Category Archives: Scramble for China

Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Collection on tour, 1847-1850

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On 18 June 1842, Queen Victoria recorded in her journal an unusual afternoon’s visit:

… we drove with Uncle, the Cousins, &c riding to see a Chinese Collection belonging to a Mr Don [sic], who made the collection, in order to have it exhibited in aid of Charities. The profits made, are to be applied to charitable purposes. The collection is splendid & very complete, down to the smallest details. There were life size figures, dressed in various beautiful costumes, all done in China, indeed one could have almost fancied oneself in China.

It was a retired Philadelphian China trader, Nathan Dunn, amongst whose collection the royal party spent an hour and a half that day. Dunn had spent the best part of 12 years in Canton (Guangzhou), and on his return to the United States had opened a ‘Chinese Museum’ housing his collection in Philadelphia in 1838. Seeking a better financial return, he shipped it to London in November 1841. Dunn’s extensive and varied collection of objects and clay mannequins of Chinese figures has been the subject of a number of passages, including one of my own, in discussions of the engagement of American and British publics with Chinese material culture, and the image and understanding of China.[1] As far as London knew in June 1842 Britain was still at war in China (the Queen, the previous month, had accepted a gift of four captured Chinese flags) and it was not until November that despatches communicating the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing arrived from China.

Frontispiece to William B. Langdon, “Ten thousand Chinese things.” A descriptive catalogue of the Chinese Collection … (London: 1844)

After the Queen’s visit, the exhibition was opened to the public. Housed in a purpose-built building on Knightsbridge Road, facing Hyde Park near Wilton Place, visitors entered through a ‘gorgeous’ (or ‘grotesque’ depending on the account) ‘exact copy’ of a ‘Chinese summer house’ – a pagoda, in fact — brought from the country itself. They then entered a cavernous hall 225 feet long and 50 wide within which was ‘China in miniature’, and which we can get a strong sense of from images published in the Illustrated London News, the exhibition’s Descriptive Catalogue, and other sources.[2] The Pagoda and the hall remained a feature of London life for the best part of five years. Punch magazine published a satirical guide to it in 1844, and there were other spoofs. Newspapers report tours of it by visiting princes and pashas, while roundups of seasonal entertainments rarely fail to make mention of it. From late 1845 reports of its imminent closure and eventual relocation started appearing, but it was not until the last week of January 1847 that the exhibition closed down.[3]

‘The Chinese Collection, Hyde Park Corner’, Illustrated London News, 21 August 1842, p. 204

In 1851 the exhibition reopened in a new building at Albert Gate, close by the original site, and close too, to the Crystal Palace housing the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’. The minor puzzle is, where had it been in the meantime? Helen Saxbee, whose unpublished 1990 PhD dissertation remains the most complete account of the Chinese Collection’s London sojourn, concluded that while it might actually have gone on tour, as was claimed it would do, ‘an undertaking to tour a show as large and valuable as Dunn’s has no precedent or parallel in this period, and must ultimately be regarded as highly unlikely’.[4] Saxbee did note that an installation styling itself ‘The Chinese Exhibition’ had been advertised as opening in August 1847 in Bow, in East London, but followed Richard D. Altick’s earlier conclusion that this was a copycat sham.[5]

I’m not so sure. It was clearly a profitable enterprise, even if we discount as salesman’s hyperbole the assurances of its ability to earn ‘a very large sum’ annually from its display in London that William Langdon detailed in advertisements in May to August 1845 when offering it for sale as Dunn’s executor after the American’s death in 1844.[6] A Briton, who had also worked in Canton and was the Museum’s salaried curator, Langdon was, under the terms of Dunn’s will, made joint trustee of the collection with a Philadelphia trader, Isaac Collins. The men were directed to maintain the collection on display in London for up to five years from its opening date and then sell it for the benefit of Dunn’s estate.[7] Langdon did not sell it, or not entirely: he seems in fact to have bought it himself.

