Austin Coates’ 1976 City of Broken Promises– The city is Macao, the Portuguese settlement on the China Coast, as it was more than 200 years ago. The promises are those made by Englishmen to marry their Macao mistresses, only to leave them abandoned and their children bastards. Martha Merop and her English lover are unique in this period. He, son of the founder of Lloyd’s and cousin of the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, was one of the first merchants to oppose the trade in opium. She, Chinese, abandoned at birth and sold into prostitution at the age of thirteen, became an international trader in her own right, the richest woman on the China Coast and Macao’s greatest public benefactress. Coates’s novel is based on oral tradition handed down through generations in Macao, and on documents that survive about them in Macao, Lisbon and London.
Only very late in 1941 the Fruchter family fled from Vienna via Berlin, occupied Poland, the Soviet Union and Manchukuo to Shanghai shaken by war and colonial conflicts. By then, the city had already received around 18,000 mostly Jewish Nazi refugees, including an above-average number of musicians. Despite all the hardships, the Shanghai music life offered a wide range of fields of activity. Paula Fruchter (1896-1983; speaker teacher, pianist), her husband Josef (1900-1976; singer, vocal teacher, cantor) and her daughter Frieda (1933-2020) arranged themselves. He made a name for himself accompanied by his wife as a concert singer and later as a cantor. Privately and at the Shanghai Conservatory, they gave vocal lessons together. In 1949 they emigrated to Israel, but soon returned to Vienna. There, Josef Fruchter became choral singer of the cult community and the Vienna State Opera. Music historically remarkable is that the Fruchters regularly sent letters to their family and friends in Vienna between 1941 and 1949. Unlike concert programs and critics, they reflect social history aspects of music life in the extreme situation of Shanghai, they integrate emotional sensitivities, private views and everyday moments – directed to addressees in Vienna, who lived in fear of persecution, deportation and war. Correspondence from Shanghai, where exile specific communication can be shown, is rare. The present edition makes the letters of the Fruchters accessible for the first time. Edited by the music historian Sophie Fetthauer with critical view, including aspects of censorship and self-censorship, as well as arranged biographically and contemporary historically, they represent an important everyday and social history document on music life in exile.
A silver beaker presented to A F B Carpenter, by the agent and crew of the Steam Launch Tung Li, for rescuing them from destruction in the typhoon at Hong Kong November 1900. The storm was known as the Geng-Zi typhoon disaster, due to 1900 being known as the “Geng-Zi” year. The storm dissipated late on November 10 over southern China. A rare November typhoon, the storm produced severe waves that damaged and sank 270 boats in Hong Kong’s harbor, including a British gunboat and a dredge.
A photo of perhaps the most influential men in the Peking Legation Quarter in 1929 – here gathered on the steps of the Legation of the Netherlands…
Left to right – Sir Miles Lampson (UK), the Count de Martel (France, and also co author of the fantastically gossipy Silhouettes of Peking), Willems Jacobus Oudendijk (Holland), John Van Antwerp MacMurray (who was about to resign over a dispute regarding the KMT with the State Department in Washington) and Daniele Vare (Italy and the author of course of The Maker of Heavenly Trousers and other great Peking-set novels)…
A commemorative coin tray, made in China c.1949 and inscribed ‘From The Chairmen, National Chambers of Commerce to John Keswick, Shanghai, October 1950’. Not quite sure when exactly Keswick was given this gift – after the revoltuion he and his wife were put under house arrest and after that he went to Hong Kong, though Jardine’s did not finally close its PRC operations until 1954. Anyway, here it is with half a dozen Republican-era coins stamped into the tray. I rather thik I would have sold it at auction later too as it’s not the most charming or valuable object ever received by a taipan I expect
Bringing Forth the New provides a headlong introduction into the world of Chinese contemporary visual art, opening from the art world onto the political, technological and economic vectors of recent Chinese history. Each chapter reads an important facet of recent Chinese history through the work of a significant artist. From examining trade war and intellectual property through the work of political pop painters such as Yu Youhan, to the development of gendered constructs in China through the work of Cui Xuiwen.
