An Old Peking Mystery Building Takes a New Twist – Chaonei No. 81

Back in 2009 (not long after I started this blog) I posted on the rather remarkable old French Barouqe style buildings at Chaonei No. 81. This sort of building was rare enough in Peking and, of course, with all the destruction in Beijing and the removal of the old that has gone on in the last few decades it’s rather amazing they’ve survived. Anyway, after I posted Ed Lanfranco, who knows more about old Beijing than most, wrote informing me of the building’s provenance as a former American Missionary compound built around 1910 that later became the California College in China (related to the University of California). You can read Ed’s history of the buildings here.

Now, however, another twist. The New York Times’s Beijing Journal has written about the buildings which still remain empty and in some state of disrepair. Apparently they now belong to the Catholic Diocese of Beijing. Now, while the old ghost stories about the building are known – most older buildings in Beijing have such stories attached to them. This article offers a few other possible histories of the building that I’ve never heard before – that it was built by the Qing authorities for the British residents of Peking and also that it was built as a private residence for the French manager of the company that built the railway connecting Beijing to Hankou in Hubei Province.I’ve never heard either of these tales before.

What is perhaps most remarkable though is that nobody at all seems interested in restoring the building or doing anything interesting with it – even though the Diocese says that it believes it would cost only (and I say “only” in relation to the ridiculous amounts thrown at new architecture in Beijing) US$1.5mn to refurbish.

Seems the mystery continues…meanwhile the building continues to fall into an ever worsening state of disrepair.

A much better picture exists on the New York Times website

September – The Month to go Fur Shopping in Shanghai in 1934

Shanghai may still be one of the best cities in the world to buy a fur and, in 1934, there was one major purveyor of furs for the discerning lady – The Siberian Fur Store on the Bubbling Well Lane (now the less charmingly named Nanjing Road West). The store was, I believe, owned and run by White Russian Jews (the Klebanoff family I think) and was a fur bank as well as fur store (so you could store you coats there in the hotter months in air conditioned vaults). It was not a store for everyone, you needed some serious gelt to make a purchase and the store was so well known and has lived in the memory of many old time Shanghainese (it made a brief appearance in Ang Lee’s Lust Caution if I remember rightly too).

The Vengeance of Fu Manchu – Marking the Centenary

As this is the centenary of the debut of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books (The Mystery of Fu Manchu, the first book in the series, was published in 1913), and as we approach an excellent conference on Fu Manchu in London – Lao She, Limehouse and Yellow Peril in the Heart of Empire (click the link for the full programme and to RSVP) this Friday at Westminster University it seems only fitting to mark the occasion with some stills from the 1967 movie The Vengeance of Fu Manchu which included a little detour to the mean streets of Shanghai….where the actual Badlands bar of foreign wastrels in Shanghai was actually meant to be I do not know (too, too many candidates in old Shanghai) but it was filmed in County Wicklow in Ireland apparently!

1960 Guide to Soochow

You could probably find one of these still tucked away and covered in dust on the shelves of a Foreign Languages Bookstore somewhere in China if you search hard enough! This guidebook and map from 1960….incidentally showing that the old spellings were still being used at that time…..

MING!: Porcelain for a Globalised Trade

Interesting though the exclamation mark is somewhat perplexing and, I suspect, wholly unnecessary – Ming!

The Ming Dynasty (1368 1644) is regarded as one of the most glorious in Chinese history especially in regards to porcelain. Ming denotes the finest and most precious porcelain, which regularly achieves astronomical prices at auctions. The Ming vase is a popular cliche even for those who are not familiar with the history of Chinese ceramics. This publication unveils the Ming myth, by presenting the internationally recognised collection of Chinese ceramics at the Dutch Ceramics Museum Princessehof. It comprises spectacular items of the highest quality, which were created exclusively for the Chinese imperial court. The rich and varied inventory of Chinese export ceramics for the Southeast Asian market, primarily from the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, is presented here in context for the first time. The founding of the Dutch East India Company VOC1602 also finally opened up the European market for Ming porcelain. Most significantly the blue and white Kraak porcelain, which was an exotic decorative luxury in wealthy households and features prominently in Dutch still lifes of that era.