As this collection, mounted in display cases on a dozen and a half large carriages (the number varies), mostly transported by train, journeyed over the next three years from Bow to Birmingham then Liverpool, to Hull and Edinburgh, to Carlisle and then in late 1850 to Newcastle, Langdon’s name is often associated with it. In April 1849 we have sight of the outline business arrangements, for Langdon’s then partnership with a Kensington silversmith, Francis George Herbert, and a Knightsbridge Linendraper Robert Lewis Gawtry was dissolved, with Gawtry leaving the business.[8] The partnership’s interest is duly recorded as ‘in the Chinese Exhibition’. Searching for the ‘Chinese exhibition’ in the ‘British Library Newspapers’ database throws up a steady series of references that have allowed me to track the exhibition as it made its way around the country. This was not least because of the special arrangements that needed to be made to effect that perambulation, for example from Hull to Edinburgh: the large number of outsize ‘caravans’ which were arranged at each site to form ‘a spacious and magnificent saloon, approached through a pagoda’, and which were conveyed by one train, suspended on special iron rods between railway trucks, sometimes on specially laid temporary lines to avoid the sides of low bridges. A second train carried the rest of the exhibition and the horses which were to pull the caravans to the actual exhibition site. [9]

High society continued to patronise the collection when it opened, and notable foreign visitors were also reported attending, but admission prices were half those of London’s, and the ‘working classes’ paid half-price. There were lantern nights, and there was always a band performing as the customers strolled between the display cases. Sometimes this ‘UNRIVALLED FULL SAX-HORN BAND’ performed ‘original Chinese airs, and other musical oddities’ in the evening, as they did one week of February nights in Edinburgh at a ‘Feast of Lanterns’ when the exhibition was augmented with an eighty-foot-long arch (and the ticket price doubled).[10] William Blight’s band, ‘of metropolitan celebrity’ was undoubtedly an additional draw, for he was well known from engagements at the Surrey Zoological Gardens and Royal Gardens, Vauxhall. Visitors got a taste of London, as they got their taste of China.

The final provincial exhibition in Newcastle was closed on 28 January 1851, and the collection was conveyed south to London. The caravans, now surplus to requirement, were sold off (minus their wheels), and instead, installed in its new building, augmented now with a ‘real Chinese lady and her attendants’, the exhibition reopened on 21 April in London.[11] So ended the provincial adventures of Nathan Dunn’s collection of ‘ten thousand things’, which had probably entertained rather than instructed the working and the leisured classes in several cities and towns, leaving little by way of any trace, barring perhaps a repurposed cararvan ‘bought of the Chinese Exhibition’ and advertised for its hauling services by a Newcastle carter, William McCree, in late February 1851. The exhibition faced more competition in London in 1851, than it had nine years earlier – even its caterer was bankrupted — and it closed in October. The collection was then sold off at auction in December that year. The pagoda seems already to have been sold, and re-erected in the new Victoria Park in east London after the closure of the original exhibition. It remained in the park until it was demolished in 1956.[12] Langdon sought a different kind of fortune in late 1852 when he travelled to Melbourne, one of tens of thousands attracted by the gold rush. He eventually settled in Australia for good, where he died in 1868.

There’s more that might be extracted from this story, and I might return to it. For now, I’m happy to leave with the thought of William McCree boasting about his new cart’s exotic associations, for I cannot think of any other reason that he would make detailed reference to its purchase when offering his services to the public. And how long did he go on doing so, as memories of the exhibition faded? Might it still have been worthy of note up until the time he sold off all his equipment and horses in 1861 when he set himself up as a commission agent? I’d like to think so.[13]

NB: I am grateful to Dr Andrew Hillier for inadvertently prompting this post.

[1] Notably: John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture, 1776-1876 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Elizabeth Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 116-17; Jonathan Goldstein, ‘Nathan Dunn (1782–1844) as Anti-Opium China Trader and Sino-Western Cultural Intermediary’, in Paul A. Van Dyke, and Susan E. Schopp (eds), The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700-1840: Beyond the Companies (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018), pp. 95-114; see also my The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qinq Empire, 1832-1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 88-89.

