The Beggar-Boats of Shanghai

Later this year the excellent reprint house Earnshaw Books are reissuing EW Peters’s 1937 classic Shanghai Policeman, the true story of a sorry copper’s lot in the Shanghai Municipal Police. It’s a terrific read and full of stories from Shanghai at probably its most exciting moment in history. Additionally much of the action of the book takes place north of Suzhou (Soochow) Creek in the Hongkou (Hongkew) and Yangpu (Yangtszepoo) districts which I write about often on this blog but are still largely undiscovered by the ex-pat crowd of Shanghai who mostly stubbornly refuse to venture north of the Creek for some reason.

Earnshaw Books were kind enough to ask me to blurb the book and so I had to re-read it recently. I had completely forgotten about Peters’s vivid descriptions of the beggar-boats of Shanghai. Peters talks of the beggar-boats on the Hongkew Creek, near Kashing Road (now Jiaxing Road) and again by Fearon Road (Jiulong Road). Apparently the greatest concentration of the beggar boats was along the creek at Fearon Road between Yalu and Yuhung Roads (Haining Road East and Dongyuhang Road West), just south of the old Municipal abattoir, what is now the struggling development called 1933.

Talking of the beggar-boats in Shanghai Policeman Peters writes, ‘Numbers of these boats always infest the waterways in Shanghai at night, the beggars mooring them along the creeks in the evening, practising their profession in the streets of the city during the night, and then slipping away in these boats next morning.’ Apparently, all creeks and waterways, even in the Settlement’s boundaries, were deemed to belong to the Chinese. Hence, moving beggar boats along was problematic for the police and authorities.

I have never seen a picture of the beggar-boats of Shanghai’s creeks (and if anyone has one please do let me know). However, I wandered down to the stretch of creek on Fearon Road between Yalu and Yuhung Roads the other day – the creek is of course cleaned up and has new banks and vegetation now. The west side of the creek is all post-1949 buildings and a police station but the east side has some structures remaining that would have been there in 1937 – of course it goes without saying north of Soochow Creek that anything pre-1949 is in a state of disrepair and probably not long for this world.

the creek facing south

the creek facing north towards 1933, the old Municipal abattoir

A remaining corner by the creek that would have overlooked the beggar-boats

Creek side housing from the 1930s that remains

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Sue Anne Tay and the Roving Exhibit

The Qianmen Tram

Trolleybuses and trams used to roll through the streets of old Peking. They went the way of most of the old gates, the walls and hutongs of the city – i.e. scrapped. Now there’s a tram back in action on the Qianmen pedestrianised retail street. Though the street is failing as a commercial endeavour according to the retailers along it (either low end provincial Chinese tour groups with no money or scuzzy foreign backpackers who don’t spend either) there are lots of strollers. The tram is usually pretty empty as they charge for it and goes up and down occasionally. However, I’m not sure if its all that accurate as the sort of tram that was there before 1949. The model of tram they’re using now is different to the images I have of the old trams from the 1930s.

Friday 10th June: “Ballot Box China”: A talk by Kerry Brown

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents’ Club Presents:

“Ballot Box China”

Kerry Brown

Fount Restaurant

Friday, June 10th, 12:30 pm to 2 pm

In the last 20 years, China has undertaken one of the world’s largest experiments in grassroots democracy. Across over half a million villages in China almost one million elections have taken place since 1988, with over three million officials elected. Chinese farmers still account for half of the Chinese population and a quarter of its economic output. With villages remaining restive, what does this mean for the future of the country as a whole – and what clues do these elections give to China’s own possible democratic future?

Venue details: Fount Restaurant, 1st Floor, Building Five, Surpass Court,

570 Yongjia Road, Tel: 60737785

Admission: Set menu, 100 RMB

RSVP: fcc.sfcc@gmail.com

About the Speaker:

Kerry Brown is senior fellow on the Asia Programme at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) and a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy,

in London. A former diplomat in Beijing, and former head of the China Section at the British Foreign Office in London, he is the author of “Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China” and “The Rise of the Dragon – Chinese Investment Flows in the Reform Period”. He is a regular commentator on Chinese and Asian affairs for a number of international media organizations. His latest book  “Ballot Box China” has just been published by London’s Zed Press. It is the first in the Asian Arguments series edited by Paul French.

