The Shanghai War Memorial

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Robert Bickers

Wreath laid at Shanghai War Memorial, 1924. Archibald Lang Collection, AL-s21

Historical Photographs of China contains a number of photographs of monuments, statues and war memorials, most no longer extant. They include photographs of dedication ceremonies, and commemorations. The allied War Memorial at Shanghai is one of these. I have written about this on my own blog, and in a published article which looked at all the monuments and memorials which formerly stood on the riverside Bund at Shanghai.

In a blog post just published on the website of la Société d’Histoire des Français de Chine, its President, David Maurizot, has published in French and English a new account of the monument and its history and, crucially, has with some difficulty provided a complete list of the names included on its panels. While several lists of wartime casualties were published in 1918 and afterwards in the Shanghai foreign-language press, a full contemporary list of those included on the monument has not yet been discovered.

St Andrew’s Day Observance remembrance ceremony, War Memorial, The Bund, Shanghai, 1925 Archibald lang Collection AL-s31

 

 

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Guest blog: Yorgos Moraitis on Robert Hart and his Loyalties, Neither Chinese Nor British

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Guest

Robert Hart is a key figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese history, best known for building and expanding the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs (CIMC) during his nearly fifty years as Inspector General (1863-1910). Beyond overseeing tax collection on behalf of the Qing government, he played a crucial role in Sino-Western affairs, serving as a mediator in negotiations between the Qing court and foreign diplomats. His ‘cultural sensitivity’ to Chinese methods and practices, combined with his genuine interest in restructuring the Qing state along Western lines made him a uniquely hybrid figure — both a servant of the Qing dynasty and an agent of Western influence.[1] These facts are more or less known to anyone familiar with the role of Hart in China. His public prominence and impact were being celebrated in London in July 1908 when this photograph was taken at the annual dinner of the lobby group, the China Association.

China Association dinner to Sir Robert Hart, London, 1908 Source: G. W. Swire Collection, Sw-S01 © John Swire & Sons, Ltd

In August 2025, I had the honour of having my book on Hart published by Palgrave Macmillan. Given the opportunity this blog provides to reflect on my work, I would like to use it to stress a few aspects of Hart’s career that, I believe, remain inadequately addressed by scholars — themes that my book explores through six case studies of Sino-foreign disputes involving Hart and the CIMC.

First, serving as a go-between between the Qing and Western powers certainly benefited both Hart and the CIMC, making them an indispensable yet autonomous link between ‘overstretched empires and weak Chinese governments’.[2] Hart himself frequently emphasised the value of his unique intermediary perspective to his nominal masters: ‘When riding a horse, you cannot sit still if you turn east or west; I just mediate between the two sides’.[3] To foreign diplomats and colleagues of his, he often boasted of knowing best how to make the Qing swallow yet another hard pill forced upon them by the unequal treaties—be it the opening of a new port, the easing of tariff restrictions, or the concession of territory.

But not everyone accepted his self-image. His position came at a price: to many foreigners, Hart appeared too ‘sinicised,’ too conciliatory toward Chinese interests, while, ironically, many Qing officials saw him as a foreigner wielding excessive influence and authority within their own state. These conflicting perceptions have been explored by some scholars. Catherine Ladds, for instance, has shown how Western suspicions extended to Hart’s foreign subordinates in the CIMC, who were sometimes portrayed as ‘deracinated turncoats’ who had abandoned their national loyalties to serve a foreign, less civilized power.[4] Chi-Hui Tsai, on the other hand, has highlighted the hesitancy of Qing reformers to trust Hart, often keeping him at arm’s length—or, at worst, openly opposing him.[5]

Yet Hart belonged wholly to neither camp, finding common cause only in fragments with each. When scholars, myself included, write that Hart worked for the Qing government, it is important to clarify that he worked for the Qing government in Beijing. That was where his employers in the Zongli Yamen were based—and where his loyalties ultimately lay. A closer look at the often tense relationship between the central Qing authorities in Beijing and the provincial administrations during the dynasty’s final decades reveals a more nuanced picture of Hart’s role and objectives within the Qing state.[6] Hart actively promoted the centralisation of Qing governance: he sought to build national institutions under the control of his superiors in Beijing, extending across the vast empire much like the CIMC he led or the postal service he helped establish. Moreover, he advocated for the creation of a central navy and the reform of land taxation—initiatives that effectively bypassed the authority of provincial governors in matters of fiscal administration. His aim was simple: greater centralisation in Beijing meant greater influence over Qing policy.

Unsurprisingly, Hart’s principal antagonists within the Qing government were provincial governors. Hans van de Ven notes Li Hongzhang’s thinly veiled resentment toward the court’s reliance on Hart during the Sino-French War.[7] Hart’s plan to establish a central navy was sabotaged by Shen Baozhen, as Hart himself recorded in his diary, while his proposed land tax reform was ultimately blocked by Zhang Zhidong.[8] All three were powerful provincial officials. Ironically, their views on the adoption of Western institutions and methods often aligned more closely with Hart’s than with those in Beijing. At the same time, this very overlap explains their hostility: they saw him as encroaching on their administrative domain and undermining their own authority within the empire.

It should also be noted that the Qing court, for its part, actively fuelled this antagonism. During the Sino-French War and the subsequent British occupation of Burma, the court maintained two parallel channels of communication with the foreign powers: one managed by Hart, and another handled by Qing diplomats abroad who were closely aligned with the reform-minded provincial governors.[9] As Hart once put it himself to his agent London, James Duncan Campbell: ‘we are all in the water together […] ; we are not a crew, on board a ship, and under one commander!’.[10]

At the same time, Hart’s national loyalties were equally complicated and cannot be neatly confined within the label of ‘an agent of British imperialism’ as some historians have claimed.[11] Despite his obvious connections with the British empire—and the fact that, as the dominant imperial power in China, Britain was the foreign authority he dealt with most frequently—Hart’s outlook and methods often diverged from those of British officials. I have emphasised on this in several chapters in my book: the first chapter, for example, shows that he repeatedly sought to keep both the CIMC and his position as Inspector General beyond the jurisdiction of British courts in China. In a later chapter, I examine a particularly heated confrontation between Hart and the British Minister to China, Sir Thomas Wade, during which Wade swore ‘by the living God’ that he would ‘smash’ the CIMC if Hart failed to comply with British policy on a disputed issue.[12] In 1885, Hart, albeit with a heavy heart, declined the offer to become the British minister to China.

