Came across this postcard of Victoria Park in the old British Concession of Tientsin (Tianjin) at a sale in London recently. Victoria Park must have been one of the best laid out treaty port parks in China at the time. It’s still there and quite nice though most of the structures were a bit shabby the last time I visited a while back and it was a bit deserted.
The large grey building behind the Park is Gordon Hall, named after General Charles Gordon (later Gordon of Khartoum) who as well as suppressing the Taiping Rebellion around Shanghai had laid out the design of the British Concession of Tientsin. Gordon Hall formed the focal point of the British Concession and the seat of government for the concession too. Close by was the Astor Hotel which is still a hotel and had what was called a ‘restoration’ a few years back – you could have fooled me, it still looked a classic example of shabby ‘communist’ hotel style though the interior hadn’t been mucked about too much with the exception of the foyer/lobby. They still had the old open lifts though they weren’t working. The cenotaph in the foreground is to the British Tientsin resident who died in World War One.
Any number of memoirs, notably Brian Powers’s great Ford of Heaven, recall Victoria Park, the uniformed Chinese park attendants and being taken their ad kids and then heading over after school. I can’t date this postcard exactly but it appears to be post-1918 at least.
I promised a quick post on the Fitzwilliam’s collection of Korean ceramics (which I visited the other week in Cambridge) after noting the museum’s current Chinese jade exhibition the other day in a post.The Fitzwilliam is home to the Godfrey Gompertz collection of Korean ceramics – Gompertz was an Englishman who both collected Korean pottery and wrote extensively about it. Korean arts and crafts have never been as highly prized and esteemed by either experts or the general public as the periodic crazes for Chinoiserie or Japanoiserie, which is a shame.
Korean ceramics should have reached a wider audience. They were first popularised to an extent by the English potter Bernard Leach and his Japanese Folk Crafts Movement. Leach was a fascinating character who had been born in Hong Kong and raised across the Far East including in Japan at the start of the twentieth century. He felt pulled towards two strands of art – William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement from the English side and Japanese arts and crafts through contact with Shirakaba, a group of young Japanese art lovers. In Tokyo Leach befriended a young potter named Shoji Hamada and later Hamada and Leach established the Leach Pottery at St. Ives, Cornwall in 1920. St. Ives of course is an arts centre (and where Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse by the way). In Cornwall the two men turned out ceramics inspired by Chinese, Japanese and Korea pottery. An example of Hamada’s work is left.
Leach liked Korean ceramics for the reason I do – their ‘natural unselfconsciousness’, lack of pretension and implicit simplicity. Scattered around my flat in Shanghai are various Chinese and Turkish ceramics (none very valuable I can assure you!) but my favourite piece is a simple traditional Korean vase in the style of the Koryo Dynasty (12th century) with a celadon glaze and the classic Korean green tinged pottery. It’s not valuable, except sentimentally (I bought it on a visit to Pyongyang so it reminds me of time spent in the DPRK too). It’s simplicity and, as Leach would have had it ‘natural unselfconsciousness’ continue to appeal to me. It’s something like the slightly more valuable one opposite.
Still sadly Korean ceramics are undervalued compared to the more ‘trendy’ Japanese stuff and the more obviously Orientalist-appealing Chinese pottery. To see as much Korean ceramic together outside Korea as in the Fitzwilliam’s Gompertz collection is a joy.
Picked up a nice old postcard of the Soochow (Suzhou) Creek recently and finally got around to scanning it in – not sure of the date but given the amazingly heavy traffic on the Creek, the complete lack of mechanised craft and the buildings along the Creek bank it’s reasonably early. Whatever the date it’s a fascinating picture just for the sheer busy-ness of the Creek which is incredible. Nothing else to say except that it’s a nice photo so I thought I’d stick it up.
On the 12 February, we celebrate the two hundredth birthday of Charles Darwin. To say this is an important event is obvious especially given the recent resurgence of nonsense from the anti-evolution elements among the religious/superstitious sections of society. Indeed if you read one book on the great man this year Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins by Adrian Desmond and James Moore would be a good choice. Still among all the celebrations, books, documentaries, essays and memorials etc it got me wondering about Darwin and his impact on China.
The only real study of the subject I know in English is China and Charles Darwin by James Reeve Pusey which was published in 1983. Of course, Darwin never visited China, but his ideas have been important in forming modern China none the less. Reeve Pusey argues that Darwinism was the first great Western theory to make an impact on the Chinese and, from 1895 until at least 1921, as thought, politics and ideas rapidly modernised across the country, it was the dominant Western “ism” influencing Chinese politics and thought. For those from mild reformers to the communists seeking alternatives and a break with China’s traditional belief systems Darwinism was as important in China as it had been for those seeking to break the unscientific and superstitious stranglehold of Christianity in the West. For his part James Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino-Japanese War and the Republican Revolution.