[2] Description from Morning Post, 21 June 1842, p. 6 (‘grotesque’ from Illustrated London News, 6 August 1842, p. 204); Elizabeth Phillips, ‘A Pagoda in Knightsbridge’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 4:2 (1984), pp. 37-42.

[3] The Era, 17 January 1847, p. 8; Punch’s Guide to the Chinese Collection (London: Punch, 1844). The magazine’s role in creating and perpetuating caricatures of China and the Chinese is the subject of Amy Matthewson’s recent book, Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).

[4] Helen Saxbee, ‘An Orient Exhibited: The exhibition of the Chinese Collection in England in the 1840’ (Royal College of Art, Unpublished PhD thesis, 1990), p. 49; ‘Removal of the Chinese Exhibition’, The People’s Journal, January 1847, p. 4.

[5] Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 292-94

[6] Eg Morning Post, 29 May 1845, p. 1.

[7] Public Ledger (Philadelphia), 20 November 1844, and Nathan Dunn’s will and associated documents, via Ancetry.com

[8] London Gazette, 20 April 1849, p. 1331. The 1851 census records Langdon as a visitor at Herbert’s home (via Ancestry.com).

[9] In this instance the details are from The Caledonian Mercury, 3 December 1849, p. 3; and The Inverness Courier, 15 November 1849.

[10] Caledonian Mercury, 11 February 1850, p. 1.

[11] Newcastle Journal, 5 January 1851, p. 1; 15 February 1851, p. 5;

[12] Morning Post, 23 September 1851, p. 7; Times, 10 December 1851, p. 8; 8 October 1956, p. 5. The last of the daily advertisements for it in the London press appeared on 15 October. I cannot trace an explicit contemporary reference to the re-erection of the pagoda in Victoria Park, but an early print of it shows a very clear similarity. This structure was in place by the winter of 1849: Morning Chronicle, 2 January 1850, p. 3.

[13] Newcastle Courant, 28 February 1851, p. 1, 26 July 1861, p. 4.

Wuhan

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Let’s remember, please: Wuhan is not an unknown place, it is not beyond our knowledge. Wuhan has long been a part, even of British lives — and many others overseas — intimately so, if unobtrusively. Produce from Wuhan fed British days. Tea was shipped out from the port and found its way eventually into British homes and down British throats (and Australian ones, and many others). Powdered and later liquid egg was sent out from processing plants in the city and would fetch up in British bakeries. A British day in the 1920s might this way be sustained by Wuhan produce. So this long relationship could not be more physically intimate. Wuhan’s direct entanglement with the world beyond Hubei province’s borders is nothing new. Caravans took tea overland to Russia. In 1868, SS Agamemnon, a British-owned steamer of the Blue Funnel line, sailed to the port to collect the first crop of new teas, ready to carry them swiftly direct to London. Wuhan was an internationally-connected city, even then, though mostly tea went first downriver to Shanghai for transhipment.

The city of Wuhan is actually formed of what were historically three cities: Wuchang, on the right bank of the Yangzi, opposite the mouth of the Han river that enters it from the north; Hanyang, on the opposite shore, west of the Han river mouth, and Hankou – written in the past as Hankow – to the east of the Han river. These cities have now grown together into the municipality of Wuhan. It has been a centre of revolutions, of a government in flight, and of international trade.

Map of the port of Hankow (Wuhan), 1892

Foreign flags once flew there. After 1861 a slice of Hankou on the Yangzi riverbank was controlled by the British, and in time other neighbouring slices adjoining it by Russia, France, Germany, and Japan. In Hankow’s British Concession a British Municipal Council ran a police force, employed British nurses in its hospital and British teachers in its school, and oversaw a militia, the Hankow British Volunteer Corps. The Council laid down roads, collected property taxes, and documented its activities in a voluminous printed annual report. Hankow’s Britons sailed home to join up in the First World War, and those who died were commemorated on a now long-ago removed war memorial on the riverside bund, which was unveiled on Remembrance Day, 1922. To the northeast of the city a fine race-track was laid out, and foreign residents and Chinese alike flowed along the road on race days to join the festivities, watch the races, and of course to gamble. The track and surrounds ‘might well be in the heart of surrey’ remarked a visitor in 1938. Britons were born in Hankow, were married there or found partners there, and were interred there in the foreign cemetery. The city’s locally-printed English newspapers published notices of these life events. The descendants of Hankow unions live across the world. They might be your neighbours.

British Municipal Council building, Hankow Concession, flying the Union Jack

This was no innocent presence; it was one local manifestation of the wider British enterprise in China that had degraded the country’s sovereignty, and seen parts of other cities surrendered to British – and to Japanese, Russian, German, Italian, French, and other – concessions and settlements. The British had acquired a colony in Hong Kong in 1842, the Japanese took Taiwan in 1895, the Germans Qingdao in 1897. Tsarist Russia had seized great swathes of Siberia from China’s Manchu rules, the Qing. All of this in turn was of course part of the ravaging of the world by the great hegemons, the European empires, the United States, Japan. These gains were defended with violence. Those British Volunteers and British marines fired on and killed demonstrators in the city in 1925. Names familiar today had a presence there: the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (now HSBC), ICI, British American Tobacco. The airline Cathay Pacific flies there twice daily today from Hong Kong. Into the 1930s its owners, John Swire & Sons, operated passenger and cargo services to the port from Shanghai through their China Navigation Company steamers.

Butterfield & Swire headquarters, Hankow, and Customs House under construction, 1923-24. Source: Historical Photographs of China, Sw-06-002 © John Swire & Sons, Ltd 2007.

Wuhan was a city at the centre of China’s great political resurgence in the twentieth century. It has been on the front pages of newspapers overseas more than once before 2020. In October 1911 revolutionary bomb makers accidentally blew themselves up there, prompting their comrades to launch the great military uprising that would lead to the toppling of the Qing dynasty. The republic that was then inaugurated floundered and in 1926 a new revolutionary alliance of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party (the Guomindang), and the Chinese Communist Party, launched an audacious campaign to re-establish and reinvent the republic. The movement’s left wing head-quartered itself in Wuhan, establishing a revolutionary capital there. Wuhan’s people reoccupied the British concession, reclaiming it for their city: it never returned to British control despite the fury and tub-thumping of British politicians and British China hands downriver, and despite the fact that the left-wing was turned on by Chiang Kai-shek from his capital in Nanjing, and destroyed. Wuhan returned to the front pages in 1938 as the temporary capital of Chiang’s republic, which had withdrawn from Nanjing in the face of the Japanese invasion. ‘Defend Wuhan’ urges the poster below, but Wuhan fell to the Japanese in October 1938.

Wuhan’s history then is a history that was intertwined with wider global developments, international trade, imperialism, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the fascist onslaught of the 1930s, and slowly evolving resistance to it, first in Spain and then in China. In March 1938 the British poet W.H. Auden accompanied by the novelist Christopher Isherwood visited the refugee capital. ‘We would rather be in Hankow at this moment than anywhere else on earth’, wrote Isherwood. ‘History, grown weary of Shanghai, bored with Barcelona, has fixed her capricious interest upon Hankow’. Caprice again brings Wuhan to the world’s attention.

Poster: ‘Defend Wuhan!’. made by the ‘Korean Youth Wartime Service Corps’ (朝鲜青年战时服务团), founded in Wuhan in December 1937 by leftist Korean nationalists. Source: Historical Photographs of China, bi-s168.

For more on the city’s history see:

Chris Courtney, The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford University Press, 1984)
William Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford University Press, 1989)

My books The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the QIng Empire, 1832-1918 (Penguin) and Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Foreign Domination (Penguin) chart the rise, fall and legacies of this historic degradation of China’s sovereignty, and the nature of the foreign-run establishment in Wuhan and other cities.

