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…
Wild Ride – an RASBJ event with Anne Stevenson-Yang on the opening and closing of the Chinese economy, in conversation with James McGregor Wednesday, July 24th, 2024 at 8:30-9.30PM PM Beijing Time (Zoom)
How did China become the second largest economy in the world in just over four decades? And how did this economic miracle come to an end, as seems the case today? Author Anne Stevenson-Yang will introduce her latest book of non-fiction published in April, which takes us back to the beginning, when Deng Xiaoping took over and opened its moribund economy to Western money and know-how. Having lived and worked in China for a quarter of a century, Anne traces China’s tumultuous development from the roaring 1980s to today’s malaise. She asks what happened to the promise of the political change that would come with the opening of the economy, and argues that that capitalist experiment is over. ‘It took me years to understand that I was an unwitting player in an elaborate dramatic confection.’
Free for RASBJ members. RMB 50 for members of RAS branches in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul. RMB 100 for non-members. You may find payment by Alipay easier than by Wechat. You can also pay by credit card. Interested in becoming an RASB member? Please sign up at http://rasbj.org/membership/
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Anyone who has spent time in Beijing in the last ten years will find plenty to make them nostalgic, or perhaps (as the young say) “trigger” them in Anthony Tao’s new collection of poetry, We Met in Beijing… And we all really should support poetry… available all over the place – here on Amazon …
“Beijing is a city of multitudes, filled with contradictions and constantly in flux. It is a place for dreamers and schemers, musicians and migrant workers, techies and teachers, cat ladies and cab drivers—and at the same time, a place for none of them, a seat of power that can feel unwelcoming and closed. In his debut book, Anthony Tao opens the gates to the tree-lined streets, dusty alleys, mirthful canals, fashionable rooftops and sweaty nightclubs of China’s political and cultural nerve center, and invites readers to experience the exhilaration, hardship, and heartbreak of trying to put down roots in this gritty, unrelenting metropolis.”
Feminist, travel writer and novelist Stella Benson went to China in 1920, where she worked in a mission school and hospital, before marrying Imperial Chinese Customs man James (Shaemas) O’Gorman Anderson. They lived in Nanning, Beihai and Hong Kong. in 1922 she published The Poor Man, about Edward R. Williams, a bit of a mess set adrift in a world gone awry who drinks far too much. Towards the end of the novel he arrives in Hong Kong and China making his way to Peking. There he finds himself at what must be the Fox Tower (Dongbianmen) – which if you’re read my book Midnight in Peking, you’ll be familiar with…..
‘There was a brick slope that climbed to the top of the wall. Iron gates barred both the foot and the head of the slope but the gates were easily climbed. Edward was on the broad weedy path that ran on the top of the wall. The seeds of flowers and tall grasses had accepted the wall as part of the soil of China. Edward went into the high-beamed hall of the guard-house. The moonlight made strange and glorious broad spaces of its dusty floor; its dazzled windows looked out on naked moonlight. It was so full of silence that its old walls cracked. That corner of Peking was a watching corner. A little farther on the dragons of the Observatory watched the sky… to the west Peking was like an enchanted forest in the milky half-light.‘
The Fox Tower and the wall (showing the small round-the-wall commuter train that existed) – the slope Benson refers to is just under the arch
