The Fairy Glen in Kuling
Posted: September 24th, 2010 | 1 Comment »Holiday weekends are upon us in China as the ancient mid-Autumn Festival collides with the arriviste National Day (really Communism Day as the 10/10 should authentically be the National Day). Nowadays of course people pop of to Thailand or somewhere (well, maybe not this year so much). In the old days when they got a holiday Shanghailanders headed for the hill resorts of China – due to its proximity Moganashan was popular (and its history recently told in Mark Kitto’s China Cuckoo, by the way – which, if you haven’t read then you should) but Kuling in Jiangxi was also popular, particularly with foreigners in treaty ports close by and missionaries. Chiang Kai-shek had a place there too. Kuling is still around and still worth visiting – sadly though the landmark, and delightfully named, Fairy Glen Private Hotel (British Owned and Managed!) is gone but was open to welcome you, meeting you at the steamer terminal too no less. Kuling – 3,500 feet above sea level in the Lushan Mountains was, and actually still is, a nice way to escape the summer city heat.
Apparently, in one of those so-good-it-must-be true stories, the Fairy Glen was one of only two hotels in Kuling. The other, the Journey’s End, placed (according to Jonathan Fenby’s bio of Chiang Kai Shek) a bible and a collection of French pornography in every room in case the guest’s found themselves spiritually in need of one or t’other.
I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of the Fairy Glen but there is one apparently in the 2008 book Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China (China Studies) by Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith
In the 1920s, my grandfather (Stuart Day Truesdell) skippered the gunBoat Tutuila on the Yangtze river. His son, Charles Truesdell, my father, was sent to the Missionary School in Kuling, and he and his mother stayed in the Fairy Glen Hotel, after arriving in Kuling by sedan. My father said the hotel grounds were wonderful, with big rocks and many trees. He and his mother stayed in a small cottage.