All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Some advance notice of a few events in Asia this month – literary Repulse Bay, bookish Lantau, Roguish Britcham Macao as well as my column for Macau Closer and a Q&A with ChinaFile… click here to read
Three photographs of the Hong Kong typhoon of 1906 time stamped 09:15, 09:30 and 09:45am showing the progression of the typhoon that day. The 1906 Hong Kong typhoon (they didn’t name them back then was a tropical cyclone that hit Hong Kong on 18 September 1906. The natural disaster caused property damage exceeding a million pounds and took the lives of around 15,000 people.
I know a lot of you have been published by The Shanghai Literary Review in the past – i know i have. They helped many find a voice, find an audience, move on to better and bigger things.
Well, now TSLR NEEDS YOU!! They’re being broken financially and morally by Duke Kunshan University, whose commitments and promises they are not only breaking but refuse to even communicate. The result of this could be that TSLR goes to the wall and a new generation of Shanghai writers have one less significant outlet through which to get their voices heard.
They helped us – the Shanghai and wider writing community – now it’s time to return the favour and help them pressure Duke Kunshan to honour their commitments – get on insta, FB, and especially Linked In, and let Duke Kunshan know what you think of their shabby behaviour and that you support TSLR and Shanghai writing…
Recently I read Xiaolu Guo’s Ishmaelle Call Me Ishmalle, a retelling or re-imaging of Melville’s Moby Dick with a female lens and some more China angles. It prompted a discussion on whether the Chinese ever really got into whaling. I still don’t really know the answer to that, but recently I came across these photos of a whaler in the Yellow Sea off Manchuria – c.1930 – and what was termed the ‘Whale Dissecting Stations’, also pictured below.
There’s a little bit of information with the photographs. The whaling season opened in April-May when traditionally whales appeared in the Yellow Sea, especially around Haiyang Island on the southeastern part of the Shandong peninsula. There were the whaling stations and the 800 ton whaling vessels. It was a migratory business apparently with the whales arriving and then the whale workers at sea and on land. Ships returning with whales would blast their horns and the crews would run from their lodgings to the Dissecting Stations. A typical Yellow Sea whale could be completely dissected within an hour – entrails removed, meat processed, bones sawn off.
It was recorded that tea houses, lodging houses and bordellos followed them for the season and the atmosphere on the island was ‘riotous’ as men were paid per whale dissection and the ship crews came ashore after a successful hunt.
Off the back of my collection Destination Macao (Blacksmith Books) a guide to visiting old Macao – hotels, restaurants, cafes, galleries, bookshops, and place to just breathe – for That’s China….Click here to read…
Around the time of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941 American journalist Gwen Dew stayed for a time in the Kowloon Hotel on Hankow Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. She did not know the provenance of the room she was assigned, but recalls the tale in her 1943 bestselling memoir Prisoner of the Japs…
‘The room which I managed to secure was a very large, pleasant one on the corner with two beds!… The only trouble was that shrapnel had broken all the windows, and it was very cold, particularly at night. That was why no one else had wanted to move into that refrigerator.’
‘Imagine my amazement and amusement when I was told that about twenty years before, this had been the room of the Duchess of Windsor, then Mrs Winfield Spencer. The hotel had been new, and was used by the (US) Navy a great deal. Here she had lived with her husband, who was attracted to the sea forces. Times had certainly changed, but I used to converse with “Wally’s” ghost during sleepless nights and tried to picture what happy times might have been spent in this room years before.’
Dew clearly didn’t know Wallis’s history of being lonely, abused and sad in the Kowloon Hotel…
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
A brazen posting of what appears to be a looted Chinese five-panel screen up for sale imminently at an auction house in Buckinghamshire, England. Not uncommon to see such an item but with more information, “provenance”, than usual:
“A circa 1900 Chinese carved hardwood five-panel screen, reputedly from Peking Palace…
Provenance: Acquired in China at the turn of the 20th century and brought to England by Admiral Osborne. As recorded in the local newspaper article “Peking to Slough in three easy moves,” the screen was taken from the Palace in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion and shipped to the UK shortly thereafter”
So, “acquired” really means “looted” by Osborne in the rampage and destruction by the Eight Powers Allied Army through Peking in the wake of the 1900 Boxer Uprising. Presumably Osborne brought his share of the loot (as did everyone else – divvied into amounts and volumes according to rank) home to England in the hold of his ship. Of course the item was looted “c.1900”, but is obviously considerably older.
So who was Osborne? Well in 1900 he was pretty much nobody – Edward Oliver Brudenell Seymour Osborne. Seventeen years old, from South Kensington, the son of a minor Raj official. In 1897 he was accepted as Naval Cadet and then assigned to HMS Centurian, commanded by Sir Edward Hobart Seymour |(not sure if the Seymour in Osborne’s name denotes any relationship?). Seymour was important as he also commanded the entire naval component of the Eight Powers Allied Army (2,000 sailors and marines from Western and Japanese warships) in 1900 as Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy’s China Station.Seymour did well out of the war in China – appointed an Ordinary Member of the First Division, or Knight Grand Cross, of the Military Division of the Order of the Bath, “in recognition of services rendered during the recent disturbances in China” and promoted to Admiral.But Osborne was just a lowly Midshipman, a rank of officer in the Royal Navy, above naval cadet and below sub lieutenant. Though so on track for better things. And he did rise up through the ranks until he retired in 1937 as a Vice-Admiral. He died in 1956.
And all that time it seems he had his China loot. Though later it starts changing hands. In 1971 a Mrs Robinson acquired the screen from the Osborne family. As you can see the letter below (that the auction house considers “provenance” though has no sourcing worthy of consideration) rather disingenuously says Osborne was “given” the screen while the legend of its belonging to “the emperor” and coming from “the palace of Peking” (the Forbidden City presumably) is thrown in for good measure with no particular evidence. It then seems that sometime later in the 1970s, or early 1980s a Mr Barrie Smith of Slough, Berkshire, acquired it from Mrs Robinson. He is noted in the local paper retelling the story of the “royal screen” (below – and also strangely offered as some sort of “provenance”)…
And now it’s up for sale in Bourne End Auction Rooms, Buckinghamshire where the listing very carefully neglects to mention that it is unlikely the emperor of China (that would be the Guangxu emperor forced to evacuate Peking during the sacking and looting by the foreign armies), was in the habit of giving junior midshipmen of the Royal Navy who turned up in his capital city to sack and loot it, ancient wooden screens as souvenirs!! Unless of course any of the screen’s owners – Mrs Robinson, Mr Smith, Bourne End Auction Rooms – could ever turn up a receipt from the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) of the Qing Dynasty to show it was purchased from them or was a gift – something distinctly unlikely to happen!
So…your thought for the day…. Who really owns this screen? Can we still consider it stolen, looted, property from China? I’d say yes, we can. It was taken, as was so much, in the organised and sanctioned looting by the Eight Power Allied Army in the wake of the relief of the Siege of the Legations. But surely this should now be returned, to be evaluated in Beijing and returned to the Forbidden City and the Palace Museum from whence it probably came. It was never really Osborne’s to own or sell – he stole it, even if his superior officers and the British Government unfortunately sanctioned that looting at that time. And so Mrs Robinson and Mr Smith, as well as whoever buys this item at Bourne End Auction Rooms on October 1 2025 (see here) is effectively receiving China’s heritage in the form of stolen goods?
This fortnight CrimeReads Crime & the City heads to a favourite spot – Chengdu – with Murong Xuecun, Zhou Haohui & Li Jieren among others to check out….