Trifles, also known as loot

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Still they seep out, items ‘from the Emperor’s Summer Palace’, the Yuanmingyuan. This is the long, long-established euphemism for material looted during the sacking of the Summer Palace by British and French soldiery ‘wild for plunder’ in the days before the complex was burned down by British forces on 18 October 1860. The context was the hard-fought North China Campaign, British and French forces slogging across the plain from the mouth of the Beihai river, avenging bloody defeat at the hands of the Qing at the Dagu forts on 25 July 1859, and the seizure and ill-treatment of Allied envoys by the Chinese. Civilisation and its virtues were reasserted by the destruction of the complex of buildings and gardens northeast of Beijing, the beauty of which had left observers stunned for words.

Lot 516 at today’s sale at Chorley’s, ‘Gloucester’s Fine Auctioneers’ is outlined as ‘An Interesting collection of items relating to General Sir John Hart Dunne KCB’. Then a Captain, Dunne served with the 99th Regiment of Foot. He seized one of the five Pekinese dogs found abandoned in the royal quarters, the one in fact that was presented to Queen Victoria, charmingly renamed ‘Looty’. Sarah Cheang has written nicely about this. Material relating to Dunne’s career was on view at an exhibition in sunny Sidmouth in the summer of 2018.

There are photographs in the lot of Looty, a negative of Dunne and a woman dressed in, presumably, clothing seized from the same place, ‘a filigree work bodkin case of cylinder form, the inner sleeve inscribed ‘A Trifle from the Emperor’s Summer Palace Gen John Hart Dunne'” and more.

Loot, and in fact fake loot, began circulating almost immediately after the days of plunder. Taipans rushed north to pick up what they could from antiques markets around Beijing, any savvy vendor of Chinese objets, or clothing, quickly ran up watertight provenance for their wares, all material now tracing its origins back to the Yuanmingyuan. The ‘fate’ of loot has been tracked by James Hevia, and by others.

And so still they circulate, in this instance ‘a trifle’, or two, and a record of others: relics of the entangled and violent history of British-China relations, items that pepper the collections of British museums and galleries, spoils of war all in plain sight. The photographs here come from the auction catalogue, and I have also edited the negative to reveal more clearly the figure of John Hart Dunne, all dressed in loot.

For more on the campaign and its legacies see my The Scramble for China: Foreign devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (Penguin). I am grateful to Dr Stephen Lloyd, Curator of the Derby Collection, at Knowsley Hall, for drawing the sale to my attention.

And for dog-lovers: here’s Looty in colour, painted by Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl, courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust website.

Fifty years in China

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Actually, it came to almost 54 years: Thomas Carr Ramsey was unusual as a Briton in spending over half a century in China without leaving the country once. Of course, many Roman Catholic missionaries never left, but most foreign residents in China spent leave periods outside the country. Some worked for firms or oganisations such as missionary societies which had paid-leave policies, allowing them a furlough every five to seven years. This was deemed to be good for their health, but also for their general well-being, allowing them to reconnect with families. It did not suit everybody, and some found themselves at a loose end, distance and time having eroded their ties to their former homes. And of course, others were in China precisely to escape them.

Directory and Chronicle, 1917

Directory and Chronicle 1917, Swatow

Many memoirs share the title (or variations on the theme): My Twenty-Five Years in China, or Forty Years in China, and so on — the latter, by consul Sir Meyrick Hewlett, is quite one of the battiest of the genre — but it was unusual for a man actually to be able to boast five decades unbroken residence in the country. The occasion it was marked, at Shantou (Swatow) with a reception at the foreigners’ Kialat Club, presentation of a bowl and ‘numerous scrolls and plaques, testifying in classical Chinese characters to his many virtues’, a Chinese banquet, a cinema show, and a performance by a Chinese military band. Ramsey responded with a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, though he was no Scotsman, having been born in South Shields, the son of Captain Henry Ramsey, who worked as a pilot in Swatow from 1876 until his death in 1883. So the family connection with this, one of the quieter and lesser-known treaty ports, was longer still.

