Shanghai – First Impressions No.10 – Hendrik De Leeuw Comes Looking for Sin, 1920s

City of Sin – Hendrik De Leeuw – 1920s

De Leeuw was a Dutch businessman who travelled extensively in the Near and Far East. His real interest was, quite unashamedly, the sex trade across the region. His investigations appear to have been a mixture of serious enquiry into the nature of the trade, particularly the local bordellos and how their customs differed from Europe or America and also the extent and operation of the trafficking of women from America and Europe to the bordellos of the Far East – white slavery. His thoughts on the business in Shanghai as well as Yokohama, Hong Kong, Port Said, Macao and Singapore where gathered together in his 1933 book Cities of Sin.

De Leeuw travelled to Shanghai aboard the Tij-Manoek liner of the Java-China-Japan Line. Aboard he made the acquaintance of “Gregory”, a man who made his living as a procurer, or pimp, bringing prostitutes (willing and seemingly often less so) to the brothels of Shanghai. When De Leeuw met him aboard the Tij-Manoek he was taking two girls to work at a brothel on Hongkou’s notorious Scott Road. Naturally this fascinated De Leeuw who had to know more.

Fashionable Avenues

Our steamer dropped anchor some twelve miles off the Chinese village of Woosung, where, not long after, the Nineteenth Route Army was to give to the world an example of Chinese bravery. Soon the passengers were transferred to a tug and we passed up the stately river. It was late at night, but the banks swarmed with life. Hundreds of sampans, protected by low-arched bamboo mats, lined the shores. I saw a number of people waiting to greet the passengers. Not far from me, in the press of the debarking, I saw Gregory. On each arm a beauty rested, chatting gaily.

 

My coolie pulled me along the handsome Bund, flanked on one side by banks and clubs and merchants’ buildings and on the other by the Whangpoo River. I rode on through a maze of carriages, motors, dog carts and sedan chairs and, at last, drew up in front of the Astor House at the corner of Broadway.

 

Gregory called for me the next night, he suggesting that we visit a house of prostitution managed and owned by an American woman. She was said to be the one of the most successful brothel owners in the East. The inmates of her establishment had the reputation of being the most beautiful of all the prostitutes in the city – and the cash return they brought her was placed at fabulous figures.

 

I agreed to Gregory’s suggestion. We went for a sedan chair and were borne by strapping coolies towards Soochow Road (1), the fashionable avenue of the native quarter, where we were to dine. We came to stop before a music hall, renowned for its excellent food. On the door that led into the gleaming palace were many posters bearing the names and places of birth of the girl performers within. Their talents were praised and the gay world was urged to come in and look.

 

Gregory and I marched up the stairs to the restaurant on the second floor. Hundreds of others were moving in and out. the air was full of the discords of a Chinese band and the bright lights flashed. There was a constant chatter of shrill voices.

 

He chose a table on the edge of a clear space. I had not settled myself before I saw the first advance of the prostitutes of Shanghai. It was a procession of young girls. They entered the room under the direction of an older woman. There were clad in silks and satins, bedecked with jewelery, and their faces were brightly painted and heavily powdered. That same old Chinese smile played around their pretty lips and they looked this way and that as they came on. It was solicitation.

 

The woman stopped in front of a table where sat four Chinese. They were laughing and, I suppose, a little overcome with wine. The woman talked briskly to the men.

 

“She is telling them,” said Gregory, “how delightful her young charges are as companions for the night.”

 

That’s what she did. She beckoned to four of the twenty girls that waited and they approached, bowing and smiling. The woman gestured and went on talking,in much the same manner as an auctioneer. However, the men were more intent upon the food that was being placed before them. The procession went on.

 

They came to us. The woman said in English: “Good evening, sirs.” She then fell into Chinese and the girls moved up, a little curious concerning the foreigners. Gregory made a sign to one of the girls. She came nearer. He spoke a word in Chinese but the girl made no response. She underwent examination coolly, hopefully. But there was nothing doing at our table. Gregory again made a sign and the troop went on. I looked into their faces as they passed. Such faces! Like dolls on a screen. Their hands moved gracefully in the long sleeves of their jackets. Their little feet made rustling noises as the rich stuff of their trousers moved.

 

A waiter spread before us a white cloth and on this he placed chopsticks, spoons of porcelain, and then tiny dishes of almonds, melon seeds, fruit and eggs. The meal began. Hours later it ended.

 

Hendrik De Leeuw, Cities of Sin, (Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, New York, 1933)

 

1) Now Suzhou Road

Shanghai – First Impressions No.9 – Hallett Abend Arrives to Start Reporting, 1926

I Was Wrong From The Beginning – Hallett Abend – 1926

Hallett Abend arrived in Shanghai fresh from America only to be advised by George Sokolsky to go to Guangzhou; he did, sailed into a fire fight on the Pearl River and declared in his memoirs, ‘My fifteen years in China had begun – fifteen years in which boredom was never to return.’ Abend went on to become the well known China correspondent of the New York Times. When he had arrived in 1926 he was new to China but positively ancient for a foreign correspondent having already turned 40.

Abend was burgled repeatedly and then badly beaten at gun point by Japanese thugs in his 16^th floor Broadway Mansions apartment. He reluctantly returned to the US in 1941 after repeated threats to his life.

