Raise The Red Lantern 4K Restoration London Screenings

London screenings of the new 4K 35th anniversary restoration of Zhang Yimou’s 1991 Raise the Red Lantern….

The Daily Telegraph’s Philip Pembroke Stephens Photographed Shortly Before his Death in Shanghai in November 1937

One of the saddest stories of the old China press corps and the Japanese war on China is that of Philip Pembroke Stephens (1903-1937)… I tell his final story in my book Through the Looking Glass, a history of the foreign press in China from the 1840s to the 1940s…

The London Daily Telegraph’s correspondent Philip Pembroke Stephens was killed by Japanese rifle-fire in November 1937 in Nantao, the old Chinese city of Shanghai. The American correspondent Harrison Forman witnessed the shooting, which occurred when Stephens climbed over a breach in the old wall dividing the Chinese city and Frenchtown. He stepped onto the platform of a water tower to get a better view of the fighting and a Japanese sniper shot him in the head, killing him instantly. Stephens was a well-liked correspondent who had given up an early career on the London stage and then a second career in the law to cover the Italian invasion of Abyssinia for the Daily Express and then the Spanish Civil War for the Telegraph before arriving in Shanghai shortly after Black Saturday (August 14 1937). His funeral attracted most of the remaining corps left in the city to mourn the loss of a friend and discuss the worsening situation. Randall Gould, Malcolm Rosholt, James Mills and Hallett Abend were all in attendance and Abend and Red Knickerbocker were among Stephens’s pallbearers.

So quite amazing to receive this letter obtained by the great old China ephemera collector Roy Delbyck. A photo of Stephens taken shortly before his death in Shanghai that he wished to be sent to his wife back in London… The heartbreaking letter is from CR Lewis to Mrs Stephens. He encloses a photograph of Stephens at the Hungjao Road Railway Crossing on November 9 1937, just a few days before his death. At that time the crossing – outside Shanghai North Railway Station on what is now Hongqiao Lu, was a frontline between the International Settlement and the Japanese occupying the Chinese districts of Shanghai (Zhabei and Baoshan).

What an awful letter to have to write…

Incidentally, CR Lewis was a roving reporter who worked for many English language newspapers in China and Japan in the 1930s. He had been a reporter with the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury and the North China Star, an American run newspaper in Tianjin. He had also worked in Beijing for the Peiping Chronicle, The China Press in Shanghai and Reuters in China.

From Hebei to Holland – The Journey of One Letter from China in 1918

An interesting letter sent from the Mines de Lincheng (Lincheng Mines Administration – Hebei Province) on the Pékin-Hankow Railway to a Mr Lionel Wiener in Holland.  – Post Box 14, Scheveningue (Scheveningen), Hollande – appears to be a representative of the Compagnie Générale de Chemins de Fer et de Tramways en Chine (General Company of Railways and Trams in China).

A number of interesting things about this letter…

1. A circular PEKING postmark is visible in the lower-left corner indicating the letter went from Lincheng via the Pékin-Hankow Railway to Peking.
2. From Peking the letter would normally have gone from China by train to Holland via the Trans-Siberian Railway though the new Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR). Russia was in obvious turmoil given the Bolshevik Revolution, withdrawal from the Allies side in the Great War and the onset of the Northern, Southern Russia and Siberian interventions (Wars of Intervention). Various nations, including China, had troops in and around Vladivostok.
3. Hence probably the letter went east via Japan (Kobe and Yokohama), crossed the Pacific or went via British-controlled shipping lanes, and entered the United Kingdom en route to continental Europe.
4. At some point the letter was opened by a censor – I believe this is the reseal sticker of the “British Imperial Censor”.

The Lincheng Coal Mines, formed in 1905 were predominantly a Belgian and French financial investment and employed many nationals of those countries. The Compagnie Générale de Chemins de Fer et de Tramways en Chine was a Belgian railway and tramway enterprise founded in Brussels in 1900 which built the  link between Kaifeng (Kaifong-Fou) and Luoyang (Honan-Fou) with the major Pékin-Hankow Railway an 185 km link known as the Chemin de fer du Pien-Lo, which officially opened in 1909.

Sadly we don’t know who was writing to Lionel Wiener but we do a little about the recipient. He appears to be the Dutch representative of Compagnie Générale de Chemins de Fer et de Tramways en Chine and living in Scheveningen, a seaside resort 15 minutes from The Hague. He was also the author of the 1923 paper Les écartements des voies de chemin de fer (something about railway gauges in China) that was included in the papers of the Congrés des Chemins de Fer (Railways Congress). He also wrote somewhat technically about railways in Brazil when he was the Secrétaire general et Chef du Service de la Traction de la Compagnie auxiliaire de Chemins de fer au Brésil (circa 1910). For his 1931 book, Articulated Locomotives, he is noted as a professor. Just to show his international reach Wiener also wrote Egypt and its Railways 1879-1940 (1932).

The Chan Kee Fur Company of Old Shanghai

The Chan Kee Fur Company, 225 Szechuen (Sichuan) Road, Shanghai International Settlement. Purveyors of eady-made fur coats and jackets in the latest styles, custom orders accepted, and furs including sable, leopard, ermine, squirrel, and beaver.

At Last – A Cecil Clementi Biography

A new biography of Cecil Clementi by Graham Hutchings – Governor, Traveller, Scholar, Spy: The Career of Sir Cecil Clementi (Hong Kong University Press).

The first full-length biography of a highly gifted colonial administrator who spent half of his roughly 30-year career in Hong Kong and played a major role in the city’s history. As a young official, Clementi quickly mastered Chinese and published translations of Cantonese poetry. He undertook epic journeys across China on intelligence-gathering missions, was closely involved in the land settlement in the New Territories, and the creation of Hong Kong University. As governor, he championed the development of Kai Tak airport and the provision of Hong Kong’s water supply. He also appointed the first Chinese member of the city’s Executive Council. Yet he resisted reforms to the controversial mui-tsai system under which Chinese girls served as housemaids to Chinese families on the grounds that it was a Chinese ‘tradition’. This study of his career, in which he was also posted to British Guiana and Ceylon, sheds light on how Britain administered the far-flung territories that formed its empire. 

Nora Pennett’s Interwar Watercolours of China

Gathering together a series of watercolours by the British artist Nora Pennett who was a dozen or so years resident in Shanghai between 1924 and 1936. She started her career while in China it seems exhibiting at local galleries in the city and at the annual exhibition organised by the Shanghai Art Club. Later, after moving back to Britain she continued to exhibition both with local art clubs and London galleries.

In China Pennett travelled throughout China documenting daily life in bustling towns and quiet rural villages. Her style has been described as ‘fluid… utilizing a soft yet expressive palette to bring a lively scenes to life’.

Markets appear to be one of her favourite places to paint….

Though there are a few references to Nora as a “German artist”, this appears incorrect as other sources have her as born in Boston, Lincolnshire. She is also, as per the style of the time, often referred to as Mrs CY, or CYK, Pennett. Nora’s husband was Cyril William K “CWK” Pennett (1896-??). He was an electrical engineer in Shanghai, involved in building out the city’s grid.

Cyril seems to have been in China already in 1916 meaning he either met Nora while on furlough in Britain or somehow in Shanghai. Cyril worked for various companies including the British Electrical Engineering Co (China) Ltd, Shanghai,  Jardine Engineering Corporation and W.T Henley’s Telegraph Works Co., Ltd. He is  listed within the local registry of the Shanghai Municipal Council and was perhaps what we used to call a “committee man” being very active in the community in Shanghai – chairman of the Shanghai Art Club, a member of the committee of the Royal Asiatic Society North China Branch etc.

It seems the Pennetts returned to Britain around 1936 (probably due to Cyril’s retirement) and travelled extensively round the country. She kept painting – including scenes of Lincolnshire and the Cornish coast. Nora is recorded as becoming a member of the Lincoln Artists’ Society in 1945 which reinforces her Boston roots.

Nora must have successfully brought many of her China paintings back with her. In April 1936 we see a photo of “Nora Pennett hanging one of her water colours for the exhibition at the FJ Ward Gallery”. That gallery was on the junction at #3 Baker Street by Portman Square in Marylebone. Ward often exhibited Chinese artists and art depicting China. At the Ward Gallery Nora exhibited mostly watercolours of China, including scenes of the Great Wall, or as the exhibition’s review in the Birmingham Gazette put it – ‘some queer places’! We are also enticingly told that Nora once slept alone in the deserted Ming Tombs of Peking!!

After the War I believe the Pennetts moved to Abergavenny in Wales. Nora was recorded as exhibiting at a gallery there – The Abergavenny Three Arts Club –  in 1946, again in 1949, and then in 1950 (“Galloping Horses and Lilies”), though the newspaper noted she was ‘recently deceased’.  However her work continued to be exhibited in Abergavenny, including paintings from her China sojourn – the Abergavenny Three Arts Club exhibited “Chinese Coolie” in 1952 (which I have not been able to find a copy of).

Finally I think that Nora Pennett can join the list of foreign women painters working in China between the wars who give us, collectively, a wonderfully colourful view of the country at a time of black and white photography. Elizabeth Keith, Bertha Lum, Anna Hotchkis, Katharine Jowett, Mary Mullikin, Emily Kemp and others…. At some point I’d like to bring their lives and art together in one place so we can better appreciate their rather overlooked contribution.

Christopher Murphy’s 1920s Illustrations of Canton

Illustrations of 1920s Canton by Christopher Murphy from Harry Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call (1924).

Christopher Aristide Desbouillons Murphy Jr. (1902–1973) was a Savannah artist, etcher, and illustrator as well as the long term partner of Hervey. It is not clear that he ever visited Canton but sketched from postcards and Hervey’s photographs.

Included in my China Revisited series from Blacksmith Books – https://www.blacksmithbooks.com/books/where-strange-gods-call-harry-herveys-1920s-hong-kong-macao-and-canton-sojourns/

The American Angle to The Last Emperor of China – for Amcham HK

Who was the American present at the final days of the imperial court in the Forbidden City in the 1920s – a missionary’s daughter from Philadelphia, born and raised in northern China, graduate of Wellesley and, fortunately, an ardent diarist and letter writer!! I tell her story here, and why she made a new version of the last emperor (and empresses) story both new and vital…. For the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong magazine…. click here to read…