Directory & Chronicle 1905, Weihaiwei

Directory & Chronicle 1905, Weihaiwei

The younger Ramsey arrived in China aged 15 on 24 September 1874, sailing out via Cape Horn and San Francisco on a vessel captained by an uncle. His career thereafter in China was peripatetic, but after 1909 he was based in Shantou. He first worked in a shipping office in Hong Kong, moved to Swatow, then on Shanghai, where he married in 1885, then moved on to Chefoo (Yantai) — where his father had previously lived — to a gold-mining venture. That failed, and he followed the flow of the expansion of the British presence in China by arriving in Weihaiwei shortly before it was formally handed over to the British, being present at the ceremony itself. After an altercation in the British court there over the probity of the firm he had established, and its practices in supplying the government (he was acquitted), Ramsey removed back to Swatow, where he secured the local agency for the British-owned Kailan Mining Administration, and became a stalwart in the Kialat Club, and in yachting locally (he designed his own boats). He also secured for a decade the position of Norwegian Acting Vice Consul, which must have been useful for something. On the way he surfaces frequently in the treaty port press as a sportsman: a champion jockey and a useful boxer.

Desk Hong List, 1884, Shanghai and Northern Ports, Shanghai section

Desk Hong List, 1884, Shanghai and Northern Ports, Shanghai section

It is the pattern of movement that interests me most, as well as, conversely, his fixity at Shantou and that of his family. When he died in Shantou in December 1931, Thomas Carr Ramsey was buried in a grave next to his mother in the now-lost Kakchieh Foreign Cemetery, while his son, Noel Ronald Ramsey carried on the firm’s business in the port after his death. Thomas Ramsey roamed along the China coast seeking opportunity but settled on exploiting a niche. You can find many like him in the archive, often moving swiftly, pouncing on new opportunities that opened as the political geography of China changed. The opening of a new treaty port, or leased territory, or a change in the rules that allowed foreigners to enter a new sphere of activity – mining, for example, or manufacturing – saw men leap in to try to secure a windfall profit (scooping up land at the first auction of lots was generally a sure-fire way to secure a good return), or otherwise exploit the advantage of early arrival. In the wider history of the treaty ports we know more about the successful than the not so lucky, but the latter always outnumbered the former. (The spectacular bankruptcy of Dent & Co. in 1865, sometime biggest rivals to Jardine, Matheson and Co, means that they are largely absent from histories of the China coast). Legal records are full of details of debts, bankruptcies, and the sorting out of estates. Sometimes, however, a man stands out in the record, and in this case one chanced into my line of sight, when I was looking for something else, through a little sub-heading in the North China Herald: ‘Mr. Carr Ramsey’s Jubilee’.

The man seems finally to have cracked: for on 13 June 1928 the ‘Norwegian Consul and Merchant’ (as he styled himself to the immigration authorities) landed with his wife in San Francisco on the SS President Grant, where he featured in the local press due to his ‘record’ stay in China, before making his way onwards to Britain. Sixteen months later he arrived in New York heading westwards; Ramsey’s wife, Ella Mary McLeod, followed him, dying in Swatow in 1935. This family was more widely embedded in the China coast world: his wonderfully named brother, Alfred Formosa Ramsey, was a ship’s engineer, who married the eldest daughter of the Inspector of Hong Kong’s naval dockyard police in 1893. One sister married a mariner in Chefoo in 1873, a man who was later Parks overseer at Shanghai for six years before his death in 1902, and whose family were a local fixture. Another sister married the founder of Shanghai’s Inshallah Dairy, A.M.A. Evans, who kept a fine herd of Jersey cattle in the east of the settlement. Thomas Carr Ramsey’s son Noel married the sister of a Chinese Maritime Customs officer, but his daughter Violet broke the China mould, and relocated to the Straits Settlements.

Swatow, a short hop by steamer from Hong Kong, was never a very successful treaty port, at least as judged in foreign minds, but it was an important point of movement of China to and from Southeast Asia, and prospered as a result of remittances from its diaspora. The city was comprehensively wrecked by a devastating typhoon in 1922, and was badly affected by the communist insurgency in eastern Guangdong province in the mid-late 1920s: in 1927 it was even briefly seized and held by Communist forces. Like many other ports it had its small foreign community, and contrary to assumptions that foreigners came, ‘plundered’ — a term I found in use only last week in a talk given by a Fudan University graduate — and then quickly went, the Ramsey family’s multi-generational story was not uncommon, nor was the way in which they had secured a comfortable niche. Old Swatow is now mostly invisible in today’s Shantou, and the port and its ilk are generally overshadowed by the bright lights (and richer records) of Shanghai, but it was an important part of the infrastructure of the China coast, and the Ramsey family itself in all its branches is emblematic of this now obscured world.

Sources: North China Herald, various, especially 25 October 1924, 8 December 1931; US immigration records via Ancestry.

From the Mystic Flowery Land … to Herne Bay

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Charles Halcombe and Liang Ahghan, c.1896

An 1853 editorial in The Times had great fun with the idea that one day soon travel to China would be so easy and ordinary, so vulgar indeed, that ladies’ maids with carpet bags would be traipsing along the Great Wall. Vulgarity was signalled by the leader writer by a reference to the otherwise inoffensive north Kent coastal town of Herne Bay, which had been transformed rapidly by the arrival of the railway and some shrewd developments, not least a pier, into a very popular seaside resort. It seems somehow appropriate then to find Charles J. H. Halcombe, late Chinese Maritime Customs, living there in March 1901 with his wife Liang Ah Ghan.

Halcombe’s books might strike a faint chord: Called out; or, The Chung Wang’s daughter, an Anglo-Chinese romance (1894); The Mystic Flowery Land: A Personal Memoir (1896) — from which this photograph comes — and Children of far Cathay : a social and political novel (1906). The first and last are romances of anti-Manchu revolution — in the latter Sun Yat-sen makes an early fictional appearance — and ‘Anglo-Chinese romance’. Halcombe had joined the Customs Service as a Watcher in November 1887 and resigned when stationed at Kiungchow (Qiongzhou) in March 1893. He was by then a Second Class Tidewaiter, and he had a novel in his pocket. The grandson of a barrister and Member of Parliament, and son of a civil servant, Halcombe would evidently prove more comfortable with the occupation of author, with which he described himself in the 1901 census, and traveller, that local newspaper profiles accorded him in Kent. Twice ship-wrecked as a teenage sailor — in December 1881 off the French coast, and in January 1883 off Cape Horn — he also spent some time in South Africa  before sailing into Shanghai in May 1887 aged 22. He tells us that he initially secured a post on the North China Daily News, but swapped that for the lowly position of Customs Service Tidewaiter, which is an unusual trajectory. Most men would aim to move the other way.

The Mystic Flowery Land is not a forgotten classic: its prose is clunky, its tone sentimental, and its claims to authority underwhelming. Several of its chapters began as articles in the monthlies, and it was perhaps to further his journalistic career that Holcombe arrived back in England with his wife in October 1894. He span a tale in one of its chapters about Liang Ahghan, the Cantonese woman he had met in Yantai (Chefoo) in north China when stationed there in 1888-89, and claimed that she had saved his life from rebels. This seems rather unlikely, but she moved with him from posting to posting, and they married sometime in late 1892 or early 1893 when he was based at Kiungchow, before he resigned and moved to Hong Kong.