Guessing Wrong

Trained newspapermen are supposed to be able to dive into a new environment and, no matter how murky the medium, come up briskly and triumphantly with the pearl of truth. If that is the safe general rule, then I was a shocking exception when I first went to the Far East early in 1926, for I was wrong from the beginning, and my errors of appraisal were continuous for the first two months I spent in China.

In fact I guessed wrong from the time I booked my passage from San Francisco in the old Siberia Maru (1), for I planned only a vacation jaunt, and my round-trip ticket was good for only six months. Instead of returning after half a year, China was my home for nearly a decade and half, and I did not leave until the Japanese drove me out in mid-October of 1940.

……………………………………………

My first impressions of China were deceiving…The ship had already entered muddy waters before nightfall of the second day out of Kobe. I was wakened at dawn by the cessation of the pulsing of the engines, and jumped up eager for the sight of a new continent. Looking out of my porthole I saw unbelievably muddy water, a flat mud bank, and a high signboard in English advertising a well known brand of American chewing gum. No pagodas, no temple bells, no spice-laden breezes. Disgusted, I climbed back into my berth and slept until we were tying up at the dock in Shanghai.

On the way south, the ship stayed only one day at Shanghai – a day of drizzling rain and premature, muggy spring heat. It seemed to me the dirtiest city I had ever seen, and the poverty evident on the streets was horrible. Even the bars at the old Astor House and Palace Hotel seemed dreary. I should have been appalled had I been told I would make my home there for more than eleven years.

My quest for background news and feature stories seemed doomed to failure until I called upon George Sokolsky (2) to present a letter of introduction from another newspaper man in Japan.

“Don’t stay here,” counseled Sokolsky. “There’s nothing going on here now, and don’t go to Peking. It’s a morgue. Go to Canton. I’m just back from six weeks down there. No, I won’t prejudice you by telling you a thing, but go to Canton and look up Li Choy. He’s the editor of the Canton Gazette. I’ll write to him that you’ll be along.”

The dreary, rainy day in Shanghai served to dull my ardor for traveling, for sightseeing, and for vacationing, but I’d reserved passage on the same ship to Hongkong, to Manila, and back to Hongkong, and I followed out my schedule.

Hongkong was even worse than Shanghai had been. Rain and mist and muggy heat; and Manila seemed neither beautiful nor interesting on that first visit, except for furnishing me my first experience of two days of incessant tropical rainfall.

We sailed back to Hongkong, and my disillusionment with the Orient was almost complete when we were landed early in the morning in a driving rain. Leaving my trunks stored in the Hongkong Hotel, I took the noon boat upriver-the old flat-bottomed Fatshan, bound for Canton. We hooted our way up the Pearl River through a drizzling fog, and at dark anchored just off the island of Shameen, the foreign concession area of Canton. The island was nearly dark, but the city beyond threw a red glow into the clouds, and close by were two trim floodlighted little war vessels-American and British gunboats, I was told.

Landing was prohibited until daylight next morning, and an evening of complete boredom seemed certain until a pleasant Scot asked me to join him in a spot of liquor in the dining room.

We sat at a table, poured our drinks, and were just raising our glasses in a mutual toast when there was a rattle of rifle fire on the river. There was a crash of a windowpane at my back, and to my amazement the raised glass of whisky and soda in my companion’s hand seemed suddenly to explode. We both stared stupidly at his right hand, from which blood was spurting over the tablecloth.

The tip of his index finger had been shot off.

Before I could grab a napkin with which to staunch the blood, the Fatshan was completely blacked out, and a machine gun on the deck of the British gunboat began to sputter and cough tracer bullets into the misty darkness.

My fifteen years in China had begun – fifteen years in which boredom was never to return.

Hallett Abend, My Life in China 1926-1941, (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1943, New York)

 

 

1) The former Pacific Mail passenger liner Siberia which transferred to Japanese ownership and was renamed the Siberia Maru in 1916. The liner became well known to many traveling the Pacific in the 1920s from San Francisco/Seattle to Shanghai via Hawaii and Japan. In 1929 the Siberia Maru changed to the Puget Sound – British Columbia – Oriental route.

 

2) Sokolsky was a famously enigmatic figure in the foreign press corps. The son of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants to America, he had studied at Columbia University’s Journalism School. At 24 in 1917 he returned to Russia and edited the Russian Daily News. He arrived in China in 1918 joined the editorial staff of the Shanghai Gazette, became close to Sun Yat-sen and involved in the May Fourth demonstrations. He later wrote for a wide range of newspapers including the North-China Daily News, often under the pseudonym ‘G Gramada’. He left China in 1931 to return to America totally disavowing his leftist past and became a right wing columnist for Hearst Newspapers. He then became a close friend of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and used his gossip column in the The Hollywood Reporter to slander actors, screenwriters and directors.

 

Shanghai – First Impressions No.8 – Coming to be a Shanghai Radio Star, 1926

The Human Crescendo – Irene CorballyKuhn – 1920s

New Yorker Irene Corbally Kuhn (1900-1995) arrived as an early “girl reporter” in Shanghai but went on to become a local radio star. In 1928 the Shanghai-based China Press newspaper backed a new radio station – KRC – that introduced lady broadcasters to Shanghai’s airwaves, initially with Irene Corbally Kuhn. Her first broadcast on December 14^th 1928 was from the studios housed in a back room at the China Press offices: ‘…with my legs melting under me like butter on a hot stove, I had stepped up before a “mike” and sent my voice into the air, the first woman ever to broadcast in the Orient, and probably the first feminine announcer in the business.”

Illusions Dispelled

All the 1,000 miles to Shanghai from Hongkong the weather was foul, and the rain fell in dirty, gray sheets as the Inaba (1) plowed slowly up the thirteen miles of muddy Whangpoo River. We berthed at the Nippon Yusen Kaisha docks in the northern end of Shanghai, and if ever a sight was calculated to dispel illusions of the romantic, exotic Orient, it was here at journey’s end.

All about, on either side of the river were the gray godowns lining the miles of docks; engineering works, cotton mills, silk filatures and shipyards. The river was crowded with shiplighters and sampans. The smokestacks of the factories belched a black, sooty pall over the grayness, mingling their smoke with the fog.

And waiting for us, on the dock, were swarms of ragged richshaw coolies, bare feet squishing up and down in straw sandals. Their importunate yells for trade were only a shade less noisy than a riot. The human crescendo was interrupted occasionally by a series of staccato explosions – fire crackers.

“It’s Chinese New Year,” explained the young British customs officer as he whisked me through with my trunk and bag and eleven pieces of heavy luggage I was chaperoning for Peggy.

“Goes on for days,” he continued, lackadaisically chalking the numerous pieces.

“Say, you’re making quite a stay, aren’t you?” he exclaimed, when he was half way down the row of luggage that now tormented me with responsibility.

“I’ve come here to live,” I told him, not very enthusiastically.

“That’s great!” he said. But at the moment I had my doubts.

“What in the world will I do with all this luggage?” I burst out. “Most of it belongs to a friend. She’s staying over in Hongkong.”

“Don’t let a little thing like luggage worry you,” he said, “We’ll load it all into a couple of rickshaws and you can get it up to the hotel for a few cents.”

He had finished now. “Hey, wambutso! Three piece, four piece!” he yelled.

I shuddered and took refuge behind a trunk, for a fury of rickshaw boys and wheels was bearing straight for me.

But the customs officer knew what to do. He spit out a string of Chinese words, grabbed the leader, a likely looking fellow, grinning from ear to ear, bade him select three of his cronies and dismiss the others. Without more ado they loaded the thirteen pieces of luggage into three rickshaws, indicating the empty fourth as my vehicle.

“Ten cents Mex each, no more now,” yelled the customs officer after me, as I got under way.

We bowled along through the rain, up a shabby street, ironically named Broadway, to the Garden Bridge over Soochow creek, past the consulates, the Public Gardens. I had no idea where I was going; I had given the coolies no destination. But apparently my young British friend had taken care of that, for the coolies dropped the shafts of the four rickshaws simultaneously before the doors of the Palace Hotel on Nanking Road, just off the Bund.

The boys, wiping their faces with incredibly dirty towels and grinning all the while, waited expectantly. I started to pay them off, but ten cents Mex seemed too little for the ride, and there I made my first mistake. I dropped two silver pieces into the palm of my coolie and in less time than it takes to tell it the Chinese equivalent of “sucker” had passed from him to the others. They surrounded me, yelling and gesticulating. A Sikh policeman hove to from the roadway, the doorman of the hotel joined him, and taking two more ten cent pieces from me to add to the two already in my coolie’s hands, they flung the coins at the boys and chased the quartette away with much shaking of fists, club waving, and picturesque Chinese profanity.

The bargain had been made for the ride. The coolies had accepted the prix fixée when they accepted me and my freight for delivery to the hotel. I had marked myself as a tourist; worse, a foreigner who didn’t know the value of money, when I had attempted, with mistaken generosity, to give them more than the fixed rate. No wonder they put up an argument, for if I were an ignorant sucker they might as well scare me into paying plenty.

Inside the hotel I registered, not bothering to inquire rates. I said I wanted a small and inexpensive room and assumed I’d get something for $3 a day.

The room to which a Chinese “buttons” led me was as large as a skating rink. The brass bed had been built to sleep eight. Modern plumbing was absent. But in a closet, as large as a boarding house hall bedroom, was its Oriental substitute, built like a throne, with high back, arms, padded cover. There was a tub, of sorts, filled on demand by white-clad coolies who came into the room with wooden buckets full of hot water swung on bamboo poles over their shoulders.

Today, in Shanghai, the Palace has gone modern; and across the street is the opulent Hotel Cathay, its appointments and fixings the last word in extravagance and luxury. Then it was just an architect’s dream. Somehow, I like the recollections of my own days there better.

Irene Kuhn, Assigned to adventure, (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1938, Philadelphia)

 

 

1) The Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) ship the Inaba Maru was actually pretty old having been launched in 1897. Kuhn must have been among the last passengers on the Inaba as a NYK vessel as in 1923 it was sold to fellow Japanese shipping line Kinkai Yusen K.K. who scrapped it in 1934.

 

Shanghai – First Impressions No.7 – Whitey Smith Comes to Not Make a Million, 1922

Shanghai was not Just a Dream – Whitey Smith – 1922

 

Arriving not to Make a Million

We were off for China!

 

Aboard with us was a fiddle player Mr. Ladow (1) had picked up to play at the Carlton. I remember him as Benny. Also the president of the China Mail Line, an old Chinese gentleman by the name of Mr. Chen, I think it was. He and his family were going back to the homeland to retire.

 

We made a stop at Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands, then up to Yokohama and Kobe in Japan. The most interesting stop on the trip was the next Japanese port, Nagasaki. The good ship Nile had to refuel there.

 

The Nile was a coal burner. Refueling was done the hard way from barges alongside by means of a human chain of Japanese women, children, old and young men carrying baskets. They crawled up the side of the ship on a rope ladder. They dumped their baskets and crawled back down again to the barge on another rope ladder. I thought the moving chain looked like a huge black python on the prowl for a drink of water.

 

Mr. Chen told me each link in the human chain for fifteen cents a day, working from early morning until dark. It my first astonishing impression of Oriental labor.

 

The operation was very dirty. By the time we pulled anchor for Shanghai the passengers were almost as black-faced as the Japanese who carried the coal.

 

The Nile’s skipper, Captain Kinley, took an erratic course for Shanghai. He told me they were dodging around trying to escape a typhoon. We hit some rough weather but on September 14^th we steamed up the Woosung River into Shanghai harbor, tying up at the Merchants Wharf.

 

My great adventure was opening out before me and I felt like an awestruck, happy kid. Mr. Ladow had found out somehow that this was the date I was born and as we walked down the gangplank an American band was playing Happy Birthday. Right then I knew I was going to like Shanghai, just as sixteen years before I fell in love with San Francisco when Papa Schmidt took us on a cable car up Market Street.

 

I wish I had the words to describe Shanghai as it was then, a great sprawling colorful stately city of contrasts with a fascination of its own. There was never anything like Shanghai in its prime, and I guess there never will be again. Years later I picked up a book written by Dr. Anne Walter Fearn (2), who became my good friend. Dr. Fearn had a couple of paragraphs in her little privately printed uncopyrighted book that recalled Shanghai exactly as it appeared to me that first day.

 

She said it was here that East met West in a jumble of cooperation, misunderstanding, struggle and friendship. She wrote that Shanghai was a city of hustling, bustling, hurrying, jostling millions. It was a city of noise and confusion. Tramcars clanged their gongs, motorcars tooted their horns, coolies sing-songed as they trudged under great burdens, “ah yee, ah yee’.

 

Chinese men walked the streets in long silk gowns, blue cotton ones or in the latest Western styles. Some Chinese women were beautifullygowned with smart waved hair, side slit skirts, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. Some wore the divided skirts and embroidered jackets of tradition. There were Japanese, Indians Americans, Ammanese, and Europeans, a conglomeration of every nationality under the sun.

 

She described the traffic in all its varieties – pedestrians, rickshaws, handcarts, wheelbarrows, bicycles, motor cars, buses and trains. Occasionally a passage had to be cleared for a patrol of mounted Sikhs on shining groomed horses, carrying lances from whose tips floated red and white pennants. They would be on their way to head some parade. And the crowds of Chinese, not only moving about the streets but silent, gaping crowds, obstructing every moving things.

 

That was the way it looked to us, too.

 

Whitey Smith, I Didn’t Make a Million, Manila: Philippine Education Company, 1956

 

 

 

(1) The Mr Ladow referred to was

 

 

(2) Dr. Anne Walter Fearn was a long term resident of China working as a medical educator in China. She was born on a Mississippi plantation, went to China at 25, founded a coeducational medical school, a school for American children, the Fearn Sanatorium in Shanghai.

 

Shanghai – First Impressions No.6 – Edna Lee Booker edges up the Whangpoo, 1922

Shanghai Glamor – Edna Lee Booker – 1922

The years after the First World War had seen a few pioneer women journalists become “girl reporters” in China. Edna Lee Booker found a job on the China Press, the Shanghai stringer for the International News Service (InterNews) and shared a house with Nora Waln, an up and coming novelist who subsidised herself by being a roaming correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. Booker was the sole woman working for the Press but claims to have been welcomed warmly by the paper’s City Editor, the reheaded Irishman J. Edward Doyle. She was hardly a novice having worked previously for both the Los Angeles Herald and the San Francisco Call Bulletin. Dinty Doyle was sparing but precise in his advise to her – ‘The only order I received regarding my copy was that American prestige must be upheld – regardless. “Face!”’ (4) Booker, determined to be a war correspondent, never let her gender dictate what she could and couldn’t write about famously disregarding the advise of the “old China hands” at the Press and heading north to (successfully) get the first interview ever given to a woman by the Old Marshal Zhang Zuolin, at the time China’s most feared warlord. She trumped this feat by then accompanying Upton Close to an interview with the warlord Wu “Jade Marshal” Peifu, while he was preparing to do battle with the Old Marshal, becoming the first woman to ever interview him too. Booker was to go on to get a remarkable number of scoops including being in Guangzhou when’s Sun Yat-sen’s government fell and he was forced to flee on a gunboat. Booker caught up to the boat, was hoisted aboard and got an interview with Sun and the last ever interview with Wu Ting-fang who was to die two days after their meeting.