Richard O’Leary has highlighted Hart’s Irish roots as a key to understanding his critical attitude toward British authority, and this explanation certainly holds weight.[13] Indeed, I would argue that the national policy in China most representative of Hart’s own outlook was that of another man of Irish descent, the U.S. Minister to China, Anson Burlingame. Hart himself recognised this affinity, remarking in his diary that he and Burlingame were both Irishmen who, as he put it, ‘got on—he for the U.S. and I for China!’.[14]

The American approach to China resonated with Hart—partly because the United States, unable at the time to pursue a more aggressive imperial policy, adopted a comparatively cooperative stance, and partly because Hart himself was influenced by contemporary American thinkers. His first Chinese translation of an international law text was by the American jurist Henry Wheaton, and he often supported China’s first ambassador abroad, Guo Songtao, by drawing on American legal cases and writings. Moreover, his previously mentioned proposal for land tax reform drew directly on the ideas of the American political economist Henry George.[15] In his diaries, Hart described US diplomacy as ‘the diplomacy of common sense,’ and he observed that ‘the U.S. [was] more interested in the future of China, and […] more connected with China than [could] be any other country’.[16]

Perhaps further study of Hart’s intellectual engagement with American thinkers could shed more light on this dimension. For now, suffice it to say that both his national loyalties and his allegiance to his nominal masters in the Qing government demand a more nuanced approach in order to decode Hart’s idiosyncratic approach to Sino-Western relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hope that my work moves the discussion in that direction.

Yorgos Moraitis is a historian specialising in modern Chinese history and Sino-Greek relations. Currently a Chinese History lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Crete, and an Associate Researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Rethymno, he is also a Postdoctoral Researcher with the IDIS China Program at Panteion University, focusing on the history of Sino-Greek maritime trade. Dr Moraitis received his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, where his research explored China’s early engagement with Western international law. His monograph Robert Hart and Sino-Foreign Disputes in Qing China, 1863–1908: Negotiating Sovereignty was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.

[1] Richard S. Horowitz, ‘Politics, Power and the Chinese Maritime Customs: The Qing Restoration and the Ascent of Robert Hart’, Modern Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press 40, no. 3 (2006), 577.

[2] Hans J. Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (Columbia University Press, 2014), 4.

[3] Xu Conghua 徐从花 and Sheng Zhuohe 盛卓禾, ‘Shi Xi Hede de “Qima” Lilun – Yi Gengzi Peikuan Tanpan Weili 试析赫德的“骑马”理论-以庚子赔款谈判为例 (An Analysis of Hart’s “Horseback Riding” Theory – A Case Study of the Boxer Indemnity Negotiations’, in Hede Yu Jiu Zhongguo Haiguan Lunwen Xuan 赫德与旧中国海关论文选 (Selected Essays on Hart and the Old Chinese Customs), Zhongguo Haiguan Lishi Xueshu Yanjiu Congshu 中国海关历史学术研究丛书 (China Customs History Academic Research Series) (Zhongguo Haiguan Chubanshe 中国海关出版社 (China Customs Publishing House), 2004).

[4] Catherine Ladds, Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854-1949. (Manchester University Press, 2016), 27.

[5] Chih-Hui Tsai, ‘Robert Hart’s Relationship with the Late Qing Bureaucracy’ (Ph.D., Queen’s University Belfast, 2016).

[6] Mu Zhang, ‘Imperialism and the Evolution of Central-Provincial Relations in Late Qing China: Zhang Zhidong in Jiangsu and Hubei’ (The University of Queensland, 2020).

[7] Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China, 116.

[8] For Shen Baozhen’s reaction to Hart’s naval ambitions, see chapter 5 in my book Yorgos Moraitis, ‘Territorialising the Qing State: Hart’s Role in the 1874 Taiwan Crisis’, in Robert Hart and Sino-Foreign Disputes in Qing China, 1863-1908: Negotiating Sovereignty, ed. Yorgos Moraitis (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025). For the internal debate surrounding Hart’s proposed land tax reforms, see vols. 66 and 67 of his diaries.

[9] I talk about this in chapter 5 of the book. Moraitis, ‘The Informal Connection: Hart and the Annexation of Burma (1885–1886)’, in Robert Hart and Sino-Foreign Disputes in Qing China, 1863-1908.

[10] Robert Hart to James Campbell, 5 December 1884, no.507 in Sir Robert Hart, The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907, ed. John K. Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, and Elizabeth MacLeod Matheson. Vol. I. Two vols. (Harvard University Press, 1975), 579.

[11] Chen Shiqi陳詩啓. 2002. Zhongguo Jindai Haiguan Shi 中國近代海關史 (History of China’s modern Maritime Customs Service. Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe人民出版社.

[12] Hart to Campbell 8 Feb. 1877, no. 169, Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, vol. One, p.237.

[13] Richard O’Leary, ‘Robert Hart in China: The Significance of His Irish Roots’, Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2006): 583–604.

[14] 3 October 1868, in Hart, ‘Diary Vol.11’, QUB Special Collections, MS 15/1/11.

[15] Stanley Fowler Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs (Published for the Queen’s University [by] W. Mullan, 1950), 795.

[16] 3 October 1868, in Hart, ‘Diary Vol.11’, QUB Special Collections, MS 15/1/11.

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Guest blog: Yutong Wang on Policing urban ‘nuisance’: slum clearances in ‘semi-colonial’ Shanghai in the 1930s

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Robert Bickers

This guest post comes from Yutong Wang, a fourth-year PhD Candidate in History at the University of York. Her research focuses on the urban governance of the International Settlement through policing practices of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), illustrating the dynamics between the ruler and the ruled and to what extent the authorities exercised powers at the grassroots in this ‘semi-colony’ in the early twentieth century. Her article, “Slum clearance in a ‘semi-colony’: coercion and restraint in policing practices in 1930s Shanghai” was published in Urban History in October 2024.

At 8 o’clock on 10 July 1936, the Reserve Unit, the riot squad of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), the force that policed the International Settlement, received an urgent call from officers at Yulin Road Police Station, to assist in removing slum huts in the Eastern District. Upon arrival, more than 50 Chinese and foreign detectives, along with a party of armed police, were met by approximately 600 residents blocking the road with sticks, bars and bricks. Women and children were in front, staging a barricade with night soil buckets. After a short while, a crowd of approximately 2,000 people had gathered, some of whom came from nearby areas scheduled to be demolished later in the year. The residents became increasingly defiant, showing their determination to protect their homes by throwing the buckets on the ground and attempting to force the police to withdraw the demolition order.[1]

Such a confrontation between slum-dwellers and the SMP was not unusual in the Settlement. Although Shanghai’s industrial and commercial heartland boasted modern houses, commercial buildings, and public water systems, makeshift settlements, viewed by the authorities as slums, had expanded in parallel with this rapid urban growth. Most significantly, in the 1930s, due to the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan in 1932 and 1937, with the latter conflict resulting in an occupation lasting until 1945, large numbers of Chinese refugees made their way to the Settlement seeking sanctuary, most of whom ended up in informal settlements within and on its borders. In 1936, there were 25,345 Chinese resident in such areas in the Settlement (out of 1,120,000 in total), roughly equal to the total foreign population (28,823).[2] Figure 1 shows in the background a typical hut constructed of bamboo poles, with matting and mud-covered walls and a thatched roof. The floor area was about eight by fifteen feet, and residents could barely stand up inside.[3]

Chinese women and their slum huts in Shanghai, c. 1930. HPC, Billie Love Historical Collection, BL04-85

Such makeshift huts, made from salvaged material without proper drainage systems, had long been a significant concern for urban governance in Shanghai. The SMC perceived these dwellings as potential breeding grounds for infectious diseases and as fire traps, and altogether a major ‘nuisance’ to the well-being and security of residents in the Settlement.

Apart from the considerations of public health and security, what made these settlements a notable concern for the SMC to address rested on the fact that they became hotbeds of social and political protest in the 1930s when various political activists, especially the Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party, GMD) after establishing a national goverment in China in 1927, attempted to intervene in Settlement affairs. As the slum issue became a prominent part of the broader political crisis, upsetting the Settlement’s stability, the SMC decided upon a systematic demolition programme. The process started with registering existing huts in November 1931. All such buildings erected without sanction from the authorities after that registration period were considered by the SMC to be unregistered and would be demolished as soon as they were detected. The task of slum clearance was assigned to the Public Works Department (PWD). However, considering the sheer number of settlements involved, the Council assigned the SMP the task of supervising demolitions.[4] Figure 2 portrays a typical scenario where the SMP officer monitored the PWD labourers as they pulled down slum huts. In principle, the SMP did not directly intervene in slum clearances. They preserved order at the site and deterred any untoward incidents arising from resistance by residents.

Fig. 2. Labourers taking down a hut supervised by a SMP police officer in the 1930s. Source: IAO, Virtual Shanghai§x

However, it was rare for the SMP to proceed with clearances without confrontation with the slum-dwellers. Returning to the incident on 10 July 1937, encountering such a tense situation that clashes were on the verge of breaking out, the SMP did not adopt heavy-handed measures, such as drawing truncheons and firearms, for instance, which were what police officers, especially the Sikhs (Fig. 3), were authorised to do when facing threatening situations.[5] Instead, both detectives and armed police officers exercised restraint, choosing negotiation with the slum dwellers’ representatives, and finally, all parties agreed on a five-day extension to remove the constructions. The demolition was later temporarily postponed until late summer 1936 under the mediation of Yu Qiaqing, a Chinese Councillor of the SMC.[6]

Fig. 3. Mounted Sikh on daily patrol, SMP, 1937 Source: HPC, Malcolm Rosholt Collection, Ro-n1035

Although batons could effectively facilitate slum clearances, in practice, policing measures were shaped by multiple considerations. In a report by the Special Branch in July 1936, Clerical Assistant John Fairbairn noted that most slum-dwellers were organised by ‘loafers’, a term used to refer to local gangsters and low-level thugs (流氓, liumang), as well as the ‘watchmen’ of the land employed by the land-renters, who collected protection fees or ‘rents’ from these communities. Realising that successful demolition would remove a source of revenue, these social ‘undesirables’ would urge slum-dwellers to oppose evictions with violence. Fairbairn further contended that to solve slum problems, arresting ‘undesirables’ would likely yield better results than using coercion against ordinary occupants.[7]

However, another important consideration was that the authorities realised that, unlike beggars (Fig. 4), most slum occupants were gainfully employed. T. K. Ho, an SMC Assistant Secretary, noted in a report in July 1936 that most slum-dwellers were industrial workers and almost no beggars resided in the huts.[8] Clashes between police and slum-dwellers in the 1920s had led to strikes, which had interrupted the Settlement’s day-to-day operations. The police were, therefore, instructed to treat slum dwellers as a part of the industrial workforce and to be cautious in deploying violence towards them. 

Fig. 4. Begging in Shanghai, 1937 Source: Malcolm Rosholt Collection, Ro-0302

It is further worth highlighting that the SMP restrained from exercising ‘corporal punishment’ against this section of the Chinese population due to close collaboration between slum-dwellers and the GMD in the 1930s through the Hut-dwellers’ Association. The Association, established in 1936, was initially put forth by slum-dwellers as an organisation for mutual assistance and a vehicle for collective negotiation with the Settlement’s authorities.[9] However, as a Chinese organisation, it was subject to the leadership and guidance of the GMD’s Party Branch Office representatives in Shanghai, whose task was to arrange anti-imperialist propaganda among the Chinese and to agitate against the SMC.[10] Hence, understanding that violent measures might provoke radical resistance at the grassroots, escalating disputes over the life of ordinary Chinese into diplomatic issues, the SMP chiefly deployed non-coercive measures like monitoring, patrolling and parleys to guarantee the slum demolition.[11] 

The cautious policing practices were broadly effective. From 1932 to 1937, on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the SMP assisted in demolishing around 500 slum huts every year.[x12]

This case study has explored the role of the SMP as a vehicle for the SMC to impose order on society through slum clearances in semi-colonial Shanghai. By foregrounding SMP’s caution in adopting violent means to tackle this urban ‘nuisance’, this study points to the frailties of semi-colonial governance in Shanghai and the need for negotiation between ‘rulers’ and those ‘ruled’ in a time of demographic, political and social crisis.

 

[1] Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) U1–16–2200, squatter huts demolition attempt failure, 10 Jul. 1936.

[2] Shanghai Municipal Council censuses, 1865-1942, accessed March 12, 2024, https://www.virtualshanghai.net/Texts/E-Library?ID=1354.

[3] Gustav Schwenning, ‘An attack on Shanghai slums’, Social Forces 6, no. 1 (1927): 128.

[iv] ‘Settlement’s hut dwellers agree to official census’, The Shanghai Times, 19 November 1931, 4. SMA U1–14–5762, demolition of unregistered beggar huts, 20 October 1932.

[v] Yin Cao, From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885-1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 84; Isabella Jackson, ‘The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh policemen in treaty-port Shanghai’, Modern Asian Studies, 46 (2012), 1672–704.

[vi] SMA U1–14–5275, a report on the straw huts by Public Works Department, 18 Jul. 1936.

[vii] SMA U1–14–5275, a report on beggar huts, 31 July 1936.

[viii] SMA U1–14–5275, huts in the Settlement, Assistant Secretary of the SMC, 20 June 1936.

[ix] ‘Hudong huxi penghu lianhe hui’ (‘The Association of Eastern and Western hut-dwellers’), Da Gong Bao, 8 August 1936, 14.

[x] NARA D3358, Citizens Federation, 8 March 1938.

[xi] ‘Hut village demolition is completed’, The Shanghai Times, 10 May 1937, 1.

[xii] SMC, Report for the Year, 1931–37. For SMC Council members’ satisfaction with the slum clearances, see the example Qian Zhang, ed., The Minutes of the SMC Vol. XXVII, 6 May 1937.

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Some that got away

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Robert Bickers

This took me by surprise. I pass the ‘Mind’ shop twice a day as I walk to and from work, but I rarely go in and browse. It’s a charity shop, one of several on this stretch of Cotham Hill, a few hundred yards from my office which (mostly) sell donated items to raise money for the charity which runs them. It’s the books I usually look over, rarely finding anything; but if you don’t look, you never find. And there today at the back, lying flat, bottom edge out from the wall on top of a pile of other books on a shelf was something I recognised immediately: a lacquer-coated wood-bound photograph album, made in Japan.

I have seen several of these as I worked on the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ project. You can find several for sale online. This one was a bit battered, with some of the mother-of-pearl inlay broken off. I now know that this style of inlay, which is more like appliqué because it is not flush with the lacquer surface, is called shibayama work. It will have been made in Japan at least a hundred years ago, and the endpapers and each of the pages were covered in silk with hand-painted scenes of village huts, flowers, storks. It’s huge – 14 inches wide, 11 high, and 3 inches thick.

That was an unusual enough sighting, but what made me start was the statement handwritten on the pink note that was placed inside: ‘Shanghai Municipal Police / British Officers Photo Album’

Isn’t it interesting, agreed the woman in the stock room when I asked if she could tell me anything about it. It was brought in two or three months ago by a man who told us all about it. It was in his family. It’s a shame about the condition. We looked it up and it could have been worth a thousand pounds if it wasn’t damaged. No, there were no photographs in it, but there were also a couple of albums full of old photographs, Victorian photographs. She looked around the storeroom then back into the store. I put them out on the shelves. No, they’re not there now. I can’t tell you anything more.

There we left it. There were no photographs inside, and not a single clue otherwise; there were no captions above or below the now vacant pockets in which photographs of different sizes and shapes will have been placed.

Perhaps it once held the assortment of coloured postcards, and photographs of formal groups, street scenes, executions and landscapes that can be seen in this quite similarly-bound album that is currently on sale in Australia. .Here at least, ‘Andy’ had written some captions as well as his name: ‘Police on Parade’, ‘Harbour’, ‘Jetties’, ‘Native Court’, ‘Hairdressing in the Street’, ‘In Egypt on Parade’. With these details I can guess the identity of the original owner, probably a man called Andrew Murphy, who most likely, given his age, had served in the British army on a ten-year contract and then in August 1906 sailed to China to join the Shanghai Municipal Police. He may have bought the album in Japan on vacation, or in a store in Shanghai. But the one I had in my hand in Bristol, a better grade of album – for Andy did not pay for one with hand painted pages — left everything to the imagination.

There you have it, as I have it. Nothing definite to report, except a near-miss with someone’s Shanghai story documented in photographs that, after being housed by a family somewhere in Bristol — somewhere probably within walking distance of my office and this shop — were briefly lodged there while I passed and repassed this summer. Then someone bought them.

I think this album still speaks, nonetheless, of journeys to Asia at the start of the twentieth century, of sojourns there, keen experiences of difference, and then perhaps after only a few years, a return home, with the usual souvenirs, including this elaborately decorated album, then in a more pristine state. It certainly once held a collection of photographs, and its tattered spine shows that it was pored over, the pages opened and turned, tales probably told and sights, scenes, and faces remembered, while memory held. The cover will have prompted exclamations, fingers will have run along and over the flowers and the hen, in time dislodging first this piece, and then that one.

As generations passed the names will have been forgotten, and the stories will have started to get muddled up, gaps appearing in them like the holes in the lacquer, and finally this album will have meant very little to those who had to find space for it. It was something that came from Shanghai, something to do with perhaps a great-uncle or great-grandfather or someone in the police. And then it was passed on, as clutter was cleared. Orphaned albums like this came to the project over the years that were found in skips, overlooked and marooned on top of old furniture, or given away. Many, many others like this, most, were thrown away and lost.

This one now lies emptied, the Shanghai memory it housed all broken up, the pages reduced to an elegant and still impressive silence; yet, it remains inviting, and yes, I bought it.

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Guest blog: Alex Thompson on British Law and Governance in Treaty Port China

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Robert Bickers

Our latest blog comes from Dr Alex Thompson who studied Chinese at the University of Leeds and in Beijing. He has worked for the British government in China and also as a legal professional in the UK. He obtained his PhD in History from the University of Bristol in 2018. His book British Law and Governance in Treaty Port China 1842-1927:Consuls, Courts and Colonial Subjects will be published shortly by Amsterdam University Press.

Empire Day Parade, British Consulate General, Shanghai, 1926. Photograph Eugene Kobza, Archibald Lang Collection, HPC AL-s45

This photograph from the HPC collection, shown on the cover of my forthcoming book, was published in the North-China Herald (a Shanghai newspaper) in June 1926. We might wonder what a reader leafing through the paper would have made of the scene, which shows the British Consul-General for Shanghai, Sir Sidney Barton, inspecting a detachment from the Sikh Branch, Shanghai Municipal Police, at the combined Empire Day and King’s Birthday Parade held in the grounds of the British Consulate-General in Shanghai in 1926. The answer, I suspect, is not much: this was a very typical scene of British ceremonial, showing just one event from a calendar of celebrations and parades repeated year after year by the British at Shanghai in the period covered in my book.

But the photograph does show something that might surprise and interest us: we see an employee of the British state in China inspecting not a detachment of British marines, but a group of employees of the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), the ‘international’ body that governed the Shanghai International Settlement. The picture portrays quite neatly the particular way that power was exercised in Shanghai, by what I describe as a hybrid colonial state, in which the British state and the SMC were the key players. The SMC may have been the Shanghai International Settlement’s governing body in most areas, but it relied very heavily, as I show in my book, on the British state to perform its functions.

British consuls and British judges exercised jurisdiction in legal matters over British subjects in China, and British consuls also sat as assessors (effectively judges) in mixed courts, such as at Shanghai, which dealt with cases involving Chinese at the treaty ports. These British officials used their powers in a variety of ways to assist the SMC in governing Shanghai, ensuring that Sikh policemen were kept in line, that the Mixed Court handed down judgements supportive of SMC objectives and that a legal framework existed which facilitated the huge levels of investment of foreign and Chinese capital in Shanghai.

British officials and SMC leaders did not always agree on every issue. For example, the SMC wanted a Mixed Court over which it would effectively exercise judicial control, whereas the British Consul at Shanghai at the time the Court was created (Harry Parkes) insisted that a foreign consular official (usually British) play that role. There were also serious disagreements over whether the Chinese government should be able to tax Chinese residents of the International Settlement. But in the case of the latter question, while the Consul strenuously opposed the SMC having control over such matters, the British judge (Edmund Hornby) was supportive of the Council.

In return for its support of the SMC, the British state gained enormous influence over the way Shanghai was governed and British official and commercial interests alike benefitted from the infrastructure the SMC provided. And as the photo shows, both British officials and the SMC certainly appear to have been in agreement over the benefit of deploying their resources towards displays of British power and prestige at Shanghai.

‘Mr Barton inspecting the troops [sic] in the King’s Birthday parade at the Consulate’, North-China Herald, 12 June 1926, p. 468. As the accompanying article made clear, these were police, not soldiers.

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Guest blog: Andrew Hillier on Armistice Day and its Aftermath in Treaty Port China

Posted on November 10, 2023 by Andrew Hillier

As we approach the 105th anniversary of Armistice Day, Andrew Hillier considers the significance of the ceremony in treaty port China and for Chinese people today.

Held at the Cenotaph in Victoria Park, Tianjin (Tientsin), the Armistice Day parade was ‘the most impressive’ of the imperial celebrations to take place in the treaty port, recalled Brian Power in his memoir of his early life in China. Modelled on the service in Whitehall, London, the Consul-General (William Pollock Ker) took the place of the King alongside members of the British Municipal Council and behind them, foreign military guests in a variety of uniforms, the French in blue-grey steel helmets, Italians with bright blue sashes and gold epaulettes, Americans with wide-brimmed Stetson hats, and the Japanese with long curved swords. On the other three sides,

a company of British soldiers, sailors from HMS Hollyhock, the Volunteer Corps, members of the British Legion and the Boy Scouts were drawn up … British families, well wrapped up in furs against the cold weather, gathered behind the soldiers, while crowds of curious Chinese watched from outside the railings. [1]

A similar ceremony took place each year in Shanghai, as we see in this image.

Dignitaries at War Memorial, Armistice Day, 1925, Shanghai, Archibald Lang Collection, AL-s24.

The previous year, a special parade had been held in the grounds of the British Consulate, Shanghai, in which the Boy Scouts and Wolf Cubs were inspected by Sir Skinner Turner, as President of the Boy Scouts Association of Shanghai, and Consul-General Sir John Pratt.[2]

Boy Scouts Parade at the British Consulate, Shanghai, on Armistice Day 1924. Left to right: Sir John Thomas Pratt (1876-1970), British Consul-General, Shanghai – Unidentified Royal Navy commander – Sir Skinner Turner (1868-1935), Chief Judge of the British Supreme Court for China from 1921 to 1927 – Sir John Fitzgerald Brenan (1883-1953), British Consul-General, Canton. Archibald Lang Collection, AL-s14.

In Hong Kong, a replica cenotaph was also erected.

Unveiling of the Cenotaph, Statue Square, Hong Kong on Empire Day, 24 May 1923. Billie Love Historical Collection, BL-s012.

Laying wreaths at the Cenotaph, Hong Kong. Jamie Carstairs Collection, JC01-02.

An important event in the imperial calendar, each year, the ceremony would implicitly validate the western presence in China. For the ‘crowds of curious Chinese’, however, it came with a bitter taste. As Robert Bickers says, ‘The Allies would soon start to forget that China had been on their side in the Great War’ and, by November 1919, it was clear that they were not going to honour the undertaking that, in return for providing the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) for the Western Front, Shandong would be restored to China. Instead, Japan was allowed to occupy the province as a zone of influence. On 4 May, 1919, a mass demonstration of students took place in Peking to protest at the failure of China’s officials at Versailles to secure compliance with the wartime undertaking. What became known as the May Fourth Movement launched ‘a nationwide assault on imperialism and on China’s prevailing culture’ and its anniversary became an important event in China’s narrative of the western presence.[3]

June 3 1919, YMCA Student demonstration, Beijing. Sidney D. Gamble Photographs Collection, Duke Digital Collections.

And so, for the remainder of that presence, two ceremonies would take place each year in China, one commemorating the Allies’ victory and the ensuing Armistice, the other commemorating the failure of the Allies to honour their commitment and China’s first steps towards ending that imperial presence.

But, despite the contribution of the CLC, it went unrecognised during the Armistice ceremony. And, still today there is no memorial in Great Britain honouring the thousands of CLC workers who died, save for five white Commonwealth War Graves in Anfield Cemetery, Liverpool, where members of the CLC, who died in Liverpool in 1917 and 1918, are buried. Elsewhere, in addition to their gravestones, a number of memorials honouring the contribution of the CLC have been erected.[4] In November 2017, a plaque was unveiled in Belgium near the village of Busseboom, Poperinge.  In December 2018, the British Chargé d’Affaires unveiled a memorial plaque which the British government had presented to the Qingdao Museum of the First World War.[5] And in May this year, a ceremony took place at Saint-Etienne- au-Mont Communal Cemetery marking the restoration of the Chinese memorial to the CLC.

Thanks to the efforts of Ensuring We Remember, there are now plans to erect a similar memorial in this country.[6] And, as has happened each year since 2017, this Armistice Day, a wreath honouring the contribution of the CLC will be placed at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Andrew Hillier, The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life will be published later this year.

*

[1] Brian Power, The Ford of Heaven: A Childhood in Tianjin, China (Oxford: Signal Books, 2005), pp.110-112.

[2] See an account of the day published in the North-China Herald, 15 November 1924, p274.

[3] Robert Bickers, Out of China, How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (London: Allen Lane, 2017), pp.1- 5 and 26-34.

[4] See, for example, the gravestones at the Chinese Cemetery, Noyelles-sur-Mer, Picardy .

[5]  See also https://medium.com/@haroutjoulakian/qingdao-world-war-i-heritage-museum-c145074d1689 The government post states that there is already a commemorative memorial in London but it is unclear to what this refers.

[6] A memorial has been constructed in China but there is uncertainty where it is to be erected – see this South China Morning Post story.

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Guest blog: Kaori Abe on the Abe Naoko Collection –– a glimpse of a Japanese family’s life in Shanghai, c.1927-c.1934

Posted on September 10, 2023 by Guest

Kaori Abe, who has written the post below, is a historian specialising in the history of Hong Kong and port cities in East Asia. The author of Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830-1890 (Routledge, 2017), she has worked in Singapore, the UK, and Switzerland and holds a PhD in History from the University of Bristol.

A decade ago, my grandmother, Abe Naoko (阿部 直子 née Futakami 二神), passed down to me her collection of old family photos of Shanghai and postcards of Hong Kong, which together make up the Abe Naoko Collection. What makes this collection unique is its portrayal of the lives of Japanese women within the Japanese community in the international settlement of Shanghai. In this post, I will explain the background and key photos from the collection, based on Naoko’s letter about her childhood life in Shanghai, my interviews with relatives, and consultation of primary and secondary sources.

Futakami Norizo (二神 範蔵) (1895–1972), my grandmother’s father, took the most of photographs in the collection. After graduating from a university in Japan, Norizo embarked on his career in Shanghai, working for Mitsui Bussan, a Japanese trading firm. He married Futakami Chitose (二神   千歳 née Oshima 大島) (1902–1987), who was a sister of his colleague, Oshima Kiyoshi (大島 清) at Mitsui Bussan in Shanghai in the late 1920s. Chitose left Japan to marry Norizo in Shanghai, and their wedding ceremony took place in there. Subsequently, the couple had two children while residing in Shanghai, with Naoko being their second daughter.

Fig. 1 Futakami Chitose and Oshima Shizuko(大島 静子) with a man, Jessfield Park (兆豐公園), Shanghai (上海) Abe, Naoko Collection KA-s29

The photograph above shows Chitose (left) and Oshima Shizuko (right), the man in the middle is thought to be one of Shizuko’s brothers.

In 1931, Norizo resigned from his position at Mitsui Bussan, taking responsibility for an embezzlement incident that occurred that year, and the family returned to Tokyo for approximately six months. While in Tokyo, they welcomed a third child into their family. Following Norizo’s acquisition of a new position at Yamashita Kisen (山下汽船), a Japanese shipping company, the family promptly returned to Shanghai, where they resided until 1934.

After the January 28 incident (also known as the Shanghai Incident) in 1932, when Japanese and Chinese troops fought a bloody month-long battle in the north of the city, the anti-Japanese movement intensified in Shanghai. In this context, between 1934 and 1935, the Japanese population in Shanghai decreased by nearly 3,000. The Futakami family was among those Japanese who left Shanghai and returned Japan as a result.[1] Upon returning to Japan, Norizo selected photographs taken during their time in Shanghai, creating separate albums for each of his children. The photographs featured in the Abe Naoko Collection come from the album handed to Naoko.

Fig. 2 Group of women and children in front a company house for employees of Mitsui & Co. (三井物産), Shanghai (上海) Abe Naoko Collection KA-s36

Photograph 2 shows a group of women and children standing in front of a company-owned house by Mitsui Bussan in Shanghai. This photo is likely to have been taken when the Futakami family lived in their first residence in Hongkou (虹口) district before Norizo resigned from Mitsui Bussan in 1931. In 1930, approximately 24,182 Japanese lived in Shanghai, most in the northern part of the international settlement, specifically the Hongkou district. Of them, 11,170 were women, making up 46.2% of Shanghai’s Japanese population. [2]

Fig. 3 Two women with three children standing on the pavement in front of a house in North Sichuan Road, Shanghai (上海) Abe Naoko Collection KA-s17

The third photograph above shows Futakami’s second residence in Hongkou district, featuring Chitose, three children, including Naoko, and their amah. According to Naoko, the family employed one or two amahs during their entire stay in Shanghai. The Futakami family was relatively well-off in the Japanese community. Still, the prevalence of diseases like cholera and typhus in Shanghai meant that “they lived with a certain degree of caution and preparedness,” as Naoko recalled.

The Futakami’s first house was located at No. 4 Hengfengli (恒豊里), Scott Road (施高塔路, present-day Shannyin Lu 山陰路) and the second one was in Cherry Terrace (Qian’ai Li 千愛里 present Tianai Lu 甜愛路), North Sichuan Road (Beisihuan Lu 北四川路).

The first Google Map below indicates the location of Hongkou, while the second map illustrates the positions of Futakami’s first and second residences and their vicinity. I drew the second map by referencing a hand-drawn map and fragments of old Shanghai maps that Naoko and her family had crafted and gathered.

Fig. 4 Hongkou (Hongkew), Shanghai

 

Fig. 5 Map showing the locations of the first and second houses of the Futakami family in Shanghai

The Uchiyama Bookstore (内山書店), a Japanese bookstore and a cultural exchange point between Chinese and Japanese intellectuals in Shanghai, was a few minutes’ walk from both of their residences. Influenced by her mother, a voracious reader, Futakami Chitose loved books and frequently visited the bookstore. Chitose seemed to often interacted with Japanese women who were also partners of expatriate Japanese, as evidenced by several photos of her and other women in kimonos at company events and gatherings.

The Japanese public school on North Sichuan Road was near Futakami’s second house.[3] Among the few English words Naoko learned in Shanghai were “public school”, “chauffeur,” and “wardrobe,” which her parents frequently used in their daily conversations.

Fig. 6 A photo of Hengfengli or Qiangai’li in Shanghia, 1985

Image 6 showing houses in Hengfengli or Qiangai’li was taken by a relative of Chitose, in 1985. When Chitose knew that her relative made a business trip to Shanghai, she asked him to find her former residence in Hongkou.

Fig. 7 Tianai Lu, Shanghai, 2012.

In 2012, my family, including Naoko, visited the same location. It was the first time my grandmother had revisited her childhood place in Shanghai. Photograph 7 is one I took when we found the Futakami family’s former residence in Qianai’li, now called Tianai Lu 甜愛路. “Tianai” literally meant “sweet love”. When we visited the street, many teenagers bought sweets from stalls and hung out there.

These are the context and supplementary explanations of the Abe Naoko Collection and my grandmother’s early childhood in Shanghai. Naoko married a person from Kobe, one of Japan’s former treaty ports, and his family was also deeply involved in business with China. My grandparents always enjoyed toast with jam and tea for breakfast. They regularly played tennis, and both were fluent in English. As I studied the history of Shanghai and the treaty ports in East Asia and delved into my family history, I understood why they embraced such a lifestyle. East Asian treaty ports incubated them, and they lived within that world.

 

Thanks to Helena Lopes, Jamie Carstairs and Robert Bickers for making this collection available at Historical Photographs of China.

[1] Fujita Hiroyuki藤田 拓之, “”kokusaitoshi” shanhai ni okeru nihonjin kyoryūmin no ichi: sokai gyōsei tono kankei wo chūshin ni”「国際都市」上海における日本人居留民の位置 : 租界行政との関係を中心に” (Japanese residents in the Shanghai international settlement), Ritsumeikan gengobunka kenkyū 立命館言語文化研究, 21 (4), 121-134, March 2010, p. 122.

[2] Dai go hyō 第五表 (table 5),  Shina honbu narabi honkon, makao zairyū hōjin gaikokujin oyobi chūgokujin jinkō tōkei hyō 支那本部並香港、澳門在留本邦人外国人及中国人人口統計表 (The tables of  Japanese and foreign population in China, Hong Kong, Macao),  dai 23 kai第二十三回 (no. 23), Shōwa gonen junigatsu 昭和五年十二月(December 1930), A-15亜-15 (Gaimusho Gaikōshi Shiryōkan外務省外交史料館 Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan), Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) <https://www.jacar.archives.go.jp/das/image/B02130022500>.

[3] The Shanghai Directory 1930: City Supplementary Edition to hte North China Hong List, Revised and Corrected to July, 1930 (Shanghai: North-China Daily News & Herald Limited, 1930), p.84.

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Guest blog: Ghassan Moazzin on Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Guest

Ghassan Moazzin is an assistant professor in the School of Humanities and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. His first monograph, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. He now works on the history of the electrical and electronics industries in modern China.

Fig 1: Hankow Road (Hankou lu) photographed from the Bund. On the left: The Custom House. On the right: The German-Asiatic Bank
© 2012 Billie Love Historical Collection, BL02-024

Figure 1 shows the Bund in May 1911. On the right-hand side, we see the Shanghai branch of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB) situated next to the building of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. While few know of this bank today, it was a leading player amongst foreign banks in China at the turn of the twentieth century and the main case study I focus on in my recent book Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China. My book explores the history of foreign banking in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China.

Fig 2: The Oriental Bank, Bund, Shanghai Helen Dhoot Collection HD-s22 © 2015 Helen Dhoot

Foreign banks entered China shortly after the end of the First Opium War. The first foreign bank that opened its doors in China was the Oriental Bank, which we can see in this picture from around 1870 tucked away behind some trees at the Bund. At first, foreign banking in China remained a largely British affair. However, starting from the 1890s, foreign banking became much more diverse with banks originating in many other countries also entering the scene. Apart from the DAB, which began business in Shanghai in 1890, another example of a new non-British bank that entered China after 1890 was the Japanese Bank of Taiwan.

Fig 3: Farewell dinner given by Manager of Bank of Taiwan, Swatow, 1913 Reginald Hedgeland Collection He03-022 © 2007 SOAS

Foreign banks could be found not only in Shanghai but also in other treaty ports. They became involved in a range of activities, including trade finance and the raising of capital on bond markets abroad for the Chinese government. In the Chinese banking sector, foreign banks interacted with Chinese bankers. At the same time, their representatives also came into contact with Chinese government officials during loan negotiations.[1]

In terms of the DAB, my book traces the fortunes of the bank from its establishment in 1889 and its beginnings in China in the 1890s through to its liquidation by the Chinese authorities during World War I following China’s siding with the Allies and declaration of war against Germany. I describe the early interactions of German bankers leading up to the DAB’s establishment; how the bank operated in the Chinese banking sector after 1890; how it became involved in the large loans China used to fund the repayment of the Japanese indemnity imposed after the Sino-Japanese War; what role German bankers played in the funding of the development of Chinese railways; how German and other foreign bankers and China’s international financial connections shaped the 1911 revolution and the triumph of Yuan Shikai; and how the DAB tried but eventually failed to use financial means to persuade China to maintain its neutrality in the First World War.

Fig 5: Yuan Shikai (袁世凯), the first President of the Republic of China, Beijing, 10 October 1913 William Cooper Collection WC01-197 © 2016 Historical Photographs of China

More broadly, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China shows that foreign banks need to be seen as important intermediary institutions that aided China’s financial linking with the global economy. At the same time, my book highlights how important Chinese agency and cooperation with Chinese actors were for foreign banks.

[1] One such representative featured in my descriptions of loan negotiations with Chinese government officials in the book is the HSBC’s Edward Guy Hillier, who readers of this blog will be familiar with from two posts, here and here, by HPC Research Associate Dr. Andrew Hillier.

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Guest blog: Helena Lopes on A connected place: Macau in the Second World War

Posted on July 4, 2023 by Guest

Dr Helena F. S. Lopes is Lecturer in Modern Asian History at Cardiff University. She was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in History at the University of Bristol. Her book Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War has recently been published by Cambridge University Press.

Nominally under Portuguese control since the sixteenth century until 1999, Macau has long been a territory shaped by regional and global connection and by the circulation of people, goods, and ideas. However, studies in the history of China’s foreign relations and European imperialism in China often ignore this small enclave. My book, Neutrality and Collaboration in South China, considers Macau in what were arguably the most dramatic years of its twentieth century history: 1937 to 1945. It reassesses the territory’s role in China’s War of Resistance against Japan, its links to neighbouring Hong Kong, and its importance to our understanding of neutrality in East Asia in the context of a global World War Two.

1 Junks in Macau harbour, c. 1910-1913. Henry Rue Collection. HPC ref: HR01-092

The photograph above showcases rather nicely the relevance of Macau’s maritime links. Although its land border with Guangdong province was also crucial during the war, many people reached the territory by boat during the conflict, and it was also by boat that several of them escaped, sometimes in hiding, to unoccupied China. Macau’s wartime experience had clear similarities to other territories under colonial rule in China that remained ‘neutral’ from 1937 until (at least) late 1941. This was the case of ‘lone island’ (孤島 gudao) Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhouwan. Their foreign jurisdictions made them attractive havens for many refugees and resistance activists, and also popular bases for those engaged in collaboration with Japan. Macau belonged to this connected network of neutral territories in China and outlived them all, remaining the only one that was not occupied by Japan during the war.

2 Refugees fleeing Shanghai, The Bund, 1937. Malcolm Rosholt Collection. HPC ref: Ro-n0032 (this photograph is reproduced in Chapter 3 of the book)

In the book, I argue that Macau’s neutrality generated overlapping layers of collaboration involving a range of actors with different interests, including Chinese Nationalists, Communists and collaborators with Japan, British and Japanese representatives, Portuguese colonial authorities and refugees of different nationalities. I highlight the importance of refugees as central to Macau’s experience during the war and consider the post-war implications of wartime neutrality.

Amongst those connected to Chinese resistance activities in Macau were some very important Nationalist figures, including Wu Tiecheng (on the left in Fig 3, below) who led Kuomintang activities in Hong Kong and Macau in the late 1930s. The family of diplomat Fu Bingchang (standing next to Wu in the photo) also stayed temporarily in Macau during the war.

3 Wu Tiecheng and Fu Bingchang in Shanghai, 1933. Fu Bingchang Collection. HPC ref: Fu02-019

The book also zooms in on the activities of Chinese diplomats in Portugal, providing a fresh look into the vitality of China’s wartime diplomacy by analysing relations with a small European power. Macau was a cosmopolitan place during the war and so was Lisbon, the distant capital where the territory was often a topic of discussion between Chinese diplomats and Portuguese officials. Both were sites of meetings, refuge, and gateways to somewhere else. Amongst those who passed through the Portuguese capital was the eminent Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun) – who served as ambassador in Paris and London during the war – and his wife Oei Hui-lan (Huang Huilan: Fig 4), the latter having sought temporary refuge in Portugal after fleeing occupied France.

4 Madame Wellington Koo (née Hui-lan Oei), 1943
Photograph by Bassano Ltd © National Portrait Gallery, London

Turning from international connections to events closer to Macau’s borders, the book also delves into the Portuguese failed attempts to occupy islands near the territory, including the one known then as Lappa (now part of Zhuhai). The Chinese Maritime Customs station at Lappa featured in some of the dramatic events. Historical Photographs of China holds several rare images of the Lappa Customs station in the early twentieth-century, such as the one below (Fig 5).

5 The Assistants’ House, Lappa Customs Station, Lappa Island, c. 1906-1909. Reginald Hedgeland Collection. HPC ref: He01-207

Thousands of Hongkongers moved to Macau during the war where they were involved in a range of activities, including in planning for a British return to Hong Kong (shown below in 1945). Exploring in detail the experience of Hong Kong refugees in Macau and the role of the British consulate headed by John Pownall Reeves, the book sheds light on overlooked features of Allied resistance in South China during the Japanese occupation of the British colony.

6 Hong Kong, 1945. Arthur Fiddament Collection. HPC ref: RB-t0872

Despite their differences, Macau and Hong Kong were deeply connected and those connections were embodied in the many people who moved between the two territories. Their post-war journeys would continue to have important, albeit understated, links. This is something I shall be exploring further in my next project.

 

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Andrew Hillier on Bessie Pirkis: A Renaissance Woman in Peking Part 2

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Andrew Hillier

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.

1. A photograph of portrait sketches of foreigners by Bessie L’Evesque Pirkis, Peking, 1877. HPC DH-s019. Bessie is three along four down, Albert is five along four down and Stephen Bushell may be two along four down. There is a photographic portrait in the bottom right-hand corner. Unknown photographer.[1] Save for those of Albert and Bessie, no individual sketches have been traced.

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.

2. Frederick Mayers. Undated. HPC PF-s0206

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.

3. Georgie and Amy Pirkis with their amah- un-named, but, possibly, Li Ma. Photographer, H. Daubray, 90, Westbourne Grove, London. Taken when the family was in London in 1878/1879, HPC PF-s0001

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]

4. Bessie Pirkis. Studio portrait by Daubray,1878/1879. HPC PF-s0043. This has a different back to the photograph at fig 3. and must have been taken on another occasion. The two cartes no doubt found their way into many other similar collections.[6]

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.

5. Sophia Williams , on the reverse of the photograph, it is inscribed ‘Mrs Pirkis with love from Sophia Williams 1876’. HPC PF-s0155

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

6. Sophia Grosvenor on her wedding day, 24 April 1877. HPC PF-s0793

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]

7. ‘The most elegant of attachés’. Sketch probably by Bessie Pirkis, photographed by Thomas Child, of Thomas Grosvenor soon after his arrival at the Legation alternatively of Edward Malet, Chinese Secretary, 1871 to 1873. Undated. HPC PF-s0016

8. Thomas Grosvenor. Undated HPC PF-s0158

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 9th April 1880

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

11.Jan Helenus Ferguson, Dutch Minister. 1880 HPC PF-s0739

12. His son, J.C. Helenus Ferguson (aged 13 years). 1880. HPC PF-s0757

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.

13. Carte inscribed, “Mr and Mrs Pirkis, as remembrance from their friend, Albert Baron von Seckendorff 28.9.1882”; possibly given on his departure for Tianjin to take up his appointment as vice-consul. HPC PF-s0128.

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.

14. Consular staff and interpreters. Wade is standing second from the left. Walter Hillier is seated second from left and Pirkis is seated on the far right. C. 1879/1880. Hi-s023. A copy is also in the Pirkis Collection HPC PF-s1018

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.

15. Uncaptioned and undated but this would seem to be a photograph of the Student Interpreters with Pirkis reclining beside the ever-present dog. PF-s0630.

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]

16. Walter Hillier as Mother Goose; inscribed on the back, ‘Canton, 21.1.74’. HPC PF-s0022.

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.

17. Mabel Desborough Parkes (later Levett), Marion (Minnie) Parkes (later Keswick) and Sir Harry Parkes. Undated. HPC PF-s0786

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.

18. Inscribed on the reverse ‘J.A. van Aalst, Peking, 29 April 1885’. PF-s0703.

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.

19. Kensal Green Cemetery. The gravestones of Albert (on the left) and Bessie Pirkis, 2023. Courtesy, Nicola Pirkis. With the Chinese inscription, Britain in China was transposed into a London cemetery.

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.

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