January 8 1937- The Fox Tower – Eastern Peking: The 76th Anniversary of the Murder of Pamela Werner

Just before dawn on January 8th 1937 in the wasteland in front of the ancient Fox tower the body of a young woman, lying at an odd angle and covered by a layer of frost. Her clothing was dishevelled, her body badly mutilated. On her wrist was an expensive watch that had stopped just after midnight. It was the morning after the Russian Christmas, which was thirteen days after the Western Christmas by the old Julian calendar, and the corpse belonged to nineteen-year-old Pamela Werner, an Englishwoman who’d been born and raised in Peking. When news of her murder broke it sent waves of fear through the city’s already nervous foreign community fearing the chaos and barbarism of a Japanese invasion of Peking.

76 years ago today….

John Garnaut on The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo – Shanghai FCC 10/1/13

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club Presents

 

‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo’

John Garnaut, China Correspondent and Author

Venue: TBD, Puxi

Thursday, Jan. 10th 2013

Time: 4:00 p.m. 

Admission: members free; non-members 50 RMB

RSVP: fcc.sfcc@gmail.com

About the speaker:
John Garnaut is The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s China correspondent. He graduated in law and arts from Monash University and worked for three years as a commercial lawyer. In 2002 John was appointed the Herald’s Economics Correspondent in the Canberra press gallery and in 2007 was posted to Beijing as the Asia Economics Correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. John has won the prestigious Walkley Award for “scoop of the year” in 2009 and was a finalist in the Graham Perkins Australian Journalist of the Year award in 2010. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo” (2012).

A Comparing China Reversal – Li Hung Chang on Broadway as Hatamen Street

I’ve posted a number of times on “Comparing China” – cases where foreigners compared parts of China to parts of their home countries. The Brits are by far the most prolific and loopy at this but the Americans liked to give it a go too occasionally. See here for some examples from the likes of Jules Verne, Peter Fleming, Somerset Maugham, Auden etc etc.

So lets twist it around for a change – how about a Chinese doing a “comparing China” while travelling overseas? Why not indeed and so here no lesser a great Chinaman than Li Hung-Chang (Hongzhang, however you like it), leading self-strengthener, elder statesman of the Qing Dynasty, the man who quelled several major rebellions and served in important positions of the Imperial Court, including the premier viceroyalty of Zhili. He travelled to America in 1896 (and the picture below was also taken that year). And so this from The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang (1913 – Houghton Mifflin, NYC)

“In New York their principal street is called Broadway, when it is not broad  at all, but narrow, as thoroughfares go in this coun-  try. I think it is not as wide as the Hatemen Road  in Peking; but with its buildings it makes me think  of the Si-kiang River at Sin-chow, with its tremen-  dous depths and high banks. But Broadway leads  the universe for business, and ‘Business’ is the key-  note of progress to-day. In America, especially,  everything is ‘Business,’ even to the art of writing.  Nobody in the United States writes for the mere love  of the work. No, the most immortal poem or the  greatest tale of true love and heroism must be paid  for before the writers will let their manuscripts out  of their hands. It is wonderful to think that if I had  been paid even a tael for each full page I have written  I should be almost a millionaire!”

Broadway, Manhattan – 1890s

Hateman Road (or more usually Hataman Street), Peking – 1890s

The Chinese Children Next Door – Pearl Buck

Pearl Buck’s The Chinese Children Next Door, was about a family of six little girls totally overshadowed and enslaved by the seventh child, a baby brother.The book was first published in 1942 (I think) and sold very well – below are a selection of covers including an early recorded version on vinyl (kind of Audible.com for the 1950s!).

Sorry – Just one more comment on Chinese Restaurants in London – circa 1915

Just one more sneaky little post on Chinese restaurants in London (following these recent ones – here, here and here) – this from Thomas Burke’s Nights in Town: A London Autobiography originally published in 1915 ( just before his perhaps better known (at least to people interested in London’s Chinese community) Limehouse Nights in 1916) on going out for a Chinese in Limehouse just before World War One. My thanks to Anne Witchard for this – who is of course the author of the definitive work on Burke, Limehouse and Chinoiserie in this period – Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie. This from the chapter A Chinese Night:

Mr. Sam Tai Ling keeps a restaurant, and, some years ago, when my ways were cast about West India Dock Road, I knew him well. He was an old man then; he is an old man now: the same age, I fancy. Supper with him is something to remember — I use the phrase carefully. You will find, after supper, that sodamints and potass water are more than grateful and comforting. When we entered he came forward at once, and, such was his Celestial courtesy that, although we had recently dined, to refuse supper was impossible. He supped with us himself in the little upper room, lit by gas, and decorated with bead curtains and English Christmas-number supplements. A few oily seamen were manipulating the chop-sticks and thrusting food to their mouths with a noise that, on a clear night, I should think, could be heard as far as Shadwell. When honourable guests were seated, honourable guests were served by Mr. Tai Ling. There were noodle, shark’s fins, chop suey, and very much fish and duck,  and lychee fruits. The first dish consisted of something that resembled a Cornish pasty — chopped fish and onion and strange meats mixed together and heavily spiced, encased in  a light flour-paste. Then followed a plate of noodle, some bitter melon, and finally a pot of  China tea prepared on the table: real China  tea, remember, all-same Shantung; not the backwash of the name which is served in Piccadilly tea-shops. The tea is carefully prepared by one who evidently loves his work, and is  served in little cups, without milk or sugar, but flavoured with chrysanthemum buds.  As our meal progressed, the cafe began to  fill; and the air bubbled with the rush of labial talk from the Celestial company. We were the only white things there. All the company was yellow, with one or two tan-skinned girls.

Harbin to Hanoi: Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940

Harbin to Hanoi: Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940

Edited by Laura Victoir and Victor Zatsepine

Colonial powers in China and northern Vietnam employed the built environment for many purposes: as an expression of imperial aspirations, a manifestation of supremacy, a mission to civilize, a re-creation of a home away from home, or simply as a place to live and work. In this volume, scholars of city planning, architecture, and Asian and imperial history provide a detailed analysis of how colonization worked on different levels, and how it was expressed in stone, iron, and concrete. The process of creating the colonial built environment was multilayered and unpredictable. This book uncovers the regional diversity of the colonial built form found from Harbin to Hanoi, varied experiences of the foreign powers in Asia, flexible interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, and the risks entailed in building and living in these colonies and treaty ports.

Laura Victoir is a former postdoctoral fellow in European Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She currently teaches in the History Department at Hunter College, City University of New York, specializing in Imperial Russia and in French colonialism in Asia.

Victor Zatsepine is a research assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong. He holds degrees from Beijing Language and Culture University, Harvard and the University of British Columbia, and specializes in China’s frontier history and the history of Sino-Russian encounters.

“This volume tells a complex story of conflict, collaboration and co-habitation between actors involved in the unevenness of colonial cities. Central to the volume is architecture and urban form seen as both the text and context for the enactment of power, negotiation and resistance. The contributors have done an excellent job in delivering an interpretive framework that understands colonial cities as a specific site of contestation and identity formation for both the colonizer and the colonized.” — Abidin Kusno, the University of British Columbia

“This well-conceived and truly interdisciplinary volume is a welcome addition to the existing historiography on the colonial built environment in Asia. As the editors note, a focus on the colonial built environment ‘exposes multiple-layers of empire-making and of conquest, both ideological and real.’
Shared connections within this fairly concentrated, compact region with easy access to the sea, as well as differences such as variations in topography and climate the colonizers confronted, are succinctly stated. The book’s regional focus reveals the multiple imperial incursions and processes of colonization by various imperial powers, and the point of revising narratives over-emphasizing the role of the British empire is well taken.” — Haejeong Hazel Hahn, Seattle University

“Harbin to Hanoi is an important cross-disciplinary contribution to the analysis of the built environment in the context of colonial and imperial history in Asia from 1840 to 1940. The editors have collected an impressive collection of essays that provide novel insights into the multiple and varied interaction of colonial powers from Europe and Japan notably in China and northern Indochina. The authors illustrate the diverse actors of colonization both global and local and their impact on built form in different historical context and diverse geographical areas inviting a re-evaluation of the relationship between what is often called the ‘colonizer’ and the ‘colonized’.” — Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College

Nancy Mitford’s China Moment

I came across this picture of Nancy Mitford the other day. Now, I must confess, I’m a fan of Nancy and her writing and a bit of a Mitford’s buff really. But I do not know of any links between Nancy and China (or any Mitford and China for that matter). I do know, thanks to Lisa Hilton’s recently published The Horror of Love, about the relationship between Nancy and Free French leader Gaston Palewski, that Pawelski had once dreamed of travelling to Peking and perhaps gaining a position with the French embassy there. But apart from that – nothing. Of course Nancy was friends with a number of people who did spend time in China, notably her friend Harold Acton.

So where is Nancy here? A restaurant, a reception of some sort at an embassy in London or Paris? – the characters behind her are general happiness/celebration characters. A party at a posh Chinese restaurant in the 1950s perhaps? A wedding? A reception for a visiting Chinese writer? I don’t know….

Well, if anyone can shed any light then please let me know?….nice pearls by the way….

Some Old Shanghai Trolleybuses…

I’ve been dabbling around on various tangenital subjects lately – Anna May Wong, London Chinese restaurant culture in the 1930s…s0 today, let’s get back to China, Shanghai to be specific, and some pictures of old Shanghai trolleybuses – the wires remain of course and trolleybuses still plough the streets of the city but all these models are now sadly withdrawn from service…