chicago Daily News and the North American Newspaper Alliance. Despite his youth Sheean had an urbane air that allowed him to charm warlords, revolutionaries and diplomats alike. He walked into an early scoop few days after arriving when he secured an interview with Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing. Following this he returned to Shanghai (a city he didn’t like for its all pervading atmosphere of colonial repression and self-declared superior foreigners) and proceeded to bag an interview with TV Soong, Madame Chiang’s brother and then China’s Finance Minister in the middle of cleaning house financially and establishing the Bank of China. Also deciding to follow the action to Hankou the prematurely greying Sheean (which helped his ability to be accepted by everyone) found the more politically committed leftists a rather dull bunch. He disliked Chen seeing him as ‘venemous’ as well as the overly serious Bill Prohme (who equally disliked Sheean for his bourgeoise tastes which included a fondness for Scotch and Egyptian cigarettes) but found Rayna more bearable – intellectually rather than physically – after the New York Times’s Frank Misselwitz introduced them. He described himself at this stage of his life as still really a ‘middle class dilettante’ and Rayna agreed with his assessment of himself calling him a fence-sitter event though he loosely adopted her socialism and became rather infatuated with Borodin, although his infatuation With Rayna was initially a rather non-committal way to enter a rather fun and loose social circle as opposed to a dedicated belief in the theory of Permanent Revolution. Still, what Sheean understood, despite his often flippant attitude (at that point in his life anyway) was that in 1927 Hankou was the crucible for those hoping for a Chinese revolution, particularly a Trostskyist version now their hopes of permanent revolution were fading in the Soviet Union as the brutal contradictions of that upheaval became increasingly apparent as Stalin consolidated power.

Despite his left wing position Sheean’s grasp of Chinese history is not always entirely free of the prejudices of the day – Shanghai existed before the British arrived and many in China would argue that the idea that the Qing Dynasty ‘did not want it’ and so gave it away is wrong; rather were forced to concede it at gun point as a consequence of their defeat in the Opium Wars and subsequent ‘unequal treaties’.

Revolution!

I arrived in China at the most fateful moment of the national revolution, that in which the victors surveyed the field and took stock of themselves. It was not a good moment for a journalist: from the professional point of view, I was too late. The capture of Shanghai and the sack of Nanking had been the high points of interest for the newspapers in America, and by the time I got to Shanghai the ‘story’, as we say in the language of the trade, was already fading into obscurity.

I returned to Shanghai, the atmosphere of which had already begun to seem fantastically artificial. Its inhabitants considered that they had built Shanghai out of nothing, and, in the most obvious sense, they had; the site of the city had been a worthless mudbank, given to the British, Americans and French because the Chinese did not want it. The British, Americans and French had reclaimed the land, built upon it with increasing pompousness, and now regarded it as an exhibition of their own superiority to the despised natives of China. It never seemed to cross their minds that every penny spent upon Shanghai had been wrung from the Chinese in one way or another, either by the exorbitant profits of foreign trade – the exploitation of what is called an ‘undeveloped market,’ which is to say a market made up of people who do not known they are being cheated – or by the direct exploitation of Chinese labor. The second source of wealth was more recent, and its profits had been enormous. The British, Americans and Japanese were able to employ Chinese people of all ages in their factories for any number of hours a day, for wages so small that they barely supported a half-starved and ever-threatened life.

The coolie population, which never had enough to eat and often no place to sleep, was easy prey for manufacturers who wished to make the modest profit of a thousand per cent. Against any mention of these unpleasant facts the Shanghai foreigner, sipping his cocktail reflectively in the cool recesses of one of his clubs, would reply with a number of statements that seemed to him irrefutable. He would say that many Chinese of the middle class, compradors, had grown rich wit the foreigners; that conditions in the British and American factories wee not so bad as in the Japanese, and conditions in the Japanese factories not so bad as in the occasional Chinese establishments; that the prosperity of Shanghai benefited all China; and that, in any case, the Chinese were an inferior race, had never been used to anything but starvation and overwork, misery and oppression, and consequently ‘don’t feel anything – not, at least, as we do.’ I never met anybody in Shanghai who revealed the slightest feeling of shame, the slightest of consciousness of degradation, in this taking advantage of human misery in its most appalling forms. On the contrary, the Shanghai foreigners felt virtuous because they gave their coolies a slightly better chance of survival than did the worst of the Chinese employers. Shanghai saw itself as the benefactor of all China, and was horrified at the rising Chinese demand for better conditions of life and a recognized share of the spoils.

Vincent Sheean, Personal History, (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934, Boston)

 

Macao – Cultural Interaction and Literary Representations

This book is a follow up, apparently, to Macao: Formation of a Global City, which I liked a lot. So this one should be interesting too….