Banned Books Week – Maybe a Selection from Shanghai’s Banned Books of 1940 Might Interest You

This week is, importantly, Banned Books Week which celebrates the freedom to read. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in American in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Scarily books on the list that have been banned after pressure include such society-threatening dangers as Captain Underpants (too rude!), The Kite Runner (gay themes) and (amazingly) Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the book banners holy trinity of sex, violence and religion). You can find out more about banned books here.

However, this blog concerns itself with old China, treaty port China and the lifes and activities of the old foreign community before 1949. So, I’m going to offer a list of books banned by the Shanghai Municipal Police censors in 1940 (the last year they got to ban books before the Japanese invaded the International Settlement). Quite why all these books were banned, seized from Shanghai bookshops and confiscated is a little unclear – sex for sure (more specifically, it’s thought, descriptions of white women having, and enjoying, sex that might have sullied their reputation with the Chinese!) as well as an attempt to force the Settlement’s book stores to ban what was banned in Britain and America (though some of these books were already available after earlier bans in Europe and America).

The following books were noted by undercover cops in Shanghai on sale in Settlement bookstores in the summer of 1940 and seized by

the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Translation Office and the Shanghai Municipal Police in the form of Special Branch (S5)…..

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,

Alexander Kuprin’s Yama: the Pit

James Joyce’s Ulysses

Theodoor van der Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique as well as Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage

(author unknown) Sex Life in France

Ely Culbertson’s The Strange Lives of One Man, a rather racy, for the time, memoir by a contact bridge player and rampant self-publicist. Theodoor van der Velde’s Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage, as well as

Victor Robinson’s Encyclopaedia Sexualis

(Author unknown) The Power to Love.

S5 really hated Lawrence and also seized Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Woman who Rode Away, Aaron’s Rod, The White Peacock, Sons & Lovers, Lovely Lady, The Ladybird and The Lost Girl as well as a collection of Lawrence stories, A Modern Lover.

Personally I’m opting for Yama: The Pit as I’ve never read it – all about prostitutes in Odessa apparently….

ISAMU NOGUCHI AND QI BAISHI: BEIJING 1930 – Noguchi Museum, New York

ISAMU NOGUCHI AND QI BAISHI: BEIJING 1930 – Organized in conjunction with the University of Michigan Museum of Art, this show explores the relationship between Noguchi and the Chinese ink painter Qi Baishi. It will include Noguchi’s brush-and-ink “Peking Scroll Drawings,” made during a stay in Beijing. Sept. 24-Jan. 26, the Noguchi Museum, (718) 204-7088, noguchi.org. Travels to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (Feb. 22-May 25).

PS: I’ll be speaking at the exhibition on October 13th about Peking in 1930…more details to follow or here….

Bartok’s Not Entirely Pleasant Chinese Meal in London, 1922

One of my occasional posts on old Chinese restaurants in London. In 1922 the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was spending some time in London. He attended a part given by the wireless genius Marconi. A few days later he visited a Chinese restaurant in the city – sadly we don’t know which one. Bartok had some rather odd views of Chinese food, as he wrote on a postcard (of Westminster Abbey by the way) to his 11-year-old son (also Bela) in 1922 and quoted in Malcolm Gillies’s Bartok in Britain…

26 March 1922, London

 

My concert was the day before yesterday. Afterwards, someone took me to have supper – just imagine with whom – the famous Marconi, who was throwing a big party in a hotel. (It was only completely by chance that I dropped in there.) There were all kinds of good things there: oysters, fish, game stuffed with goose liver, champagne, real cognac. But you would have stayed hungry! Still, the day before yesterday I was taken to a Chinese restaurant. Of course I wanted to order dog and cat meat (if it is going to be Chinese, then let it really be Chinese), but there was nothing like that on the menu. But I still ate some rather curious things. Horses have already completely disappeared from the streets here; just once in a while you see one or two harnessed to a carriage. Bye-bye – and kisses,

 

Your Father