In the autumn of 1924 Wallis arrived in Shanghai seeming a divorce in the International Settlement from her abusive first husband, Win Spencer. She stayed at the Palace Hotel on the Bund (now the Swatch Art Peace Hotel) and dined several times at the Grill Room over at the Astor House Hotel (now sadly the little visited China Securities Museum & no longer a hotel). Both properties of Shanghai Hotels Ltd. Turned out she couldn’t get a divorce in Shanghai, but she hung around to see the town and have some fun anyway….
In Women and Their Warlords, historian Kate Merkel-Hess examines the lives and personalities of the female relatives of the military rulers who governed regions of China from 1916 to 1949. Posing for candid photographs and sitting for interviews, these women did not merely advance male rulers’ agendas. They advocated for social and political changes, gave voice to feminist ideas, and shaped how the public perceived them. As the first publicly political partners in modern China, the wives and concubines of Republican-era warlords changed how people viewed elite women’s engagement in politics. Drawing on popular media sources, including magazine profiles and gossip column items, Merkel-Hess draws unexpected connections between militarism, domestic life, and state power in this insightful new account of gender and authority in twentieth-century China.
The images below accompanied a story from the Kansas City Star in 1927 that President Calvin Coolidge was considering relocating the US Embassy (Legation) in Peking from its position (where the buildings remain today) at the south-western edge of the Legation Quarter, adjacent to Chienmen (Qianmen) and what became Tiananmen Square.
Where they were considering and why I’m not sure – indeed it may have been a non-story as it quickly went nowhere. Anyway the following images (perhaps from earlier than 1927) accompanied the piece and are interesting I think…
Of course all the later rumours pushed about in the 1930s by British Intelligence looking to subvert the relationship with Edward VIII said Wallis went to China chasing men, gambling, smoking opium, to learn erotic techniques! In fact she went to Hong Kong to try and reconcile with her troubled first husband Win Spencer, commander of the USS Pampanga (below), one of a couple of ships (old rust buckets seized in the Spanish-American War) that formed the US Navy’s South China Patrol patrolling between Hong Kong and Canton. He was an abusive drunk, and eventually she left him and headed to Shanghai seeking a divorce….
When Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, throngs of mourners converged on the Martyrs’ Monument in Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. Following Hu’s 1987 ouster by party elders, Chinese propaganda officials had sought to tarnish his reputation and dim his memory, yet his death galvanized the nascent pro-democracy student movement, setting off the dramatic demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre.The Conscience of the Party is the comprehensive, authoritative biography of the Chinese Communist Party’s most avid reformer and its general secretary for a key stretch of the 1980s.
A supremely intelligent leader with an exceptional populist touch, Hu Yaobang was tapped early by Mao Zedong as a capable party hand. But Hu’s principled ideas made him powerful enemies, and during the Cultural Revolution he was purged, brutally beaten, and consigned to forced labor. After Mao’s death, Hu rose again as an ally of Deng Xiaoping, eventually securing the party’s top position. In that role, he pioneered many of the economic reforms subsequently attributed to Deng. But Hu also pursued political reforms with equal vigor, pushing for more freedom of expression, the end of lifetime tenure for CCP leaders, and the dismantling of Mao’s personality cult. Alarmed by Hu’s growing popularity and increasingly radical agenda, Deng had him purged again in 1987.
Historian and former intelligence analyst Robert L. Suettinger meticulously reconstructs Hu’s life, providing the kind of eye-opening account that remains impossible in China under state censorship. Hu Yaobang, a decent man operating in a system that did not always reward decency, suffered for his principles but inspired millions in the process.
One of the many lost spots of old Beijing that Wallis knew well is the US Marine Guard Swimming Pool that was once in the former American Legation at the western end of the Legation Quarter adjacent to Qianmen. The brick built pool was a welcome break from the summer heat for the sizeable Marine detachment & the American Colony in Peking. Wallis, as a single woman was especially welcome as a rather rare breed in 1925 Peking, as well as being acquainted with Captain Louis Little, the popular head of the Marine Guard at the time.
Chinese white metal presentation cup, engraved ‘Shanghai paper hunt club, 26th December 1913, won by SBM Bremner on Court Courier’ above a bamboo shaped stem and spreading circular base…
The good people at Bookazine in Hong Kong – half a dozen stores including a fantastic new one at Tai Kwun, and a great online presence are offering a pre-order on signed copies of my new book Her Lotus Year for HK$240 – click here for more details…
