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.
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.
Wang Shaoling (Wong Siu Ling), 1909-1989, a native of Taishan, Guangdong, was a Hong Kong’s first generation artists. In 1913, Wong moved to Hong Kong and studied Western painting. In 1935, Wang and some Hong Kong artists, including Luis Chan, joined the Hong Kong Arts Society where he met the Peking-based artist Xu Beihong. In 1937, together with Li Tiefu and Yee Bon, Wang went to visit Guilin with Xu Beihong. In 1938, with the encouragement of Xu Beihong, Wang left Hong Kong for the United States to further his studies in art at the California School of Fine Arts. He specialised in oil and watercolour painting. Here are two portraits that came up for auction recently…
I’d forgotten how much I rather like Austin Coates’s The Road from 1959. 1950s novels are always much more overtly sexual than you expect. Coates was a District Officer in Hong Kong with a wry eye and a deft pen. And so his comic novel of 1950s manners includes an attempt to build a road on an outlying island, a rather over-focused official, his scandalous novelist wife, the crooks on the island, a dodgy temporary Governor, a host of venal civil servants, wealthy bit vacuous mid-levels types, dopey academics and an hilarious scene at a British Council event (as all British Council events are rather doomed to be ridiculous) is on the money. Plus ca change – Nothing changes, everything changes. A charming period piece still.
Stella Benson was worshiped in her day (the 1920s) though, i think, it’s a little hard to see why nowadays. But interestingly she lived in many obscure treaty ports (wife of a customs officer) and Hong Kong while being feted in far off literary London and occasionally visiting to escape backwater Pakhoi or Nanning and swan around Bloomsbury. She lacks the light gossipy touch of an Ann Bridge or the insider knowledge of a Nora Waln – both slightly later contemporaries in China – and rather overwrites her scenes. Still, The Poor Man, a tale of a failing man who drinks a bit much and eventually ends up in China has some nice Peking and Chungking scenes – places she knew well.
Algernon Bertram “Bertie” Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837-1916), writer, diplomat in China, Russia and Japan, paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters. Served in Shanghai & Peking late 19th century. Wrote The Attache at Peking, published 1900 which included this map of the city (sorry for folds but it was very thin and easy to tear).
Christopher Cowell’s Form Follows Fever (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press) is a beautifully produced book as well as a being fascinating historical angle….
Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent early years of settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapour or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better.
Caught in a frenzy to rebuild the city in the devastating aftermath, this book charts the complex interplay between a cast of figures, from military surveyors, naval doctors, Indian sepoys, and corrupt and paranoid officials to opium traders, arsonists, Chinese contractors, and sojourner architects and artists. However, Hong Kong’s ‘construction’ was not just physical but also imagined. Architecture, cartography, epidemiology, and urban infrastructure offer a critical forensic lens through which to examine the shifting ideologies of public health and space, race and place-making, and commerce and politics, all set against the radical alteration of the settlement—from shore-hugging to climbing city—in response to miasma theory, a pre-bacteriological belief in gaseous emanations from a sickly environment.
This kaleidoscopic study draws upon many unpublished textual sources, including medical reports, personal diaries and letters, government records, journal accounts, newspaper articles, and advertisements. As this history is set a decade before the introduction of photography to the colony, the book relies upon a variety of alternate visual evidence—from previously lost watercolour illustrations of the city to maps, plans, and drawings— that individually and in combination provide trace material enabling the reconstruction of this strange and rapidly evolving society. Form Follows Fever sheds new light on a period often considered the colonial Dark Ages in the territory’s history.
The other week I went to the Victorian actress Ellen Terry’s cottage at Smallhythe, near Tenterden in Kent, now managed by the National Trust. Terry first took over the cottage in 1899. A year after her death in 1928 her daughter, Edith Craig, transformed the house into a museum which now displays a fascinating personal and theatrical collection that reflects Ellen’s extraordinary career and unconventional private life.
Among the exhibits on display is Terry’s “Chinese Dress(s)”. The Chinese style robes were worn by Terry around 1910. Sorry about my rather poor photography – the lower one of Smallhythe Place is from the National Trust…
