Notes on the "Underworld of Shanghai": A Campaign Against Sin and Vice in 1918

This finely detailed article, published by the British-run Shanghai Times in 1918, reflects a growing movement by Christian organizations in Shanghai, particularly the local branch of the W.C.T.U. to address the social problem of prostitution in the city. It is a fascinating read on many levels. It begins with general speeches about “white slavery” and the condition of prostitution in cities around the world, and finally it hones in on the prostitution industry in Shanghai, taking the reader on a tour of the city’s vice districts in their heyday, as an anti-vice movement in the city gathered force and speed. This article also gives us a glimpse into the underworlds of vice and the role of Russian women in particular in stoking the furnaces of the sex industry in the city, at least among foreigners. It also mentions the efforts to eliminate vices and reform society, including the Door of Hope, an institution that offered refuge and reformation for former prostitutes in the city. Oddly the speaker doesn’t mention the ubiquitous Chinese courtesan houses, at least not directly. She does however mention the notorious area in the Hongkou district that became known as the Trenches and provides some very specific info about who was running and staffing these bars and cabarets.  Finally, she ends with a rather idealistic and naive proposition for how to keep sailors and other international visitors occupied without resorting to the vice trade. The movement to crack down on the city’s “underworld” of vices, namely the sex trade, was one of the factors that eventually precipitated the rise of dance halls and cabarets in the city, where vice culture was clothed in more respectable garb.

UNDERWORLD OF SHANGHAI: FACTS AS TO COMMERCIALISED VICE. FALL OF RUSSIAN REFUGEES. SPEECHES AT LAST NIGHT’S MEETING

(The Shanghai Times Feb 8, 1918)

Under the auspices of the Shanghai Woman's Christian Temperance Union a well-attended public meeting was held yesterday in the Union Church Hill, under the chairmanship of Mr lsaac Mason, to discuss “Commercialised Vice” a theme which has been reviewed by the members of the Women’s Union at several previous meetings which were open only to women.

The Chairman said-:—Ladies and gentlemen: The W. C. T. U. has done me the honour of inviting me to preside at this meeting, not, I take it, with the idea of listening to any speech from me, but because, on the subject before us today, I form a link between the Union and Committee of Shanghai residents which is also considering the social vice subject, more especially as it concerns the city in which we live. 

It is not my intention at present to do more than just refer in general terms to the fine propaganda which has been so efficiently carried out in the three meetings already held by the W.C.T.U. Mrs. Morgan will sum up the thoughts of the papers read better than I could do, and put them effectively before us all. I wish to congratulate the ladies on the way they have been able to bring real valuable matter to our notice. They have certainly succeeded in their object which was “to educate the members of their Union, and as many others as possible, on the subject of the devastation in morals, health, society and economic stability, caused by Commercialized Vice.”

As one who has ben privileged to read the admirable papers of Dr. Polk and Mill White, in their printed form, I wish to say how much I have appreciated them, and I heartily recommend them to all who have not yet heard or read them.

Shanghai has, of late, through the medium of these papers, and of correspondence and editorials in the press, come to know more of things as they really are,—and the Christian conscience has been once more deeply moved. That is the first step; but it is only one of the steps which must be taken in this campaign. We meet today to consider what we can do individually and collectively to promote the cause of purity, to cherish and exalt the ideals of womanhood and manliness, to persuade and win mankind to leave the lower for the higher planes of existence, to urge such reforms as are practicable, to fight the forces of evil, and to save some who are slaves to vice, whether through fault of their own, or through the shameless greed and base depravity of others.

There will be some who disapprove of such meetings as this. It is unpopular to speak or write of the seamy side of things—unless you can succeed in disguising it so as to make vice look like virtue, and prurience pose as purity. We may be told it is bad taste to even mention vice in mixed assemblies,—and that possibly by some who will sit in mixed companies and witness suggestive or indecent pictures without a qualm. I regard it as an encouraging sign that we meet jointly, men and women, to face facts as they are and to encourage each other to do our best to improve matters, regardless of what others may think of us, or what they may call us. ln taking this stand, our ladies are following the noble examples set by Mrs. Josephine Butler and her colleagues in England, and Miss Frances Willard and other brave women in America.

We have passed the day of smoothing over all that is unpleasant and remaining in ignorance, real or assumed. Our Health Officers, being sensible men, know that nothing is gained by ignoring the poisons lurking in dangerous areas. They bravely turn on the light, and bring things to the surface, not simply to gaze upon, but in order to size up the dangers and take effective measures for the good of all, the stricken as well as the healthy. There are still Chinese surgeons who cover all sores with huge plasters, and trust to luck. But we prefer the careful surgeon who probes to see the extent of the damage in order to apply his remedy with knowledge and skill. These meetings have been on a sound basis scientifically, and have already resulted in good in the information given. It remains now for us to make practical use of the facts in our hands, and to honestly try to make things better, and naturally our first efforts should be in our immediate surroundings. The consideration of the matters is the object of our meeting today. I now call upon Mrs. Morgan to address you.

Mrs. Morgan’s Address.

Our programme this afternoon is a summary of the facts and impressions gathered from the meetings of the past three months, followed by a free discussion. It rests with me simply to set the ball rolling,--a process which takes but little time and fortunately less wisdom. We have no new topic under consideration,—not even a fresh aspect of the subject. The only difference between this and the previous meeting is that not one but, we hope, many will contribute, and that not one, but both sexes are present, to consider the very difficult and unpleasant problem which lies before us.

It is far easier to work than to speak, more especially under present circumstances. But I have to remember that no one in this hall would have come here unless impelled by real interest. Sympathy may therefore be taken for granted, 

And why are we here? Many men and women outside these walls are asking “To what purpose is this waste of time? What good can possibly result from such meeting?” “The Social Evil has existed and will exist,” said a lady conspicuous in rescue work, to me the other day. “You will never stop it.” Others argue thus, “Live straight yourself and leave others to paddle their own canoes. If they paddle into the rapids and are drowned, it is their own look-out” and so on. Probably the great majority of people in this “Model Settlement” argue in this way and scorn even the contemplation of the “dregs of life.” For just about fifty years Charles Dickens wrote in the preface to one of his best known novels; “There are people of so refined and delicate a nature that they cannot bear the contemplation of shabby rags, foul and frowsy dens, haunts of vice and hunger.” “But,” he goes on to say, "I have no faith in the delicacy which scorns to look upon them, and it seems to me that to paint them in all their wretchedness and squalor would be a service to Society; and that the truth needs to be told.” So he wrote of Bill Sykes and Nancy; and the world has been wiser ever since.

Believing, therefore, that though ignorance of this ghastly trade is certainly bliss, yet it is still better to be wise. We have held this series of special meetings on the hygienic, economic and social aspects of commercialized vice and we now invite our brothers to participate in an endeavour to summarize the situation.

At the first meeting, the speaker dealt most comprehensively with the medical side of the evil. It would be impossible in a mixed gathering such as this to quote in detail from that fine address, but we then learnt: that venereal disease, which is the direct resu!t of immorality, is the greatest menace to the health of the community, —that it is subtle, hereditary, difficult to diagnose, hard, if not impossible to cure and that, owing to present war conditions, it is rapidly on the increase.

We also learnt that clinical examination which has been considered a safeguard, and, when conducted as it usually is, more or less hurriedly- and without the use of a microscope, and of one sex only, a failure, in that such an examination engenders a false sense of security and, therefore, entices more to run the risk of infection.

At our second meeting we learnt that the vice business is a colossal and hideous reality, which encourages and cultivates prostitution for its own commercial profit, all the world over.

Wo learnt that the article for sale in this awful trade is woman, and that revenues are being derived, in this and other cities, from women who are on the market.

We learnt that the traffic is cleverly planned and stratified, all the world over, to attract every class of society, from the man who owns his own motor-car, down to the street scavenger: and ricksha coolie, and that the profits to the exploiters run up into the millions annually,—those exploiters being men who move from place to place with their chattels, in search of the best market.

Wo learnt that those procurers, as a rule, hire a woman to run their houses. Such women have also in their time been “white slaves ” and now receive a salary of about $150 gold per month.

The proprietors also employ commercial agents—runners, look-outs, water-boys, chauffeurs, cab-men, ricsha coolies, who resort to deceit, intoxication and “doping,” to get their “goods.” Advertisements are moreover sent out to ships, hotels, etc., when new inmates of these houses arrive.

We also heard that the average number of customers served by one “slave” daily is 10 or 11 in Europe, and 15 or 16 in America, also that a girl can earn four times as much as a prostitute as she can in any respectable industry.

We have learnt that artificial rents are offered and received for houses of ill-fame, and that the owners and agents go scot-free. Also that many professedly God-fearing men and ladies in good society, are owners of this kind of property.

The sources of stimulus to immorality are, we are reminded, alcohol, late hours, sensuous amusements, starvation wages, low theatres, indecent picture shows and dancing halls.

Drinking and drugging, we all know, go hand in hand with vice. They are its sina qua non; and are in themselves monster evils. A prostitute receives a commission on every drink she serves to a customer. Four drug stores in Chicago sell as much as 4 lbs. of morphia and 6 oz. of cocaine in one month.

The results of this awful traffic are the unproductiveness of millions of women; childless homes; asylums full of insane and the general degeneracy of the race. Each army corps has now its own hospital for venereal disease.

Following upon these statistics, Mrs. Willard Eddy showed up that the causes of social vice were degeneracy, ignorance, lack of will power, unoccupied time; little or no social life. These could be overcome the future by education along sex lines in the Home, the School and the Church, teaching not so much the natural consequences of irregular living, but the sin therein involved,—sin against oneself, one’s neighbour and God.

For worse than all the private bereavement and national poverty arising out of this terrible war, will be pollution of corporal life threatening the well being of every individual. In future there must be less glitter and more care: for the things which really matter,—proper housing, living wages, supervision of a place of amusement,— no unprotected girls in bars and hotels, no children under age in factories.

Having now given a brief and very inadequate resume of the facts already laid before us at previous meetings, I turn to the second matter for consideration, viz:

How does all this touch us as individuals out here, except that in so far as we are parts of the great whole? Is it, in short, any business of ours and, if so, what are we to do?

In other words “Are we called upon to repair the wall ever against our own house” as they managed things in Jerusalem in the old days. The need for “Building” is patent enough. It is urged by some in authority that Shanghai is “no worse than other places,”—that “the best is being done that can be done,”..and that “there is really nothing to worry about,” though one of the Admirals has called Shanghai “the worst port in the East,” But even if Shanghai is not worse than Paris, New York, Chicago, London, or Berlin, is that any consolation? A mother whose child is dying of scarlet fever or smallpox in our Isolation Hospital, due to the want of precaution on her part, finds it but poor consolation to be told that some one else’s child died of the same disease in America or Europe! The ruling thought in her mind is “Would that I had not exposed her to infection!” She feels keen remorse. She would give all she possesses if preventive measures could be taken now. But it is too late!

Do we not feel remorse when we hear, of the wreck of fair young lives which might have been saved, and if preventive measures had been taken? We surely owe it to the place in which our lot is just now cast to try and live up to our ideals and help others to do so.

As to the conditions of things in Shanghai, I have spent many hours lately in trying to ascertain them. But complete accuracy is unobtainable, even if details were of much value. The difficulty lies largely in the international element of this foreign settlement, but also in the fact that, apart from Nanking Road and other thoroughfares on which soliciting goes on nightly, to the disgrace and ruin of pedestrians, many of the prostitutes are hidden away in alleyways behind the main streets and no one knows of the actual numbers. I have been told that there are 45,000 such Chinese in the settlement. This is probably incorrect. But even if the figure be only 10,000 (and there were as many as that fifteen years ago), that is an appalling menace to a total population of 800,000 which includes all the other women and children!

In Kiangse Road there are 10 houses, containing about 100 women, all of course foreign. These houses have no licence, neither has any other brothel in Shanghai, although, according to By-law 34, it is illegal to open such places without one.

There are several other houses kept by Europeans sectored about in various districts, but most of these are not registered at any consulate; and a good many lie outside the Municipal area, Some of these are run by low class Russians, some by Rumanians and one, in Chapoo Road, not far from the General Hospital, by two French girls.

With regard to the Chinese who cater for foreigners’ and their own people alike, there are at the corner of Shantung and Av. Edward VII 50 houses resorted to by Chinese sailors of the lowest type, 20 cents being the price of service for one night. In Shanse Road there are 8 similar ones. There is also one in an alleyway off Szechuen Road south, frequented by foreigners.

The district west of Shanse Road, on’ both sides of Nanking Road, is too thickly populated with harlots to give figures, or perhaps it would be more strictly truthful to say that I have been unable to obtain them. In the midst of these, on the north side, is the Receiving Home of the Door of Hope, and one of the devoted workers there told me that after three o’clock in the morning sleep was practically impossible, as the inmates when disappointed of customers and fearful of the wrath of their mistresses, shouted out of the window for trade, vying with one another in hailing any late passers-by.

The districts consisting of Yuhang, Miller, Chapoo, East Dixwell, Fearon, and Yalu Roads are too well known by repute to require much mention. In the first there are 3 houses containing 7 women, all Russian, but not registered at any consulate. These are visited by sailors and civilians. There are also two Chinese houses in that road.

Miller Road contains one foreign and one Chinese house,—also a boarding house which I shall have occasion to speak later. Yalu and Fearon Roads are the so-called “prescribed area,” reserved for Cantonese girls, every house in the former street being used for immoral purposes, and the latter containing 10 Chinese brothels for the use of foreigners and others. The girls in these roads undergo regular examination in the Chinese Isolation Hospital.

The price for service in the houses filled with Chinese varies from 20 cents to 15.

The inmates give the authorities very little trouble (which accounts, partly, I suppose, for their continued existence). They ply their evil trade quietly. No arrests can be made on the streets unless a prostitute is seen pulling a man, and even then prosecution has been refused in Court, for lack of witness other than that of the arrestor. The girls and their exploiters are aware of this, and may usually be seen standing quietly in groups at the entrance of alleyways or strolling along the pavement followed by their amahs. One evening returning from Bubbling Well between 11 and 12 o’clock at night in a ricsha, I counted 34 such girls between the Palace Annex and Chekiang Road.

Of the big Yangzepoo district I have no statistics to offer. But there are also, as you all well know, many places of ill-repute and temptation lying outside the Municipal area, north of Range Road. The police have tried hard to improve matters, with the result that only 6 low class bars are left on the main road. These are all licensed by the Chapei authorities. Out of these five, two are kept by Chinese, one by an Austrian and two by Russians, Some of the bar maids are Russians, some Japanese, and there is (sad to say!) one English girl, whom repeated efforts to rescue has so far proved unavailing. One of these bars, though financed by a Chinaman, is run by an ex-American sailor, who keeps a Japanese barmaid. Another of the barmaids, in the Alhambra, is married to an American.

Behind these bars and close to the Isis Theatre, four places have recently been opened, viz. The Cafe Moderne, —a bar and a dancing saloon opened all night; The Rialto, kept by a Russian Jewess; the International Cabaret and Dancing Hall, run by a French woman and the Tipperary Bar kept by a Chinaman. These are patronised by the poorer classes of Germans, Russians, and Portuguese.

It rests now with others to discuss methods of reform. For myself, I wish to plead for greater preventive measures, By all means let us reclaim the fallen. All honour to these, more especially the ladies of the Door of Hope, who for the past 17 or 18 years have been steadily, patiently, successfully pursuing this Christ-like work. Let us also got some of the brothels closed, if we can, so long as the remaining ones are not licensed. Let us, above all, clear Nanking Road off traps for loungers. All these things might be done if the citizens in Shanghai had sufficient determination. But what we need most is counter-attractions of a sound and healthful nature. I am convinced that the majority of men and women desire to live pure lives, and given favourable conditions, would remained unscathed. What can we expect when our streets are all of pitfalls, and when evil suggestion, opportunity, and temptation meet men at every turn ? What can one expect if a girl does not even get a living wage? It isn’t easy for a young woman to house, feed, and clothe herself upon $50 a month nowadays especially if she likes pretty things as every girl should. And if she has no work at all—if she is stranded on these shores, moneyless and friendless, knowing no one and without any recommendations, as two poor Russian refugees were three weeks ago, —then the path of prostitution becomes not only a temptation, but in their eyes, (for they were young and loved life, and being ignorant, didn’t realize the consequences),--a necessity. Oh the pity of it, when we sit in our comfortable homes!

We don’t realize enough that young men, sailors or otherwise, need occupation, recreation, fun, social life—in short, a free vent for their energy when on shore. They also need friendship, sympathy, and often practical help. Where can they go to get these in Shanghai? Most of them would really far rather spend the evening in lawful amusements and games, music, spinning yarns about their mothers and their sweethearts in the dear homeland, than in a low class eating house or bar on the streets. They want to be good. It is only when idleness besets them and temptation lures that their lower nature comes uppermost and they fall. One fall makes the nest more easy. Then follows remorse, disease, despair, disgrace, death!

If every home represented here today were open to the home sick sailor boys and the young men in houses of business, and if we all laid ourselves out to give them a good time—good dinners without wine, good fun without coarseness, good story books to read in their leisure hours, the society of ladies then the brothels of Shanghai would soon have to close down.

We need, however, not only to open our homes, but we need a well-organized and thoroughly equipped club and hostel, run on total abstinence lines, with a good library, good concerts, and entertainments, and at the head a gifted woman who would inspire the whole and give herself heart and soul to the uplift of the visitors.

“Where Yellow Rules White”: An Article about Russians, Chinese and Japanese in 1920s Harbin and Manchuria

While researching my doctoral dissertation way back when, I came across this fascinating article republished in The China Weekly Review in 1929. The author gives us an account of life in Harbin, Manchuria in the 1920s, with a special focus on the Russians and their relations with Chinese and Japanese in that city and in Manchuria and other parts of China. We are given some glimpses into the lives of the destitute Russians who fled the revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union, and how their plight, as well as the rise of Japan since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, was changing the status of white people in the Far East.  There are a few tantalizing tidbits about the nightlife of Shanghai and Harbin and the roles Russian women played in the cabarets of those cities. Since I didn’t know anything about the author, I searched for her online and came up with this account of her life, which is fascinating on its own. Clearly Olive Gilbreath was a person who knew this part of the world firsthand and who had suffered many indignities brought upon by the Second World War and the advance of the Japanese Army in China. She must have thought it quite ironic that the Soviets gave Manchuria over to the Chinese Red Army after the end of WWII. 

Source: Findagrave.com (accessed on Dec 23 2020) “Olive Gilbreath grew up in La Plata, Missouri and graduated from La Plata High School in 1900. She entered Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and received a Bachelor's and Master's degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She then taught English for two years at the University of Kansas. Due to the influence of family and friends, she became interested in Russia and Russian Literature. After college she left to travel the Far East. Interested in Russia, she headed there, waiting in Peking, China for four months until permission was granted. 

Olive was caravaning in Mongolia, beyond the Great Wall of China, when WWI broke out in 1914. A railroad ticket for Russia was already in her pocket, but American officials in China refused to allow her passage. The Russian minister, however, allowed her to cross Siberia to St. Petersburg via the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the private car of a Russian general and his aides. This journey lasted 16 days. Upon her arrival in St. Petersburg in 1915, where she worked at the American Hospital there, she was witness to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. 

In the fall of 1918, as there were Americans in Siberia giving help to the Russians, she traveled on a Red Cross train as an interpreter for the doctors. This journey formed the basis for her first book, "Miss Amerikanka", which was originally serialized in Harpers Magazine in 1918. Her trans-Siberan journey and the days immediately following in St. Petersburg and Moscow, are described in a romantic, diaristic style. Her second book, "If To-Day Have No Tomorrow", a poignant tale of the effects of the Russian Revolution on an aristocratic Russian family during the Bolshovik Revolution, is a masterpiece. As a foreign correspondent, she wrote for "Harper's," "Yale Review" and "Asia Magazine". 

In 1934 she was married in London to her life-long friend Daniel David McLorn, an Englishman who was serving as the Deputy Director General to the Postal Bank for all of China. They made their home in the international settlement in Shanghai. Since Mr. McLorn had established many small banks all over China, he refused to leave during the outbreak of WWII. He realized that the Japanese would destroy the banks, but he hoped that his staying would keep them open longer. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was interred in China by occupying Japanese forces for 2 1/2 years at a Japanese concentration camp near Shanghai. As an American, Olive could have returned home, but she chose to stay with her husband. They were released at the end of the war in 1945.

In the late 1940s, both returned to the U.S. and settled in Olive's hometown of La Plata, to her Queen Anne Victorian home built by her parents. Mr. McLorn died in June, 1974. Olive lived her last remaining years in La Plata and offered many gracious contributions throughout the state, including a large donation to the University of Missouri's Museum of Art and Archeology, including a priceless art collection of Asian artifacts from various dynasties. A wing in their gallery bears her name.”

Where Yellow Rules White

BY OLIVE GILBREATH

(Harper's Magazine for February)

(The China Weekly Review Mar 30, 1929)

NOT even in the days of marsh monsters has the world been more packed with drama than it is to-day: the drama of the air, the drama of far continents, the drama of under the sea, the drama of ideas, of electrons, and of ether. Not least of all, that toward which all others seem to lead—the drama of changing peoples, of shifting social orders and races. Every now and then the center of the human drama leaps to a new corner of the globe. In the past few years it has reverted to those level plains from which the horsemen of Genghis Khan set out to conquer Asia and Europe. Let the man who does not believe this journey to China. And let him make the journey by way of Russia. In Russia he will see an absolute bouleversement within the white race—a new social order under the sun. In China he will be confronted by something even more astounding. He will see a reversal in the relations of the white and yellow races. The most memorable sight in the East to-day is not Yokohama struggling up from the ashes or the modern stone buildings of Shanghai or Tokio. It is North Manchuria—a Chinese policeman beating a white driver.

Ever since the Kaiser coined the phrase “the Yellow Peril" it has maintained journalists in the style to which they were accustomed. But while the hue and cry have been hawked in the streets by newspapers, it is little realized that in one city in the world the thing is a fait accompli: the Oriental has ascended to the seats of power, is sitting there, and has been sitting there for some time. This city is Harbin, the only white city in the world run by yellows.

In appearance Harbin is pure Russian. There is little to suggest that it is not a city of black earth Orel or Tver. Like most Slav cities, it has never been able to pull itself together but wanders over the plain, old Harbin here, new Harbin there and, in a different quarter along the magnificent Sungari River, the Port: all laced together by wide streets and mammoth bridges—the only scale that the Russian seems to know. The cobbled streets are the same as those of Moscow, and the horses’ hoofs that clatter down them. The capacious stone buildings that line the streets, the shops, and the cinema are similar to those that rise in Vladivostok or Leningrad. The steamers on the river are Russian; the twisted green and gold spires of the churches and the little kiosks. The traktirs and gardens are Russian, and in them sit Russian crowds eating sunflower seeds. The music is Russian, the gaiety and melancholy, the cafes and the caviar. The smell is Russian. Need anything further be said?

A Curious Flag

In the bright Manchurian sun, however, flies one of the most curious flags in the world: the upper half is the Chinese five-barred flag, the lower—not the upper—half is the Soviet sickle and hammer. Down the street clatters a Russian izvostchik, swinging his long whip over his shaggy Siberian pony. In the old days that long careless whip would certainly have flicked any Chinese tardily crossing the road. Now the traffic policeman who puts up his hand at which the bearded Jehu stops short has a yellow skin and slant eyes. If there is an altercation the Russian will be slapped or beaten before a crowd and there is no redress. If he is arrested, it is the heavy hand of the yellow that hales him to the yamen, and the justice he meets is yellow. The mass of the city is white, but the wires, the antennae that control it are Chinese. The whole administration, in short, of this Russian city of eighty thousand is Chinese. If you rise early enough you may even see the Chinese mayor making his rounds. He is a Buddhist scholar and rises at six to see if the municipal plant is working.

To the man who revisits the Far East this spectacle is as astonishing as seeing the Mississippi run dry or the Statue of Liberty fall upon her face. After he has recovered from the first bewilderment the spectacle teems with questions. How did it come about? Is the administration efficient? If so, why? Especially does the traveler ask this if he has just come up from China proper and witnessed the chaos there: the threatened disorganization of the posts, the bankruptcy of the telegraph, the ruin of the railways under advancing Chinese control. Is it possible that this experiment here in the north suggests that, if once he could be extracted from the melee of rival war lords, the Chinese might not prove incapable of governing? How does the Russian react toward this Chinese overlordship?

II

The history of the bouleversement is simple. It is another wave caused by the mammoth stone which the Russian Revolution heaved into the world pool. Up until 1918, though on Manchurian territory, Harbin had been a Russian city. But in 1918 the White Russians, mainly the officials of the Chinese Eastern Railway, seeing the Bolshevik wave advancing across the Urals and hoping to save Harbin, invited the Chinese to come in and rule their own house. The Chinese needed no second invitation. They came, and they brought an iron hand for their dealings with the whites. In spite of the defense measure, however, the Soviet took possession of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Their first step was to abrogate the former treaties and give to China half the control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. But the Chinese did not halve the control of the city. In all that concerns city administration they are still the sole masters.

Does Chinese policing of a white city work Well? It depends upon the standards—Spotless Town or East of Suez. As East of Suez goes, Harbin is clean and safe, but East of Suez does not go far in either of these directions. Its forte is neither soap nor salubrity. Perhaps the most one can say is that the city plant has not visibly deteriorated, but perhaps it could not if Chinese coolies armed with long brush brooms sweep the streets. After several months it was discovered that they only swept the dirt from one side of the street to the other. A few Russians were added, and the streets are now as clean as ever. The traveler need no longer give Harbin a wide berth. Not many years ago, the Harbin, and Vladivostok papers read like a Police Gazette. The visitor venturing up from Peking or over from Japan, after perusing the police report of the night before, warily transferred his bags to Changchun and fled back to civilization.

He no longer does this. He can go to Harbin and take the trans-Siberian train or sojourn there unharmed. The money and the carriages are probably the greatest danger he will encounter. Every filthy ten-kopeck note—patched and repatched—carries the seeds of ten thousand deaths, every broken-down droshky twenty thousand. After the money and the droshkies, the traffic police are the next danger. A Chinese traffic policeman, when he is borne down upon by several cars, generally brandishes his arms and invites all, indiscriminately, to dash in all directions at once. A hospitable gesture—whether rooted in paralysis or politeness—but hardly safe. If one escapes the money and the traffic cops he runs no special risk of being sandbagged—that is, no more than in Chicago—or of having his furniture moved, more, than in Long Island. In brief, he is safe unless he be very poor or very rich. If he is either of these he has special attention from the police.

The worst crime in Harbin is poverty. Out of a population of eighty thousand Russians, a large percentage are emigres who flooded over the Urals during the Revolution, sleeping four deep on the floor of the Siberian stations, leaving their dead unburied as they fled, and now clinging to life in the back streets of Harbin in a state little short of debasement. Over these the Chinese police keep a heavy hand. Many must beg for a living, but the police permit them to beg only on one day a week; then they go from shop to shop, receiving a penny or so at each door. Many poor in Harbin never appear until after nightfall and then only on the deserted back streets. All live in the daily terror of either being sent back to Russia or shunted farther into China.

But poverty is not the only way to attract police attention. The rich also receive their share. Whenever the police need money—and when do the police not need money ?—a victim is selected, either Chinese or Russian, and golddigging begins. Sometimes legal means are used, and the “prospect’, is arrested for some heinous offense, such as appearing in a hat or buttoning his coat, and he is dragged to the police yamen. But often the refined circumlocutions of legal means are omitted as tedious, and he is simply kidnapped. Every rich Russian or Chinese anticipates falling into the hands of the police once or twice a year. One victim in Harbin is said to have already yielded two hundred thousand dollars in ransom money. The victims pay as they do in Shanghai, where kidnappings are frequent, and so perfect is the police system that they never discuss their treatment. Yes, cleanliness, law and order, and a good police system prevail—the cleanliness, order, and police of the East.

The Soviet have surrendered Harbin to the Chinese. There is no apparent friction over the city administration. With far-reaching schemes in the Orient, Moscow can well afford to let the Chinese rule Harbin so long as she does not lose her hold on that greater prize which is the key not only to Harbin but to all north Manchuria—the Chinese Eastern Railway. This, and not city administration, is the matter of first importance. Thanks to its exorbitant freight rates on parts of the line where there is no competition, the Chinese Eastern Railway makes stupendous profits. Twenty-eight million rubles were recently divided by the Dalbank, half to the treasure chest of Stalin and half to that of Chang Tso Lin (then alive). The money melts away like sugar in the Sungari but there is always more to come. This division of spoils and the lynx-eyed necessity of watching each other to see that neither encroaches on the control of the railway very comfortably occupies the Chinese and Russian Machiavellis. But underneath this official status quo, the relation of the two races en masse is a gruelling drama: persecution and abuse from the Chinese, fear and humiliation on the part of the Russians. Under Chinese rule, the man without a country is seen at his worst.

The White Men’s Loss of Prestige

Two things are responsible for the loss of prestige of the white race: one is the fact that the white man now does manual labor; the other is the increasing number of Chinese-Russian marriages. Perhaps, after all, the most significant sight of the Orient is not a Chinese policeman striking a white driver. Perhaps it is a little ragged Russian girl with bare feet, her kerchief tied over her fair hair, washing windows in a Chinese house. For the first time in the history of the East white men work as coolies. Russian and Chinese porters together meet the trains. Russian and Chinese waiters serve together in hotels. Russian and Chinese longshoremen load and unload the steamers. The Chinese has never read William Morris or Ruskin. He knows nothing of the “dignity of labor.” He himself never works when he need not. He cultivates peonies or goes in for cricket-fighting or something that makes life worth while. Ever since the first voyager first landed on these shores of limitless coolie labor the unwritten law has been the white shall do no labor with his hands. Now that the Oriental has seen the white man bent under loads of bean cake, the white has lost something he can never regain.

The second factor—both cause and effect of Chinese ascendancy—is that growing number of streets in Harbin given over to Russian women married to Chinese men. There have always been marriages between Orientals and whites since the first clipper ships landed on these shores without women in their holds. One of the pictures of Hongkong and Shanghai or Kobe has been the blond-bearded Viking striding along the street, his lily-footed wife toddling in his wake at a respectful distance. In the old days of the China Coast, however, it was the Occidental man who married or kept the Oriental woman. A reverse order was a coast scandal. But the world now is full of reversals. Every modern war lord buys not only aeroplanes and alarm clocks from the West, but adds a few white wives to his harem as zakouska. And not only the war lords add Russian women to their menages, but among the poorer classes there are many marriages.

Since women are the home-makers, the families thus constituted live as whites—as slip-shod whites, for the marriages are usually among the very low classes. But in the physiognomy of the children Chinese blood dominates, as it always dominates the less well-established germ cell of the white. The effect upon the Chinese and Russians themselves involved in such a union is lowering rather than otherwise. In close contact with the Russian, the Chinese always loses something difficult to define but easily recognizable —perhaps an inner harmony, the heritage of the oldest civilization in the world. The white women who thus marry seem to lose caste. The prestige of the white race is still sufficient for that. At least they form a society of their own and keep to themselves in company with the other white women who have married Chinese. At first impression it seems a curious rather than encouraging experiment of nature. Perhaps it is her first foreshadowing of her uncaring way of solving the race problem. Stranger things have occurred in her vast melting pot.

Certain it is that certain chemicals are exploding into new forms in the Orient. It would take a very astute intelligence indeed to analyze this changing psychology of Asia and the deep bases of it. One group of foreigners talks of the “inferiority complex.” To them, the Chinese and Japanese have long been inflicted with an inferiority complex thrust upon them by the guns and commerce of the West, and are now revenging themselves. Another group talks of the “superiority complex.” It holds that the Chinese have always known their rape and civilization to be superior, have held the West in contempt, and arc determined to seize and hold their own.

Whatever the basic psychology, the result seems to be the same. China is awakening and awakening arrogantly. Soviet propaganda, the mastership in Harbin, white men and yellows working together as coolies, the fresh accessibility of white women—all have left their mark on the Chinese mind. There are many other contributory factors too complex to analyze, but the main factor lies in that flood of Russian emigres flooding over the Urals who now tread so warily with the Chinese. This moment the Chinese saw the first Russian standing on the street and selling matches the status of the white world changed. And the day the first ragged Russian went to drudge in a Chinese house was more important than the signing of the Versailles treaty. For on that day the constellations of East and West shifted in the heavens.

With what result have the constellations shifted? Is China awakening to assume her obligations or only to make demands? Does the Harbin experiment mean new potentialities in the race—strength, honesty, efficiency ? (Every one of these is a volume in itself in China.) In this remote north is a new type developing which augurs well for the solution of national problems? Those who know China best are the slowest to answer. Only time can tell.

Certainly here in the north is a freer atmosphere. For years Manchuria, containing Harbin and Mukden, has been Chang Tso-lin’s special province—his source of revenue and the sanctuary to which he fled when hard pressed south of the Great Wall. He has drained it regularly and ruthlessly. In spite of all this drain, however, it has prospered. Lying serenely to the north, cut off by the Great Wall, by Chang Tso-lin’s armies, it has escaped the fever with which the rival war lords have kept China seething. Here, if anywhere in China, there seems the possibility of a new type with a clearer head and a stronger will.

And a good type does seem to have shown on the horizon : remarkably keen and intelligent in business, quick to grasp an alien language even as difficult as the Russian, shrewd in everything except the principles of government. It is the science of government that he must learn if he is to pull his great kingdom there to the south together and gain the confidence of the West. Not through theoretical schemes of government on paper—a million here for a power plant, a million there for radio when his treasury would not yield a copper cent if scraped—can he demonstrate his greatness but through the thing at hand : less arrogance and less abuse of the peoples over whom he has authority.

Ill

The Russians would, perhaps, feel more keenly the humiliation of being ruled by Chinese were they any other race than Russian and if their own world were not so laden with drama. Harbin is like one of these boxes one takes apart, finding always another inside. Within the drama of the yellow and the white there is another drama of the Red and White. The officials of the Chinese Eastern Railway represent Moscow, and whoever controls the Chinese Eastern Railway controls Harbin. But in population, Harbin is White Russian, the stand of the Old Regime.

There lies the rub and it is a hard rub. Go into a Chinese hairdresser's and a woman comes in straight from the Rue de la Paix. Attend an official dinner and you dine with Stalin. In Russia, the Old Regime has ceased to exist in sufficient numbers to affect the scene. In Harbin they sit side by side, with no other nation to obscure the type. The Chinese Eastern Railway dispenses its stupendous profits with a gesture of true Russian magnificence. It has built a smart railway club with a delicious cuisine, charming gardens, an opera. Last year it spent three hundred thousand dollars on the opera, with artists out from Leningrad and Moscow. At these playgrounds of the railway Red and White mingle. At one table in the gardens a group of the Old Regime—the women marked by their thin faces and fragile skulls, the men in well-cut clothes—are watching the sunset over the Sungari. At the next table is the shaven head and thick neck of a good Siberian bourgeois, tucking away a Gargantuan Russian meal: he wears a Russian shirt, his boots smell of oil. He is probably a profiteer in furs; the woman with him wears a pink silk blouse and many bangles. A few Chinese faces here and there give the scene the strange flavor of the Ear East and the Far North. But mainly the scene is Russian: Russia old and mellow; Russia new and masterful. The railway—that great power which sustains, overshadows, and rules Harbin—is their common meeting ground. But there the line is drawn.

Magnificence and Squalor

Here and there in the city are evidences of the gigantic contest: not bullet holes and wrecked houses but, none the less, evidence. Take a motor and rattle over the ill-paved roads to Old Harbin. There you will come upon a chapter redolent of the past: a little collection of one-storied houses, the dirt roads winding like cow paths. It was the outpost of the Trans-Siberian when Russia was an adventurous empire striding toward China and the sea with her advance guard of Cossacks. At the end of a road, overhung with trees, is one of the strangest bits of mosaic in the East, a white-pillared house of old Russian style, built privately for the head of the Trans-Siberian Railway when his state approached that of Viceroy of this wild country. Vast rooms, polished floors, a park where the nightingales of Turgenev might have sung— all at the end of the cow paths. It is unconfiscated because it stands on Chinese territory, but even in Harbin it is unique. All the other big houses are occupied by the Soviet, the former inhabitants eking out an existence as best they may—by selling milk and eggs, by being janitors. At least one new palace has been built on railway ground by the Soviet, and in both Old and New Harbin are Soviet parks, beautifully kept and open to the public—reminders of the new masters of the old land.

Why, one asks, does the Old Regime cling to this straggling frontier town at the top of the world, administered by Chinese and Reds and so full of tragedy? They cling here because pride dies hard; because, although poor, here they keep something of their identity; because they dread to be lost in the vortex of the West. For certain numbers the Chinese East offers a livelihood, though it is always haunted by fear.

The Soviet permits the White Russians to hold positions on the railway provided they have Soviet passports. Since in the beginning technically trained men were scarce, the pay-roll contained a large number of men who were not Red at heart. Moscow has not found this agreeable and has been recently trying to replace them with Red disciples. This was all the opening necessary for the Chinese who, taking advantage of the Mukden agreement, that there should be an equal number of Chinese with Russians—the number now being somewhat less—laid claim to the posts here. The result has been an interlude in the Whites’ terror of dismissal, though a temporary one. Those who have any means of livelihood at all are fortunate. Most of the Old Regime Russians stay in Harbin because they are too poor to move.

The Russian heart does not harbor bitterness, but with the drama so recent, the atmosphere resembles that of our Southern border states after the Civil War. There is much propaganda still in Harbin, the money coming in from Europe; and where there is such propaganda there is bitterness. The customs could tell a strange tale of the wares that cross their counters: jewels in quantities wrenched from their settings so that they may not be recognized, silver cigarette cases marked with a crown, the coffee cups of a Grand Duke. But who is there to buy? The Whites cannot and will not. The Reds need not, it is said. In this connection an authentic story is told in Harbin, names and dates of which can be supplied. The wife of a well-known Bolshevik official, wearing a valuable sable coat, was stopped on the street one day by a woman, her shoes almost worn through. “Madam,” said the shabby woman, “will you come with me to the police station? That is my coat.” The wearer protested, but was compelled to go. "There is name and date written on every skin of that coat,” the shabby woman informed the police. “If the coat is hers she will know what they are.” The wearer was unable to say what was written on the sables. The woman with the ragged shoes then gave a name and date. The coat was ripped open and the name and date were found as stated.

“ The most pathetic pawns in the game are the girls thrown on the market. Whenever there is a break in the economic life of a nation it is always the women who are cheapened first. Never before has jt occurred in such appalling proportions as in Russia. Shanghai is flooded with Russian girls who constitute much of the night life in that bizarre hybrid; not all are to be bought, but many are predatory to such an extent that it has been the subject of open debate in the Shanghai papers. In Harbin the life of man—especially of a bachelor with more than a sixpence in his pocket—is either a South Sea paradise or a case of St. Anthony, according to the temperament. When a bachelor moves into the quarters belonging to the customs or posts or one of the big business firms he usually finds a girl already established. She goes with the house like the furniture, and it takes more than a slant-eyed policeman to eject her. She does not appear at his parties but keeps discreetly hidden. Marriages have not been unknown, however, and any American woman with a fiance in Harbin is warned to take the first steamer thitherward. “Ladies must live,” and so must superfluous bits of froth on the stream of life.

A City of Tragic Contrasts

Harbin, essence of tragic contrasts: of East and West, of old and new, of poverty and riches, the "City ‘of Nechevo.” And yet wherever are Russians there is life, and Harbin at night puts on a mask of hectic gaiety. There are ten cabarets which begin activity about midnight—tinsel affairs but clever and amusing. The cabarets are both expensive and cheap. The young “China millionaire” up from the interior with hungry eyes and his year’s salary burning his monkey jacket can buy champagne, probably also the red-haired girl in green spangles with whom he dances, if he chooses. The artists are presumably sans reproche, but the girls who dance are in that borderland which adds piquancy to the geisha. The young China millionaire may spend his whole salary if he likes. But paterfamilias may also take the whole family for a dollar a head.

The cabaret is seldom vulgar, never abandoned. Sometimes there is a moment that touches the heart. Someone sings a gypsy song, the lights go lower. Out of the shadows seems to flow the deep river of the past, winding like a broad ribbon of memory; ahead stretches the misty, unknown future. One feels the Russian soul voyaging about on the bitter plain of experience; no longer friend and foe, the struggle against poverty, against exile, the struggle against yellow and against one another forgotten—all touched into a common race by memory. The moment passes. The lights blare on. A troupe climbs down swinging ladders, clad in powder and paint. Harbin, the “City of Nechevo.”

While inside the city drama within drama unfolds—the drama of power on one hand against fear on the other outside, Manchuria herself, twice as big as Germany, prepares the next battlefield of the world. One line of battalions already moves across the horizon. Through the gates of Harbin themselves flows a constant stream of blue: Chinese coolies who   have fled famine-stricken, tax-ridden Shantung and Chihli pour hungrily over the empty brown plains. Through the break in the Great Wall and the ports they swarm, two million this year and millions more in the loins of these. They bring their wives and children with them, even now and then an aged father across a stalwart back. They carry bedding rolls and bundles that contain all they own in this world, some of them carry a hoe. The sunshine pours down into the plains, warm and golden; the flags hang limp in the air. The scene looks serene and peaceful and remote from wars. No enemy is in sight. Where are the antagonists?    

One sits in Tokio: a small dapper gentleman who in his leisure has a passion for jade and gardens. The other sits in the Kremlin: a stoutish person in a peasant shirt. One holds the key of the South Manchurian Railway, the other of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the Trans-Siberian. Both look with disappointed eyes at Manchuria. The figure in Tokio long ago had a dream: it was a dream of the rich stream of life, but pouring in from his own islands across the way. He has resigned it sorrowfully but finally; he knows now that the Japanese farmer cannot compete with that blue-clad figure with the grass-and-mud cake tucked in his coat. The peasant in Moscow—only he was not a peasant then hut a suave gentleman in a frock coat—also once had a dream: it was of a great Slav empire with free outlets to the sea. That also has passed. Manchuria will be Chinese: only an act of God can stop that now. But the control of that output, the sovereignty over this rich virgin land? Who holds the key to that?

If the shield of Manchuria were drawn, it should be three figures couchant: the bear, and two dragons—a white and two yellows. A battle of railways and ports fought for the last west. Each has her weakness and her own strength. Against Japan works the innate distrust felt for her by China and by Russia; for her, endless cleverness, her militant vigilance and her determination to keep the “special position" which she avers she won in the Russo-Japanese war, and which she states she will bold at the point of the sword. Against China is her chaos and her lack of organized resources; vastly in her favor, the mighty mass of twenty million coolies already on the laud. The bear is probably the weakest of the three. Against him stands lost prestige in the Far East and complex internal problems. For him, ten years of experience which has developed some of the cleverest brains in the world, and the fact that as an ally or enemy Russia is the immediate giant of the future.

What happens in Manchuria will carry results for the whole world. It would be interesting to open one’s eyes in Harbin a hundred years from now and gaze at the seats of power. White or yellow? And if yellow—which?

Shanghai 1935: An American Lady’s Account of the City and its High Society

A photo of Ruth Day published in the Springfield Republican in 1930

My talk last week at the wooden box

A few years ago I sent Graham Earnshaw a PDF copy of a rare book, which I found in the New York Public Library back in 1995. At the time I discovered the book, I was beginning to conduct research for what would eventually be my doctoral dissertation on the nightlife and dance hall industry of Shanghai in the 1920s-1930s, which became my first book Shanghai’s Dancing World. The book I sent to Graham was titled Shanghai 1935. It was penned by a mysterious American author named Ruth Day. Among all of the various memoirs and first-hand accounts that I found by western writers, Ruth Day’s book struck me as one that was very genuine, thorough, and perspicacious in its descriptions of the people and places that the author encountered during her brief trip to Shanghai in the spring of 1935. Other than the copy at the NYPL, I could find no other extant copies of the book. Fortunately, I made a photocopy of the original book, and I had kept it in my research archives for all those years.

Having already successfully republished one memoir of Old Shanghai, Whitey Smith’s I Didn’t Make a Million, Graham and I agreed that this book was worth republishing. In the process, Graham asked me to write a foreword to the book and to learn more about the woman who wrote the book. The story of who she was and how I sleuthed her out of obscurity is told in some detail in the foreword to the book. 

In a nutshell, Ruth Day was a high-society socialite, mother, and amateur thespian living in Springfield Massachusetts. Dr. Frederick Cleveland, her mother’s second husband, was one of the foremost financial experts of his age. He had been hired by the Nationalist Chinese government to help sort out their finances and he was living in China with Ruth Day’s mother. In the spring of 1935, she went out to visit her parents in Shanghai, and she ended up writing a memoir of her experiences there. During her stay in China, she also took a brief train trip up to Peking with her mother, and she relates that journey in the book as well. All in all, her book is a wonderful and vivid firsthand account of high life in the city during its heyday. While in Shanghai, she hobnobbed with folks like Victor Sassoon, Lord Li Jingmai (son of the famed Li Hongzhang of late imperial times), Lord and Lady Maze and many other elites of Shanghai society. She did of course take notice the vast social stratification and the dire poverty of the Chinese masses, but by and large this book is a closely observed account of the city’s elites and their lavish lifestyles.

I quote Ruth Day’s descriptions of her brief forays into the city’s nightlife in the introductions to both Shanghai’s Dancing World and Shanghai Nightscapes, and they appear periodically in entries to this journal as well. I strongly encourage those of you interested in this fascinating time period to buy a copy of this book. It is a wonderfully cogent account of what it was like for a foreigner to visit the city in its heyday, and her various encounters with the exotic cultures and habits of the Chinese people are still telling and full of humor today. She provides many lavish descriptions of banquets and dinner parties, and the book contains very detailed accounts of her visits to restaurants, theaters, nightclubs, and private homes. The fact that Ruth Day herself was no China expert and that this is not a “China’s place in the world” type of book makes it even more charming and valuable.

Last Saturday, October 31, I gave a talk at the Wooden Box (a local bar and café in our neighborhood of Shanghai), organized by Frank Tsai and China Crossroads and co-sponsored by the Royal Asiatic Society. Over 80 people attended my talk, and the crowd was very international. I asked the audience members to read out selected quotes that I chose from the book. These quotes were juxtaposed with images of the people and places she encountered. The quotes included a long firsthand account of her one big night on the town, which took her to the Kavkaz Restaurant, the Carlton Theater, the Paramount Ballroom, and the Del Monte Nightclub. The talk seemed to go quite well overall, and afterwards many people asked good questions. I hope to give more such talks in the near future and will happily take up the offers of other organizations to hold them.

Horses and Courses and Races Oh My! A Q&A with James Carter, China/World Historian and Author of the New Book Champions Day

Dr. James Carter has been teaching and writing about Modern Chinese and World History for over 20 years. He is a Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University. You will find more info about Dr. Carter on his personal website. Professor Carter’s new book Champion’s Day came out earlier this year from W. W. Norton. I took this opportunity to interview Dr. Carter about his new book and about the process of researching and writing a book that carries a narrative punch and has the potential to reach a broad audience, without sacrificing the painstaking research and methodology that goes into crafting a book of historical non-fiction.

AF: First of all, congratulations on a fantastic book! You’ve succeeded in integrating a very unique and original story of the history of horse racing in treaty port era Shanghai (1842-1943) with a broader history of both the city and of modern China. 

This is the first thematic book (as opposed to a general history) I’ve read that I feel could work well as a textbook on the history of treaty port era Shanghai. It really covers an admirable range of subject matter, stories, personalities and characters. Although the ostensible focus is on the history of horse racing, you also manage to include information about Shanghai’s built environment—particularly the Jiangwan Civic Center built in the 1930s, as well as the Shanghai Race Club and racecourse area, which eventually became integrated into the People’s Square/Park area. You also cover other subjects such as social and economic history, political history, business history, the history of theater and film, and many others. 

It seems that choosing racing as a theme enabled you to branch out into these areas, since people who were into horse racing were also doing other things of importance and significance in the city. Since horse racing appealed to such a diverse set of people—rich and poor, Chinese and westerners, etc., you are able to use this topic to showcase the polyglot and cosmopolitan colonial environment, while also elucidating the politics of western and Japanese colonialism and Chinese nationalism during this era. 

Choosing one day for a special focus--Champions Day on November 12, 1941--enables you to tell multiple stories, including the fascinating story of Liza Hardoon, one of the wealthiest women in Asia at that time. Not to mention that you also cover the history of the Japanese invasion and occupation of China and Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s, and the fall of Nationalist China to the Communists in 1949. And you manage to do all this in an engaging and compelling way.

Author and Historian Dr. James Carter

JC: Thanks for the kind words about Champions Day! It really was a pleasure to write and to research, and I am always pleased when people enjoy it. 

AF: Given that your previous work focused on other topics such as Buddhism and on the history of another city in China (Harbin), can you elaborate on the process by which you came to embrace the subject of Shanghai history? What was your overall strategy for getting to know about Shanghai’s history? What were the most important sources and voices you encountered along the way as you developed your own expertise in this area?

JC: I’ve always felt that history was most interesting, and most important, when it is connecting big processes or events with the lives of individuals. Neither makes complete sense without the other. With that in mind, I’ve looked for characters that helped make sense of the time they lived in. And after Heart of Buddha, Heart of China—my second book—I took a look around and realized that most of my writing focused on the history of China’s relations with “the West,” not on a state-to-state level, but a personal level. It made sense to me that I would stick with that (very broad) topic.

Taking those two trends together, Shanghai was a natural fit. There’s no better place to see the intersection of China with other parts of the world. And it was a lot easier to work in than, for instance Harbin!

As for developing a strategy, I have to say that I have been very fortunate to find generous scholars and writers who were willing to help. I’ve been writing about China for 25 years or so, but Shanghai is its own subfield, and this was my first time venturing into it. I couldn’t have done this without the help and expertise of so many. Maura Cunningham, Jeff Wasserstrom, and Robert Bickers stand out, but there were many others (yourself included!) who gave generously of their time and expertise. The list of people who helped me is very long indeed. 

Beyond people, one aspect of Shanghai’s history in the treaty-port era that lends itself to research from abroad is the tremendous periodical literature. Newspapers in many languages, but especially Chinese and English, allowed me to immerse myself in the period I was researching.

AF: This book strikes me as the work of somebody who has spent a great deal of time teaching undergraduate students about modern Chinese history. Is that a fair assessment? Can you discuss how you integrated the specific histories of horse racing and of treaty port era Shanghai with the larger story of China’s transformation from a dynastic empire into a modern nation-state in the early 20th century, and with China’s crises during the 1930s and 1940s? What were some of the challenges that you faced as you did so?

JC: At Saint Joseph’s University, I teach exclusively undergraduates, and I have been teaching about China at St Joe’s for more than 20 years now. I didn’t design this book for undergraduates—I have co-written a world history book called Forging the Modern World that IS designed that way—but that’s not a bad way to think about my ideal audience. I didn’t write this primarily for specialists, though I think that there is material in Champions Day that would interest specialists.

The goal—and this is true for undergraduate courses as well as for narrative history—was to tell a story or series of stories that would help illuminate the bigger picture. And that picture wasn’t only modern China: the British Empire, colonialism, and many others.

You know this as well as I do, and you’ve engaged Shanghai’s history even more deeply than I have. The challenge for a book like this (and again, a parallel with undergraduate history) is how to simplify what is complex and complicate what seems simple. In Champions Day, that meant situating Shanghai’s political transformations of the 1920s and 1930s without losing the narrative thread. A focus like horseracing, or my handful of characters, helped with that. Even though so the political environment was constantly shifting, I could see how that played out in the lives of people like Arthur Henchman or Nates Wong or Ing Tang.

As for complicating what seems simple, the race club itself was probably the biggest challenge. It was a racist institution and an emblem of colonialism. I didn’t want to glorify that. It needed to be clear that the privilege of many at the club was built on racism. At the same time, 90% of the people at the race were Chinese, Chinese owners and racing fans made racing the institution that it was in Shanghai, and there was much more to the story than the racist membership policies of the club. Conveying the nature of that scene was really important, especially since the book published at a moment in American history when race is so central to our national conversation. One of the formulations I used in the book seemed to capture it pretty well: “quintessentially Shanghai: cosmopolitan, racist, pragmatic, cooperative, and cynical all at once.”

AF: You chose to work with a trade publisher for this book. Your previous books appear to have been published by academic publishers or university presses. It would be interesting to know more about your experiences with a trade publisher—how did the expectations differ from those of an academic publisher? How did this choice shape the book? What were some challenges you faced during this process?

JC: The differences between trade and academic presses are sometimes exaggerated. Increasingly, academic presses are trying to reach the same broad audience that a trade press does. I was really happy with the university presses that published my earlier books, but the resources that Norton put into editing and marketing were extraordinary. At every stage of the process, the support and expertise I encountered was brilliant. I don’t know that it was mainly the contrast between a trade and an academic press, or it was about the team at Norton specifically.

The biggest difference was probably in when I put time into the process. For my earlier books, most of the time went into the research and writing of the first draft. After that, revisions were relatively small. For Champions Day, I put in the same amount of time into the research, but there was a lot more time invested in the revision and rewriting process. The first draft of what would become Champions Day looked very little like what was eventually published.

To some extent it was a question of priorities. I think there is a misimpression, at times, that trade presses don’t care about the academic aspect of the book. In my experience, that was not true at all! The editors there pressed me on sources, perspective, and argument just as much as any university press did. But there was definitely more attention to narrative and how to tell the story. In general, trade presses seem to have more resources and expect to use them to help promote the book, but university presses are increasingly following this same approach.

AF: Your book seems to be targeted to a much wider audience than the typical Chinese or Shanghai history monograph. Who is your intended audience and what are your hopes in terms of its reception by a broader public outside our narrow field of Chinese/Shanghai studies? Who do you envision as the ideal reader of your book?

JC: This speaks to the previous questions. This book is trying to reach a broad audience, one that includes historians of China and/or Shanghai, but my ideal reader is an educated, interested person with an interest in but probably not a ton of background on China or Shanghai. If the book succeeds, I think it may be the first book, or one of the first books, about China that many readers pick up. That shaped a lot of how I wrote, for instance how much background to include or how thoroughly to explain concepts.

It’s not harder or easier to write for a broad audience, in my view. They both have challenges and opportunities. Writing a complicated argument is hard…but conveying complex ideas in straightforward terms can be just as difficult! And there is a comfort writing for specialist when you can expect your audience will have read the same texts. 

The weekly column I recently started writing for SupChina called This Week in China’s History is doing some of the same things: trying to write accessibly about China’s past, for an audience that is not, primarily, academic.

AF: You chose a very fascinating topic—horse racing—and a very particular date—November 12, 1941—to anchor and frame your book. Can you describe the process by which you came to structure the book as you did? Did you encounter any major difficulties along the way and if so, how did you overcome them?

JC: I came to the two pieces—the single day and the races—separately. For racing, I have long had a love of sports and sports history, though I have not had a chance to write about that. Horseracing was central in Shanghai, physically, culturally, and socially, so it seemed an obvious choice as a means into the city’s history. The more I looked, the more I found, and I was especially pleased to see that the races cut across all aspects of the city. It wasn’t just a white, elite institution. It involved all of Shanghai.

I was also captivated by the races themselves. That part of the book may have been a little self-indulgent; I am not sure most reviewers really enjoyed my descriptions of the action on the track as much as I enjoyed writing them! But I felt it was important to immerse myself in the races that were distracting so many people from the cataclysmic events going on all around them.

As for the single day, that had been an idea I had been carrying around for a long time. I spent a year or more going through newspapers and books about Shanghai to see if there was a single day that would be a good focus. I didn’t want an obvious “red letter” day, necessarily. In the same way that “important” people are often not the best way to understand an era, less prominent days can be lenses that reveal unexpected details.

In this case, I at first started looking at the wrong day! The history of racing in China contended that the last Champions Stakes in Shanghai was in May, 1941, so I spent a few months developing that as my focus, but once I got into the primary sources I found that this information was wrong. And November 12—because of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday and Liza Hardoon’s funeral—turned out to be a much better day.

Initially, the book was going to focus more narrowly on the single day. It would start at dawn and end at sundown, or maybe midnight. But as I developed and shared the early drafts of the manuscript, it became clear that more background was needed. So, even though the book takes this one day as the frame, it extends back and forward in time beyond just November 12, 1941.

A White Russian Mail-Order Bride and a Cabaret in 1930s Tientsin (Tianjin): The Story of Tania Manooiloff Cosman

“I longed to throw the ring at him. But this dramatic gesture was impossible because I had already traded the ring for a winter coat.” So quips Tania Manooiloff Cosman during her description of a rather nasty encounter with a Texan marine named Jim in a cabaret on Taku Road in Tianjin in 1931, the same year the Japanese took over Manchuria, where she’d been born. This is one of many episodes revealing the combination of tact, wit, humor, luck, and pragmatism that enables the heroine of this remarkable story to survive and ultimately to prosper despite numerous hardships.

Written in the 1990s, her amazing memoir My Heritage with Morning Glories (Washington DC: Creative Communications Services, 1995) looks back upon the early years in the life of a White Russian woman born into poverty in China’s harsh northeast, known then as Manchuria. The book tells her story from her own perspective, as she struggles to survive poverty, the death of her mother, life in an orphanage and many other trials and tribulations in the tumultuous era of the 1930s, when that region of China was being taken over by the Japanese military. After living in Harbin, she eventually makes her way down to the international city of Tientsin (Tianjin) near the former imperial capital of Peking (Beijing, then known as Beiping), for the purpose of an arranged marriage with a Russian named Ivan, keeping in mind that she was 14 years old at the time.

When the arrangement goes sour, she is persuaded to join a cabaret on Taku Road that caters to soldiers and sailors of various nationalities. What follows here is the end of Chapter Seven, where she makes the fateful decision to join the cabaret, and the whole of Chapter Eight, which tells the story of her working in the cabaret. In all my research on nightlife in China during this era, I have never encountered such a rich and evocative portrait of the cabaret or taxi-dance hall in 1930s China as told from the perspective of a young Russian ingenue who was being initiated into that world (or from that of a much older, well-educated and worldly woman looking back on her youthful days). Luckily, she has a guardian angel, the mysterious Olive, who helps her to navigate and survive this world.

Spoiler alert: After her experiences in the cabaret, Tania goes to Peking where she is “rescued” by Ida Pruitt, the great doyenne of Peking’s expatriate intellectual society. In this story, Ida Pruitt comes out smelling like a rose—a Saint or a Living Buddha even—and the chapters on western expatriate life in Peking are absolutely fascinating as well. This is a gem of a memoir and it deserves republishing! (Thanks to R. Steven Upton for alerting me to this wonderful book).

End of Chapter seven

“Ivan has a lot of good in him, but he lives in a world of fantasy,” Madame Givet said, stroking Petrushka with one of her twinkling little hands. “Did he by any chance tell you how his father saved the Imperial portraits?”

“Yes, he did. Why? Isn’t it true?”

“Not a word of truth in it!” she laughed. “The rescue didn’t even happen here in Tientsin, but in Shanghai while I was there. Poor Ivan, he thinks it makes him important because his father engaged in such a heroic escapade, so he goes everywhere telling that lie to anyone who will listen. That’s one reason Captain Givet doesn’t like him — that, and the opium, and also the way Madame Petroff earned her living. Me, I know what it’s like to be poor and Russian in China, but dear Henri is French and rich and doesn’t understand.”

“The more I hear of Ivan, the more I realize how lucky I am,” I said at last. “What if he had given me his sickness? Or passed it on to our child? And at any time he could be seized by the Chinese police!” At the thought of all these terrible possibilities tears came to my eyes, and I groped for a handkerchief.

“Well, what are you going to do now?” Madame Givet asked after she had given me a few moments to recover. I told her of my hopeless week of job-hunting.

“Isn’t there anything you can do besides housework?” she asked. “Think, child, think!”

“I guess I can sing a little, although not well enough to get a job as a singer. And I can dance a bit too.”

Madame Givet sipped at her beer and studied me thoughtfully.

“You’re not bad looking, either,” she said finally. “And you’re very pretty when you smile. So, clearly, there’s only one thing for you to do, Tania. Become a taxi dancer in a cabaret. It’s not the best job for a young girl, but it’s not the worst, either.

“I know this because I, too, was once young and penniless and became a taxi dancer in a soldiers’ bar in Peking. It wasn’t bad, and in fact that’s where I met the dear Captain.”

“But don’t people look on you as a prostitute when you work in a cabaret or a soldiers' bar?”

“Yes, Tania, unfortunately they do. But that’s no reason you have to become one! You can keep your head, it seems to me and I think you’ll be all right. So tomorrow I’ll take you to see a good English friend of mine who works in a soldiers’ bar, and we’ll see about a job."     

Miss Olive, Madame Givet’s friend, lived in a dark and narrow street in the poor-Russian part of the English Concession, and although her makeup made her look tough, her eyes were kind and her voice soft and cheerful with only occasional sad undertones. She seemed very old to me, but I suppose now that she was around forty.

“I’m sorry you want to become a taxi dancer, Tania,” she said. “But if you are hired you’ll come and live with me and I’ll take care of you and see that no one insults you or takes advantage of you.”

She led the way down to the lower Taku Road, which was famous for its bars catering to American, English, Italian, and French soldiers and sailors. In one of them she introduced me to a fat, bejeweled Russian Jewess, who was the owner. The woman looked me over appraisingly and decided to hire me. She lay down her rules, one by one:

“Your salary will be fifty dollars a month.

“You’ll have a free dinner every night if you get here by five-thirty.

“You’ll also get twenty cents from every dollar drink that a guest buys for you.

“If you don’t want any dinner you’ll have to be on the job promptly at six.

  “You’ll be fined a dollar for every fifteen minutes you are late.

“You work seven days a week from six until midnight. “Do you want the job?”

I accepted, and she waddled after us to the door.

Believe me, you’ll make a lot of money in no time!” she exclaimed, winking. Just remember that you are young and pretty so watch your step. Soldiers are the toughest customers in the world.”

No matter, I thought, as I began to fall asleep at Miss Olive's that night. Fifty dollars a month and a free dinner every night! I’d be all right, and I would never, never have to go back to Uncle!

Chapter Eight

Taku Bar in Tientsin; Tania and Miss Olive

Miss Olive looked at the clock. Almost four. She glanced at me in my days-on-end, job-hunting dress and feverishly started rummaging in her clothes closet. A bright orange creation caught her eye.

“Tania, just slip this on, dear; soldiers like bright fussy dresses. Yours looks like a determined wallflower.” And she tossed her choice to me.

I was barely listening. My eyes were adoring and consuming the orange fluff in my hands, the heavenly puff that might vanish if I did not don it immediately. I examined the dress gingerly — too big here, too tight there, the armholes playing hide-and-seek, the hemline randomly irregular. But I put the dress on, conquering all its obstacles.

I looked like a princess at her first ball!

Miss Olive’s hand mirror went up and down as I danced on tiptoes admiring myself. All the soldiers, I was convinced, would swoon and desperately fall in love with me. I was elated.

I had such a glamorous job where I had to wear such gorgeous gowns.

If, at that moment, someone would have tried to prove me wrong, it would have been easier to convince Ghandi or Twiggy that they were overweight.

I was fourteen and life was alluring with dangling expectations.

When Olive’s voice brought me back to reality, I must have been lost in narcissism for quite a while.

“Come on, dearie. You look fine. We must not be late, remember!” she said, pinning a big red silk rose to her left shoulder.

Once outside, we could feel the cool autumn breeze. Olive in her blue and I in my orange creation fluttered like poplars down the street. We had no coats. Olive walked first. I had my orange chiffon to keep me warm. The two of us did not look at anyone or anything on the way. We must have been a sight for the passers by. A few even turned around as we dashed by, staring at us,

muttering wonderings under their breath.

Exactly at five, we entered the Taku Bar and went straight into the dressing room—a small room with greasy walls, a beat- up basin, a rickety wooden chair, an unshaded light bulb hanging high in the ceiling, dingy towels on a nail, a pair of shoes flung in one corner, a spotty ragged undergarment wadded up under the chair, and the unswept floor with dozens of footprints.

Other taxi dancers straggling in saw Miss Olive before the mirror and craned their necks to admire themselves. Some mechanically greeted me in Russian; one turned to me questioning:

“You’re new, aren’t you? Awfully young. Thirteen?”

“No, fourteen.” I said.

“And in this den already! You’re starting early, girl!”

I blushed, ashamed. I wanted to explain and assure her that I was not an eager apprentice, that I did not plan to work here, but it was the only way to survive, that— But she had her say, was already living in her own world, in her own thoughts, and no longer concerned with me. She saw me coming toward her and hurriedly left the room.

Her comment made me realize how others saw me. Suddenly I felt trapped, but more determined than ever to find my way out of the Taku Bar. At that moment, however, I could only think about tonight. Yesterday and tomorrow were far away.

Olive and I finally joined the other taxi dancers who were all sitting at dinner eating. There were twelve altogether. Most of them I had already seen in the dressing room. All, except Olive, were in their twenties and all were Russian.

As we were eating, my eye caught a familiar face. I recognized one of my teachers from the Harbin school. Timidly I addressed hert         “Olga Stepanovna! I am Tania! Your student from Harbin! I am so happy to see you!”

Olga glared at me. I wanted to fall through the floor. “Don’t be so forward. I am Olga but not Olga whatever-she-is. I have never been to your Harbin. Don’t bother me. Get lost.”

I did. I never dared to speak to her again. But I knew the large bosom, the straight black hair in a bun, the broad brow and thin cheeks, the haughty expression. I had seen this face daily for years, sitting in class. ‘Why did she not want to recognize me? Was she also ashamed to be here?’

Suddenly, I felt water running down the back of my head and a voice:

“Golubka, little pigeon, you’ve got such pretty red hair, but it looks terrible now. I’ll fix it for you. All right?”

Elizaveta, one of the dancers, lay the pins beside my place and while I ate twisted my hair into tight, wet little ringlets and stuck a pin through each one.

This attention to my hair made my heart feel lighter, after the verbal exchanges. I was pleased that somebody admired my hair and wanted to put it up in curls. The fancy orange dress and ringlets in my hair—all that and more in one night!

In the meantime. Miss Olive was eating intently, occasionally exchanging smiles with me and the other girls, most of whom were lamenting the departure of a consignment of American marines from Tientsin. A scramble was now on to find replacements for the boyfriends who had just left. Elizaveta, my plump hairdresser, was particularly hard hit.

“They don’t come like Joe, my sweet, dear Joe,” she was saying tearfully, while trying to balance some pins on my shoulder.

“Don’t move your arm so much, golubka. The pins will fall off.. I really loved my Joe and he loved me,” she continued.

“You love easy,” said Olga. “How could you make love to that scarecrow. I would never, never. But for you, any man will do, as long as he is good....” She was ready to go on and on, nagging at Elizaveta. But just then Tamara, a tall blond, started snickering and Olga ploughed into her:

“You bitch! You’d better shut up. You’re nothing but scum, running after every pair of pants that’ll buy you a drink. Always scheming how to get away from your penniless customers. Bitch!” and Olga jumped up, ready to hit Tamara.

But nobody paid any attention to Olga, to Tamara, to anyone or to anything. Everybody knew this litany of insults, jokes, and jibes. Tonight it was just as boring as last night and the nights and weeks before.

Everyone just silently continued to eat. The woman bar owner kept on waddling around the room, switching on weak, unshaded bulbs in wall brackets, and the lights slowly and dimly started illuminating the long, dark room, throwing shadows on the wall drawings of naked women. I was embarrassed to look at them; they were so erotic, even the tables seemed to cling to them, to hug them, to encircle them, as if expecting to merge with them completely.

The ceiling, perhaps to relieve the eye, perhaps to emphasize the murals, was barren. At one time probably whitewashed, now it was darkened by the smoke, the heat, and many years of neglect.

The door opened. One by one, slowly, silently, five men all very thin, all very pale, all dressed in black shabby, baggy suits, walked in. Quietly, with heads bowed as if afraid to look up, they began unpacking their black instrument cases.

“Who are these creeps?” I asked Elizaveta, who still was busy on my hair.

“They’re our musicians. One of them,” she whispered, “is a Jew. These men never talk to us. They think we are bad, lost women and they are scared to death of us.”

The clock struck. A quarter to six. Wang, a Chinese waiter in a long white gown, began clearing the table in a hurry. Some of the girls had not yet finished eating and were scraping the last few spoonfuls on their plates.

“Hurry up, girls, hurry up!” the owner was saying. “If you’re not ready at six o’clock you’ll be fined. Remember that.” The girls looked at her indifferently as she bustled off again.

Just at that moment, the door opened again and a girl slithered in. She had on an extremely short, tight skirt, and her hair was plastered down like mine in wet ringlets. She did not glance at anyone but walked directly into the dressing room.

“That’s Yelena,” Tamara, the blonde, explained to me.

“Is she afraid of us too?” I asked.

Tamara shrugged. “No. She just minds her business. Sometimes I think..” and she tapped at her forehead.

At last, at six sharp, the bar doors were flung wide open. In excited waves, by threes, by fours, and then in swarms like bees searching for exotic and fragrant flowers, the soldiers gushed in. We, the dancers sat quietly at the tables along the walls, hoping to be chosen quickly by anyone at all.   

My first few nights in the bar, I thought all the soldiers would rush to pick the most beautiful girls. But the pattern was quite different: the English picked the ones in the brightest dresses; the Americans chose the good dancers; the French selected girls with seduction in their eyes, and the Italians preferred voluptuous figures.

Luckily for me, on my first night at the bar the servicemen had just been paid so every girl was in demand. Giggles and shrieks rose and fell and were finally drowned in the Russian rendition of American jazz, the dancers’ feet moving faster and faster with the tempo. A short marine approached me. I took it as an invitation to dance. I was elated and happy, but felt sorry for my partner. I knew I was not a great find. I stumbled, I floundered, I looked furtively at the marine, hoping he would not feel the beating his feet were taking. And to make matters worse, whenever I looked at my own feet in the clumsy flat black shoes with drooping cotton stocking protruding from the yellow chiffon.... I must have been the saddest sack on the dance floor that night!

My marine had perseverance, however. We lasted out the dance. The music stopped, he steered me to a table, bought a whiskey for himself and the standard lemonade for me. He said something to me in English. I smiled, silently staring at him. After a few minutes of this mute exchange, he finished his drink in a hurry, mumbled something, and vanished.

A Frenchman tried his luck next—just two dances but no drink. Then a succession of American sailors with their bell bottoms. I had never seen such pants. They fascinated me. I forgot about my feet completely, began to relax, to dance better, and was soon quite able to follow the new and strange rhythms.

In the first few weeks, whenever my partner and I sat down at a table, conversation, for me at least, was no problem, due to complete lack of English and the loud music. Over and over, to the utmost capacity of their lungs, the five men in solid black, night after night, blared their entire repertoire of American jazz. To this day, I can sing “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” “If I Had a Talking Picture of You,” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”

We, the girls, loved most of all the song, “I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” written in 1930 but already in 1931 popular in China. The hero’s heart is weeping because he is not dancing with the girl whom he passionately loves, but with a complete stranger. He tries hard to smile while tears slowly envelop his heart.

A Russian could have written this as well—Ivan loved Olea but she loves Boris. Thus all three are unhappy- a frequent Russian theme. In the bar, our Slavic souls sympathized fully with the forsaken American and reminisced about our past sad loves and dreamt blissfully of better encounters in the future. When that tune was played, the girls without male partners danced mournfully together, eyes glistening in reveries.

The most popular number among our customers was undoubtedly “The St. Louis Blues.” It was also the masterpiece and the pride of our band. The trumpet player’s cheeks ballooned and his face turned scarlet with effort. Time and time again he was saved from probable apoplexy in the nick of time by the bar owner who frequently bustled over and enforced pauses between the dances, hoping to persuade the soldiers to sit and buy a round of drinks.

The evening wore on with the din, the shrieks, the drunken men, the grabbing, goosing, pulling hands, hands holding so tightly that one suffocated, hands making lewd gestures. All this created havoc, confusion, ugliness, despair, and utter loneliness.

The only person who seem unperturbed by it all was the bar owner. Facing the door, she sat like a gypsy princess in a large armchair; a red shawl with huge cabbage-flowered roses over her shoulders, big ring-shaped earrings, bracelets, and rings. With her fiery black eyes, her face powdered and rouged, and her proud glance, she reigned with an iron hand over her salacious and unruly kingdom, demanding and getting attention and obedience from everyone in the room. The old timers knew her ways and knew the limits of permissiveness in her bar.

But not the American sailor sitting a few tables down from her. He rebelled at paying a dollar for his girl’s lemonade, seized Wang by the arms, and pounded his fist on the table, demanding a real whiskey for his companion. Wang was outraged—no one had ever touched him this way before—and wailed for his boss. She waddled up, waved her finger at the culprit, her bracelets, necklace, and flesh shaking in unison. The girls began giggling, interpreting her tirade into Russian: “No Strong drinks for the girls, the first and foremost rule of the bar.” The young sailor hurriedly ducked away from the waving finger, repeating constantly, “Shut up, shut up,” and, grabbing his hat, fled into the night.

Then we heard a scuffle at the opposite end of the room. An Italian officer was glaring at an English tommy. A fight was in the air, we could sense it. We recalled the lurid stories about Italians carrying knives and using them eagerly and quickly. Sometimes we even saw the result of such fights when, after a prolonged silence, an old English customer would come in, minus a few fingers or an ear or sporting an impressive gash across his face. Naturally, all this lent a certain color and excitement to our lives and was a source of endless conversation and speculation on many, many dull evenings in the bar.

This time an Italian officer started a fight over Olga, the teacher. She was the statuesque idol of the Latin clientele. That night she was wearing a shocking green dress with enormous purple polka dots—just what the English admired. The officer was so determined to have Olga as his partner that he pulled out a knife and was on the point of stabbing the tommy. Everyone screamed, petrified. A group of American marines rushed in, wrenched the knife away, and pushed both contenders out the front door.

Our boss trundled in the wake of the melee, grumbling and gesticulating. Payday nights were good for business, but pretty rough on her nerves. On nights like these, they probably felt like the strings of a guitar tightened up for a major chord.

The noise, the jostling, the crowding went on and on. Out of the babble of unfamiliar languages, one distinct phrase, “Shut up! Shut up!” kept recurring from all over the room. I thought of it as one word, “Shuddup.” I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was English and I filed it carefully in my vocabulary, happy that I was beginning to learn the language.

At times, I lost track of Miss Olive in the crowd, but every now and again, I would feel a little nudge against my foot and there she was, walking by with an escort and flashing back a quick smile of reassurance. It cheered me to know she was nearby, that she cared, that she kept an eye on me.

At long last, when I had despaired of the evening’s ever ending, the boss began herding out the last guests. The musicians finally put away their instruments. When the bar closed, some girls left with a soldier or sailor, some walked home with other Women, Olive and I among them. A few uniformed men were loitering outside the bar, but Olive lost no time leading our way. She looked rather severe as she rapidly made her way through the throngs, but when the men jostled her, she called out replies in a good humored fashion.

On the way home, the events of my first evening at the bar kept churning over and over in my head—the sights, slights, and humiliation. I was disappointed I was neither the Cinderella nor the belle. The soldiers were completely indifferent to me. To them I was merely a new face, no more than that if they had thought about me at all. Most likely they did not.

Suddenly I also realized it was October 1, 1931—my intended wedding day. In the last two weeks, my life indeed had taken a strange twist. And it hurt. I needed desperately to talk to someone. But by now, there was just Miss Olive at my side and she spoke no Russian. I racked my brains for some of my Harbin classroom English. And it came:

“Great Britain,” I said aloud, slowly and carefully, “is sit- u-a-ted on an island.”

Miss Olive stopped abruptly. He mouth dropped open and then she shrieked and howled with laughter. After a moment, so did I. We laughed all the way up the stairs and after we got in bed.

I fell asleep immediately. I dreamt I was wearing my wedding dress but now it was bright orange like a radiant midday sun. How beautiful it was, how happy I looked, how everyone loved me. I woke up hearing Miss Olive move about stealthily, preparing tea on our primus stove.

After breakfast, Olive and I got a few things from Madame Givet. Fortunately, she was not home. There was no need to talk, to rehash impressions of my first night at the Taku Bar.

Olive and I settled down in the rooming house in the British Concession to a frugal and circumspect daily life. By one in the morning we were always ready for bed, a huge double bed for the two of us. At nine, Olive made strong tea, I put rolls on the table and we had our breakfast. Then we cleaned our small, dark room, trying hard to get rid of the musty smell and fetid air. I can still remember the smell of the highly perfumed cheap soap m the house. That smell was running in dead heat with the claustrophobic stairway air of the entire establishment, especially on our top floor. It is said that the nose is the most sensitive of the sensory organs and tires most easily. This is true After a whilewe hardly smelled anything.

A lunch of bread, tea, and sausage about noon. Then chores and rare visits to other tenants, gossiping with them over sunflower seeds. Newspapers, books, or magazines did not exist for us or the other tenants. I do not remember reading one word during my entire stay in Tientsin. We had no radio either and gathered the local and world news either from our customers or other dancers in the bar. Frankly, we did not really care what was happening in the world as long as we had enough to eat, could keep warm, and had a place to sleep. The huge city of Tientsin with its million and a half multinational population, its vast commerce, its beautiful foreign concessions, cathedrals, manors, glittering shops, did not touch our lives at all. We lived in a cocoon for the day and by the day.

Only occasionally, to break the boredom and monotony, we went to the English Park in the British Concession. We admired its tenderly tended shrubs, flower beds, spacious alleys and broad walks, baby carriages attended by uniformed nurses, and Chinese amahs watching over children at play. But we never saw any Chinese men or women strolling about. I asked Olive about this once. She rather shyly muttered something to the effect that the Chinese were not permitted in this park. I did not know enough to press the issue further.

The days passed slowly, but five o’clock never failed to come. Then we hurried to put on our good dresses and get to the bar on time. By five-thirty, we were there, waiting for our free dinner, the bridge that linked the dullness of the day with the bedlam of the night.

On a night like my first one, when the men had just been paid, every girl was in demand. But as payday receded, competition to get the men who still had money sharpened. Only Yelena—who moved like a marionette with her short bright skirts, her long thin legs, and her dead-pan expression, and who was beginning to give me the feeling that I was seeing a living corpse— favored the English tommies. The rest of us, like cabaret girls everywhere in the world, preferred the American marines. They were the best paid and the biggest spenders. All the others, even the Italian officers, the only officers who ever visited our bar, were usually poor. We dreaded being stuck with them for an evening, laughing and sitting the whole six hours with one drink, from which we earned a mere twenty cents.

But just before payday, even the Americans had barely enough money to buy themselves a couple of beers. We were pretty well forgotten. We missed our small commissions, but sometimes were glad to sit, rest our feet, and gossip.

Miss Olive was more successful with her customers than any of the rest of us. They were relatively few, but they were loyal, constant, and generous. Mostly they were middle-aged American marines. She rarely danced. Instead she sat at a corner table and held court, often with four or five drinks of lemonade in front of her at once. Her customers hung around her in a little group, plying her with more lemonades and avidly listening to an inexhaustible supply of stories. I could not understand her rapid and colloquial English, but I could understand that she was telling her stories well. The men listened attentively and looked up annoyed if anyone tried to break into their corner of the room or if others at the tables nearby got too loud. Then simultaneously they would break into roars of laughter and pound each other on the back while Miss Olive sat looking pleased and a little priggish.

The other girls thought that, on the whole. Miss Olive was very strange. All sorts of rumors floated around about her past. In fact, I gathered she was something of a legend throughout Tientsin. One story had it that she once owned a prosperous brothel in the French concession. Another said that she had been married to an English remittance man who got involved in some confidence game and was jailed. Miss Olive was supposed to be awaiting his release and in the meantime trying to make the best of her life. But she never told me, or anyone else as far as I knew, one scrap of information about herself.

I lived with Miss Olive when I hardly knew any English from October 1931 to mid-January 1932. Many a time, I must have been a nuisance to have around. Yet she never raised her voice, never scolded me. She was seriously annoyed with me only once—I used her delicate cuticle scissors to cut my toe nails. I broke the scissors. I remember  Miss Olive with     love and  eternal gratitude. She saved me from all evil in the Taku Bar. She was like a mother hen and I was her ugly duckling.

Miss Olive occasionally took part in the idle talk of the women in the bar, but never in their quarrels. And they spent a lot of time at that. One never knew just who, at the moment was a friend and who was the enemy.

Living with Olive, I worked hard at my English and in the bar I was working hard in learning to dance. I was becoming popular among the American marines. This brought me commissions but also a good share of bad feelings. “You greedy pig!” Elizaveta shouted at me venomously one evening in the dressing room. “I saw you making eyes at my partner. You’ve already had two Americans tonight. Oh I’d like to wring your neck, you rat!”

Immediately Tamara and a dark, gypsy-like girl named Maria came to my defense. “Anybody could see your partner didn’t like you, Elizaveta. Why don’t you learn to dance!”

It so happened that everyone was temporarily jealous of Elizaveta because she had been able not only to replace Joe with another American, but her new mate had already applied to his commander for permission to marry her, a rare occurrence and the dream of many Russian taxi dancers in China. Naturally, everyone envied and hated her.

The next night at supper, Elizaveta, perfectly amiable again, was plastering down my hair as usual—I think she must have been a frustrated hairdresser—and sticking up for me while Dusia complained that having a silly, know-nothing child around was a nuisance.

Everyone loved giving advice. I should use my opportunities to get a man to shack up with me; I should stay clear of men away from the bar. The same girls would advise me one way one day, the other way the next. As for me, at first I had no conscious viewpoint on this matter, one way or the other. Indeed, I had no particular point of view about anything that went on in the Taku Bar or about my own place in this new,bewildering life.

But points of view and attitudes develop almost of themselves, and if there is no important incident to hasten or to crystallize them, small incidents will do. On the surface, nothing really happened at the Taku Bar. Night after night, seven nights a week, there was simply more or less the same confusion and racket: “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” white-gowned Wang flapping back and forth with his tray of whiskeys and lemonades, walking with a duck-like gait, shrieking girls being pulled onto soldiers’ laps, fogs of cigarette smoke, uniforms, uniforms, uniforms.

But out of the hordes of men, three emerged as individuals. One after another, three gave me a jolt. I progressed from bewilderment at my surroundings and lack of direction about my own behavior, to decision, to stoical determination to make the best of things, and finally to outrage.

The three were all Americans: Steve, the simple, homesick farm boy; Charles, of the sophisticated and inquiring mind; and

Jim, the Texas soldier of fortune.

Steve was first. He came into the bar one evening, blond and chubby cheeked, and sat down at my table, keeping his knees out from under as if he were prepared to get up and run at a moment’s notice. “You like drink?” he asked indifferently.

All evening, at intervals, he repeated, “You like drink?” and I responded “Thank you with much pleasure.” In between, we sat looking at the dancers and occasionally smiling at each other.

When the bar closed, Steve said, “You and me, we get along fine.” I thought so too.

The next night Steve turned up again, this time getting his knees under the table and asking “You like drink?” with greater confidence. Making his words low and simple for me, he told me that his parents had gone to America from Poland. At home he lived on a farm. He had farmers’ hands, big and stubby, and farmers’ eyes, blue as the sky, not darting and alert, but quiet and focused far away. His nose was short and buttony, like a baby’s nose. He was very homesick in Tientsin.

Before I met Steve I had never wondered why the soldiers came to our bar. Steve did not tell me in as many words, but I soon understood he was there because there was no other place for him to go. He opened my eyes to the fact that Europeans in Tientsin classified enlisted men, even of their own nationality, with Chinese coolies. I learned from Steve’s artless remarks, made without malice, that “no nice girl” in Tientsin would speak to a soldier or a marine.

“How soldiers not in bar make fun?” I asked him once in pidgin English.

“Just drink,” he said.

I felt sorry for Steve. He was healthy and big and four years older than I, but he wasn’t as tough as I was.

It was a good week, having him as a steady customer. Then on Saturday night he came in as usual and sat down as usual but did not ask, “You like drink?” Instead he said, “I come here week now. You like Steve?”

“Yes, thank you,” I replied.

“Today I find place,” he said. He grinned bashfully and blushed. “I buy nice presents. We live together. Later we like, we marry.” He blushed again. “Hey, you like drink?” he asked.

“Steve,” I said. “I no go tonight. I think.”

And I did think. Steve’s offer was tempting. Maybe this was a way to escape from the bar. Maybe this was the way to find security. I asked nobody’s advice, not even Miss Olive’s.

What instinct of self preservation came to my rescue, I do not know. But the next day, as Miss Olive and I were dressing for work, both of us silently preoccupied with our own thoughts, the whole notion struck me as absurd. Didn’t I know that eventually Steve would leave Tientsin like the others? Didn’t I know there would be a hunt for somebody else and then somebody else? And what would happen finally to me?

When I told all this to Steve, he scolded me a little, became depressed, bought me a last lemonade, and said goodbye.

That was that.

A few days later, Elizaveta told me her new husband was a buddy of Steve’s. Steve was moving in with them, and he had given Elizaveta all the presents he prepared for me. As she combed and pinned my wet hair, she described each item in lengthy, glowing detail—the fancy pillows all covered with embroidery, the bright blue rayon dress, the rhinestone necklace, the celluloid powder box. Steve told her the gifts were for me. She was aghast at my stupidity. “A nice fellow like Steve! You must be crazy!” she exclaimed. Yes, everyone agreed I must be crazy. I didn’t care. I had settled it with myself, once and for all, that I would do no shacking up.

In our bar was a handsome, willowy girl named Galia. She ate and walked with exaggerated refinement. She was one of those Russian exiles who always talked about her family’s position and influence and lost wealth. For some reason, perhaps because she herself felt trapped in a life of shacking up and wanted to believe there had been no alternative, she seemed to take my decision about Steve as a personal affront.

One evening when I was sitting alone, I heard my name mentioned amid giggles. I glanced around at a party of girls and marines nearby. “I swear it’s the truth,” Galia was saying shrilly, “We’ve got a virgin in our bar.”

“Where is she?” asked one of the marines.

“Over there. Sitting by herself,” squealed Galia. “Afraid to lose her virginity!” This was followed by screams of laughter.

The marine, a rather nondescript looking fellow with black hair that kept falling into his eyes, rose and walked toward me.

“Like to dance, gal?” he asked.

“Sure, sure. I’ll dance with great pleasure,” I said,

mumbling one of the English sentences I had learned by heart.

The dance over, he took me to a table and bought me a lemonade. For himself he ordered nothing. “You long time here?” he asked.

“No, I here month. No can do other things so dance and drink for bread,” I said, expressing myself the best I could.

“My name Charles. You like here very much? People nice?” He was making a real effort at conversation.

I had been taught to say that I was very happy, that I liked the work, that soldiers and sailors were the most welcome guests. I looked around to make sure no one was near us. “I no like here but please, Charles, you no say other people. The boss she throw me out, she hear I say this.”

His face was sympathetic. He understood my pidgin English.

In the next several weeks I had many talks with Charles. He was much more curious about Tientsin and its people than anyone else I had ever met. He would ask me question after question and, jerking his head back to flop his hair out of his eyes, would listen patiently to my halting, awkward answers. He made me feel that I was an interesting person and that Tientsin, even the bar was an interesting place. Probably he was the best example of those who “join the Navy to see the world.” In return he told me about a kid sister who    lived     in   a place called Brooklyn. “You my Russian kid sister,” he said, smiling.

I asked him if life was wonderful and easy in America and he gave a short, hard laugh. “Things tough. No jobs,” he said. I puzzled over this awhile and gave up. America was supposed to be a rich place; people did not have to work there.

Charles liked to take me to lunch in the various foreign restaurants in Tientsin. I was always hungry, always ready to try new and exotic dishes.

One late fall afternoon he took Miss Olive and me to a Japanese restaurant. We were welcomed at the door by a little man in a silk kimono, bowing from the waist and welcoming us effusively.

“You’ll have to take off your shoes, so you won’t dirty their floors,” Charles told me. Miss Olive and I were quite amused, as we put on the slippers. I laughed even more when I had to sit on the floor. Charles’ long legs stuck out on either side of the tiny, low table. I tickled his stocking feet gently. He tickled me back and said, half laughing:

“You’re getting pretty fresh, my redhead. It’s o.k. with me. But go easy with some of those bozos off the boat. The first chance you give them, watch out!”

“Oh, Charles, I no fresh girl. I, lady.” I said reproachfully.

“If you’re a lady, you shouldn’t eat so fast,” seeing me stuff my mouth full of rice and sukiyaki.

“But I like,” said I, pouting.

“That’s what I lake about you, you always lake everything.” Charles teased me, imitating my accent.

As we ate, two Japanese waitresses fluttered about us, adding sauce to the sukiyaki simmering over a charcoal brazier. To Miss Olive and me they paid little attention but made a great fuss over Charles, who teased us about it, saying that Japanese girls were brought up with the proper respect for men.

Olive and I were having such a good time that we didn’t care whether we were late at the bar or not. But Charles finally urged us out.

Later that evening, he dashed into the bar in great excitement, sought out Miss Olive and me and sat us down together. An hour after we left the restaurant, the whole place was blown up, he announced. He shook his finger at me. “Miss Olive and you stay English concession,” he said. “Japanese take Manchuria. Now think they do anything in China. Maybe trouble here next. You be careful.”

Trouble came as he expected. Tientsin experienced a mild warfare during the next few days. Japanese were caught and beaten up when they ventured out of their concession. Reprisals followed. The soldiers and marines who came to the bar were tense and fidgety, arguments and fights were more frequent.

And then the blow struck us. The zone in which our bar stood was declared off limits for troops. Her clientele gone, the boss decided to close the bar. We were dumbfounded when we realized our sole source of income was cut off.

It was close to a new payday, but we were given no money because our full month was not up.

For the first week Miss Olive and I were fortunate. Every night Charles bought us our dinner. We were sure of one meal a day at least. But then his ship was ordered out of Tientsin for patrol duty. Before he left, he emptied his pockets into my hand.

“This is all I have, Tania,” he said. “Let’s hope it’ll do until the bar opens. Can’t be too long. You be good and brave. If you get in trouble, you send postcard, and he wrote down for me his ship address.

In the lean month that followed, when the money Charles left was gone, I was often hungry and always cold. It was mid- November. The bitter North China winter was in earnest. Icy winds were blowing from the Mongolian plains.

Miss Olive’s winter coat had yielded up its interlining years before. It was now a bed quilt and I had only a thin fall coat. When we were hungry, we roamed the streets purposelessly, driven out of our room by the dreariness and the cold, the cold which seemed almost worse indoors than out.

Many times I made up my mind to write and ask Charles for money. But I did not do it, whether out of pride, shyness or fear of disappointment. However, the very thought that I had this untouched resource was a bulwark. If it had not been for Charles and for Miss Olive’s matter-of-fact confidence, I have no idea where I would have turned. But as it was. Miss Olive and I shared our hunger and shared our food. It was then I began to learn her technique of concentrating on each hour’s existence and of smiling at the triumph of getting by another day. I never really gained her wise old mastery of that art, but stiffened by the intangible security of Charles parting words, I made a good disciple.

And somehow, before we reached the ultimate desperation of too much cold and too much hunger, something always turned up. Once it was Madame Givet with a pound of ham, butter and cheese, and two loaves of bread. Sometimes it was the other tenants of our house inviting us in for tea and maybe a bite of cake. Twice it was a message from the bar owner to hasten over and slip in by the back door, summonses that were really for Miss Olive only. Some of her faithful coterie had 

managed to elude the military police and sneak back to the bar. I lagged along, however, and while the men listened to her stories in the darkened room, they bought me lemonades too and later dinner.

At last, one bitter, blustering December day, came the news that hard times were over. The bar reopened, noisier, rowdier, more crowded than ever. “Merry Christmas,” people were saying and, in my newly won determination to accept everything cheerfully, I said it too without understanding that this was our Russian holiday with a different name and a different date.

Then in a few nights, English tommies turned up by the score, almost bursting with exuberance, and invited us girls en masse to a party the next night in Gordon Hall, a place they described proudly as “a castle.”

For this occasion, I bought a new and singularly inappropriate dress, street-length brown wool with a heavy woolen jacket, for I was temporarily obsessed with the notion of keeping warm. Miss Olive wore her blue fluttering dress and stuck close by me all evening. Whenever a tommy began to paw me too enthusiastically, she rescued me with the nicest possible mixture of firmness and good humor. Happily I abandoned to her the job of watching out for me. It didn’t matter about my dress. Nobody noticed. There were so many, many people, and all of them happy, loud, and affectionate and shouting “Merry Christmas” at everyone.

Back at the bar after the holiday, the soldiers seemed to have more money than ever and to be more reckless with it. Good times had returned with a vengeance.

The most ostentatious spender of the lot was Jim. Jim was a marine newcomer and he fascinated all of us, not only because of his money but because of what we called his “dangerous look.” He had very black, heavy eyebrows, was apparently permanently half-drunk, and he had a lanky, sinister sort of grace. On his cheek was a bandage, the trophy of a fist fight, and he wore it like a decoration. It was whispered around that he came from Texas. Now, neither I nor any of the other dancers knew what or where Texas was, but for some reason it seemed glamorous and we thought it worth repeating. He reminded me of the swashbuckling czarist officers in the Harbin Black Shirts.

One night early in January, Jim got into a rousing brawl with tall Tamara. Drawn by his roars and Tamara’s screams, we all left off dancing or talking and crowded around the furious pair. Jim held Tamara by the wrist; she was trying to pull away, and both were shrieking accusations. Some of the other soldiers, egged on by our boss, attemped to calm Jim down, but most of them simply enjoyed the scene and screeched their own entertaining comments.

“That’s the way, treat ‘em rough, Jim.”

“Want some help?”

“Come on, come on, a little more action.”

Jim gave Tamara’s arm a cruel jerk. Her face went white and she staggered to gain her balance. Jim grinned and returned to the audience. “She doesn’t want to dance until I’ve bought her ten drinks. The damned whore!”

With the flat of his hand against her chest, he shoved her against the table, turned his back and strode through his audience. All the girls scuttled back to their tables.

He sauntered down the room, glancing loftily at each dancer, and then stopped where I was sitting. With an air of great unconcern, he pulled me from my chair and began to dance. “You don’t think I’m so bad, do you kid?” he breathed in my ear.

“I am most pleased to dance,” I said, actually scared to death. Miss Olive, I noticed, was keeping a watchful eye on us.

Her intervention was not needed, however. It was already almost closing time and though Jim was sullen, he was self-controlled.

“Meet me tomorrow afternoon at two at the corner of Davenport and Cousins Road,” he ordered, as he was leaving. To avoid trouble, I agreed.

Still with the notion of avoiding trouble, I turned up at the appointed time, bringing Miss Olive with me of course. Jim greeted her politely, then bade her goodbye. I was secretly delighted to observe his mystification and irritation as she bluntly stayed with us, then his dawning realization that she was one of the party. Pulling me off a little, he demanded, “Why in hell did you bring that old dame?”

“Miss Olive always comes my dates,” I answered.

“Oh Jesus, well come on!” he exclaimed. A crowd of rickshaw coolies had gathered around us hoping for fares. Cursing at them, he seized my hand and pushed our way through.

Miss Olive nimbly followed.

The coolies shaken off, he muttered something about a present. Miss Olive and I exchanged glances. We were thinking of the first rule of the cabaret dancer: watch out for trouble when you get a present.

“No want present,” I said, lack of English forcing me to be rude.

But Jim looked down his nose imperiously, took me firmly by the elbow and steered me into a jewelry shop on Victoria Road, the Fifth Avenue of Tientsin. I stood with Olive, ill at ease, while Jim rummaged through a tray of rings. Finally he called me over curtly and thrust an alexandrite set in white gold on my finger.

“Many thanks,” I said aloud, wondering to myself, “What happens now?”

What happened was the last thing I expected. Miss Olive’s attitude toward presents went into reverse. She began diffidently admiring various small articles in the shop windows and with much coy hesitation accepted Jim’s gallant offers to purchase a lipstick and handkerchief. Then she progressed to more expensive items and less subtle hints. Rewarded by a large and fancy box of powder and an ornament comb, she finally dropped all pretense of being coaxed and boldly requested a warm jacket.

The whole afternoon was spent in shopping. My embarrassment at Miss Olive’s shenanigans changed to apprehension and then to rather delighted stupefaction. When the spree was over and Jim had deposited us at our door, he had only one dollar left from a tremendous roll.

As we dressed to leave for the bar. Miss Olive cheerfully surveyed her pile of loot. Every now and again she would meet my eye and grin, then quickly compose her mouth into a thin, prim line.

Jim, to my relief, didn’t turn up at the bar again for a couple of weeks, probably because he was so broke. But on the next payday, he came again. He took me to a table, ordered a drink for me, and in rapid succession he drank a few whiskies.

He told me a tall tale about his friendships with John Gilbert, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and a new star named Jeanette MacDonald. I believed everything he said and was eagerly waiting for more when he leaned over confidentially and whispered, “Tonight we go to a hotel.”

My impulse was to jump up and run. Stuttering and blushing, which of course gave me away, I pretended not to understand him. “I have room with Miss Olive,” I told him. “I no need room in hotel.”

“Cut it out,” he said, raising his voice. “You know damn well what I mean.”

I naively tried a new tack. “You have sweetheart in America, no? What she think?” I slipped from the seat, my eye on the dressing room door.

With one quick movement, Jim was up and barring my way. Now I was in Tamara’s shoes. He slapped me hard across the cheek. “Damned bitch!” he shouted. “You promised to sleep with me when I bought you that ring!”

“This damn prostitute! This cheat,” he shouted to the bar at large. Turning, he slapped me again on one already stinging cheek, then on the other.

I longed to throw the ring at him. But this dramatic gesture was impossible because I had already traded the ring for a winter coat. While the bar owner railed at him and two soldiers held him, I ducked miserably through the door into the dressing room. There I leaned against the wall, hot tears of humiliation streaming down my face. The girls came in to comfort me. The woman who had denied she was my teacher and had always ignored me patted me on the arm, then blurted, “It can’t always be school days for people like us, Tania.” Yelena came too and tonelessly said the only words she ever spoke to me, “I could kill them all.” Then Miss Olive gently suggested we go home early.

All the way home I sobbed. When we reached our room I put my head in her lap and poured out all the accumulated fear and anger of my fourteen years. She let me talk on and on, in a sobbing, inarticulate mixture of Russian and English, while she patted my head now and again and made sympathetic cooing sounds.

I won’t go back! I cried over and over. “I won’t go back to the Taku Bar!” °

Olive comforted me but never said what both of us knew. I had no alternative but the Taku Bar.

The next day neither of us talked of what happened When five o’clock struck, we put on our bar dresses closed the door to our room, and left for another free dinner and another night of noise and lemonades. There seemed no way out. Tacitly we agreed that the old routine still stood.

The Piano Shop on Nanking Road: A Brief History of S. Moutrie and Co.

This would make a great topic and title for a book. The other day, while I was conducting some newspaper research online, I came across the name S. Moutrie and Co. Originally this was for a footnote for an article I’m writing about the dancing world of Shanghai for an upcoming book on social dancing in the 1920s-1930s. Intrigued, I did some research and found out that this was the first company in China to manufacture pianos. The company began in the 1870s, when a Londoner named Sydenham Moutrie moved to Shanghai and set up a business importing pianos to China. He later branched out to Yokohama Japan. In the 1890s, S. Moutrie and Co. began to manufacture pianos built in their shop in Shanghai, using Chinese laborers. The story of how they did so is told in exquisite detail in the news articles below. Eventually the company began to sell other musical instruments and audio equipment for listening to music. Again, we get some wonderful descriptions of Moutrie’s and other music shops that existed in Shanghai, including what sort of equipment they offered, how their shops were set up and arranged, and what sort of music they sold—the lists of song recordings are particularly interesting and precious. All in all there is a treasure trove of information in the newspapers about the company and its operations in Shanghai. In 1907, Moutrie died suddenly, leaving the company for the shareholders and board to continue. Moutrie’s kept apace with technological developments in music and continued to serve as a premier purveyor of musical instruments through the 1930s. By the late 1930s, owing to the economic downturn exacerbated by war, and to technological developments that turned people away from playing instruments and towards listening to sound recordings on radio or gramophone, the business of piano-making was in peril. Yet during the WWII era, Moutrie’s was able to expand its influence and its operations to several Asian countries and cities, as the last article in this collection makes clear.

A New Shanghai Industry.

(North China Herald, 26 April 1895, pg. 637)

Though low exchange is a sad infliction to residents in China generally, it encourages manufactures on the spot for which we used to rely upon Europe, as the bimetallists point out so strongly, and one instance of this can be found in Messrs. S. Moutrie and Co.’s establishment. Formerly the firm used to import all their pianos from Europe, but owing to the great fall in exchange and the cheapness of labour in the East, the firm seriously considered the possibility of making the piano for the most part in Shanghai, importing for the purpose certain essential parts which can only be satisfactorily made at home, and Mr. Sydenham Moutrie’s long experience in Broadwood’s establishment in London and the lengthened residence in the East, eminently fitted him to carry this project to fulfilment. First of all Mr. Moutrie set about procuring the proper wood for the purpose, and this he found could be obtained from Japan, of a quality that was in every way suitable. Of course the greatest care is taken that the wood is thoroughly seasoned, which is done on the Shanghai premises. Mr. Moutrie was fortunate in obtaining a Japan wood that makes an excellent sounding board, which is a very important matter. The wrest plank, into which the keys for tuning are driven, and also the iron frame, metal tuning plate, action, keys and strings are imported from Europe, the freight being comparatively much less than if they formed part of an entire instrument, and this enables the firm to complete in their Shanghai workroom an instrument which is in every way as good as one that could be imported. One of these can now be seen in the Nanking Road. It is a cottage piano in solid hardwood case, ebonised, with an iron frame, metal tuning plates, check action, celluloid keys, being 3ft. 9-in. in height, 4ft. 6in. in width, and 1ft. 11in. in depth. In addition to the iron frame this piano has a very solid wooden frame with seven thick wooden pillars running to the top of the instrument, while the wrest plank— which bears the tension of the strings, estimated in this piano to be about 14 tons— is supported by the iron frame, and bolted right through the wooden pillars at the top, thus effectually preventing the wrest plank from moving down or curling over, which frequently happens in pianos of this description when proper precautionary measures are not taken.

The continued fall in exchange, and the high rate of freight that has to be paid on an instrument when shipped from Europe in a complete condition, rendered it impossible for Messrs. S. Moutrie & Co. to offer a home-made piano at a lower cost than £40, and if even a discount of ten per cent, was allowed, the net cost of £36 represented at the rate of exchange recently touched—say 2/8/1/2—Tls. 265, and yet a similar and equally good piano which is turned out in Shanghai now, can be sold for Tls. 200 or with allowance of cash discount, Tls. ISO. This fact is very significant, and it is probable that before long we shall not only have our pianos manufactured in Shanghai, but many other necessary articles which were formerly obtained direct from Europe.

Messrs. S. Moutrie & Co.’s Piano Factory

(North China Herald, 19 Nov 1897 pg. 914)

About two years ago attention was drawn to the fact that Mr. Moutrie, of Messrs. S. Moutrie & Co., had succeeded in turning out the first piano manufactured in Shanghai. Although only a comparatively short interval has elapsed, what was then necessarily an experiment has grown into a vigorous industry, with the prospect of a bright future. In all some 95 instruments have been made at Messrs. S. Moutrie’s factory in the Nanking Road, and in every case they have given complete satisfaction, being remarkable for excellent tone, and standing the severe climatic changes of China in a surprising way. About six a month are now being completed, and the demand is greater than the supply, the instruments as a rule being sold before they are finished. They jave been sent to the most distant parts of China, as well as to the outports, and, as we have said with every satisfaction. Apart from the advantage of being constructed to resist the climate, which in this part of the world works such havoc with pianos, they have the additional and important recommendation of costing less than the imported article. The counterpart of a cottage piano from home which would cost about Tls. 360, can be bought for say Tls. 250, and for conscientious workmanship, quality of tone, and beauty of design and finish the locally manufactured piano stands the test of strict comparison.

Recently a representative of the N.-C. Daily News had an opportunity of going over the factory, and witnessing the delicate and complex work of building up a piano. It was a most interesting occasion, demonstrating once more the high grade which Chinese artisans can be trained to, and the amazingly accurate results they can attain under competent instruction and supervision. When it is learned that the majority of the operatives have come into Mr. Moutrie’s hands unfamiliar even with a brass screw, the state to which they have been brought as carpenters, joiners, and mechanicians, is a credit to his patience and skill. Before proceeding to write of the work carried on there, a description of the factory in the Nanking Road may not be out of place. The ground floor is principally used for the storage of lumber in its rough state, but of two small rooms partitioned off, one is where the finished instrument is tuned, toned, and regulated, and the other for the storage of actions, keys, and metal parts which require careful keeping. The iron-frames, hammer-felts, wire, etc., are also here, whilst the stock of screws in a variety of sizes is certainly striking. Necessarily great attention has to be paid to the wood used in the piano. The lumber includes beech from Japan, teak from Bangkok, fir and spruce from Vancouver, and poplar from other parts of America. As an instance of the care exercised in the selection of the materials at the factory, it may be stated that Mr. Moutrie has the teak specially surveyed at Bangkok before it is shipped, and it comes up with a guarantee that it is of the best quality, and free from any flaws or defects. In the ordinary course such wood only finds a market in Europe, for the timber coming here usually is only of third quality.

It is on the top, or second floor, that the building of the piano actually takes place. This well-lighted and airy workshop is fitted with strong beams extending to the roof, making a capacious storehouse where the planks season and become fit for use. Speaking generally, the timber goes through a scientific course of acclimatising which lasts for about two years. First of all it is stored in a godown in rough planks for about six months, so as to become gradually dry. Then it is cut into the requisite sizes and placed in racks above large heaters which are on each floor. It remains there about three months, during which time the wood is never cool. Following upon this it is stored in the roof on the top floor, until it is required for use. The construction of the piano commences with the making of the frame, and, although the pianos all have iron frames, still it is considered that they should be supported by the wooden frame, which not only assures solidity to the instrument but also improves the tone. The frame is of very stout American fir, and is covered with a paint and protective varnish to counteract the effect of insects and damp. The string block is of beech, and supports the iron frame at the bottom. The wrest plank, into which the pins for tuning are screwed, is also made of beech imported from Europe. This plank is composed of three thicknesses of wood with the grain crossed, to prevent cracking. The sounding-board is made of spruce, varnished very carefully both at the front and the back. The bridge on the sounding board is imported from home, but the important work of putting in the pins—upon the correct distance of which so much depends, —is done here. The iron frames are imported from Europe, being made to Mr. Moutrie’s own design. They are of special strength, in order to be able to bear with every assurance of safety the great tension of the strings, which amounts in a cottage piano to about 13 tons. The pianos are strung with an amalgam-plated steel wire which resists rust, and though the copper-covered bass strings are at present imported from Europe. Messrs. S. Moutrie & Co. have a machine for making them. The cases of the piano are manufactured throughout of solid wood, no veneer being employed. The majority are of solid teak, but those for ebonising are made of poplar and beech, which being of closer grain take the ebonising better than the teak. The actions and keys are imported, and only check-actions of the very best quality are used. These are fitted into the instrument on the first floor, where the polishing is also carried out. They are also fitted with metal rails at the back to prevent warping, and the fastenings and other supports are all of metal. After this the piano is thoroughly polished and is taken downstairs to the finishing-room, where it is tuned and toned. The pianos are at present made in three or four models, the designs of which are as artistic as the workmanship is satisfactory.

So far we have given a sketch of the interesting processes which eventuate in a delightful instrument, but the success which Messrs. S. Moutrie & Co. have achieved in performing major operations upon pianos which have suffered the effects of time in many ways, are noteworthy, and would excite the admiration of experts.

In one case we saw a Collard and Collard grand, from which the sounding-board had been taken right out to be repaired, the bars having become loose. This arose from the glue having perished, and still further illustrated the importance of paying particular attention to such points where the climate is likely to be trying. In the construction of their pianos, Messrs. S. Moutrie & Co. use a particular kind of fish glue made on the premises.

The marvellous endurance of the glue used in old Chinese furniture has attracted attention, and it is this which induced Mr. Moutrie to experiment in the same direction. Altogether the visitor cannot fail to be struck with the evidence he sees in every little detail of a determination to have the best materials combined with the best workmanship.

The Music Shops

(North China Herald 15 May 1920, pg. 421)

All music shops are interesting, and Moutrie’s is a place to forget one’s troubles. They will put one of their charming new records on the Victrola and away goes dull care. Have you heard “If You Could Care,” by Frances Alda, or the new “Minuet” by Heifetz for the violin, or “La Campana di San Guisto” sung by Caruso, as only Caruso can sing? Tetrazzini sings a Solveig’s Song, and Mabel Garrison sings “Khaki Sammy-’’ They are all new and should be added to your collection as soon as possible. They have all the latest standard songs, “I Love Your Eyes of Grey,” “House of Memories,” “Bird Lullaby,” which is a gem, “Wait,” “Wind Song,” etc- And if you care for popular songs they are all there. Have you heard “Poor Little Butterfly is a Fly Girl Now” —sounds wicked does it not?—but really it is quite harmless. You might get “Freckles,” “Peggy,” “"My Baby’s Arms,” “Patches,” “I Might Be Your Once in a While,” and “I Want a Daddy to Rock me to Sleep”—to take with you on your holiday this summer. They all suggest the holiday mood and you can dance to most of them. Mr. J. Deane Wells, who is in Moutrie’s has written a number of songs, among them “In Flanders Fields,” and “Rest Ye in Peace” which is America’s answer to “In Flanders Fields.”

This shop has the Schirmer Library, Boston Music Library, and the music of Oliver Ditson Co. and Jos. Stern Co. They sell also all musical instruments.

The Period Design Grafonolas at Robinson & Co. are works of art. Each has been modelled after a piece of furniture that was used in the period it represents. For example, the Jacobean or Charles II is a tall cabinet profusely carved with birds and fruits The scrolled fretwork is backed with silk through which the music passes. The Queen Anne is the acme of simplicity and would look well in any room. The “Adam” should appeal to the Chinese, as it is finished in plum, blue, and yellow. Hand paintings cover its several sides and they are delicately executed. All these charming Grafonolas are operated by electricity, and stop automatically. Robinson & Co. are the only Shanghai agents for this decorative ‘‘period’’ variety. I saw a few very small instruments and when I inquired about them I was told that they were for children, but unfortunately no more can be procured. If I were a kiddie I should consider myself absolutely “made” if I could have my own Grafonola. There is a large assortment of new records at this shop including “The Vamp,” “India,” “Chong,” “Send Dunes,” “Egyptland,” ‘‘Mummy Mine,” and “Venetian Moon.” They are the agents for the Broadwood pianos of London.

From the Shanghai Times, 31 May 1919

Music Salon At Moutrie’s Shows Latest Orthos

Innovations In Luxuriant Types Of Reproductive Devices Shown

(China Press, 2 Feb 1928)

Messrs. S. Moutrie and Company have done somethIng new for the comfort of their friends and patrons, and added to their existing premises, in the new Salon on their Nanking Road premises especially constructed for listening to Victrola music of all kinds. It is over the shop, and occupies the entire second floor of the premises, and being done in lovely tones in the cream walls vieux rose and gold in the furniture, offers a very restful background for listening to music of any kind.

The decor of this salon in Shanghai’s odest music house is the work of two well-known Shanghai ladies, and is a complete ensemble of furniture in the Louis Seize manner, against the color scheme of which the satiny walnut sheens of the Electro-Orthophonic Victrolas, and Radiolas or combinations of one or all of the preceding, are particularly striking. The walls are painted in cream color and the cornices, frieze, and columns in old gold. There are three rose-color Axminster carpets, each wove in one piece.

The furniture consists of upholstered settees and easy chairs covered in old-gold and rose damask, arm chairs covered In striped two-color rose damask, finely carved, gilt semi-circular console tables and center tables with bevelled glass tops, also carved and gilt writing desk to match. The electric lighting is supplied from fourteen carved and gilt candelabras and two floor standards with rose color silk shades.       

Some of the machines here to be seen, described in detail, follow. It should be immensely popular with both foreigners and Chinese, here to be able to sit in luxurious comfort as one decides what type of musical instrument to have in ones home.

The Orthophonic Victrola is an instrument, which gives exceptional reception through the orthophonic system; it contains a non-set automatic eccentric groove brake which stops the record automatically without, pre-setting. The Cabinet is carried out in the Italian Renaissance style with the finest walnut veneers.

Automatic Orthophonic Electrola—is an instrument which changes its own records. It plays either twelve ten-inch or twelve twelve-inch records without operating attention, at intervals of thirty seconds and the motor operating the mechanism stops automatically, after the last record on the spindle has been played.

The Electrola Combination is an instrument with a special Victor acoustic stabilizer and the music can be regulated from a whisper to full orchestral volume.

From the China Press, 16 May 1929

Company Meeting: S. Moutrie & Co.

(The North - China Herald Jul 24, 1935; pg.146)        

An opinion that the day of the piano in China was rapidly passing was expressed by a shareholder at the annual meeting of S. M. Moutrie & Co., held on Tuesday, July 16, in the offices of the company at 20 Nanking Road.

The chair was occupied by Mr. W. J. Isenman, who was supported by Messrs. K. E. Newman, H. W. P. McMeekin, and W. S. Watson, directors. Shares present totalled 1,185.

Presenting his report, the chairman said:—

In presenting to you the report and accounts for the past year, Board regret to have to record a loss of $19,777.57 on the year’s trading.

For the first six months we managed to work at a small profit after allowing for a proportionate share of annual charges, but since October last there has been a steady decline in the volume of business due to the gradual elimination of the spending power of the public caused by the extreme financial stringency. Those shareholders who are resident in China are doubtless fully conversant with the present local situation, put for the benefit of our shareholders abroad I would state that Shanghai is at present passing through a financial crisis of unprecedented severity and that business of all kinds has been practically brought to a standstill through lack of financial facilities and the fact that even the most valuable of assets are entirely frozen.

Your Board circulated to you in November last our auditors’ report on the position of the company and also the report issued by your special committee. Your Board have given effect to various recommendations made with a view to cutting down running expenses and in this connection have with much regret circulated the staff that the company cannot at present continue its contribution to their provident fund. During last year your managing director voluntarily reduced his remuneration under agreement by 20 per cent, and since the close of the financial year staff wages have been reduced by the equivalent of approximately $9,000 per annum, which with the amount previously contributed to provident fund will effect a total annual saving of around $18,000.

Your directors also voluntarily reduced their fees last year, which policy has been continued this year.

Continuous efforts have been and are being made to sell or lease the factory but under present conditions in Shanghai it has been impossible to obtain any definite offer owing to the closing down of many manufacturing enterprises.

Contrary to the views expressed at the last annual meeting, the piano branch of our organization has been the mainstay of our business and even in these bad times our sales have kept up remarkably well and our own Moutrie piano continues to grow in popularity.

The radio and gramophone side of our business has again shown a marked falling off and the position of this market is most unsatisfactory. Not only have foreign manufacturers been compelled to make heavy reductions in their costs to meet competition but the excessive stocks in this market are being sacrificed at heavy losses. Fortunately our stocks have been kept down to a minimum but these have had to be drastically written down and in all our branches we have had to face sharp losses in this connection.

There have been suggestions that the company might possibly be liquidated with a view to preventing further shrinkage of assets but I feel sure you will realize that at any rate for the present this policy would not be in the best interests of shareholders, as the company’s main asset in land and buildings could not be realized, nor could such high class security- as Municipal and Public Utility Debentures and Preference shares be sold except at a very considerable sacrifice.

The Board, however, are watching the situation closely and no long-term agreements are being entered into either for purchases or for staff engagements, so that our commitments will not preclude us from taking advantage of any situation which may arise.

As regards the immediate future we cannot hold out any rosy prospects of business improvement but can only express the hope that by practising every economy we can safely survive until such times as the financial stringency passes and confidence is once more restored in China.

Mr. A. L. Anderson said that it was five or six years since the company had paid a dividend, and indications were that it would be quite some few years before it would be in a position to do so again. When his father was a boy, every young lady learned to play the harp. Yet where were the harps to-day? When he was a boy, every young lady learned to play the piano. He thought ; it absurd to think that young ladies were going to spend hours daily practising scales to-day when by simply turning on the radio they could “listen to music played by far better musicians (laughter).”

"The piano is dying, there is no doubt about that,” he continued. Due to an overstocked market, and that Chinese shops could afford to sell them at a much cheaper rate, they could similarly expect nothing from gramophones or records. If they thought that better times were ahead, let them stick together and fight their way through. If they did not think so—and he did not—he suggested they put matters in the hands of a liquidator.

Replying primarily as a shareholder, Mr. Newman said there was a great deal in what Mr. Anderson had said. If that was the opinion of a number of the shareholders, he suggested they call a special meeting and go into the matter. In any case, they would have to do things gradually, as even when a branch closed down it cost quite a sum of money.

Mr. Anderson said he had merely seized the opportunity of pointing out what was in his mind.

The following resolutions were then passed unanimously:—

That the report and accounts for the year ended March 31, 1935, be adopted and passed. Proposed by Mr. Isenman and seconded by Mr. Newman.

That Mr. If. W. P. McMeekin be re- sleeted to the board of directors. Proposed by Mr. Newman and seconded by Mr. F. Kempton.

That Messrs. Lowe, Bingham & Mathews, Lowe. Bingham & Dunham, and Messrs. Evatt and Co. be re-elected auditors of the company for the ensuing year at a total fee of approximately 53,782 (with some small allowance for exchange). Proposed by Mr. Anderson md seconded by Mr. F. Youngs.

Moutrie and Co. Report Highest Profit in History of Firm

(China Weekly Review 17 Aug. 1940, pg. 423)

S. Moutrie and Company, Ltd., piano and organ manufacturers and dealers in music and musical instruments, cleared the highest profit in the long history of the firm, according to report of the annual meeting, held in Shanghai on Aug. 9. The profit amounted to $197,- 588.65, which, according to Dr. W. J. Isenman, chairman, “was considered satisfactory, even after allowing for depreciation in the value of the Chinese dollar.” The Chinese dollar, in relation to American currency, is only worth about one-sixth its previous value. Most of the profits were derived from operations of the firm in China as its activities were curtailed in Hongkong, Singapore and Penang. As a war-time measure the authorities of Malaya had prohibited import of Moutrie pianos, the chairman stated. 

Introducing the Tango to Shanghai (1913-1914)

First developed in Argentina and Brazil, the Tango swept the western world in the early 1910s, eliciting a Tango dance craze in London and Paris in 1913. Shanghai was soon to follow in the footsteps of its western rivals. These two articles from the British newspaper The North China Herald relate the introduction of the new dance known as the Tango to Shanghai society around the beginning of World War One. Far from being a passing fad, this dance would go on to enjoy popularity in Shanghai through the 1930s and beyond.

THE TANGO IN SHANGHAI: EFFORTS TOWARDS ITS INTRODUCTION

(The North - China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, Nov 22, 1913; pg. 591)

The Backwardness of Men.

The Tango has already made its appearance in Shanghai, both publicly and privately, but people say that it is unlikely to catch on for this season at any rate. Up to the present Tango is confined to the smallest of circles, and the majority of people confess that they do not know anything about it.

But if it is true that the Tango is not to be a rage this season, millinery has taken a step in advance of it. Our lady correspondent in London said something yesterday about the Tango dress, slashed up to the knee and so forth, having a kind of feeling for the dance, and one well known modiste in Shanghai assures us that dozens of these dresses are being made for the season. Evidently the appearance of these fashions has nothing to do with Tango for the moment, and it will probably be next year before the dance becomes anything like the rage. 

Appearances to Date.

The public performances of the Tango, which have been made by two well known danseuses, have attracted a considerable amount of attention, but of course there is the difference of stagecraft between these and the efforts of the common or ballroom dancer. A few nights ago the dance was shown by them in a restaurant which has the reputation of having introduced most new steps into Shanghai, and it is reported that, after they had finished, members of the audience attempted to emulate their performance, and failed miserably.

Apart from this a number of  “Tango teas” have been held in the western district of the Settlement, and through their agency the dance has been taught to a limited number. One of those having the good fortune to acquire a sufficient number of the steps to do the thing in some style, is responsible for the opinion that it is not going to be a rage here. “You have to practise so much for it, and if you get a partner who doesn’t know it, you can’t put her through it, not for instance as you can do with the one-step.”

The Keenness of Curiosity.

Curiosity regarding the fame of the Tango has led a few to look for lessons, and we understand that some of the dancing mistresses and professors in town are already preparing for the demand. One is said to be taking lessons from the danseuses mentioned above in order to impart her knowledge to pupils, but if they have only just started, it looks as if it would be somewhat late in the season before any progress were made towards the Tango’s becoming at all universal.

One cause suggested for the improbability of the Tango coming immediately into fashion is that the men in Shanghai are so much worse dancers than the women. At public dances men as often as not hide themselves in the bar, and thus save the situation. But the remark just quoted refers to men as a body, and if it be a correct statement of the case, they will hardly be enthusiastic enough to give to the measure the strenuous practice required.

The Season’s Dancing.

At present dozens of people are making an attempt to acquire some sort of proficiency in reels, eight- some and foursome, but this is only one phase in the season’s doings which will pass with the big opening event at the end of this month. Locally one-stepping is to be the thing again this year: such is the general opinion. It was introduced cautiously and even timidly the year before last, but last year it superseded most of the dances. It is of particular interest to note that for the present season the authorities in charge of one of the series of dances which enliven the winter are admitting it to their programmes, having all last year strenuously set their faces against it.

Probably the Tango will come along in the course of the season as did the one-step two years ago, but for the time being it is in its very infancy here. Unless it has a bad set-back in London or New York it is almost bound to become popular, unless indeed our dancers do not possess the necessary energy to learn it.

TANGO TEAS FOR SHANGHAI

 INNOVATION AT THE ASTOR HOUSE

(The North - China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette Mar 7, 1914, pg. 689)

The Tango, or versions of the same, is no stranger to Shanghai, but the famous dance may be said to have been introduced with all due formality to the public at the Astor House on Monday evening. The reception was cordial, and it will be no surprise to find interest in the dance developing into enthusiasm in the course of the series of Tango Teas arranged by the management of the hotel. The ball room had been very prettily decorated for the occasion; neatly arranged flowers and foliage and the subdued gleam of hundreds of dainty electric lights set the room off very tastefully, giving a hint of the splendours amidst which enthusiastic Tangoists meet in European capitals. There were numerous parties for tea, tables being arranged down the whole length of the room on either side, but the accommodation was scarcely sufficient for the many visitors, who must have numbered quite 200.

Exhibitions of the Tango were given by Miss Elba, Miss Phillips, and Mr. Lucas. They gave four dances, and all were observed with the keenest interest and attention, broken by bursts of applause as each dance concluded with its graceful and very precise final movements. The music for the Tango has a slow and emphatic rhythm, and the movements of the dance are correspondingly definite, precise and graceful, finished movement being of the essence of the dance. Many of the figures are attractive, some of them charming, some simple, others complicated. Among the best known movements introduced by the dancers were the El Cruzade and glide, Spanish pirouette, step glide, double one- step, fan, with reverse, scissors, single and double, hesitation glide, essence, half-fan ballet, and Argentine dip, double ballet, and finale combination.

In the intervals between the Tango dances, a programme of dance music was played, and in this way two hours passed very pleasantly. The second Tango Tea will be given on two evenings each week until April 2. The attendance on Monday evening suggests that the innovation will be a very popular one; it would, however, be unsafe to predict that the Tango has come to stay.

Many of those present also danced the Tango, and while styles generally were almost as varied as the dancers were numerous, the essential features were well caught, and many budding experts were to be picked out.

The Nightlife of Peking (Peiping) in 1935

This is one of the richest accounts of nightlife in the former imperial capital that I have yet seen in the Shanghai newspapers. Wonder what the Peking Papers would have to say about this? And if this represents the decadent phase, I wonder what Peking nightlife was like back in its glory days? Obviously Peking didn’t hold a candle to Shanghai in terms of its international nightlife, but “Outside Ch’ien Men” (qianmen) sounds very intriguing to me. And somehow the description reminds me of Guijie in the 2000s.

Peiping Night-Life Found Outside Ch’ien Men

Moral-Mayor Has Little To Say About After-Dark Goings-On

China Press, 1935

By LaSELLE GILMAN (Special China Press Correspondent)

PEIPING. Oct. 25. — Peiping's night-life ain’t what it used to be.

That’s what the old-timers will tell you in almost every town in China—Canton, Hankow, Shanghai, Tientsin, Mukden, Harbin. The times seem to be out of joint and something is rotten in the state. At any rate, it is quite evident in the Old Capital. The splendor of former days is gone—and with it most of the whoopee-joints.

Viewing this aspect of Peiping society, of course, one must remember that there are two different types of night-life—foreign and Chinese. Anyone who has visited “outside Ch’ien Men" can vouch for the fact that the Chinese still know how to amuse and entertain themselves in that world-famous Pleasure Quarter. It goes full blast every night and the crowds are always gay.

Wine-women-and-song Is a very important part of outside Ch'ien Men night-life, in spite of the fact that Peiping’s moral-mayor, Yuan Liang, frowns mightily upon such didoes. Yuan Liang once undertook successfully to clean up Shanghai’s notorious Jukong Road, and he is pursuing his blue-law reformations In Peiping, with corresponding success and to the tune of considerable laughter from the sidelines. But Peiping’s Chinese night-life is too much an integral, part of the Old Capital to be swept away with one fell swoop. The Quarter where princes and ambassadors, visiting officials and wealthy travelers found relaxation during Imperial days is still doing business at the same old stand.

Riot Of Sound And Color 

Outsidc-Ch’ien Men after dark is a riot and bedlam of sound and color and light: ricksha bells clang, motor horns blare, hawkers squall their wares, from the theaters come a pandemonium of shrill flutes, gongs and drums, dinner-parties. In the restaurants are merrily proceeding with the aid of sing-song girls. The narrow streets, as bright as day in the lights of shops, are crammed with humanity of every shade and type—rickshas, hawkers' stands, carts, camels, cyclists, motor-cars, carriages are packed together; soldiers, clerks, artisans, prosperous merchants, wealthy officials, ministers, monks, generals, singing girls, women young and old, rich and poor, virtuous and carefree, and an occasional party of foreigners pass to and fro under the bright shop-banners and across the Bridge of Heaven en route to or from the play-houses, restaurants, shops, pharmacies, bath houses, markets and fairs, gardens, guilds, wineshops and bordellos. Beyond are open tea-stalls, peddlers, chestnut- stands, traveling kitchens—where the poorer folk congregate to buy and sell anything and everything they can lay hands on. The Chinese hedonists have made “outside Ch'ien Men” something never to be forgotten.

The sing-song houses, the theaters and restaurants are naturally the most patronized. Peiping’s demimonde enjoys no small fame throughout China—those gayly dressed, shining and calcimined ladies who make their living entertaining guests, playing games, attending dinner parties- singing, girls who make money for themselves, or are mortgaged, or are sold outright to become wives or concubines. They enjoy names such as Fragrant Jade, Water-Spirit Flower, Jade Lotus-Bud, or Miss Wang, the Bright Little Night Pearl from Shanghai— "flower names" that they may change with a change from one house to another. Even the houses are appropriately named—The Four Seas, Garden of Beautiful Fairies, Garden of Transplanted Flowers, and the like.

Peipingites Theater-Struck

There are many theaters, both outside Ch'ien Men and in the West City-Tower of Extensive Harmony, Garden of Joyful Merriment, Theatrical Garden of Equilibrium and public dance-halls with foreign men—so he closed them up.

What, then, is left of so-called "foreign” night-life?

Peiping foreign society gets together privately, for the most part, at parties, balls and dinners, large or small. In private residences or in the legations. They have their own clubs of course, and they put on plays and give concerts. But foreigners do not gad about at night very much. They stay at home, or at someone else’s home.

However, if they want to dance in public, they go to the Grand Hotel de Pekin. In the summer they dance to an orchestra on the roof of that large building, and the roof is a very attractive spot. In winter they dance in the hotel’s big ball-room. There is dancing every night, but Peiping's residents usually turn out on Saturday, and the patrons on week-end nights are for the most part tourists. Occasionally they dance at the Wagon-Lits Hotel in the Legation Quarter. In summer, sometimes they dance on the roof of the Du Nord hotel near the Hatamen.

Dances Short, 3 For $1

As for cabarets, there are but two left that merit that name. One is Alcazar, the other is the International. Both are small compared with Shanghai night-clubs, and are similar to something you’d find on Rue Chu Pao San. In the former there are about 20 dancing partners. In the latter about 15. Nearly all the girls are Russian—there are no actual Chinese girls and no Japanese. Dances are three for a dollar, and are short. The cabarets close around three or four in the morning. There is no cover charge. You can get most anything you want to drink, and usually a snack to eat. No meals.

The patrons of these cabarets are for the most part foreign servicemen—marines from the US. Legation Guard, French soldiers, British soldiers, Italian marines. Tourists occasionally drop in, once in a while a civilian resident appears in search of a night-cap. There are very few cafes or bars in Peiping for the foreigner to visit. A few exist in the East City, along Hatamen Street, east-of-Hatamen. Some are Japanese Sukiyaki houses. There is the Royal (Russian restaurant). Hempel's (a German restaurant and bar popular with the marines), the Soldiers' Club (British soldiers), Karatza's (mostly British soldiers), Olympia (usually Italian troops here). Foreign troops, of course, have their own enlisted men's clubs, and Peiping's civilian males have their Peking Club on Rue Marco Polo.

Foreign servicemen have not been behind the civilians n discovering the Pleasure Quarter "outside Ch'ien Men" and frequent the tea-houses there, referred to among enlisted men as the "language schools." They have created, more or less, their own "language schools" In that dark maze of hutungs that form a labyrinth “east of Hatamen," a very busy quarter after nightfall.

The Tung An Shih Ch'ang, known to many foreigners as the Morrison Street Bazaar—a sort of glorified Chinese five-and-ten-cent store—provides considerable evening amusement, mostly in the form of shopping, but there are also restaurants and tea-shops there, and there is an establishment where young men ignorant of the art of wielding pool or billiard cue on a green table may lake lessons in that pastime, from attractive young Chinese girl-teachers.

In general, however, the foreigner in Peiping has very poor hunting when he goes in search of nightlife of the Western kind, and If lie doesn't take to "outside Ch’ien Men", he usually winds up early with pipe, book and fireside.

Underground Nightlife in Wartime Chungking (Chongqing)

I was always curious as to whether the nightlife culture of Shanghai was carried over to the city of Chongqing, which became the wartime capital for the Nationalist government after they retreated from Nanjing in 1937. These articles offer a curious glimpse into a hidden world of underground dance clubs, which seems strikingly similar to occupied Paris in the same era—which is where the concept of the discotheque was born. For the newspaper that I searched online to find these articles, see this link.

Latest Wartime Vice —20 Dancing Clubs!

From the Chungking Edition, Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury (1944 16 June)

CHUNGKING—Night life in wartime Chungking is not so dull as it appears. For those who are tired of cinemas and theaters, an alternative of more exciting variety is now available.

Believe it or not, said the Nanking Wan Pao recently, dancing has become the favorite pasttime among bored rich Chungkingites and more than 20 private dancing clubs are in existence. Most of these places are scattered through the downtown areas and the South Bank, while a few are hideouts on the North Bank. The equipment of these resorts is rudimentary and consists chiefly of jazz music supplied by radios and gramophones.

Opened very secretly to dodge the moral uplifters, the dancing clubs are known only to selected few whom the operators consider reliable.

Turpitudinous Terpsichore

Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury (1944 7 July)

Bootleg dance clubs are Chungking’s latest. Twenty such establishments are reported to be secretly operating at various points, mostly in downtown areas and on the South Bank. If you “know Joe” you can get in for an evening of hopping to jazz phonograph records and the strains of radio tuned in on something headier than exhortations to moral uplift.

This is indeed a new version of the “New Life Movement.” Possibly it proves once more the essential kinship between Americans and Chinese, and the dissimilarity of both to the Japanese (who, when dancing was forbidden, meekly acquiesced). Prohibitionary edicts seem to work best in countries bound in the wrong direction.

Interned Pootung Hep-Cats Form Hottest Dance Band

I am posting this piece as a follow-up to the article I previously posted on jazz in Japanese prison camps. Such a fascinating episode in the history of the wartime era.

Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, 4 Feb. 1944

A report on American hep-cats in Shanghai at the time of Pearl Harbor is given in the Jan. 15 issue of “Down Beat,” musicians’ professional organ, published in Chicago, under the byline of Hal P. Mills, of Shanghai. His story appears on the front page under a banner headline “Yanks Jive in Jap Prison.”

Accompanying the story is a two-column photo showing "Jimmy” James and his band serenading the departing American Marines in Oct. 1941.

According to Mr. Mills, who left a hospital at Hines, 111., on the day this article appeared and who is now understood to be in New Orleans, such United States hep-cats as the Japs nabbed are now mostly in the Pootung prison camp where they have formed "what is described as the hottest dance band Shanghai ever has known.”

“Golden Opportunity”

Although the musicians are not getting very wide scope for their talents at the moment, Mr. Mills expresses the personal opinion that Shanghai is going to be “a golden opportunity town for hep-cats after the war.”

Portions of Mr. Mill's article follow:

"The band includes five men who are orchestra leaders of fame and one former assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The latter is Henry Francis Parks, of Chicago. The austere Mr. Parks was chosen as leader of the prison band, but later was deposed bypopular demand.

"The current leader is Tommy Missman, whose mother, Mrs. Cloe Springer, resides at National City, Calif. Tommy is a loyal American but is in the good graces of his keepers not only because he has a Japanese wife, but also because he can sling more than a little of the Japanese language. Prior to being interned the cheerful and amiable Missman was leader of the crack dance band at Jimmy James’ New Winter Garden, Shanghai.

Well Known Leaders

“Other recognized leaders in the prison camp band are Henry B. Nathan, who for many years was leader of the Cathay Hotel Ballroom band, Shanghai. The Cathay Hotel, in case you don’t know, was the swankiest spot in Asia. Henry plays sax, clarinet and violin.

“Another member is Johnny Staley, of California. Back in 1931 Jimmy was imported to Shanghai to head the orchestra at the smart Little Club, then the reigning night spot of the city. Both Missman and Staley are known to many Chicago musicians.

"Others of the prison unit ARE Cliff Flook, ex-leader; Sonny Lewis, Hawaiian musician and ex-leader; Dick Reynolds, one-time maestro of the Metropole Ballroom band at Shanghai; Charley Jones, Lester Vactor, who is also the prison camp barber; Foster Vernon, Bob Hill, who was famous as leader of the old Venus Ballroom band, and Bob Fockler, ex-leader of the Del Monte Cafe band. In its hey-day, the Del Monte was one of the world’s most famous cabarets.

“Fockler, however, is not in good standing with many of the internees. After Pearl Harbor he broadcast anti-Ally programs for the German station at Shanghai. True, he did so with obvious lack of enthusiasm, but even so, he did 'aid and comfort the enemy.’ He may never be able to return to America.

Hausermann in Chicago

"Another able member of the Pootung camp band was Fred Hausermann, of Chicago, who recently returned aboard the Gripsholm and who is now in Chicago with his parents. Fred is in a bad fix physically. One lung is missing.

‘‘Came the day when the lucky internees who were to be exchanged were preparing to leave the camp. The hep-cats rallied ’round and broke into Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America.’ Tears were rolling down the cheeks of dusky Jimmy Brown, crack trumpet player but he played as never before. Others, too, were misty-eyed. A mighty cheer went up from the prisoners and the alarmed guards came running from all directions, bayonets fixed.

‘‘But Tommy Missman rose to the occasion. Speaking in Japanese he soothed the worried guards, explaining that it was only music and not an uprising. The guards were mollified, but directed that the number not be played again. It hasn’t been. 

Interned at Chapei

“Almost all of the hep-cats were imprisoned during the Big Round-up of Americans last February. Those with families were interned at the Chapei camp. Interned there, too is Jimmy James, father of the Union of Musicians at Shanghai, and its first honorary president.

“Jimmy, his wife and young daughters, Ann and Doris, are still at the Chapei camp. Cliff Flook and his bride are at the Chapei camp. His wife was the charming Stella Myers, secretary to the publisher of the Shanghai Times. They married shortly before Pearl Harbor.

“Pursuing a policy of attempting to win Filipino favor, the Japs have not molested or interned any of the 200 or more Filipino musicians of Shanghai. Tops in the Filipino field is Don Jose’s orchestra at the Lido Ballroom.

"All European refugee musicians are interned in the Hongkew District.

“Music in the city’s night spots is furnished by Filipinos, Russians, and Chinese. The average pay is about $1000 per month, Nanking currency, or about US$50. Almost all of the musicians are in dire straits.

Chinese Bomb Spots

"Musicians who play at the large Chinese ballrooms and cabarets are in constant danger. Patriotic Chinese have a ’playful' custom of exploding bombs in such spots, the idea being to discourage dancing and drinking while China is fighting her war for existence. Bombs have been exploded in the Paramount, Lido, Mee Koo May, Metropole and Paradise ballrooms, many persons being killed.

"Gloria Andico, daughter of the late beloved leader, Andy Andico, is Shanghai's top femme leader. Andico died last year. He was a Filipino and a veteran of the first World War, during which he served in the U. S. Navy.

"Beer is unobtainable in the hot spots, the entire output of local breweries going to the Jap armed forces. Doubtful whiskey costs about US $2 per drink. The once- despised vodka is now in brisk demand at $1 per copy.

"In the opinion of this writer, who spent 16 years in Shanghai, that city will be a golden opportunity town for hep-cats after the war."

The Jazz Scene at WWII Japanese Prison Camps in China.

Recently, I found this article in a PDF version online while searching for information about specific jazz musicians who played in the ballrooms of Shanghai in the 1930s. This is a fascinating firsthand account by a westerner who was interned in prison camps by the Japanese military in China during WWII. For those unfamiliar with the background, during WWII, after the Pearl Harbor incident in December 1941, the Japanese began to round up Allied nationals and put them into internment camps outside of Shanghai, Tianjin and other cities with a large foreign population. The prisoners were released after the Japanese surrendered in August 1945. This account is fascinating for its reminiscence of how jazz musicians from China’s club scenes came together to play and perform in the prison camps, to the delight of the inmates and at least some Japanese officers and guards. It is a testament to the endurance of the human spirit and to the power of music, and a fascinating read in relation to the times we live in right now. This article was so interesting that I decided to republish it so that it might find a wider audience.

The Jazz Scene at Japanese Prison Camps in China. 

By Desmond Power, West Vancouver, BC, Canada.

June 2012.

Desmond Power in 1940s

Never mind that I was living in far off Tientsin, North China when World War II broke out in Europe, I did my duty by enlisting in the Volunteer Defence Corps. Being in the Corps had its compensa- tions. Donned in my formal blue dress uniform I could pass off as a full blown adult and so gain entrance to Little Club Ballroom, the night spot that was the talk of the town. You couldn’t miss its notice in all the dailies.

My first time there the place was bouncing. I forget the number they were playing, but the beat of the bass and the incredible runs of the reeds and brass sent me whirling into another world. I was back again, and yet again, and never was disappointed.

Then it ended, as it had to end, that cozy world of ours. At dawn on December 8th, (Dec 7th at Pearl Harbor) Japanese storm troops swarmed into the concession, and they did so without a shot fired. The regular British garrison had long withdrawn from Tientsin, and Volunteers on duty were ordered to slip away and get into their civvies. None were taken prisoner, which was not the case with the US Marines and a score of civilians deemed dangerous enough to the Empire of Japan to be locked up alongside the Marines in their barracks. Allied nationals were free to roam the British Concession but not step outside it. And Little Club on Wusih Road in the ex-German Concession was outside, maybe by only a few yards, but outside all the same in now forbidden territory.

With banks and businesses closed, many Allied nationals soon ran out of money even for food. With help from the Swiss Consul, the Masonic Hall on Race Course Road was converted into a mess where they could get a free meal. When I showed up there, the man running the place asked if I would help out by serving as a waiter. My OK was the best decision I made for a long time. One of the first tables I served was occupied by several of “Earl Whaley’s Coloured Boys”.

After eating, they moved to a seating area where there was a grand piano. The tallest one, the handsome and debonair one, ran his fingers over the keys. Then he drifted into We Three with such a delicate touch that we servers stood transfixed. We soon learned his name was Stoffer. And it wasn’t long before we got to share jokes with him and with Jonesy, the boisterous happy-go-lucky string bass player. Stoffer introduced us to others of the group, saxophonist Earl Whaley and clarinet man Wayne Adams.

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They say that life is full of surprises, but what they don’t say is that some are only meant to tease. At the Masonic Hall one day, I was confronted by Mr Coghill the British Vice Consul. “How would you like to get to freedom,” he asked. “There’s a prisoner exchange ship at Shanghai, the Kamakura Maru, which will be taking us diplomats home. There are a few spare berths and we can get you one of them.” How could I not jump at the chance! So in August 1942 I joined the trainload of happy Britons heading for freedom.

The Kamakura Maru sailed off all right, but without me. My berth and those of a good few others had been snaffled from under our feet by British Taipans.

So with the connivance of fellow Brits I found myself in Pootung camp, which turned out to be one of the worst of all the Japanese prison camps in China. It comprised a network of closely connected concrete warehouses long abandoned by the British American Tobacco Company as being unfit for storing tobacco (see picture below). But not unfit for storing humans according to the Japanese who jam-packed 1,200 single men from all walks of Shanghai life into the place and provided them with rations hardly enough to keep a bird alive. Maintain a stiff upper lip our leaders told us, we won’t be here long. But the never ending string of Japanese victories that came over the loudspeakers told us otherwise. Our morale hit rock bottom.

Pootung Prison Camp

Passing through the camp’s crowded quadrangle one day I stopped to watch a dozen or so men mostly Blacks all with musical instruments seated on stools and chairs in two close rows. The sharp rap of a baton started off a beautifully stroked intro from a guitar that lifted saxophones, trombones, cornets into a buoyant rendition of that old standard There’ll be Some Changes Made. While my heart was beating like mad, the saxes took off on a practice run of their own, then a trombone by itself, then once again, the baton rapped, and the gui- tarist re-launched the band with his breathtaking intro. A guitarist at heart, I stayed glued to the spot in seventh heaven.

Band practice over, the musicians packed their instruments and collected their chairs. When the Black guitarist had some trouble with his awkward folding metal seat, I stepped forward and offered to carry it for him. A big smile and he led the way up to the third storey

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of the main warehouse where he bunked with two dozen others. I went into a dither when he gave my hand a warm shake. But I was conscious enough to notice the name painted on his guitar case: Dick Reynolds – Metropole Ballroom.

What a godsend, that band, lifting the camp’s morale as nothing else could! All top musi- cians they had played at Shanghai’s best ballrooms and nightclubs. There was Jim Staley of Shanghai Little Club fame, and Bob Hill of Venus Ballroom, and there was Tommy Missman, Charlie Jones, Lestor Vactor, Fred Haussman, Sonny Lewis, each a star in his own right.

Pootung’s internees could never have enough of the concerts the band put on for them. For two whole hours they forgot they were prisoners. And it wasn’t all jazz music; there were song and dance acts. Back in the States, Dick Reynolds had been in vaudeville, and by the sheerest coincidence his roly-poly partner from those days, Theodore “Bubbles” Dyer, happened also to be in camp. A crew member of SS President Harrison he had been taken prisoner when his ship, pursued by the Japanese navy, ran itself aground. That Black pair’s sparkling performance of I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You, just about brought the concrete roof down.

Even before I got to Pootung, I had outgrown “cowboy” chords. Now with amazing gen- erosity Dick gave freely of his time demonstrating how to cover all six strings with full majors and minors and augmented ninths. He explained the importance of the right hand and how to pick runs. But above all, he risked his precious Gibson by letting me take it through packs of bustling internees to my own block for an hour every day.

A Eurasian roommate of Dickie Reynold’s broke from shooting craps when I happened to mention the name Earl Whaley. “I knew him at St Anna’s Ballroom,” he burst out. Where is he now?” And that’s how I got to know Eddie Esmond who was not a musician, not even a Shanghailander. Though from Peking, he knew Shanghai night life through and through. He knew how to wangle free meals at Farren’s Gam- bling Casino. He knew everyone that counted at the Paramount Ballroom on Yu Yuen Road and also at the Casa Nova on Avenue Edward VII in the French Concession. He knew most of the camp band, and it was he who introduced me to the clarinetist Tom- my Missman when we crazy fools thought we could build up our bodies by doing Charles Atlas exercis- es on a skywalk roof. When one morning a guard barked at us to get off the roof, Tommy amazed me

by his sweet-talking the fellow in good Japanese to let us stay. Apparently, Tommy had picked up Japa- nese during the years his band played at Tokyo night spots. For sure the Japanese wife he married there had a hand in enhancing his fluency.

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Eddie helped me on to a raised platform opposite the main gate on that one occasion when the band brought onlooking prisoners to tears. The US and Japanese governments had agreed to an exchange of civilian prisoners, and when that big moment came in September 1943, the band gave a rousing send off to those hundred lucky ones exiting Pootung. And when one of their own, Freddie Haussman, went past waving good-bye they broke into a number right on the button – San Francisco Here I Come.

I had no inkling of it then, but not many days later, having been drafted for transfer to Lun- ghua camp at the opposite end of Shanghai, I too exited Pootung. Not easy saying good- bye to Dickie Reynolds, Jimmy Agnew, Solomon Delborgo, Denis O’Shea, Eddie Esmond and all those others I had palled up with in camp. On more than one occasion, Eddie told me that his mother and sister, Nora and Deirdre Esmond, had been sent from their home in Peking to Weihsien camp. He now begged me on the off chance that I might ever get up there to let them know he was OK.

The countryside freshness of Lunghua was a big improvement over the twice breathed air of Pootung. And the better rations and presence of girls was a welcome change for sure, but how I missed that jazz band. Word got around that I played the guitar, and next thing I was enrolled in the camp’s dance band. We were amateurs, though our leader, Ikey Abraham, a sparkling drummer, could have passed off as a pro any day of the week. Even so, to those inmates who transferred in with us from Pootung we must have sounded flat compared to the real thing. However, they didn’t have to suffer me long. Only five months later, the Commandant ordered me to be shunted me off to Weihsiein camp in Shantung Province, 700 miles north of Shanghai. I must have made some impact on Ikey, for he wrote this, signing himself as “TAIPAN”, in my autograph album on the day of my departure.

Two days and a night by train and I was together again with my family and Tientsin school pals. Assigned to work as a stoker at Tientsin Kitchen where 900 internees were fed, I was astounded to find that my fellow stoker on our two-man shift was none other than Reginald Jones that marvelous bass man from Little Club. He didn’t remember me at Tientsin’s Ma- sonic Hall. No wonder, it was 3:45 a.m., the single incandescent dangling from the ceiling giving off only a dim light, it was freezing cold, and no time for talk. The water in the giant cauldrons was supposed to be on the boil before the cooks arrived on shift at 6:30, so we had to go hard at it, drawing clinkers and hustling life into the fires.

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Soon as we could take it easy, Jonesy gave me the news that Earl Whaley and Wayne Adams were in Weihsien, but not Stoffer. His appendix had ruptured the day he arrived in camp when the hospital was still in shambles, and he died before they could get him to one in Tsingtao. Our mood brightened only when the cooks arrived. Their mirthful exchanges with Jonesy told me how warmly they regarded him. Clearly he was a wag and banterer of which I was to see more of at mid morning when the all female vegetable squad arrived on shift. Their chatter, excited by his presence, turned to shrieks at some madcap antic of his.

In the building where Jonesy was quartered I got to meet up again with Earl Whaley and Wayne Adams, and also two new faces, Hawaiians, George Alawa and George Beck. All were keen to hear what I could tell them about their jazz brethren in Pootung. First, I gave them the bad news I’d heard when in Lunghua that Tommy Missman had fallen from a skywalk and was lying with broken bones in Pootung’s sick bay. As for the good news, all the other jazz players were fit and well. They kept their hand in by giving regular concerts that were eagerly attended not only by the internees, but also the Japanese from the high and mighty Commandant down to the lowly guards who always grabbed the front seats.

Earl Whaley offered that they too kept in practice by playing at dances. He and the others had brought in their instruments with them, but not Jonesy, though he fared well enough on the cello the good Anglican Bishop lent him. As for the Shanghai jazz men I named, he knew most of them when his Red Hot Syncopators played there at St Anna’s Ballroom.

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He added that of the two Syncopaters who were now in Weihsien, I already knew the one who’d been prominent on the US West Coast as Evelyn Bundy’s lead clarinet man – Wayne Adams. The other, the gifted guitarist, Earl Kilgore West, was probably new to me.

The next dance was a week off and I had better get there early, the place filled quickly. The two Georges, Alawa and Beck, would be playing, and Lope Sarreal too. An entertainment promoter from the Philippines, Lope was equally well known as a fine trumpeter and band leader. But he wouldn’t be leading. Guitarist Earl West was now leader.

Guitarist band leader? Yes, Sir, band leader and a fine one. After the Syncopators broke up in Shanghai and went up north to Tientsin to play with Lope Sarreal’s Swing Band, West headed for Peking 80 miles still further north where he formed his own group Earl West and His Night Owls. Though they were a hit at their Peking hotel, his Night Owls did take on one night stands at other locations. Here they are at Tientsin’s Villa West Lake Hotel. Note the mix of Black and White jazz men which includes Jonesy on loan from Little Club.

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And now here he was in Weihsien, Earl West, a powerfully built man, standing with mem- bers of his dance band in a space cleared of tables in Tientsin Kitchen’s eating area. He began by snapping off a catchy all-chords intro on his resonant guitar that launched the combo into bouncing choruses of Shine, he, Jonesy, and the two Hawaiians coming in with peppy vocals that had the dancing couples showing their appreciation with bursts of ap- plause. And more hand claps when Lope Sarreal delivered a terrific trumpet solo of Peanut Vendor. If my memory serves me right, the Hawaiians followed with Sweet Leilani, Alawa taking the melody with heavenly sweetness on his steel guitar. And then the whole combo with Earl West leading a jaunty Coquette after which they came on with a great selection of old favorites before hotting it up in a grand finale with an uproarious Nagasaki.

Jonesy

Jonesy was not one of Whaley’s Red Hot Syncopators, but his back- ground was no less distinctive, his father being a teacher at Michigan Conservatory, and a brother, Reunald, number one trumpeter with Count Basie and Woody Herman. He himself was no slouch on the double bass, starring at Harlem’s Cotton Club before joining Charlie Echols’s renowned fourteen piece band. When trumpeter Buck Clayton joined that band he must have hit it off with Jonesy, for when in 1934 he formed his Harlem Gentleman to go out to Shanghai to play at the Canidrome Ballroom, he took Jonesy with him. (Here’s a picture of Jonesy per kind favor of Fern West.)

The growing menace of Japan’s militarism and their acts of terrorism in Shanghai’s foreign settlements was sufficient writing on the wall for Clayton to pull out. When he offered passages home to members of his band, Jonesy was the single standout against going. He had a Philippine sweetie he could not leave. But leave her he did. Next thing he showed up as one of Earl Whaley’s “Coloured Boys” who had contracted with promoter Lope Sarreal to play at Tientsin’s Little Club.

I’d not forgotten my promise to Eddie Esmond in Pootung that I would look up his mother if I ever got to Weihsien. Nora Esmond turned out to be an attractive fair-haired English lady in her forties. At hearing what I had to say about her Julian Warrick Edward, which were Eddie’s full given names, she gave a shout of joy, then pleaded with me to pass on the news to her daughter, Deirdre, who had married in camp and was now Mrs West.

Nothing prepared me for the surprises that lay in store when I intro- duced myself to Deirdre. First, unlike her brother who was swarthy for a Eurasian, she had the pale porcelain skin of a Merle Oberon. Second, when her husband stepped out of the hut to greet me, I was staring into the face of that big strapping guitarist, Earl West. All I could do was mumble some gibberish, but it was the start of a solid friendship that was to last until our final day in camp a year-and-a-half later. Over that time, I showed him the chords and runs Dickie Reynolds had taught me, and he elaborated on how important it was to do all that in different keys. Occasionally when he let sit in with the band, what a triumph when he’d wink to tell me I was doing things right!

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Having learned that Earl’s jazz group had been based in Peking, and knowing that Deirdre grew up there, I wondered if the two had met before the war. Anyway, the couple’s lovely daughter Fern was born soon after the Japanese handed out parcels from the American Red Cross. Among each parcel’s precious items was a large tin of Klim. I wasted no time hand- ing over my Klim to Deirdre.

Deep concern spread among us when in the spring of 1945 Earl Whaley was rushed to the camp hospital suffering from acute appendicitis. We who knew of Stoffer’s tragic end kept our fingers crossed. Thank God, Earl survived the surgery. Soon as visitors were allowed, I went around to see him. He lay in much distress, his stomach bloated with gas. He asked me to call the nurse. When I did, that fierce matron of the Royal College of Nursing gave me hell and sent me packing. Back in his quarters, Earl’s full recovery took weeks during which time he avoided getting involved in the sometimes noisy discussions with his room mates, but he did appreciate the bits and pieces of war news that I gleaned from newspapers discarded by the guards – Japanese Kanji script carrying the same meaning as tradition- al Chinese characters. Throughout his convalescence he had another constant visitor, the mysterious Tartar-born Ahmad Kammal who had been a guide of sorts with the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews Expedition in Mongolia. Kamal struck me as an unapproachable loner so all the more did I find it strange the friendship that developed between the two.

As viewed from outside the camp, the hospital where Olympics Gold Medallist Eric Liddell died and where Earl West’s daughter Fern was born and where Earl Whaley had his appendix removed.

Note the guard tower and electrified barbed wire to deter would-be escapers.

Our internment ended with a suddenness that astonished us all. Though for several days rumours abounded that Japan had surrendered, the guards remained armed and were ready to shoot to kill. Then on August 17, a lone four engine US plane flew over the camp, circled it once, twice, and then dropped a team of seven OSS parachuters within two hundred yards of the camp walls. That must have taken extraordinary courage, the seven being so

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lightly armed for a mission of such high aspirations as forcing the Commandant and his guards and the nearby Weihsien garrison to hand over control of the camp to US authority. It was almost beyond belief that the Japa- nese gave in so abjectly.

Within days, squadrons of giant B29s were dropping into and around the camp great loads of food and medicine and clothing. Specialist teams from US bases in Western China landed at the nearby Japanese fighter airstrip with film projectors, loudspeakers and latest issues of Time and Life to “re-orientate” us.

It was carnival time and our camp band gave as much as it received, surprising our liberators with the quality of its jazz. With Lope and his trumpet in the lead, the band marched up and down Main Road sounding off hearty choruses of The Saints Go Marching In and Glory Glory Hallelujah and the like. At the ball field they put on and a show encouraged by an exuberant US Serviceman who joined in playing some sort of kazoo, his improvisations astonishing both musicians and onlookers for their sheer brilliance.

At first we basked in the glory of liberation from the Japanese jackboot, but as the weeks passed and we were still stuck in the place our spirits took a dive. And it didn’t help matters to learn that the embarkation port of Tsingtao, now occupied by the US 7th Marines, was only three hours away by train. It took our leaders to tell us that Japan’s defeat had caused the long brewing Chinese Civil War to burst out into the open, bringing road and rail traffic to a standstill, and that because it seemed we were in for the long haul we might as well undergo the re- orientation the Americans had planned for us. One of the American lecturers who’d seen Belsen told us of his surprise at finding our camp in such good health. We’d apparently escaped starvation, disease, and bestiality of the guards. How could I not agree with him? My family and friends had come through in reasonably good shape, the jazz musicians: Whaley, Adams, West, Jones, Sarreal, Beck were all sound of life and limb. That huge goitre on George Alawa’s neck he’d brought into camp with him.

It was during this time of limbo, waiting for things to happen, that I heard Earl West wanted to see me. When I got to his hut, he held out his precious guitar and told me it was mine to keep. I refused, of course. But he was adamant. He wouldn’t take no. To this very day, the man’s incredible generosity stuns my mind.

Soon afterwards two trains did make it through to Tsingtao taking a quarter of the camp population with them. Gone were girl friends, workmates, roommates, those I stood in roll call line with twice a day for the past eighteen months. Earl and Deirdre West and Jonesy and Earl Whaley were gone and I don’t remember saying good-bye to them or to any other member of the band.

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When another four weeks went by with no train making it through, the Americans with their incredible genius for planning and organization took command of the airstrip and flew out the rest of the camp in a matter of two days. My mother, half-brother, half-sister and I were taken by C47 to Tientsin, our hometown before the war. But I did not stay long in China, I moved from there to England to New Zealand to Canada where I now reside.

Some time in the mid-sixties when I met up with schoolmate and Weihsien roommate Douglas Finlay, I bemoaned the sad fact that every member of the camp band had disappeared off the face of the earth the moment they departed by train to Tsingtao. He looked me in the eye and said not so. A few years back he had run smack into Jonesy. It happened he said on a Sunday morning when he and his wife Yvonne had walked past Hotel Vancouver on Georgia Street. Approaching them on the sidewalk was a hefty Black. In the instant that he and Jonesy recognized each other they embraced and exchanged shouts of joyous laughter. As it turned out, they were to have no opportunity of renewing their friendship, for Jonesy had just completed a gig at The Cave Supper Club and was heading back to the States.

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It was good to know that Jonesy had got back to work on the bandstand, and a top band at that, for the Cave on 626 Hornby Street hosted only the foremost bands and entertainers amongst whom were Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sophie Tucker, Lena Horne, the Ink Spots.

News of other Weihsien jazz musicians hit me in the oddest circumstances. In 1998 when I was in South Pasadena, CA, visiting a friend from my Tientsin school days, she showed me a business card that had been presented to her back in the 1960s by a real estate agent who told her that he had met a number Tientsin people while he was Weihsien prison camp during the war. The name on the card: Earl Whaley.

With the arrival of internet search engines, I came up blank with searches on Earl West, Wayne Adams, Dickie Reynolds, but I had better luck with jazz trumpeter and entertain- ments promoter Lope Sarreal. A web site told me that he died in 1995 in his 90th year. Hon- ored as the Grand Old Man of Asian Boxing he had been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, New York, for bringing that sport alive in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan and Korea.

I’d given up hope of ever hearing of the Wests again when ten years ago out of the blue the words “Deirdre, the beautiful Eurasian wife of a Black musician” sprang out at me from an autobiography Adopted the Chinese Way written by Peking-born Marguerite Church. More than once in the book she told of meeting Deirdre aboard the attack transport USS Lavacawhile it was repatriating US citizens from war-torn China.

I was in for an even bigger surprise when I came across a photograph among Kim Smith’s collection on the web of wonderful historic sketches, paintings, and photographs created by her father William A Smith while assigned to Weihsien prison camp as an officer serving in the OSS. The photo gives a bird’s eye view of a truckload of internees heading for the railway station to board the train bound for Tsingtao. The couple with their backs to the cab have to be Earl and Deirdre West with perhaps infant Fern on Deirdre’s lap.

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Then, wonder of wonders, I made contact with Fern West who was but a mere infant sit- ting up in a cot outside her parents’ prison camp quarters when I last set eyes on her. In the flurry of correspondence that now passed between us she told me that soon as they arrived in the States following their liberation from Weihsien, Earl and Deirdre decided to settle in San Francisco’s Bay Area. And it was there that they began adding to their family: son Earl Leland in ’46, daughter Iris in ’47, and son David in ’56.

Fern well remembers her father practicing for so long and hard on the guitar that even at the age of eight she could hum the tunes as he played them: Brazil, Temptation, Begin the Beguine. She went on to say that he did manage to get some jobs at night clubs, but they came so few and far between he was obliged to move on to other work.

From hindsight we can see that regaining his playing dexterity was not the only challenge facing Earl. Times had changed. Electric guitar instrumentalists with their emphasis on riffs and solo leads had so grown in popularity they were filling the job slots. And then there was the arrival of bebop whose chord dissonances must have sounded foreign to jazz men, some taking to it without qualm, others turned off by its strangeness. When Earl met up with Jonesy in post war USA (it happened only the once according to Fern), bebop and how to take to it must surely have come up between them.

Among the precious photographs Fern sent me is this one of Deirdre and the couple’s son Earl Leland and daughter Fern taken in 1950 in a community park. When I asked Fern how come Earl was not present, she said he was – he took the photo.

Deirdre West (wife of Earl West) and the couple’s son Earl Leland and daughter Fern taken in 1950

What struck hardest from everything that Fern told me about the family was Earl’s death on October 19 1959 of lung cancer. He was only 49. That not only closed a chapter for me, but also for a number of Weihsien internees upon whom he’d made a lasting impression.

Of those still alive today I can think of Ralph Baltau whose missionary parents were next door neighbors to Earl and Deirdre in their prison hut. Ralph fondly remembers a dark- skinned man with a name sounding like “Wes” for his many acts of kindness such as taking him to get a rare ration of milk and handing him half sticks of chewing gum.

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Another with favorable memories of Earl is Zandy Strangman, my rival on the camp soft- ball diamond. He told me he was present on the occasion that “poor Mrs Esmond” had to move out of the hut she shared with her daughter Deirdre, to allow Earl “a real gentleman” to move in after he and Deirdre had married.

And then there is Arthur Kerridge, my camp roommate, now a Texan with good working knowledge of the Web, who advised me how to download Louis Armstrong’s 1930 version of Shine, which he said was just as Earl West and his men performed it. By golly Arthur was right. Listening to that download, how I itched to run my fingers along the strings of Earl’s guitar! But it was no longer in my possession. After getting twelve good years use out of it in Australia, England and New Zealand, I handed it over to a young Russian in Wellington, NZ, keen to learn the instrument. I’m sure Earl would have approved.

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The Social Life of Foreigners in Shanghai in 1924

While searching old Shanghai newspapers for more evidence of the early phases of jazz and dancing in the city (a subject I never seem to tire of researching), I came across this article published in the USA’s Vogue Magazine in 1924. It is a fascinating account of foreign life in Shanghai with many interesting insights into the colonial culture of the treaty port era. The way the article describes Chinese as “background” to the colorful foreigners is very telling. Also, the article claims that Chinese society is a “caste” society which is quite interesting if not entirely accurate (certainly China did not have the caste system of India). What I found most fascinating of all was the detailed explanation of Chinese household servants and their various roles. One comes across many references to household servants in foreigners’ accounts of life in Shanghai during this era, but rarely with such detail. The article provides some keen insights into the amazing leisure life of foreigners that such servitude enabled. Finally, the section about Shanghai’s nightlife as a form of “slumming” dovetails well with the research I’ve done in the past and with the book I co-wrote with James Farrer, Shanghai Nightscapes. If I’d found this article before we published that book, the passage at the end of this article would surely have made its way into our book. The ads I’ve included here originally appeared along with the article in Vogue.

Social Life in Shanghai

Vogue Magazine, 1924

By Franklin Carl

AFTER three hours of golf or tennis on a steaming hot summer afternoon in Shanghai, one is as parched and dry as a bone, and so, at sunset, after a shower and a change, one drops into the American club for a series of cool drinks and a chance meeting with friends while looking down into Nanking Road, Shanghai’s gay white way.

The parade is a mosaic. It is mostly Chinese, and a huge part is of Chinese pedestrians, for out of the million and a half of Shanghai’s population, not one in forty is a white European or American. One accepts all the Chinese, dun coloured and inert, without personality, as a background for the white “foreigners” who are the high spots of colour in the parade dominating the street crowd, just as the small foreign population dominates and colours the life of the city.

“FOREIGN WOMEN” AND THE MODE

In the carriages and motors passing are French, British, Russian, American, and a dozen other types of women. Their style, despite the cosmopolitan contact, remains as clearly their own as if they were at home in their respective countries. The Frenchwomen are as chic and distinctive, the American women as individual and dashing, the British as sports-like and mannishly tailored, as in their native surroundings, and, nowadays, there is also the cream of the Russian refugees. It is a fashionable procession that is passing, but it has one feature that is striking. It is not le dernier cri for any woman of any country. Every one is just a shade, and just the same shade, behind the fashions of Paris, London, and New York, respectively. Every one is out of style, but all are out of style together and to the same degree, so that the effect is as smart and satisfying as if there were no later word in dress. It has an interesting corollary. If a newcomer is so unwise or unkind as to put on the latest thing in gowns, which she has certainly brought with her in her forty-odd steamer trunks, she immediately becomes unpopular.

One always brings letters, and a husband’s business connections are also social connections, so the process of becoming acquainted is rapid, especially in such a high-speed life as that of Shanghai, where every one is more or less a transient resident and each depends on the others of her own kind for spice and variety to life in a community out of touch with home.

            Shanghai social life is a cluster of glittering, dashing bodies of foreigners with a nimbus of servants. The Chinese themselves, in daily touch with the foreigners, are, nevertheless, continents away in thought, sentiments, and customs. To the Chinese, we are magnificent barbarians. They copies our luxuries and conveniences, but they scorn our philosophies and our habits. However, both Europeans and Americans love China, because it is so flattering to the Anglo-Saxon sense of racial superiority. Democracy becomes a memory of another clime, while the present is a continuing experience of real supremacy. The poorest junior can afford at least one personal servant, and moderate wealth commands an establishment.

            China has a rigid caste system which is based on command of wealth, as well as on birth. It ranges up from coolie labour of all kinds, through sub-divisions of service and business, to the pampered pets of fortune who hold a fat purse. The average American fits very high in that scale by income, and, whatever his personal attributes, is from the moment of his arrival a member of an exotic aristocracy.

THE SERVANT PROBLEM IN CHINA

            In the Chinese castes of labour the divisions are inflexible. A coolie may become a house boy by good fortune, but a house boy will starve before he steps down to become a coolie. No one grade of labour will do the “pidgin” of another grade. For example, the most modest household requires five servants. The “boy” is majordomo, and looks after the service of the table, the stores, the wine-cellar, and the other servants. The cook is an artist, the lord of the kitchen range. By the Chinese, he is rated as the social equal of a doctor, and he will do nothing menial. All such work is assigned to the second cook, or “learn pidgin.” The coolie scrubs floors. The amah is lady’s maid. Not one of these would do a stiver of the work of the others. He would rather lose his place than to lose his “face.” Indeed, the Chinese staff is not unlike the domestic staff of many an English household.

Any household more complex than the “most modest” one has correspondingly more servants. The result is the essence of luxury. Service extends to the last detail. One has a separate groom for each separate one of a string of ponies. One must, because one groom will not take care of two ponies. At golf, one has a caddy to carry the bag and one or two fore caddies who follow the ball. These are friendly little creatures, too. When they mark the position with a little red flag, if you are at all noted for generosity, they will improve the lie of the ball, or you will find you did not drop in the sand-trap, as you thought, but cleared the bunker.