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Bad Memorials that No Longer Stand on the Bund

Robert Bickers was in town recently and gave a series of talk about his new book The Scramble for China. In one presentation he went through some of the old statues that sat along the Bund between the 1840s and 1949. Interesting stuff and I know many of you will be familiar with the grand old war memorial to the 1914-18 war and the statues of Harry Parkes and Robert Hart.

More interesting and obscure perhaps was the memorial to General Gordon, remembering his command of the Ever Victorious Army and protection of Shanghai during the Taiping Rebellion. The memorial was made in Hong Kong and shipped up to Shanghai – it was not liked much apparently. Rather like the stuff designed in Hong Kong and shipped to Shanghai these days – mostly ghastly nouveau riche canteen-like dim sum restaurants and marble palace shopping malls – it was considered gauche. I also like the fact that you can, apparently, take the English out of England, but not England out of the English – British sailors disliked it so much that, when drunk (one imagines a very common state for them) they would abuse it and try and smash it up – binge drinking lager louts in early 20th century Shanghai – my heart swells with pride!

Then there was the Margery Memorial that started out along Soochow Road (Suzhou Road) in 1881 and then got moved to the Bund Public Gardens in 1907. Margery was a British functionary who was about as smart as most of the chinless wonders who work for the Foreign Office these days still and got himself killed rather stupidly in south west China. Rather pompously the inscription apparently read, ‘the path of duty was the path of glory’. Margery was officially praised as an English hero though others suggested he was just a typical Foreign Office burke who annoyed the locals and got his throat cut for his trouble. Anyway, the Margery Memorial was pretty awful too – compared by some as being as bad as the Albert Memorial in London, that most vainglorious of unnecessary totems stuck up in the capital to a waste of space. I thought I’d see if it was possible that Shanghai had once been graced with something as architecturally repulsive as the Albert Memorial – not quite, but it was a close thing!!

Ciro’s Great Nightclub Remembered in the Basement of Ciro’s Crappy Plaza

The famous Ciro’s nightclub – “The Most Fashionable in Town” – which was at 444 Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road) was a very classy creation from the very classy Victor Sassoon. For much of its life the manager was the legendary Freddy Kaufmann (immortalized by Auden and Isherwood in their 1939 Journey to a War). Interestingly Ciro’s call itself the ‘coolest place in town’ which may confuse some younger readers. They were of course referring to their state of the art air-conditioning – the general use of the term ‘cool’ meaning good didn’t really enter the general lexicon in America until after WW2 and everywhere else much later (though ‘cool’ was used in black slang in the nineteenth century).

Sadly the wonderfully modernist Ciro’s was bulldozed a long time back in the spurious name of redevelopment. After a couple of shabby structures on the same site we eventually got the stunningly bland Ciro’s Plaza which defies any attempt to be remotely uninteresting with great strength. Though in the basement I noticed that there is a small display including some old photos of Ciro’s noting that the current dreary shopping mall is plonked on top of the original nightclub. History does pop up in the most unlikely places sometimes…

Prostitution and Urban Development in Republican Suzhou – This Tuesday, Shanghai

RAS Shanghai LECTURE

Tuesday 7^th June, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.

Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road,Shanghai

Peter J. Carroll

on

Prostitution and Urban Development in Republican Suzhou

During the late Qing and Republic, Suzhou state officials and business leaders openly exploited prostitution to foster economic development, especially along the railway station “horse-road” (malu) outside the northern city wall. City leaders correctly surmised that the “spill-over” from prostitution would support an array of other commercial activities. This practice, if not explicit policy, was not uncontroversial. Male and female reformers militated against female sex-work as a local and national shame that bespoke the noxious effects of male lust and capitalist exploitation. At the same time, some businessmen feared that the prominence of vice interfered with the expansion of licit commerce and development. In the end, many commentators agreed that prostitution and the prerogatives of male desire were inextricably linked to the fortunes of the greater urban economy.

This talk examines local debates regarding the physical, discursive, and political-economic place of prostitution within the city during the late Qing and Republic. The paper will particularly focus on the critiques of prostitution leading to its “abolition” in 1929 and later “reintroduction” under a regime of state regulation in 1935. (The initiation of state-sponsored prostitution was explicitly linked to the ineffectiveness of abolition, as well as the deleterious economic consequences of wholesale prohibition.]

Peter J. Carroll is a social and cultural historian of modern China and teaches at Northwestern University, USA. He is the author of the award-winning book Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937 (Stanford UP, 2006) and is writing a book on suicide and conceptions of modern society in China, 1900-1957.

Entrance: RMB 30 (RAS members) and RMB 80 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn