How Shanghai Beggars Operated in 1889

Here, from the Times of London, in 1889, a description of how beggars operated in Shanghai…

Britain and China, 1840-1970: Empire, Finance and War

A new edited collection from Robert Bickers with plenty to interest all Chinarhymers I feel…..

This book presents a range of new research on British-Chinese relations in the period from Britain’s first imperial intervention in China up to the 1960s. Topics covered include economic issues such as fi nance, investment and Chinese labour in British territories, questions of perceptions on both sides, such as British worries about, and exaggeration of, the ‘China threat’, including to India, and British aggression towards, and eventual withdrawal from, China.

Introduction 1. ‘The Usual Intercourse of Nations’: The British in Pre-Opium War Canton John M. Carroll 2. British Intervention in the Taiping Rebellion Stephen R. Platt 3. Britain and China, and India, 1830s-1947 Robert Bickers 4. The Interest of Our Colonies Seems to Have Been Largely Overlooked: Colonial Australia and Anglo-Chinese Relations Benjamin Mountford 5. ‘Coolies’ or ‘Huagong’? Conflicting British and Chinese attitudes towards Chinese contract workers in World War One France Paul J. Bailey 6. Sino-British Relations in Railway Construction: State, Imperialism and Local Elites, 1905-1911 Koji Hirata 7. Foreign investment in modern China: an analysis with a focus on British interests Chen Qianping 8. Curative Finance: Francis Aglen, Bond Markets, and the Early Republic, 1911-1928 Hans van de Ven 9. Expansion and Defence in the International Settlement at Shanghai Isabella Jackson 10. Nationalistic Enthusiasm versus Imperialist Sophistication: Britain from Chiang Kai-shek’s Perspective Sherman Lai 11. ‘Decolonisation’ in China, 1949-1959 Jonathan J. Howlett

“Golden Flower” Shuai Penniless in Peiping

According to this article, from 1936, a former sing-song girl of Peking known as “Golden Flower” Shuai who had thwarted the German soldiers in the city in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion was reported to be living penniless in the city. I know nothing of the story of Shuai – if anyone does please do elucidate me….??

Urbanizing China in War and Peace: The Case of Wuxi County

Toby Lincoln’s Urbanizing China in War and Peace looks interesting…

Urbanizing China in War and Peace rewrites the history of rural-urban relations in the first half of the twentieth century by arguing that urbanization is a total societal transformation and as important a factor as revolution, nationalism, or modernity in the history of modern China. Linking the global and the local in space and time, China’s urbanization was not only driven by industrial capitalism and the expansion of the state, but also shaped how these forces influenced daily life in the city and the countryside. Although the conflict that beset China after the Japanese invasion in 1937 affected the development of cities, towns, and villages, it did not derail previous changes. To truly understand how China has emerged as the world’s largest urban society, we must consider such continuities across the first half of the twentieth century – during periods of war as well as peace. The book focuses on Wuxi, a city that lies a hundred miles to the west of Shanghai. In the early twentieth century local industrialists were responsible for it quickly becoming the largest industrial city in China outside treaty ports. They built factories, roads, and other infrastructure outside the old city walls and in surrounding towns and villages. Chapters examine the countyAEs transformation as recorded in guidebooks and travel magazines of the time and the role of the state in the early 1920s and into the Nanjing Decade, when new administrative laws led to the continued expansion of the city under both municipal and county officials. They explore the revival of the silk industry during the Japanese occupation and the industry’s role in driving urbanization, as well as efforts by Chinese leaders to carry out prewar development plans despite lockdowns and qingxiang (clean the countryside) campaigns. In the midst of the barbed wire and watch towers, plans to shape the built environment in Wuxi County and the region as a whole persisted and were carried out. Ambitious and well researched, Urbanizing China in War and Peace will appeal to scholars and students of Chinese urban history, the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and the Republican period. Its engagement with issues of urbanization in general will interest urban historians of other times and places.