Strange, Mysterious, Oriental

Out of the moonlight which silvered the Whangpoo came junk after junk. The orange flickers of lanterns hanging at their masts touched the widespread sails with magic, and lighted great red eyes carved high on their bows.

My friends on the tender from the Pacific liner, anchored at the mouth of the river, were laughing in a gay little group. But I was scarcely aware of those others, so keenly conscious was I of the action that surged about us. They had lived long in the East, were returning from home leave, but to me it was all new.

Out there the river teemed with life: strange, mysterious, oriental.

A long boat train towing cargo barges chugged past – low-lying like a string of children’s blocks. Gayly lighted river steamers churned up saffron spray with their side paddles: steamers which had once plied the Mississippi. Freighters such as Joseph Conrad wrote of, a “P and 0” from London, a liner flying the Tricolor of France lay, steam up, at their berths. Tiny mat-hooded sampans bobbed alongside battleships anchored amidstream. And just around the bend in the river, which was tortuous as a dragon, rode a great fleet of Chinese fishing boats. Their masts rose stark and black like the lines of a Rockwell Kent (1) etching.

Harsh whistles announced our arrival at Shanghai.

I forgot the picturesque Whangpoo in the lights of the city. Along the river, the Bund stretched like a well laid out park and, beyond the grassplots, the flowers and the trees, rose in silhouette the city’s massive buildings. On the Customs Jetty, firecrackers, like dancing fire devils, created a sharp din, and in the waiting crowd I glimpsed Chinese children juggling two-edged knives, turning acrobatic handsprings.

At last I had arrived in China, my Flowery Kingdom!

I had come as a foreign correspondent for the International News Service of New York and as a “girl reporter” for the China Press (2), leading American daily in China. California friends, with whom I had crossed from San Francisco and was to live while in Shanghai, hurried me ashore, into a motor car. I had wanted to ride in one of the wild rickshaws, but as we left the Bund and turned onto Nanking Road my disappointment was forgotten in the picturesqueness of that famous street.

It was a shifting wheel of bright lights, gorgeous red and gold banners, gilded signs, and throngs of carefree Chinese. A joy in Shanghai swept over me as we rode out Nanking Road, Bubbling Well Road, and on out into the country. We stopped before an impressive residence, where a beaming watchman opened high gates.

Well back from the street, in tree-shaded grounds, rose a three-story residence of German architecture. The prominent German who had owned it had been evacuated from the city with his compatriots during the World War. My friends were enthusiastic about their Shanghai home; but I had hoped to live in a Chinese temple or a Chinese house, rather than in a handsomely appointed Herrenhaus. But it is only in Peking that foreigners live in the unutterably lovely old Chinese homes with their courtyards, ghosts and moongates.

My rooms – a study, bedroom, and bath – were on the third floor.

A few weeks later Nora Waln (3), author of “The House of Exile” and more recently of “Reaching for the Stars,” occupied an adjoining wing. We became good friends during those months and dreamed of a caravan trip into the far reaches of Mongolia. She too was romantic about China. Nora was gentle in manner, and her fair hair was always smooth. She sat at her typewriter for hours on end, writing and rewriting material based on experiences during a North China visit which she hoped would interest the editors of the Atlantic Monthly.

That first night in Shanghai, I was falling asleep under a great canopy of mosquito netting when the haunting song of a Chinese flute – a song prominent with the romance of old Cathay, plaintive with the mysteries of life – floated through my open window.

I had found China in the strange beauty of an ancient melody. And under its spell I drifted into dreams that were a prelude to the waking glamor of Shanghai.

Edna Lee Booker, News Is My Job: A Correspondent in War-Torn China, (Macmillan, 1940, New York)

 

1) Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) – American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer and left wing political activist known for his use of symbolism and drawings of Tarrytown Heights, New York, Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Greenland and the Adirondacks.

 

 

2) The China Press was the leading America-owned and run newspaper in Shanghai that had been started by Thomas Millard in 1911.

 

 

3) A Pennsylvania Quaker who married an Englishman in the service of the Chinese government Waln was a relatively well known novelist at the time who subsidized her literary endeavours as a roaming correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.

Shanghai – First Impressions No.5 – The Great JB Powell Shows Up, 1917

So This Is Shanghai! – JB Powell – 1917

The American Thomas Franklin Fairfax Millard (1868-1942) who had founded the China Press in August 1911 and hired John Benjamin Powell (1886-1947) to work on his own more personal vehicle Millard’s Review in June 1917. Powell (centre with glasses above), known to most people as simply “JB”, became the Chief Editor of Millard’s Review and then bought it outright in 1922 when Millard left. Powell changed the name to The Weekly Review of the Far East and then finally The China Weekly Review, which continued for several more decades before being suppressed by the Japanese. The erudite and soft-spoken Powell was from the start a first stop for many young foreign would-be journalists (mostly Americans) turning up in Shanghai, including a young Edgar Snow (a fellow Missourian) fresh out on the boat from the Kansas City Star.

