Visualising China

Concluding his overview of the recently digitised Pirkis Collection, Dr Andrew Hillier digs further into these 400 cartes de visite to consider what the collection tells us about the legation world and the European presence in Peking more generally during the 1870s and early 1880s.

As we have seen, children in the Legation spent much of their time away from their parents. It seems from one of Bessie Pirkis’s paintings, that, by Christmas 1877, Amy and Georgie, now aged six and three, each had their own amah and this certainly will have given Bessie more time for her music and art. For Christmas 1877, she made sketches of a large number of the principal European figures in Peking. In addition to a self-portrait, the series comprised eight women and thirty-two men. Presumably, it was done by way of a Christmas gift for each of the sitters and, although identifying them has proved difficult, it most probably included all the officials in the British legation. At some point, perhaps before they were distributed, the individual images were assembled for the purpose of the photograph in Figure 1.

Bessie captured her subjects in a variety of poses but all in profile, some more formal than others – the women all seem to have had their hair carefully prepared and the men are smartly dressed but somewhat more casual with one reading a book.  It perhaps says something for Bessie’s standing that she was able to persuade all of them to sit for her – a lengthy process, given the care with which they have been executed – but, no doubt, they were delighted with the results.

Hart was not amongst the sitters – he was probably too busy and too impatient – but some Customs men and their wives may have been, as the photograph comes from the collection of David Marr Henderson (1840-1923), who as the Engineer -in-Chief in the Marine Department was responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of China’s developing network of light-houses from 1869 to 1898.[2] The fact that he presumably acquired the album at about this time raises a number of questions: how many copies of the photograph were made, to whom were they distributed and why would the photograph be of particular interest to him? Whatever the answers, we can be confident that the exercise will have established Bessie as a leading figure in Peking’s small ex-patriate world.

With Albert due a year’s furlough, once Christmas was over, the two of them began preparing for the family’s departure. They set off towards the end of March, full of excitement, but, on reaching Shanghai, were greeted by the tragic news that the Chinese Secretary, Frederick Mayers, who had arrived with his wife, Jeannie, and two children just days before them, had succumbed to what was described as ‘typhus fever’- a catch-all phrase for many illnesses but, in his case, one certainly exacerbated by over-work and Peking’s harsh climate.

A stately funeral was organised, with the coffin being borne on a gun carriage through the International Settlement and, no doubt, it was attended by Bessie and Albert. Immediately afterwards, they, together with Jeannie and her two children, boarded the Messageries Maritimes Steamer, Anadyr and sailed for England.[3] Their journey took them through the Suez Canal to Marseilles, across France by train and thence to England. According to the passenger list, Bessie and Albert were accompanied by their amah, who will have shouldered the main work-load – she is unidentified but may have been called Li Ma (a name which appears in an earlier letter).[4] However, with Jeannie and her two boys in deep mourning, it will have been a melancholy voyage.

Arriving in May, Bessie and Albert must have been keen to meet their respective families and show off the children. Whilst there will have been plenty of excitement, there was also sadness. Having returned to England, George Pirkis had recently lost his wife, Susan Maria (née Lyne), shortly after childbirth, leaving him with two children to care for. Of the  photographs which can be specifically attributed to the Pirkis’s time in London, the one taken of the children with their amah – fig. 3 – is particularly evocative.

Unusual as it was for an amah to be included in a studio portrait, although she is not looking at the camera and may not have welcomed the attention, it indicates that she had built up a close relationship with Amy and Georgie and no doubt also with Bessie and Albert. Little is known about amahs when they came to England and it must have been an extraordinary and somewhat alarming experience for her to have been in London, given that she probably had no opportunity to meet any other Chinese-speaking people during this time. [5]

Refreshed after their year away, Bessie and Albert returned to China, leaving via Southampton and arriving in Shanghai on 27 May 1879. Although the amah is not mentioned in the passenger list, it was not unusual for ‘native servants’ to be omitted and she almost definitely accompanied them. On reaching Peking, they found that considerable changes had taken place. As a career diplomat, Hugh Fraser had only been due a short stint in China and, somewhat to the relief of his wife, Mary, they had left. He was succeeded as the Chargé d’Affaires by the Honourable Thomas George Grosvenor, who had been in Peking since the early 1870s. At some point, he met and then became engaged to Sophia Gardner Williams, the daughter of a medical missionary and Sinologue, Dr Samuel Wells Williams, and his wife, Sarah Simonds Williams (née Walworth). Samuel Williams had been in China since the early 1830s and in 1855 had been appointed the first Secretary of the United States Legation to China. Bessie and Sophia may have first met soon after Bessie’s arrival in Peking, but Sophia’s carte is dated 1876, and so was given shortly before she left for America. The wedding took place in Connecticut in April 1877, and this was possibly a parting gift before she returned as Sophia Grosvenor.

Soon after her return, she gave Bessie this picture, taken on her wedding day.

With their immense wealth, deriving in part from London’s Grosvenor Estate, and having no children, the Grosvenors enjoyed a lifestyle very different from that to which the consular staff were normally accustomed. And it was not only wealth which set them apart. ‘Elegance and position’ were also key attributes in the diplomatic world, as Mary Fraser’s memoirs make clear, and, coming from modest backgrounds, Bessie and Albert might have found it difficult to adjust to their world.[7] However, Sophia’s family was deeply religious and this may well have been a strong bond between her and Bessie. It seems clear that the two couples got on well, with Thomas having been made godfather to Georgie. The humorous sketch by Bessie – see figure 7- is most probably of Grosvenor but it could be of Edward Malet, who was Chinese Secretary from 1871 to 1873, and, as is clear from his later letters, also a dear friend of Bessie. [8]

In addition to the Williams family, Bessie enjoyed good relationships with the staff from other legations. The Dutch Minister, Jan Helenus Ferguson and his son, Constant, gave her cartes bearing the following inscriptions:

To A.E. Pirkis Esq. With kind regards and best wishes for the welfare of himself and his dear family 9^th April 1880

Remembrance from Constant Ferguson to his dear kind friend, Mrs A.E. Pirkis, 9 April 1880.

Whether Ferguson’s wife, Maria Eleanor (née Waymouth) was with her husband in Peking is unclear, but certainly they will not have had all thirteen of their children with them.[9]  Albert Edwin von Seckendorff, who was attached to the German Legation in the early 1880s, was another friend – see figure 13; in a later letter to Bessie, he talks about the many days he spent with them in Peking.

By the time of the Pirkis’s return from England, Wade was tiring of life in China and wished to spend more time with his books and his family. Although he would formally retire only two years later, in figure 14, we see him shortly before he left Peking, placing himself somewhat unassumingly in the back row and to the side.

Following Wade’s departure, Grosvenor took over as Chargé d’Affaires, pending the arrival of Harry Parkes as the new Minister. With his easy-going approach, this was a convivial time and may well have been when the photograph in figure 15 was taken, showing Albert relaxing with the Student Interpreters.

Although they would not leave for another twelve months, in October 1882, the Grosvenors held their farewell dinner, an evening which Hart described as ‘the brightest, best, gayest, and pleasantest … we have ever yet had at the British Legation’. [10]  The following year, Walter Hillier (elder brother of Harry, who had played with Bessie at Hart’s musical evenings) returned to the legation as Chinese Secretary with his wife, Clare and in July, 1883, they added another baby, Florrie, to the crop of legation children. Extrovert and vivacious, Clare was soon at the heart of legation life, and getting on well with Bessie and Albert who already knew Walter well from his earlier days in Peking.[11]

A keen Sinologist, like Mayers, Hillier was a demanding teacher but he had a lighter side. At some point, he gave the Pirkis’s a photograph of himself as Mother Goose – see figure 16- knowing how much they both enjoyed Amateur Dramatics, which was also a popular aspect of Legation life. Bessie and Clare Hillier both appeared in the Legation’s Christmas play in 1884, an evening which the Minister, Harry Parkes, much enjoyed, as he told his daughter, Marion:

It was a great success; Mrs Pirkis played to great perfection. She got herself up as a most attractive young girl and looked so pretty and acted ravishingly well. Mrs Hillier also did excellently but her part was a more staid one. After the performance the whole house which was crowded came over to me to dance and to sup as last year.[12]

Bessie seems to have been one of the few who were able to get on with Parkes on a personal level. Having lost his wife, Fanny, in 1879, he was extremely dependent on his two daughters, Marion (‘Minnie’) and Mabel, both of whom came with him to Peking. The earnest tone he introduced is palpable in the carte in figure 17 – one of the last photographs to be taken of him – which will have been duly presented to Bessie soon after their arrival.

A year later, in October 1884, Minnie married James Keswick, a partner in Jardines, and left  for Shanghai. Parkes was bereft, as he told his daughter, ‘We have had no events of any kind and I am afraid the Legation is much duller than before’.[13] Not known for relaxation or conviviality, he drove himself as hard as he drove his staff, and six months later he was dead. However, Bessie seems to have established reasonably good relations with the two Parkes sisters and, despite their father’s gloomy account, continued to enjoy herself. [14]

Music was her real passion. She had performed professionally before coming out to China and, having published some songs, she helped Hart with his own compositions, with a view, to producing, he told Campbell, ‘ten songs, ten drawing-room pieces and perhaps ten sonatas …’.[15] Also taking part in Hart’s musical evenings was J.A. van Aalst, a Belgian, who had arrived in Peking in January 1883 having been appointed Postal Clerk.[16] An extremely junior position, it is nonetheless clear that Hart was keen to support this young man because, as he told Campbell, ‘he had made his way up from nothing’ and, more important, was ‘a fine musician’,

With him on the flute, Mrs Pirkis at Piano, Scherzer at harmonium, Lyall on violin and myself on ‘cello, we have considerable music every Saturday evening.[17]

Despatching van Aalst to England the following year to deliver lectures on Chinese music during the Fisheries Exhibition, Hart warned Campbell that he was inclined to be ‘morose and bad-tempered’, a prediction which turned out to be all too well-founded, when Campbell had to be retrained from dismissing him because of his arrogant behaviour. [18]  However, picking up his music when he returned to Peking, van Aalst made friends with Bessie and presented her with the carte at figure 18.

Given what we know about him, it is perhaps not surprising that he chose to be photographed looking somewhat arrogant in the robes of a Chinese official. If this was principally to show those at home that he had truly ‘arrived’, as we see from the accompanying letter to Bessie, it had a different purpose. Albert’s health was failing and the Pirkis’s were already packing up to return to England for a period of recuperation. Enclosing the scores of two songs, “Sublime Lesson” and “Goodbye, dear friend”, van Aalst told Bessie that the latter composition, made up from various verses he had found, was offered as a ‘souvenir’ and a ‘tribute of [his] esteem and respect’.[19]

Four weeks later, Albert and Bessie sailed for home with the children. It is clear from their letters that this was an anxious time and Amy and Georgie were sent to stay with cousins, whilst Albert searched for a cure. Sadly, he had left it too late and died on 7 July just one month after their arrival. The news will have come as a terrible shock for those who had known him so well in Peking, for, as the North China Herald observed, ‘a kinder or more genial man, there never was’.[20] Bessie would live on for another fifteen years, bringing up the two children and surrounded by mementoes of their years in China, including her paintings and, of course, her photographs. She and Albert were buried side by side in Kensal Green Cemetery, with Albert’s head-stone bearing a Chinese character meaning ‘love’– see fig. 19.

If the dominant image of Legation and Consular life in China is that of patriarchal figures, heavily bearded, with the women in the shadows, the photographs in the Pirkis Collection provide a very different picture. Whilst only a few can be included in this blog, taken together they show that Bessie had a wide range of friends both inside and beyond the legation. Although often over-looked, this sort of intimacy underpinned Legation life, softening its edges and humanising it. This was important for all those engaged in that world, not least the Student Interpreters, who, away from home for the first time and struggling to learn Chinese, were still highly impressionable. The presence of women and children was key to creating a familial atmosphere in what was otherwise an unfamiliar world and Bessie played an important part in that process, as well as being at the centre of legation life.  Cartes could be exchanged not only as tokens of affection but also to keep alive the memory of those friendships, when lengthy separations were about to take place. They could also help to maintain links between Peking and Europe – we can, for example, imagine van Aalst’s family, proudly showing his portrait to their friends and relations at home.

For the legation children, this was also a formative stage in their lives. Save for the year they spent in London, Amy and Georgie had known only the legation world. Returning to England, aged thirteen and ten, they would maintain contact with many of those they had known and pass on their memories of those years to the next generation, no doubt, drawing on these photographs to remind them of this world.[21]

——

Andrew Hillier’s The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life, 1843-1853, will be published by City University Press, Hong Kong, later this year. Click here for more details and updates.

[1] The surviving individual images of Bessie and Albert measure 18 x 16.5 cms and are slightly different from those in the photograph. This could indicate that in some cases Bessie made a number of copies. It is also possible that one set of originals was retained together as we see in the photograph.

[2] Bickers, Robert, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 266 and 268-9; https://hpcbristol.net/collections/henderson-david-marr.

[3] North China Herald, 28 March 1878, p.322.

[4] Li Ma’s name appears in a letter from Sophia Grosvenor to Bessie, dated 11 June, which must have been written in 1883, since it refers to the Hilliers, who had only arrived earlier that year – by then, Walter’s wife, Clare, was seven months pregnant. It appears Bessie was on holiday in Yokohama at the time. There is also mention in the same letter of Shing-erh, who may have been Li Ma’s daughter, in which case, it would show how much amahs were part of the family.

[5] Cf. https://ayahsandamahs.com/

[6] See also a photograph of Albert taken by the London Photographic Company during this trip, PF-s0034.

[7] Cf. Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.13

[8] For similar use of the term, see A.B. Freeman-Mitford, The Attaché at Peking (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900), a volume of letters written by a young diplomat whilst serving in the legation in the mid-1860s.

[9] Married in 1859, when she was aged fifteen, Maria died aged 46.

[10] Letter, Hart to Campbell, 6 October 1882, no. 379, John K. Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, Elizabeth Macleod Matheson (eds), The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).

[11] See fig.4 in Part 1.  and Andrew Hillier, Mediating Empire: An English Family in China, 1817-1927 (Folkestone: Renaissance Books, 2020), pp. 120-129 and 199-201.

[12] Undated letter, Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes, Sometime Her Majesty’s Minister to China & Japan (London: Macmillan, 1894), vol.2, p.421; see also a review of a later play in North China Herald, 18 March 1885, p.313.

[13] Letter, November 1884, Lane-Poole, Harry Parkes, II, p.416. Hart’s wife, Hester, and their three children were back in England.

[14] Lane-Poole, Harry Parkes, II, pp. 415 and 426-7.

[15] Letter, Hart to Campbell, 21 January 1884, 460; see also, 10 June 1884, 484, Fairbank, The I.G. in Peking.

[16] Born in 1858, according to the CMC Service List, 1881, he joined the Customs that year although his official service record gives the date of his first appointment as 1 April 1883, https://www.chinafamilies.net/customs_service/5707-aalst-j-a-van/ . Certainly, he was in Peking by January 1883; see letter, Hart to Campbell, 7 January 1883, 395, Fairbank, The I.G. in Peking.

[17] Letter, Hart to Campbell, 11 August 1883, no. 429, Fairbank, The I.G. in Peking.

[18]  See letters, Hart to Campbell, 14 January 1884, 458, 23 March 1884, 470 (for the quote), 21 June 1884, 487 and 5 December 1884, 507, Fairbank, The I.G. in Peking.

[19] Letter, van Aalst to Bessie Pirkis, 29 April 1885 (Private Collection). Although he was promoted, he continued to have a chequered career and ‘ran off the lines’, having to be replaced as Postal Secretary (see letter Hart to Campbell, 12 October 1901, 1218, and later, 9 July 1905, 1382, Fairbank, The I.G. in Peking), but rose to the rank of Commissioner and retired in 1914. He became the leading authority on Chinese music, publishing a learned treatise on it- see Han Kuo-huang, ‘J. A. Van Aalst and His Chinese Music’, Asian Music ,19 (1988), pp. 127-130. For two photographs of him with his wife in Xiamen in 1904, see Queens University, Belfast Special Collections, MS 15.6.2A.076 and 077, https://www.flickr.com/photos/qubspecialcollections/19729190409/in/album-72157653886629503/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/qubspecialcollections/19942386305/in/album-72157653886629503/

[20] NCH, 28 August 1885. The news seems to have taken longer to reach Peking and a poignant note is struck by   a letter from Hart written on 29 August asking Campbell to forward to Bessie a parcel containing a small violin which he had procured for Georgie; letter, 29 August 1885, 536.

[21] Amy would never marry and it is possible that it was who captioned the photographs, a way of treasuring the memory of those years.

A recent approach to HPC revealed a treasure trove of material relating to life in the British Legation, Peking, in the 1870s and early 1880s, but, as Dr Andrew Hillier explains, making sense of the photographs can be a challenge. 

We keep up our music here …. Every Saturday I have a musical dinner party, Mrs Pirkis, Scherzer, Lyall (violin), Van Aalst (flute), + self … The first three are fine performers … [1]

So wrote the Inspector-General of Customs, Robert Hart, to his subordinate, Harry Hillier, but, until recently, little seemed to be known about ‘Mrs Pirkis’ or her husband, Albert, save that she was, as Hart said, ‘a fine performer’ and that he had served as the Accountant to the British Legation in Peking from 1870  to 1885.[2] However,  just over a year ago, a family descendant approached HPC with a treasure trove of material relating to the Pirkis’s years in Peking – photographs, letters and, perhaps most fascinating of all, paintings, both oil and water-colours. From this, it soon became clear that Elizabeth (Bessie) Levesque Pirkis was truly a Renaissance woman in this intensely masculine world.[3]  But if the letters and paintings are to some extent self-explanatory, the photographs present more of a challenge, given that there are several hundred of them and many are without captions.  This is not unusual with this sort of ‘shoebox-collection’, a large number of which have been generously deposited with Historical Photographs of China for digitising over the years.[4]  Whilst placing a single photograph on-line can trigger unexpected responses and leads, it can be more difficult to make sense of a large Collection of such images.[5]  However, although we must avoid  ‘wrenching them out of their frames and context’, in  this two-part blog, I want to explore not only how the images ‘once lived as objects’ but also what, taken together and filling in the gaps where I can, they may tell us about legation life at this time. [6]

None of the photographs, it seems, were taken by Bessie or Albert. This is not surprising given that the hand-held Kodak was yet to arrive and there was no possibility of taking quick snaps.[7] However, there were already professional and semi-professional photographers in Peking and the Pirkis’s compiled an album containing a large number of pictures of the city and its surroundings. Whilst these are of interest, it is the loose photographs, collected piecemeal during their time in Peking, on which I want to focus. The collection must have started on Bessie’s side of the family because a number predate her arrival. We can begin with one which was taken before her wedding but which she may well have given or sent to Albert before or at the time of their engagement – see figure 1.

Originally Huguenots, Bessie’s family, the Levesques, or, as she liked to style herself, L’Evesque, had established themselves as ‘piano-forte makers’ and dealers in musical scores in East London. It is not clear when or how Bessie and Albert met – she was thirty-three and, unusually for the time, he was four years younger – but they may have been related through Bessie’s step-father, William, whose surname was also Edmeades. A piano-maker himself, for some time, he seems to have been in business with Bessie’s brother, Josiah. The engagement must have been sealed by an exchange of letters since the wedding took place in Shoreditch, London on 29 June 1869, soon after Albert’s return from Hong Kong, where he was serving in the Auditor-General’s Department. [8]  Setting off back to China ten months later, he and Bessie travelled through France and stayed in Paris, where they had their portrait, or ‘likeness’, as it was called, done before continuing on by train to Marseilles – see figure 2.

From there, they caught the Messageries Maritimes steamer. The youngest of four sons, Albert had first arrived in Hong Kong in 1862, following in the wake of his eldest brother, George Ignatius Pirkis, who had joined the Army Commissariat in 1850 and had been posted to the colony two years later. After taking charge of the arsenal during the Second Opium War and later serving with the Ever Victorious Army, he returned to Hong Kong and would remain stationed there until 1875.[9] In 1866, the second eldest brother, Daniel, had followed George and Albert to take up an appointment as Consular Chaplain in the treaty port of Kiukiang (Jiujiang) [10]  – see the photograph at figure 3. Formally posed with George wearing the civilian uniform issued to Commissar staff, Daniel sporting a magnificent beard, which had recently become fashionable, and Albert looking self-important with cane and top hat, copies must surely have been sent home to the family in England for distribution to friends and relations.

Soon after their arrival in Hong Kong, Albert was informed that the Audit Office had been transferred to Peking and in the autumn he and Bessie set off again, making their way by steamer to Shanghai and then on to Tientsin (Tianjin) from where they went by river-boat and then mule-cart to the capital.  Comprising a vast and picturesque palace with extensive grounds, the compound provided ample space for them to have their own separate accommodation.[11]  It was there that Albert, as Legation Accountant, and Bessie would spend the next fifteen years.

Their arrival coincided with Thomas Wade succeeding Sir Rutherford Alcock as Minister.[12] A very different character to his predecessor, Wade was a highly accomplished Sinologue and a somewhat unworldly figure. Recently married, during his twelve years in office, although prone to irascibility, he would be reasonably easy-going in managing the legation staff, which comprised two career diplomats and a small number of consular officials. Alongside them would be a cohort of young Student Interpreters, who would spend a rigorous two years learning Chinese with a ‘native’ teacher, culminating in an examination by the Chinese Secretary – at that time, the brilliant but unforgiving W.S. Frederick Mayers.

As is clear from the photograph at figure 4, the Interpreters could enjoy a much more relaxed relationship with Albert Pirkis, since they were not accountable to him.[13] We see him with his close friend, Dr Stephen Bushell, the Legation’s medical adviser, surrounded by students.  As usual, dogs are in evidence and the tone is informal, if self-conscious, with the students’ poses ranging from languid to earnest.

If this, along with other similar images, conjures up an intensely masculine and somewhat laddish world, the collection brings out a very different aspect, one in which women and children helped to generate a familial atmosphere, which, although alluded to in some accounts, has not been reflected in photographs of this period.[15]

This atmosphere owed much to Wade’s wife, Amelia. The eighth of twelve children born to the famous astronomer, Sir John Herschel and his wife, Margaret, Amelia was said to be ‘everything that the wife of an official in the East should be, thoroughly and fundamentally British, cheery, kind, intelligent, a woman who never made a mistake’.[16]  In just over three years of marriage, she had borne Wade three children and would bear him three more over the next three years. [17]

To add to this familial setting, Frederick Mayers, the Chinese Secretary, and his wife, Jeannie (née McKenna) – see figure 6 – had two young boys under the age of five.

Following Bessie’s arrival, there will most probably have been an early exchange of the cartes de visite which we have seen at figures 1,2, 5 and 6. Although this sometimes occurred as a matter of formality, they were mainly used as ‘tokens of affection’ and a way of sharing images not dissimilar to today’s Facebook or Instagram. Although the above were all taken in England, a stock will have been retained for the purposes of later circulation. [18]  There is a large number of such cartes in the collection and, if many of the sitters cannot be identified, we can be reasonably sure that many relate to this time.[19]  Settling into this world, Bessie and Albert had two children, the first, Amy, arriving on 1 January 1872, and Albert George (always known as Georgie), three years later.

Given that portraits were generally executed in a studio, there are very few photographs of children at a young age and so the one we have at figure 7 is particularly unusual, being taken within the Legation.

Although the children appear to be dressed for the occasion, the setting is reasonably informal and can be contrasted with the carte which the Revd Burdon must have presented to Bessie showing himself and his family in a much less relaxed pose.

A fervent Sinophile, Burdon had spent ten years as a missionary teacher at the Tongwen guan, originally established as a Qing government language school in Beijing in 1862, before leaving in 1873 to take up his appointment as the Bishop of Hong Kong. A close friend of Bessie and Albert, strong religious beliefs will have been an important bond between them.

The picture of Amy and Georgie will almost certainly have been sent to friends and relations at home. That there are no surviving photographs of Albert and Bessie with the two children at this time may well have been because of the difficulty of obtaining formal studio pictures in Peking. However, the photograph at figure 9, taken a little later at one of Hart’s parties, conveys an atmosphere in which children could be both seen and heard, with their being given cart-rides under the careful attention of a Chinese servant:

Pidgin English was not spoken in Peking and, spending much time in the care of their amahs, the Legation children all learned some Chinese and, save when with their parents, ‘never spoke any other language among themselves or with anyone else till they were much bigger’. Visiting the Legation, Li Hongzhang (one of the Qing’s most powerful and intimidating officials) delighted to watch them and ‘listen to their fluent Chinese talk’. [20] However, this congenial atmosphere was shattered when, in March 1875, news arrived of the murder of Augustus Margary, a young consular official, whom Bessie and Albert will have known when they first arrived in Peking. Threatening Li with war if his demands were not met, Wade packed his wife and six children off to England in late April 1875, and, whilst Amelia would return, the children would not do so. However, he failed to persuade the other Legation wives to leave for Chefoo (Yantai).[21]

Although Sino-British relations would be extremely tense over the next eighteen months, this does not seem to have unduly affected the pace of legation life. Recently married and appointed First Secretary, Hugh Fraser had arrived in 1874 with his attractive and sophisticated wife, Lady Mary Crawford Fraser. The first of their two children were born the following year, a time when, as she recalled, Peking ‘was enduring the hottest summer on record’. [22]

With Amy aged four and Georgie just one, it will have been a worrying time for Bessie. The only saving was the complex of Buddhist Temples in the Western Hills, known as Badachu, where Legation wives and children could get away from the heat, smell and noise of the city. Accompanied by the Student Interpreters, for whom studying in such conditions was unthinkable, they would be joined at week-ends by their husbands. [23]

With so many babies arriving and no trained mid-wife on hand, Stephen Bushell will have been responsible for superintending the births. Having then taken long leave, he had returned with his recently-married wife, Florence (née Mathews),‘a typical English girl’, who, according to Mary Fraser,  was in the process of ‘making her new home an exact copy of the Sydenham villa she had left behind her’. [24] Mary’s snobbishness probably did not worry Bessie, whose taste may have been no better than Florence’s. She is not mentioned in Mary’s memoir and, on this occasion, the exchange of cartes may have been more for form’s sake – see figure 10. However, with Pirkis forming a close friendship with Bushell – they were both keen collectors of porcelain – no, doubt, Bessie and Florence had plenty of time to spend together and their cartes will certainly have been exchanged as tokens of affection – see figure 11.[25]

Some, but by no means all, of the above images have appeared elsewhere but it is their presence within a single collection, along with all the other photographs, which gives them a particular significance, showing the importance of intimate relations within the formal legation world. After seven years, Bessie had become a leading figure in that world, and, with the children growing up, she was now able to make more of her talents, as we shall see in Part 2.

Andrew Hillier’s The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life, 1843-1853, will be published by City University Press, Hong Kong, later this year. Click here for more details and updates.

 

[1]  Letter, Hart, Inspector-General, Imperial Maritime Customs to Harry Hillier, 26 October 1883 (Private Collection).

[2] Cf. https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/specialcollections/music-making-in-the-customs-service/

[3]  I am extremely grateful to Nicola Pirkis for allowing me to draw on the Pirkis Collection, which has now been digitised by HPC, and for giving me the benefit of her research on the Pirkis and Levesque families. It was a particular pleasure working with Nicola as she is a great-great-granddaughter of Bessie and Albert, and Harry Hillier, who knew Bessie well and was the recipient of the letter from Hart, was my great-grandfather.

[4] Cf. https://www.flickr.com/photos/whatsthatpicture/galleries/72157628628085879/  https://www.kulturacollective.com/exhibitions_proper/the-shoebox-collection/

[5]   See, for example, It was wonderful: Lully Goon, aviatrix  https://robertbickers.net/

[6] Robert Bickers, ‘The Lives and Deaths of Photographs in China’ in Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh (eds), Visualising China, 1845 -1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp.3-38, quotes at p. 3.

[7] Cf. https://visualisingchina.net/blog/2017/01/26/the-kodak-comes-to-peking/

[8] TNA FO 17/537, letter, Alcock to Auditor-General’s Department, 14 October 1868, 55, referring to Pirkis being granted one year’s leave. He did not leave Hong Kong until 9 March 1869, suggesting that Bessie took longer to accept the proposal than he anticipated or that the wedding had to be delayed for some reason. The journey will have taken about five weeks.

[9] Richmond & Twickenham Times, 12 July 1890.

[10] TNA FO  17/460, letter, Hammond to Daniel Pirkis, 28 February 1866, f.223 and following.

[11] J.E. Hoare, Embassies in the East, The Story of the British and their Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the Present (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp. 21-23, HPC BL-n023.

[12]  Previously, Chargé d’ Affaires, Wade formally took up his position in July 1871.

[13]  For life as a Student Interpreter, see ‘Where Chineses Drive.’ English Student-Life at Peking (London: W.H. Allen, 1885), initially published anonymously, but later attributed to W.H. Wilkinson, who joined the Service in 1880 and will have known the Pirkis’s well; for a description of their house, see pp. 26-27; see also Cf. Andrew Hillier, ‘Bridging Cultures: The Forging of the China Consular Mind’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (2019) 47, pp. 742-772 at pp. 748- 753.

[14] The same photograph is also in the Pirkis Collection, HPC PF-s1016; for legation staff, see PF-s0632 and PF-s0633.

[15] See Nick Pearce, ‘A Life in Peking: The Peabody Albums’, History of Photography, 31 (2007), pp. 276-293 and Terry Bennett, History of Photography in China: Western Photographs, 1861-1879 (London: Quaritch, 2010), p. 31-79.

[16]  Mrs Hugh Fraser, A Diplomatists’ Wife in Many Lands (London: Hutchinson, 1913), II, p.153.

[17] Letters, Hart to Campbell, 1 September 1871 (25), 21 November 1872 (45), 10 February 1875 (119), John K. Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, Elizabeth Macleod Matheson (eds), The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).

[18] Cf. Bickers, Robert, ‘The Lives and Deaths of Photographs in China’ , pp.21-25, quote at p.24; see also  https://visualisingchina.net/blog/2017/07/07/regimental-cartes-de-visite/

[19] See, especially those at HPC, PF-s0678 and PF-s0818.

[20] Fraser, A Diplomatist’s Wife in Many Lands, II, p.191.

[21] For Margary’s murder, see Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 258-261 and for reaction in the Legation, Fraser, A Diplomatist’s Wife in Many Lands, II, pp. 144-149.

[22] Fraser, A Diplomatist’s Wife in Many Lands, p.153; for the Frasers, see also Pearce, ‘A Life in Peking’, History of Photography, 31 (2007), pp. 276-293.

[23] Hoare, Embassies in the East, pp. 30-31; ‘Where Chineses Drive’, pp. 197-234; see, for example, Facade of Da xiong bao dian at Fa hai si, HPC, Hv13-13.

[24] Fraser, A Diplomatist’s Wife in Many Lands, II, p.148; cf. Helen McCarthy, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 26-7.

[25] Nick Pearce, “Collecting, Connoisseurship and Commerce: An Examination of the Life and Career of Stephen Wootton Bushell (1844–1908)”, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society. 70: 17–25.