Kaohsiung Harbor Train Station, the Takao Post – threatened with Demolition

Alarming to read in the Taipei Times of the possible destruction and demolition of the old Kaohsiung Harbor Train Station, otherwise known as the Takao Post. It’s been kept for some time at the Takao Railway Museum but now the light rail authorities want to turn the site into a park or something. The building, constructed around 1900 as the first railway station in Kaohsiung was classified as a historic monument in 2003 and has been a museum since about 2010 after ceasing to be a functioning station in 2008. However, it is a classic Japanese colonial period structure with a Chinese hip style roof. There is a campaign to preserve and save the building that will hopefully be successful…

The Takao Post when in use as a station

the site as a museum today

Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill Covers

I blogged yesterday about the e-book reissue of Emily Hahn’s novel of a “white flower of the China Coast”, Miss Jill. Here’s some previous covers including when the book was retitled a House in Shanghai…..

Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill Reissued

Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill is a great tale of a “white flower of the China coast”, lost in Shanghai and falling into prostitution. It’s not as widely read these days as it should be, either as a classic of Shanghai-based literature or as part of Hahn’s body of work. So good to see it’s been republished as an e-book for those who don’t know it….

PS: I’ve blogged in a little more detail about the novel previously here…

Author of such celebrated and acclaimed works as THE SOONG SISTERS, CHINA TO ME, and FRACTURED EMERALD: IRELAND, Emily Hahn has been called by the New Yorker as “a forgotten American literary treasure.” Now, E-Reads continues to reintroduce Hahn to a new generation of readers, bringing to light her richly textured voice and unique perspective on a world that continues to exist both through history and fiction.

Meet Miss Jill, a young woman pursuing the oldest profession in pre-war Shanghai. At 15, blonde, and with a somewhat empty-headed prettiness, Jill begins her career as a mistress of a Japanese banker. Soon after, she becomes a European prostitute in the house of Annette, and believes that marriage will come soon from a privileged Count. Yet none of her adventures prepares Miss Jill for the war and her subsequent internment. Here is Emily Hahn at her richest, portraying a period in time with great authenticity and empathy. MISS JILL, like its titular protagonist, is a novel with charm and personality.

University of Missouri Graduates Living in Shanghai, 1932

Amazing how many foreign journalists in Shanghai in the interwar years were University of Missouri graduates – Carl Crow too (and details of him and many of these in my book Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand) but also others working in newspapers and elsewhere:

• Arthur Bassett – lawyer and District Attorney to the US Court for China at Shanghai
• Gilmore Bradford – representative in the Far East for the Frigidaire Company
• Susan Willard Brown – a doctor (medical) at the Margaret Williamson Hospital, Shanghai
• AU Buschman – I believe was something in finance and banking
• Gustaf Axel Hellstrand – I believe something in mining and metallurgy
• YP Wang – manager of the Shim Pao and China Times
• Victor Keen – correspondent for the New York Herald- Tribune
• JB Powell – editor of the China Weekly Review
• Maurice Votaw – professor of journalism at St. John’s University
• David W Lucas – employee of Standard Oil
• Margaret Cecile Powell – Wife of JB above and writer on the China Weekly Review
• Stuart Robinson Price – not sure – there was a Stuart Price who was a casino operator in the early years of the century and was American but this is a different one I think
• Edgar Snow – Journalist and Red Star Over China author
• Hollington Tong – newspaperman, adviser to Chiang Kai Shek and later Taiwanese Ambassador to Japan and then USA
• Grace May Ware – not sure what she was doing, but was daughter of missionaries
• Pei-Yu Chien – journalist
• Morris Harris – Associated Press Bureau Chief in Shanghai
• Kan Lee – head of publicity for the Chinese Ministry of Finance in the Nationalist government
• Louise Wilson – editor of the Women’s Section of the North-China Daily News
• Thomas Millard – newspaperman, founder of Millard’s Review of the Far East and the China Press, later adviser to the KMT

Fenton, Wong, Tsang, Nicholas and Nee are unfortunately unknown to me – any ideas?