SPORTS MADE EASY

A flock of coolies drags the houseboat along the inland canals all through the week-end party, and the guests, as perfectly attended by the servants as at home in Shanghai, have nothing to do but rest, which they do so strenuously as to arrive at home, Sunday night, tired out. A crowd of coolies carries the racing shells down to the water when the club crews go for rows during training for the international regatta at Henli, and wipe and groom the boats into perfect condition after each spin. There is no work or pleasure that service does not touch. One does not even stoop to pick up the balls at tennis. Small boys retrieve them.

In Shanghai, there are many household staffs of fifty and seventy-five servants. Service is subdivided, each servant having his restricted duty, which he never exceeds. This is carried to the point of absurdity, as in the case of the “goldfish coolie” in one establishment, whose sole duty it is to “bathe” and feed the goldfishes. The whole background of life in China is made up of flawless Chinese servants. In America, we have nothing which more than remotely resembles this perfection of service. And these marvellous servants are on duty for twenty-four hours a day. they almost never leave, and, when they do, they provide a substitute as a matter of course.

As it grows nearer eight and the street darkens after the long summer twilight, one leaves the comfortable observation posts at the club windows to hurry home to dress. “Boy,” one calls, and the nearest white-gowned attendant hurries forward from the cloud of “boys” standing at attention against the wall. “Boy. go catch the car chop-chop.” One does not expect literal obedience, because the boy is not a messenger. That is not his “pidgin.” The boy calls to the door coolie, the coolie to the doorman, the doorman to the chauffeur, and down below the club windows the chauffeur detaches himself from a knot of this kind standing there smoking and discussing intimately the affairs and foibles of their “masters” and “missies,” and trots around the corner to where the car is parked. The car arrives. One ambles leisurely downstairs, climbs in, and rolls away home. The club empties, except for the servants and those gay young bachelors, not gay this evening, who have missed out somehow in the plans of Shanghai hostesses.

Very few foreigners in China speak Chinese, while their servants always do, except when they are addressing the foreigner. They generally assume that their native tongue is a safe code, and one hears surprising remarks even in the undertone between the perfect attendants serving at the table. One makes it a practice never to listen, for it is a little startling, for example, when a lady of the dowager type has spoken somewhat testily to a boy, to see him incline very respectfully and then an instant later hear him say softly through the opening into the service pantry, “This old buffalo does not like the fodder.” The Chinese have no respect for a person with a short temper. They regard it as a final sign of bad breeding, and one speculates whether they may not be right. They pay respect for consideration and disrespect for temper.

At home, the boy has laid out dinner-clothes. One wears, with the black trousers, a white mess jacket, universally known as a “monkey jacket,” a natty little affair that stops at the waist with a little pointed tail at the back, a cummerbund, or sash, around the waist in lieu of a vest, and a soft pleated shirt with a soft turn-down collar. It is the coolest and most comfortable rig imaginable and is at once adopted by any visiting foreigner.

CHINESE-PARIS GOWNS

            It is not so simple to describe what the ladies wear. They are a riot of colour, with all the styles of the world to draw from at first hand, all the wonderful fabrics the Chinese make in addition to those from home. Patient and capable house tailors, right at hand, make dresses and then still more dresses, and all at the most astonishingly low cost, in the aggregate. The house tailors are unique. One gives the tailor an illustration from Vogue, an older dress for measures, and the material, and in a day or two he achieves a creditable near-Paris gown.

            This is the diary of a lady’s day in Shanghai: “I rode this morning, and then had tiffin at Margie’s where Cora and Virginia came in and we played Mah-Jong from two o'clock until I had to rush home to dress. I asked them all to come to dinner. I didn’t phone the cook until after six, and I’m sure he borrowed three outside dinners to make up enough. I looked into the dining-room when I came home and saw tons and tons of strange silver and china….I hurried downstairs and mixed cool drinks. Outside, the sound of a coolie grinding away methodically at an ice-cream freezer, the cook being jovial, the boys beaming, indicated that we were going to have a large evening, and every one was happy. There was no sign that the cook thought an hour too short notice for six guests. As full half of the servants’ income is “squeeze” or graft on the household bills, a volume of supplies means loose control, and guests are a welcome sign to the household staff.

“The guests arrived. As each car passed the gate in the high wall of the compound, the gatekeeper announced it by a shout. The coolie opened the house door. The boys, efficiently and without hurry or confusion, as the guests entered, appeared at hand to take their wraps. Every one talked at once. A distinguishing mark of Shanghai’s social life is that one almost never hears a phrase, much less a conversation, worth recording. Every one is too busy playing to be serious. Boys in white gowns passed hors-d’oeuvres of all the spiced and seasoned relishes that ever were invented, until one imagined there could not be any dinner intended to follow. But dinner followed, most elaborately, with perfect service and a loud, cheerful sound of voices and laughter.

“The evening was not planned. It just happened. Wives and husbands were carefully separated at table and remained so during the evening. In cars, by twos, they left the house and went down to the Carlton to dance. It was awfully crowded. There was a jazz orchestra, imported from the United States. It was as good an orchestra as any at home, and since foreign service has to be made attractive, it is perhaps fully twice as well paid. Every one in Shanghai, except the missionaries, is there sometime during the week. Some of the “regulars” come every evening. Lines of social cleavage are apparent between the tables around the dancing floor, but not on the dancing floor itself.

“Later, we moved on. Into the motors again and to the Astor. After a while, away again and to Maxims, but it is very much like the Carlton at either place, and finally, in the small hours, some one of the party suggested the dance halls out on Zikkawei Road in Frenchtown, the Crest and the Delmonte. Those are just beginning to wake at midnight, and from then until morning they get more riotous. It is the equivalent of slumming. Then we see at gay tables friends who have come on for the same reason as we—to see the sights. Even after this, our party felt no depression. The very air was fuzzy after the long evening, and so we laughed and chatted as we had five o’clock breakfast of ham and eggs, plebeian, prosaic, comfortable ham and eggs”

Out there, it is a gay, hectic, carefree life. Ask any man who has been there if he would return. He would. If he would not, he was one of the lame, the halt, or the really conscientious. Such never really taste Chinese life, but those who have tasted are bound to it. They can not escape from its call if they would, and they would not if they could—, and so that is the colour of Shanghai.

Building Shanghai's Dreamworld: Elite Ballrooms of the 1920s-1930s

This year I participated in a workshop on heritage conservation at Tongji University organized by Dr. Rosemary Wakeman, which resulted in a special issue of the journal Built Heritage. I contributed a talk and an article to the journal on the subject of 1920s-1930s interwar era ballrooms. As I write in the article, the designers of these ballrooms constitute a veritable Who’s Who of Shanghai-based architects including the Spaniard Abelardo Lafuente, Englishman George Leopold “Tug” Wilson, Austro-Hungarian WWI veteran Ladislaus Hudec, Frenchman Paul Veysseyres, and Chinese architect C. S. Young (Yang Xiliu).

My article focuses on the history of seven ballrooms: the Astor House and Majestic Hotel ballrooms, the French Club ballroom, the Sky Terrace ballroom of the Park Hotel, the Cathay (Peace) Hotel ballroom, the Paramount Ballroom, and the Metropole Gardens Ballroom. Among these seven, five still exist in the city today. The Majestic Hotel was torn down in the early 1930s and the Metropole Gardens seems to have been destroyed in the 1990s if not before. Both occupied the space where the Westgate Mall (Meilongzhen guangchang) stands today, on the corner of Jiangning and Nanjing Roads.

If you wish to visit the remaining five ballrooms, they are generally open to the public, though often they are being used for private parties. Here are some photos I’ve taken of them over the years:

The Paramount Ballroom on Yuyuan Road

This is Shanghai’s most famous ballroom. Since the 1990s it has undergone numerous renovations and has lost its original dance floors. It is the only ballroom still being used primarily for dancing today.

Paramount Ballroom in 2017

Paramount ballroom marquee by night

The Astor House Ballroom (north of Bund near Garden Bridge)

I have also posted several articles on this website on the Astor House. Also see Alvaro Leonardo’s article in our special issue for details of Lafuente’s design scheme.

Nighttime exterior of Astor House taken in 2017

Ground floor ballroom with Arabesque ceiling

One of the most striking features of the ballroom is its original dance floor from the 1920s.

Center of original dance floor built in 1923, which still could be seen as of 2018

The French Club Ballroom (now part of Okura Garden Hotel on Maoming South Road)

This ballroom was built in the 1920s and designed by Veysseyre and Leonard; it was the center piece of the French Club or Circle Sportif Francais, which in 1990 became part of the new Okura Garden Hotel.

The front entrance to the Garden Hotel from Maoming South Road, which used to be the French Club in the 1920s-1940s

The grand hall leading to the second floor ballroom of the former French Club has kept its original design, including the caryatids (nude female bas relief figures) on the pillars holding up the ceiling.

The ballroom is being gussied up for a private wedding party. Unfortunately the original sprung dance floor is hidden by a thick rug.

The most stunning feature of the French Club ballroom is the stain glass light fixture on the ceiling, whose oval shape mirrors the dance floor below

This is one of many bas relief figures that grace the ballroom, which are still there today after nearly a century of revolutionary history in Shanghai

The Cathay Hotel (Fairmont Peace Hotel) Ballroom

Built as part of the Cathay Hotel and Sassoon House in 1929, designed by George Leopold “Tug” Wilson, this ballroom located on the 8th floor of the Peace Hotel on the Bund still retains many of its original features today.

The Peace Hotel with its famous tower as seen from the Bund at night

The Peace Hotel ballroom, taken in 2019, whose floor is now hidden by a thick rug

A Lalique female figurine ensconced in the pillar of the ballroom, atop a striking Deco feature

The Sky Terrace Ballroom of the Park Hotel

Located on Nanjing West Road across from People’s Park, the Park Hotel is a masterpiece of Hudec’s and his flagship building in Shanghai. The 14th floor ballroom still retains its Deco features.

The Park Hotel in 2007 (source: Wikimedia)

The skylight feature on the ceiling of the Park Hotel ballroom.

Some jazzy Deco bas relief figures lining the space below the ceiling of the ballroom

The ballroom being used for a private party in 2019—note the original wooden dance floor

Designing and Building the Astor House Ballroom (1917-1923)

The Astor House ballroom featuring its peacock-fan shaped orchestral shell, built in the 1920s (this photo was taken from a guide to Shanghai published in 1932)

The original floor of the Astor House Ballroom can still be found in the space today. The ingenious design of this floor is described in Alvaro Leonardo’s article (see link above)

The Astor House ballroom is one of several fine ballrooms built in the 1920s that catered to Shanghai high society, and which may still be found in the city today. The following two articles published in the North China Herald describe the design and building of the ballroom of the Astor House Hotel, Shanghai’s landmark hotel located just north of the Garden Bridge on the Bund. The hotel itself goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, but in 1909 it underwent a major extension to become the landmark building that it still is today. The ballroom design was handled by the Spanish architect Abelardo Lafuente. An article by Alvaro Leonardo published in the Tongji University journal Built Heritage sheds new light on the architect Lafuente and his unique contributions to Shanghai’s built environment in the 1910s and 1920s.

New Ballroom at Astor House

(North China Herald  Dec 1, 1917)

The new ballroom at the Astor House Hotel was formally opened last Saturday night with a
grand ball. Alterations and improvements have been going on for some months now and many structural difficulties have been met with and overcome to make what is now perhaps the finest dance hall in Shanghai.

A solid wall had to be removed and replaced by reinforced concrete piers and girders allowing a passage and several private rooms to be included in the general scheme, making the new dancing floor area 95 ft. by 70 ft., A stage has been erected at one end which should be a valuable asset for concerts and soirees besides providing accommodation for the orchestra.

The room is well ventilated by windows running the whole length of the hall on both sides with large mirrors between them. The mural decorations are tastefully done in cream and white matte paint picked out with old gold; the electric lighting scheme was also well thought out, the result being a pleasing soft effect with ample brilliancy. Cloak rooms and refreshment rooms are situated at the entrance. The floor is oak parquetry, highly polished and in beautiful condition for dancing. The architectural work was carried out by Messrs. Lafuente and Wootten, the furnishings by Messrs. Lane, Crawford & Co., and the electric lighting by Messrs. Andersen. Meyer & Co.

The New Astor House Ballroom

Brilliant Opening on Saturday Night: The Architectural and Colour Beauty

(North China Herald, Dec 29 1923)

Tho Astor House ballroom was opened formally on Saturday, if one may say formally, for there was a good-natured jolly crowd numbering 375, who came in to dinner. But although they were dressed in the most conventional style, they hardly seemed formal, for such an air of good fellow-ship and friendliness prevailed that it would seem an anomaly to characterize it as such. Those who attended the first night declared that words could not describe the marvellous combination of colours and lights that have been the product of the mind of the mind of Mr. A. Lafuente, the designing architect. The light blue walls decorated with maidens and sylphs dancing in the open spaces, are surmounted by the plaster reliefs for the indirect lighting system suspended from the ceiling, while high on the marble pillars beautifully cast female figures appear to support the roof.

Probably the most novel feature of the decorative scheme, excepting the incandescent mirrors, was the peacock shell utilized by the orchestra, and in particular the effects of light produced by the electrical staff. Five primary colours have been used for still effects throughout the variegated bedecked panels of feathers, but the revolving cylinder hidden added hundreds of shades of light that blended and dissolved over the whole giving the appearance of running waves of rainbow hues. The electric installation is by Messrs. Larsen & Truck.

The dinner was most excellent and the guests enjoyed dance numbers throughout, most of them not finishing with their meal until well after eleven, when dancing began in earnest. The new Astor House orchestra under the direction of Mir. “Whitey” Smith, numbers eight, of whom three formerly played in one of Shanghai’s ball-rooms while the other five arrived here just 10 days ago. The strains of “Zamboanga” and “No, No, North” delighted the light steppers and encore upon encore was called for, to which the musicians responded most liberally.

Messrs. J. H. Taggart and E. Burrows, who have been so keenly interested in providing Shanghai people with this splendid dining and ball-room, are to be congratulated on the complete success of their efforts.

An Exquisite Synopsis of the Cultural History of Dancing in Shanghai (from a Chinese article)

While searching the Chinese internet for information for an article I’m writing on several important ballrooms in 1920s-30s Shanghai, I came across this article today, and found it to be such a good synopsis of the history of dancing that I decided (with some help from Google translate) to make an English translation of the article and post it on my website. Here is the English version. The original Chinese version can be found on this website.

During my leisure time, I often go out and stroll around casually, and I find that Shanghai is now full of people dancing in public places. Is this a sign of a cultural decline? Once upon a time, for the Shanghainese, didn’t dancers always go to the dance hall?! If you don't know the history of the ballroom, I am afraid you don't know what is modern, what is called Shanghai style.

The history of the Shanghai people’s “Bump and Rub” [dancing] was started with the opening of the [treaty port].

Although social dance, like horse racing, is definitely a Western custom, this fact did not prevent the Chinese from embracing it warmly and treating it as a fashion. According to reports at the time, in the early 1920s, when the first batch of dance halls opened, the Shanghainese immediately flocked to watch. And popular magazines like "Linglong" [a Chinese women’s magazine], in addition to articles on movies and movie stars, also introduced social dance in three phases.

Located in the Paris Hotel on Tibet Road, the “Black Cat Ballroom” was the first independently operated ballroom in Shanghai. After that, the [dance] palaces of the Moon Palace, Majestic Ballroom, Anle Palace, and Santa Anna opened. In the 1930s, Shanghai’s economy was unusually prosperous, the extravagant winds prevailed, and the dance industry developed rapidly. Tibet Road was also known as the “Dance Floor Road”.

In the 1930s, Paramount, Metropole, Ciro’s, and New Zealand became the most representative ballrooms at that time, and they were called the “Four Great Dance Halls” of Shanghai. Among them, Shanghai shall never forget the Paramount. In 1932, Chinese businessman Gu Liancheng invested 700,000 taels of silver to build the ballroom known as the "Premier Entertainment Palace in the East". The largest dance floor was more than 500 square meters. There was also a small dance floor above the big dance floor that could be divided freely for dancers and dances. The floor of the dance floor was supported by car steel plates and was flexible [sprung dance floor].

 Speaking of this elastic floor, there is a popular word in Shanghai gossip, "elastic girl" --where did the word come from? The dancer is called "dancing girl" in English, and pigeon English in Shanghai is called "elastic girl". “Flexible girl” often dominates the fate of the ballroom. For this reason, Paramount established a strict system of accompanying dances. It was stipulated that only the “elastic girl” who passed the assessment and was issued the dance certificate could enter the Paramount to dance. This guaranteed the interests and safety of the “elastic girl” and the dancers. 

Ask the old Shanghainese again, where is the "octagonal hall"? They will definitely answer you, "The Metropole Ballroom."

The ballroom was built by Guangdong businessman Jiang Yaozhang on Gordon Road (now Jiangning Road, near Nanjing West Road) in 1934, and immediately became one of the "landmarks" of Jing'an nightlife. At that time, the "top dance hall" was not that called casually. For the Metropole, the main feature was a self-contained architectural style with luxurious hard and soft decoration. Secondly, it had to have the best band. The Metropole band was not from The Western Ocean but from the South Sea (the Philippines mostly).

The most important thing is to have a hot dancing girl. The hot dancing girl is a mouth-watering "signature dish" who attracts diners. When their customers were many, the dancers were busy "turning tables" all night. It was said that the income of a good "elastic girl" could be more than ten times that of the middle-level staff of the ballroom. The development of the “elastic girl” team stimulated and promoted the development of the Shanghai ballroom industry.

While the café was mainly a place where “superior Chinese”, foreigners and writers and artists visited, the dance hall entertained various levels [of society] and become popular in the public imagination. Legend has it that the writer Mu Shiying frequented such a dance hall called Moon Palace and there he pursued a dancer and eventually she became his wife. It is no wonder that in his novels, many backgrounds are always ballrooms.

 For more than a decade after the 1930s, there had been a "big development" for Shanghai's "dance industry". By 1946, there were 3,300 dancers. At that time, there was no concept of tickets in the ballroom. The guests mainly paid for tea. The price of tea in the big ballroom was about 1.4 yuan per cup, the mid-range ballroom’s price was 0.8-1 yuan, and the price in the small ballroom was 0.5-0.6 yuan. (calculated by silver dollar price).

However, in 1947, the Nanjing National Government issued a decree prohibiting the opening of the ballroom on the grounds of “harmful customs and promoting thrift”, namely the “ban dance order”. Wang Yunwu, the vice president of the Executive Yuan led this decree. Why did he detest dancing girls? According to gossip, his son-in-law liked to frequent dance halls and fool around with the girls. So he vowed to end the "dancing girl" line.

The embattled "dance industry" personnel marched on the streets in January [31] 1948 to protest, and even rioted at the then Shanghai Social Affairs Bureau (later it became Lele Middle School and it is now Huaihai Road’s Central Plaza). The parading crowd was beaten by military police and more than 400 people were arrested, which led to a "dancing case" that shocked the country. Later, under the pressure of the society, the authorities cancelled the order to “immediately ban dance” and released the relevant detainees.

The lifestyle of "if you can't dance, you are not Shanghainese" came to an end after 1949.

The people's government has carried out reformations of prostitutes and dancers of the old Shanghai, allowing them to support themselves and seek a new life. Under the impact of the new society and new ideas, the once-famous dance halls finally declined. The first one to be completely closed was the “Great Eastern Ballroom”.

However, such good facilities like the "Big Four" can't be idle. So they changed, like the Metropole Ballroom, which was transformed into a "Jingyuan Bookstore" in 1954, where people performed Suzhou Pingtan.

"Bumb and rub” means to dance, so what did people dance then? "Collective dances" brought over by "the old brother of the Soviet Union". At the same time as the dance halls were being transformed [into cultural palaces], collective dance as a mass dance activity became a trend. From 1952 to 1956, in factories, enterprises, schools, military units, and Lanes, there were many people dancing in group dances during festivals, even in peacetime and on weekends. There was a collective dance fever. In the 1952 National Day Gala, there were more than 100,000 people dancing together in the group dance.

When it comes to the "cultural revolution", you can’t call it "Bump and Rub", the collective dance has been replaced by another dance: "Loyalty dance", most of the soundtrack [to dancing] was related to the theme of loyalty [to the Party], like "The sea sails by the helmsman" and songs such as "Devotion to Chairman Mao"... After the reform and opening [c. 1980], people discovered through the history that when they were monotonous and thought imprisoned, some people in the deep walls of the courtyard still "Bumb and Rub". It is estimated that this is called the "gap", hehe.

As soon as the reform and opening period began, people began to bid farewell to the monotonous cultural life. In the early 1980s, ballroom dancing began to rise in the domestic university campus, and gradually extended to institutions and communities. Dancing once again became fashionable. On July 14, 1984, the Communist Youth League Shanghai Committee provided communication opportunities for the young unmarried youth, and the first public return to the ballroom dance at the Shanghai Exhibition Center was a sensation.

In the late 1980s, a large number of dance halls re-emerged. The “Ciro’s” of the Great World and the “Metropole” of Jiangning Road regained their reputation in Shanghai. According to conservative statistics, as of 1987, Shanghai had more than 300 dance halls and music cafes, ranking first in the country, with an average attendance rate of 70%.

At this time, the dance floor couldn't be described by dancing. It was more like dozens of dances. It was a "human flesh bumper car". It didn't involve touching the shoulders, but rather bumping elbows. "One, two, three" tempo. The dancers usually came by themselves. The male dancers were more sophisticated, they would wear shirts, and then they would be dressed in suits.

At the time, this craze injected a little lubricant and vitality into the tense interpersonal relationships and peaceful life. However, it didn't take long for the trend to fade out.

Then what became popular was the DISCO ballroom. The disco was once a young man of the 1980s, knowing a window of pop music. When Gao Lingfeng died, the first program of Dongguang 101.7 once sighed: "There is no high Lingfeng, how lonely the ballroom in the 1980s will be" - this is true. Until 2000, the disco gradually withdrew from people's attention.

Today's dance halls are not too high (often in high-end hotels), that is, the facilities are too bad. Think about how the Shanghainese people once pursued an exquisite lifestyle. It’s really quite pathetic to see these old folks now dancing in public squares. What about the past aesthetics? Whatever happened to "denying oneself and returning to propriety"?

Mapping Shanghai's Entertainment World in the 1920s-1940s

In 1999 and 2000, while I was completing my doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, I used a set of commercial maps of Shanghai published in the 1940s to map out the city’s entertainment quarters. These commercial maps are quite well known, and they provide an extremely detailed record of the individual establishments, residences, and businesses that existed in the city at that time. Other scholars have used them, included Christian Henriot, who mapped out the city’s prostitution quarters in his book Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai.

I put together the commercial maps and made a large wall-size poster, and then I used color pens to map out the various entertainment places in the city. Although my focus was on dancing establishments (ballrooms, dance halls, nightclubs), I was also looking at how these establishments fit into a larger environment of entertainment culture in the city.

The results of my mapping exercise eventually led me to construct these maps, which are included in my first book, Shanghai’s Dancing World. These maps show how the entertainment sector of the city was concentrated in the middle of the city, mainly in the international settlement surrounding the Recreation Ground, which was a racetrack for horse racing and also a parade ground and sports field for the British imperialists and their lackeys (haha, waxing Red here…)

Below are the maps I created to map out the city’s entertainment district and its subdistricts: shopping, theaters, and hotels. Dance establishments are also concentrated in this district and they are dispersed throughout and deeply integrated into the sub-districts. They also spread out into other parts of the city via the main roads in the International Settlement and French Concession (I will include a map of dance establishments in another posting).

This map shows the locations of the sub-districts within the entertainment district: a) theater, b) shopping, c) hotel. This map shows where the different districts were located in the city. R is for residence, E for entertainment, B for business, and M for manufacturing. Of course, this is a very general scheme.

This map consolidates the three sub-districts and provides a key to the labeling of the various entertainment facilities.