Answers to A Hundred Questions

The Astor House Hotel, then Shanghai’s leading hostelry, had grown from a boarding house established originally by the skipper of some early American clipper, who left his ship at Shanghai. He christened his establishment in honor of the then most famous hotel in the United States, the Astor House in New York; however, he was compelled to add the designation “hotel,” as the fame of the New York hostelry had not yet reached the China coast. Aside from the name, the two establishments had little in common, as the Astor House in Shanghai consisted of old three- and four-story block and linked together by long corridors. In the center of the compound was a courtyard where an orchestra played in the evenings. Practically everyone dressed for dinner, which never was served before eight o’clock. At one time or another one saw most of the leading residents of the port at dinner parties or in the lobby of the Astor House. An old resident of Shanghai once told me, “If you will sit in the lobby of the Astor House and keep your eyes open you will see all of the crooks who hang out on the China coast.”

At the hotel I asked the clerk where I might find my boss-to-be, Mr Millard, and was relieved to learn that he lived there and would come down to the lobby shortly. What would he be like? Soon a Chinese boy called my attention to a man coming down the stairs. He was a short, slender man weighing perhaps 125 pounds and dressed so perfectly that I wondered how he would be able to sit down without wrinkling his immaculate suit.

I soon learned that my boss, who had served the old New York Herald many years, first as dramatic critic and later as international political correspondent, had taken on many of the eccentricities of his employer, the late James Gordon Bennett (1).

I naturally was anxious to obtain answers to a hundred questions concerning my new job, but Millard appeared in no hurry to enlighten me. In fact we were soon the center of an interesting group of local residents who strolled in for afternoon tea, but the “tea” they consumed consisted chiefly of cocktails and whisky-sodas.

The profusion of drinks aroused my curiosity, because I had grown up in a dry local-option territory in the Middle West (2), and America was within a few years of the “great experiment” (3) of 1920 when I sailed from San Francisco.

The circle about our table expanded and the Chinese boy added a new table to hold the accumulating bottles and glasses. As the newcomers came up and were introduced they usually ordered a new round of drinks, which meant that each finally had several drinks standing on the table. After the boy had brought the drinks he would present the one who placed the order with a little piece of paper called a “chit,” which no one ever looked at before signing.

While waiting in the lobby for Mr Millard, I had seen on a bulletin board a Reuters dispatch from one of the local English newspapers carrying the momentous news that the United States had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany. It was February 3^rd 1917. But the conversation about the table did not concern America’s entrance into the war; on the contrary it was confined to the subject of possible prohibition in the United States and the increasing cost of drinks in Shanghai due to the shortage of shipping from England. Agreement was unanimous that Shanghai would never go dry, and that the British were more intelligent, on the liquor question at least, than were the Americans.

Suddenly the conversation became hushed as a gray-haired man of medium height entered the lobby and approached our table. I was introduced to him, Thomas Sammons, American Consul-General (4), a likable official, who was constantly obsessed by the fear that something would happen in the community which might involve him in complications with the State Department.

America’s entrance into the war latter added tremendously to the Consul-General’s responsibilities and anxieties, due to the character of the government of the International Settlement. Since China was still neutral, German and Austrian consuls and their nationals went about their affairs practically without restraint, although all Britons and most Americans had ceased speaking to them or doing business with them.

When the group finally broke up, Mr Millard suggested that I take a room at the Astor House and introduced me to the manager, Captain Harry Morton. Since most of the managers of the Astor House had been sea captains, the hotel had taken on many of the characteristics of a ship. The corridors were painted to resemble the passageways leading to the staterooms of a passenger liner. I was therefore not surprised when the manager told me that he could give me a room in the “steerage” for $125 a month, including meals and afternoon tea. That figured out at about $60 in United States currency.

John B Powell, My Twenty-Five Years in China (Macmillan, 1945, New York)

1) The publisher of the New York Herald whch had been founded by his father, James Gordon Bennett, Sr. Known for his flamboyant and sometimes erratic behavior, which included not marrying until he was in his seventies.

(2) Powell was from Hannibal, Missouri. ‘Dry local-option territory’ meant that the voters themselves had voted against granting any liquor licenses.

(3) i.e. prohibition

(4) Thomas Sammons was US Consul General in Shanghai between 1906-1919 before moving on to be US Consul General in Melbourne.

Shanghai – First Impressions No.4 – Carl Crow Arrives, 1911

Strange Odors of Camphor Wood and Hot Peanut Oil – Carl Crow – 1911

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and made the city his home for the next quarter of a century, working there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and groundbreaking adman. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a dull colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the thriving and ruthless cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book – “400 Million Customers” – that encouraged a flood of businesses into the China market in an intriguing foreshadowing of today’s boom. Among Crow’s exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of Western hostages from a mountain bandit lair, and being one of the first Westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao’s second-in-command Zhou En-lai. During the Second World War, he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, coordinating US policies to support China against Japan. The story of this one exceptional man gives us a rich view of Shanghai and China during those tempestuous years.

West Meets East And Likes It

Most foreigners went to China for the first time prepared to be sorry for themselves and carried a fair amount of self-pity with them. They also took with them a normal amount of moral indignation which was often used up and seldom replenished. Many of them found plenty of use for self-pity in the first few weeks, or months of their arrival for they came face to face with life for the first time. At home we divide life into grooves and compartments which isolate us from our less fortunate fellow beings. They do not live on the same streets, therefore we seldom see them and are unconscious of their existence. This is not true in China. No matter where one lives he is surrounded by a sea of poverty and human misery. We seem to be engaged at home in a desperate effort to conceal the ugliness and the cruelties of life and so lack the mental background of the Chinese who for so many centuries have adjusted themselves to their surroundings instead of attempting isolation. Thus many foreigners who go to China come into intimate contact for the first time with poverty, filth and cruelty. During their lives at home they have only read about these things in the papers.

