In December 1924 Wallis passed through Tientsin (Tianjin) and stayed at the Astor House Hotel (which of course still stands and is open for business) – she had to travel by coastal steamer from Shanghai as bandit & warlord fighting meant the trains were barely running, the Peiho River icing up it was so cold, Tianjin was in the grip of a typhoid epidemic. The city was in chaos as the sick flooded in, a problem exacerbated by warlord tensions across north China, political tensions were high ahead of an expected peace summit between Sun Yat-sen and the northern warlords. Ocean liners out of Tientsin to Hong Kong or back to rhe US via Japan were packed as people sought to leave northern China. Yet Wallis, 28 years old, went to the train station and bought a ticket to Peking, a city surrounded by warlord troops due to bandit attacks along the line, and a cold 2 days journey due to bandits ripping up track and attacking trains. American citizens were advised not to travel. Why then did she go to Tianjin and then on to Peking? Her Lotus Year is out November 14 2024….
New Macau Closer magazine out – available from Livraria Portuguesa in Macao (& online) – loads of great articles (& my regular column on Macao in popular culture)….
You can still find glimpses of the China Wallis knew in 1924/1925 – here the lobby of the old Grand Hotel de Pekin now the Nuo Hotel on Chang’an Avenue – it’s been squeezed by later buildings that all form the hodge-podge of the Beijing Hotel, but elements of the original lobby and central staircase remain just as Wallis would have known them when she checked in just before Christmas 1924….j
A selection of paintings from the artist Ian Houston (1934-2021) – some details below. I believe he visited Hong Kong and did these paintings around 1999.
Ian Houston was born in Gravesend in Kent in 1934. A talented musician, he studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1950. Soon afterwards he began a part time painting course at St Martin’s School of Art and before long he decided to eschew a promising career as a concert pianist in favour of his painting. He began exhibiting his work in London in 1956 and a year later while showing at the wildlife specialists Tryon Gallery he met the artist Edward Seago. At the time Seago was a celebrity artist, equally popular with the man in the street and the Royal Family, he had recently returned from accompanying Prince Philip as a friend and ‘tour artist’ on a trip to the Antarctic in HMY Britannia. Seago saw great potential in the young Ian Houston and offered him encouragement from the start, in much the same way perhaps that Munnings had encouraged the young Seago. It was Seago who persuaded Ian to concentrate on landscape painting, a remarkably unselfish suggestion as it was his own specialty. Ian told us that “Ted was enormously generous and such a nice person. He used to give me a box of paintings to copy.”
Since China ratified the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1985, heritage discourse has become intertwined with all kinds of spaces. This has included not only world-famous heritage sites such as the Great Wall and the Forbidden City but also spaces that have not previously been regarded by state institutions as worthy of celebration, such as colonial buildings, neighbourhoods delineated by popular religion, and abandoned factories. Rapid urban development has constituted a constant threat to all but the most revered heritage sites and yet municipal authorities have also selectively preserved or reconstructed colonial, religious and industrial spaces (among others) in order to redevelop inner-city neighbourhoods, produce unique city brands and generate tourist revenue. This panel continues the Contemporary China Centre Conference Deconstructed format, bringing together international experts to examine municipal attempts at the heritagization of urban space, as well as the extent to which these projects have been successful in their aims.
The event is free to attend and open to all. A Zoom link will be provided to all those who register before 18th November.
Dr Philipp Demgenski is Assistant Professor in Anthropology in the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University. He is also a senior research partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He was previously a member of the “UNESCO Frictions” project, researching the implementation of the “UNESCO 2003 Convention for the safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in China, Brazil and Greece. He is the author of Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City, published in 2024 by Michigan University Press. His current research explores the role of digital technologies in shaping future cities in China. On this panel, he will draw on his work on urban redevelopment and heritage-making in Qingdao, probing the conundrums of the political mandate to preserve rather than demolish old urban neighbourhoods.
Dr Luo Pan received her doctoral degree in 2011 from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, as an anthropology major. Since 2014, she has worked as an associate researcher in the Department of Research at the Chinese National Museum of Ethnology. Her research priorities include museum anthropology and the history of ethnographic museums in China, as well as cultural heritage and spatial strategies. Her talk focuses on spatial negotiations between the state and local actors in Quanzhou, with a focus on how religious practices based on the Pu-jing neighbourhood system have helped local residents in preserving the meanings of traditional space in the city.
Dr Paul Kendall is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese cultural studies at the University of Westminster. His monograph, The Sounds of Social Space: Branding, Built Environment, and Leisure in Urban China (2019), focused on the production of social space in Kaili, a small city in southwest China, through its branding as “the homeland of one hundred festivals,” ethnicized public spaces, high-decibel soundscapes, amateur music-making practices and inhabitants’ conceptualizations of music, ethnicity and the city. His current work examines the ways in which conceptualisations of the Third Front have shifted from military secret under Mao Zedong and economic anachronism under Deng Xiaoping to industrial heritage in the present day. His talk for this panel will specifically examine the emergence of Third Front museums in Guizhou.
The good people at Bookazine in Hong Kong – half a dozen lovely 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…