Within his writings Darwin did draw on knowledge gained from China that he had access to. A useful essay in a 1984 issue of The History of Science Society Journal – Charles Darwin’s Chinese Sources – by Jixing Pan (1) notes that Darwin did respect Chinese science though not enough to footnote his learnings from it very much. Darwin’s major China-related interest was in the domestication of animals – silkworms and all manner of farm livestock including goldfish and pigeons as well as sheep, cows and pigs. He was also interested in plant cultivation – various fruits as well as tobacco and wheat. When writing about the domestication of goldfish, carp and pigs Darwin does especially note China.
I spent a couple of days in Cambridge the other week visiting a mate who’s decided to sit out the recession doing a Phd which seems a fairly smart thing to do. He arranged for me to stay at Darwin College which is nice as i) the rooms are good; ii) it’s the old boys bicentenary and I’m a fan of Darwin rather than of God and; iii) they have one of the best and latest student bars in Cambridge – showing Darwin’s superior intelligence yet again!
While there I spent an afternoon in the Fitzwilliam Museum which, despite repeated visits to Cambridge over the years, I’d never set foot in before. It’s a beautiful building (above) with quite spectacular domes inside making it worth a visit for the architecture alone (and it’s free). I also wanted to visit as they have an exhibition of Chinese jades on at the moment (see below) and a permanent exhibition of some very good Korean ceramics (see later post). The Immortal Stone: Chinese Jades from the Neolithic Period to the 20th Century runs at the Fitzwilliam until May 31st. There are some great pieces including jade objets designed for funerals and ritual ceremonies, animal sculptures and luxury utensils from the Ming and Qing dynasties. There are also some fun fake jade pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries and anyone visiting a market in China will know about fake jade.
The exhibition coincides with the Fitzwilliam’s publication of a new catalogue of the museum’s extensive jade collection, also called The Immortal Stone.
I think its unfashionable nowadays but my favourite book is still Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. I usually reread it every Christmas – last year was no exception and I’m still not bored by the book. I’ve visited Kipling’s best known home – Batemans – in Sussex many times and it’s always beautiful. The National Trust now own the property and you can stroll around the house and gardens looking across Pook’s Hill and the surrounding inspirational landscape.
However, Kipling finished Kim not at the well known Batemans but at his previous and lesser known Sussex house, The Elms at Rottingdean. And so passing through Sussex I thought I’d better have a look. It’s a nice house, originally built in 1745 and situated on the green and opposite the church. Kipling knew Rottingdean as his aunt, Georgina Burne-Jones, owned North End House as a holiday home. This house which also faces the green, was formed in 1880 by joining together Prospect House and Aubrey Cottage and was originally inhabited by the famous pre-raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.
Kipling and his family moved to Rottingdean in 1897. They rented The Elms for three guineas a week. Kipling’s study was on the ground floor to the right of the entrance. He was appalled when the horse-drawn bus from Brighton began stopping by the high flint wall of the garden to allow the trippers to stare into the famous writer’s garden. Once a woman wandered into their garden and stared into Kipling’s study where he was writing. When he drew the blind, she exclaimed “How rude!”
Kipling had started writing Kim during his sojourn in Vermont, America but he finished the book while living in the Elms Rottingdean in 1901. Not sure what visiting Rottingdean does for my appreciation of Kim, but it was nice to have a good look at the village and house all the same.
The Guardian’s Dan Chung, who it appears to be spending some time in China, has posted another of his rather lyrical and relaxing videos on the Grauniad’s website (I noted his excellent film on Shanghai’s Longchang housing estate the other day). This time he’s just filmed people on The Bund enjoying themselves and highlighting the penchant for silly animal hats that is all the rage this Chinese New Year. He also has some nice shots of the Bund and down onto the Jinmao Building and Pudong presumably taken from atop the new IFC skyscraper – better known as the “Bottle Opener†for obvious reasons (left).
I missed this anniversary so thanks to The Beijingerfor reminding me. February 3rd 1949 was the date of the ‘liberation’ of Beiping by the PLA and The Beijinger has commemorated it – click here. A few good photos and some useful links to other sources on just how peaceful the ‘liberation’ was. The picture left is also of the PLA ‘liberating’ Beiping to add to the range of images knocking around.
I missed this anniversary so thanks to 