There is something terrifying about it and especially about the huge masses of humanity – because at first it is difficult to think of these strange-looking people as human beings like ourselves. I will never forget the first stroll I ever took in a Chinese city. It was the second day of my arrival in Shanghai and I started out alone to explore the place, wandering about on an aimless route. Soon I found myself on a crowded street with no English signs and no white faces -there was no one who even remotely resembled the people with whom I had lived from the time of my birth. It was a July day and many of the small tradesmen were sitting in front of their shops stripped to the waist, comfortably fanning their fat stomachs. Everywhere I looked there were people, people, people -strange people -all of whom seemed to be converging on me. The air was full of the strange odors of camphor wood and hot peanut oil.

Today, almost thirty years later, a whiff of either gives me a little pang of homesickness for China but on that July day the odors were strange and only added to my feeling of isolation. All about me were peculiar sounds of street cries and an undertone of conversations in words I did not understand. I was suddenly terrified and wondered if I knew my way back to the hotel (1). I never felt exactly that way again but have seen the terrified and worried looks of hundreds of visitors to whom I have from time to time shown the sights of some crowded Chinese city. Because I never knew exactly what it was that frightened me, I always tried to find out what terrified them but they were as vague as I about the cause. I presume it was nothing more than the nightmare terror of strange surroundings – a sudden realization of the fact that for the first time in their lives there were no familiar signposts about – nothing to reassure them that they were still living on mother earth.

Carl Crow, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, (Harper & Brothers, 1940, New York)

 

 

1) Crow stayed in the Palace Hotel on the Bund when he first arrived in July 1911.

 

Shanghai – First Impressions No.3 – The North China Herald Goes to Pootung and Meets Some Christians, 1900

Pootung – A Wide And Melancholy Waste Of Putrid Marshes – North China Herald – 1900

Few foreign travellers’ memoirs recall arriving in Shanghai at Pootung (Pudong). This is obviously because most didn’t, and those that did were invariably sailors in one navy or another and “Jack Tars” are notoriously bad at writing memoirs. However, contrary to the popular myth that has grown up since 1949 that Pudong was somehow a place of chicken farms and rice paddies and nothing else, there was a wide range of activities taking place “Pootung-side” from farming to active markets, livestock auctions, ship repair yards, chandlery markets, all manner of factories, go-downs and warehouses as well as houses for people who worked on the eastern banks of the Whangpoo.

This article from the North China Herald (the paper that eventually became the North-China Daily News), the preeminent English language newspaper in Shanghai that had been founded in 1850, shows that by the start of the twentieth century Pudong was already fairly industrialised and sprouting an increasing number of factories – the treaty port powers had been opening factories there for some time as had Chinese business interests and, after 1895 and the Treaty of Shimonoseki that followed the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Japanese industrial capital poured into Pudong. Along with industry it was also a major centre for visiting naval and commercial shipping as well as being fertile land, so the article argues, for Christian evangelising.

A Trip in Pootung

Godown house, Pootung

To most people in Shanghai the name of Pootung has no particularly attractive sound. They look across the river and opposite the Settlements see the steadily lengthening line of docks, mills, and various industries, studded with chimneys. Occasionally the place gains unenviable notoriety by the perpetration of some mean outrage by the band of desperadoes preying on the industrial fringe.

To the traveller approaching Woosung it looks a wide and melancholy waste of putrid marshes but the sportsman has some familiarity with it by reason of short week-end jaunts after the pheasant or snipe.

Yet Pootung is more than all this, and has some remarkable characteristics. In the first place, it contains, within a comparatively small area, a greater proportion of native Roman Catholics than any other part of China, with the possible exception of certain parts of Szechuan. Whole villages are Christian – not convert, but of the sixth or seventh generation – and, as is well known, the International Cotton Mill work-people, to the number of about 2,000, are drawn from these.

Within the last year or two, practically since the inauguration of the fine church at Dangmujao, the objective of the present journey, and yet to be described, a happy custom appears to have grown up of foreigners paying occasional visits to the interesting country. Such a one took place last week, and, it can be safely said, it will leave a lasting impression upon those who were privileged to participate in it.

With the approach of the end of May it was arranged to visit the church dedicated to the Virgin at Dangmujao, a church which, besides being a striking structure, has an element of romance in its history. The priest there, Father Gouraud, has devoted his patrimony to it, and aided by his relatives, has built within the last two or three years a striking edifice accommodating 2,000 worshippers, besides an institution and school for children of Christian families and the poor little waifs and strays of Chinese humanity.

Last week the trip eventuated. Soon after two o’clock the party of visitors, consisting of several priests and five laymen, left the French Bund in a couple of steam launches.

Crossing the river and going up the creek opposite the Arsenal (1), good progress was made along the winding waterway until about four o’clock, when the launches were exchanged for small native boats on account of the narrow creek. Some little distance further a stoppage was called at a place named Zieka, where several of the party landed to inspect a fine church, whilst the remainder continued on in the boats.

The church here has a history. The original building was destroyed during the Rebellion (2), and two of the priests were killed. After the usual prolonged negotiations reparation was secured and the present edifice was erected by Imperial command, with a tablet reciting all the circumstances. It is a fine structure, with quarters adjoining for priests’ residence, and quite close to an imposing house of a native Christian family who are not, however, sufficiently prosperous to allow them to live in it, and it is therefore little more than a show place.

The village contains about 200 native Christians. Here, as indeed everywhere the party went, the news of the visit, and the fact that two steam launches were coming, had been known for some time. In the guest-chamber light and very welcome refreshment was laid out – though the priest was absent – and was duly appreciated in the midst of a respectful, if curious, crowd.

After this the visitors set off on foot across country, passing through villages with modest little chapels, some of which were visited. One priest in the party, Father Pierre, who has ministered all over the district for about 14 years, and who now attends particularly to the spiritual needs of the cotton-mill operatives, seemed to know most of the people met on the road. Striding along in Indian file (3) across the fields the visitors were an object of curiosity all around, and groups made short cuts over the country to intercept and exchange a few words with the padres.

“Have you said your evening prayer?” a priest salutes one group. “Yes, father,” they answer and with a smile and a nod on he passes. From one village a messenger runs out to call him back, to ask his advice upon some matter, and he has to retrace his steps, soon however, catching up the rest of the party. Towards evening the high steeple and church at Dangmujao come into full view and rapid progress is made, the destination being reached a little before sunset.

Sufficient time remained for a glimpse at the schools and the church. The latter is built in the shape of a cross. The nave is 180 feet long by 60 feet wide, the transept in front of the altar being 120 feet long, and the height of the spire is 131 feet. The windows are filled with brilliantly hued glass, somewhat striking perhaps to foreign ideas, but probably most pleasing to the native taste. The choir sing in a gallery at the west end of the church, into which, on the arrival of the visitors a fine harmonium just received from Europe was being hoisted.

The schools were an interesting sight. The girls number about 60, and the boys the same number. It was pathetic to hear the stories of some of the poor little inmates. Abandoned by parents, rescued from barbarity by the fathers, or the victims of misfortune, the youngsters looked happy and smiling, and their spotlessly clean surroundings must alone be a liberal education.

Amongst the girls was one poor little wizened creature, twenty-three years of age, of almost infantile stature, dwarfed and disfigured by years of ill-treatment, and rescued by Father Pierre from being thrown into the Huangpu. It was not the least interesting to see the pleasure they showed at their protectors’ visit. The boys were busily getting through supper, the sibilant chorus as they sucked from their rice bowls producing a curious effect.

The inspection being over, one’s thoughts not unnaturally turned to dinner, for the walk across country had sharpened appetites. It would be difficult to do justice to that evening. With the most charming hospitality the Fathers seemed to place everything at their guests’ command, and a happier party could not be imagined.

It was a curiously mixed one. The accent of Belgium, mingled with those of France and Holland, and at times the mellifluous brogue of “the distressful country” (4) touched French as lightly as it did English.

Those who associate gloom and asperity with the missionary should have listened to the quaint songs of old France, capitally sung, and have heard the laughter which greeted “Father O’ Flynn,” as a visitor sang it. Never had he a more responsive audience than when he asked “Why leave the gaiety all to the laity?”

And as evening glided by, the conversation touched upon all subjects, for here there were men who could talk. Did one wish to discuss music, here was a Father, a born musician. Was it literature, then to your right. Was it medicine here was a Father, a qualified doctor, and so on.

Five o’clock the next morning the tolling of the church bell aroused the visitors, and half-an-hour later at the first Mass a considerable congregation had flowed in from the countryside. As the sun rose higher in the heavens – though the day was not an obligatory feast, but consecrated to Our Lady the Help of Christians – the attendance became large. At half-past seven, when High Mass was celebrated by Pere Louail, formerly of Hongkew (5) – accompanied by some really excellent music rendered by the priests and their visitors – the church held at least 1,200 worshippers, the women on the one side of the nave being, not unnaturally, more numerous than the men who are just now very busy in the fields. The whole service was most impressive and striking, the singing being unusually good, and the harmonium showing a most organ-like tone.

It had been intended to make the return journey by steam launch, but the low water in the creek prevented this, and after bidding good-bye to the kindest of hosts, the party set out to walk. At mid-day a brief halt was made at the village of Tsangkaleu, some four miles from Shanghai, where light refreshment was served in the house adjoining the chapel.

This village is interesting as consisting almost entirely of Christians – some 800 or 900. Here the “trip” practically ended, for some stayed behind, others took wheel-barrow or pony, and others walked.

North-China Herald, June 6, 1900

1) The Jiangnan Arsenal and ironworks opened in 1865 as part of China’s Self-Strengthening movement and developed primarily by the military general Zeng Guofan and statesman Li Hongzhang. In 1868 the Arsenal produced China’s first steam warship.

 

2) The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)

 

3) By this the author means the style of one behind the other, in single file as American Indians taught Europeans how to walk in the woods.

 

4) By which the author means Ireland.

 

5) Now Hongkou