All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
An interesting and rare album of photographs of the ruin of the Shanghai National Labor University (Laodong daxue), dated February 1932. The univesity, established in 1927 in the Kiangwan district of Shanghai, was heavily damaged by Japanese artillery in the 1932 Shanghai War – the university never reopened.
A lovely carpet from the Tientsin (Tianjin) factory of Walter Nichols that was in business from the 1920s to WW2 and sold to discerning shoppers in both China and America….
Recently in my China Revisited series (Blacksmith Books) I published an excerpt from Harry A Franck’s Roving Through Southern China from the 1920s. Slightly lately, in 1927, he wrote this small book for those facing their first trips overseas which has a few references to China….
Submarines proved their worth in World War I. Afterwards Britain’s Royal Navy deployed its newest ones to Hong Kong to eradicate piracy from beneath the waves. But when a Hong Kong-based submarine hunting pirates fired on a ferry carrying 200 and it sank there was hell to pay… click here to read…
Some pictures that recently surfaced in an old album put up for auction of the Spring 1921 Tientsin (Tianjin) races at the Tientsin Race Course. The Tientsin Race Course was slightly less grand than Shanghai but definitely better laid out and with attendant stands and club than the Paomachang course in Peking – see Austin Coates’s great study, China Races, for more on all these courses.
A delightful book from 1930 edited by Wu Luen Tak and published by the Liang You Printing & Publishing Co…
China – A Cruise of Chinese Waters: Being the Log of The Fortuna by Captain Augustus F Lindley was published in 1880. In 1859, Lindley was a young Royal Navy officer stationed in Hong Kong where he became betrothed to Marie, the daughter of the Portuguese consul at Macao. In 1860 he resigned his commission, taking a job as the executive officer of a trading steamer smuggling specie to the Taiping reform movement in Shanghai. He accepted a commission from Taiping general Li Xiucheng, and helped train their soldiers in British Army techniques, while Marie became a sniper! After her death, he returned to England. In 1866, he wrote and published Ti Ping Tien Kwoh: or the History of the Taiping Revolution and included a dedication: To Le-Siu-Cheng, the Chung-Wang, “Faithful Prince,” Commander-in-Chief of the Ti-Ping forces, this work is dedicated if he be living; and if not, to his memory.
Your can read Lindley on archive.org here…
A rare book this one – Shanghai, Buildings Of Today And Tomorrow, A Review Of Modern Construction, An Illustrated Review published by Trollope & Colls (an architecture firm) of London in 1924. 1924 is really an important year as I think many Shanghai scholars would agree it’s the year the city really takes off architecturally.