Halcombe made an attempt at his literary career, but it proved hard-going. He had not received much schooling, and for the reviewers this showed. The author was ‘a clever man’, remarked The Westminster Review in 1899 in a notice of his novel about reincarnation and ancient Rome, The Romance of a Former Life, ‘but we doubt whether he has yet mastered the art of fiction’.  “One reads on from page to page wondering what extraordinary mistake the good man will make next’, wrote Country Life‘s reviewer, patronisingly, of ‘the flood of childish and pretentious errors’ to be found in its pages. In 1905 Halcombe placed a letter in the Daily Mail offering a reward for the return of his journals which recorded the shipping disasters that he had survived, and which had been lost when his parents moved home. He was planning a work on his early travels, but his seems to have been a forlorn request, and neither the diaries nor the book seem ever to have appeared. His writing trailed off after 1906.. Halcombe died in May 1931 in Dover, noted still as an author and traveller, but also as a former local councillor, and civil servant, altogether a more secure occupation than novelist, or, particularly in his case, sailor.

It is Nina — Liang Ahghan — I think of, however. There are few traces of her outside her husband’s various references in his writings: in June 1900 she was baptised in a Herne Bay church; she appears in the 1901 and 1911 census; and she is nearly always mentioned in local press accounts of Halcombe’s work. There were 1,825 people born in China recorded in the 1911 census of England & Wales, although many of those were, unlike Liang Ahghan, not Chinese, but the offspring of missionary, commercial or Customs service families — as were Herne Bay’s two other China born residents. (The couple themselves had no children). What were the dynamics of the household caught in the 1911 census: the author manqué – pompously careful to have his status as District Councillor recorded on the form — his widowed 78 year old mother, the 18 year-old Kent woman who was the household domestic, and Liang Ahghan. A more agile novelist then Halcombe — a man whose books mostly fictionalised and mythologised his own life, and which repeatedly picked over his culturally brittle relationship — could make something of that, perhaps a comedy of manners and nations set against the backdrop of Herne Bay’s pier. Liang survived her husband by the best part of two decades and seems to have died in late 1949, in Folkestone. I wonder about her later life, and of what she made of these towns of coastal Kent after Yantai, Canton, and Hong Kong. We are left only with her husband’s mythologisation of her life, and of her father — who forms the subject of one essay in The Mystic Flowery Land (available in a 2009 Chinese translation, for some reason) — and this rather touching photograph of an Anglo-Chinese marriage.

Lost monuments and memorials of the Shanghai Bund 2: Statue of Sir Robert Hart, 1914

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I first started writing up this research in 2010 when invited to give a lecture in Shanghai at a meeting of the International Council of Museums. This had been timed to coincide with the Shanghai World Expo, which carved out chunks of the city, south of its former core, and peppered them with dozens of pavilions showcasing international design. Over six months some 73 million visits were made to these sites. Part of the city’s overall pitch was to show how internationalised a place it had become after two decades of ‘reform and opening up. It was now a true world city, cosmopolitan and modern. I have never trusted the word ‘cosmopolitan’, for reasons that I will come to, but I have found the word used more than once to describe these monuments that formerly stood on the city’s Bund — its riverside embankment. In fact they are used to represent Shanghai’s longer history of being a world city: we have always been cosmopolitan, runs the argument, look at the array of artistic styles represented by the monuments which graced our public spaces. One display in which you can find this wording used is in the Bund History Museum underneath one of the current memorials: the Monument to the People’s Heroes (上海市人民英雄纪念碑).

Unveiling of statue of Sir Robert Hart, 25 May 1914

Unveiling of statue of Sir Robert Hart, 25 May 1914

Was this the most ‘cosmopolitan’ of the memorials? The second youngest of the Shanghai monuments at the time of their removal in September 1943 was the statue of Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General (I. G.) of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from 1863-1911. Designed by Henry Pegram, R.A., and unveiled on 25 May 1914, the Hart statue (赫德铜像) originally stood on the river-front lawns at the junction of Jiujiang (Kiukiang) Road and the Bund. Ostensibly, yes, it was in many ways the most ‘cosmopolitan’ of the six memorials placed by the Huangpu river. Hart’s organisation was an agency of the Chinese state, but it employed some 11,000 foreign nationals over nearly a century, from 1854 until 1950, and they worked smoothly together, mostly, in what was for its time an institution unusually international in its composition. Half of those men were Britons, like Hart, but the others were American, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and from many more nations besides (including quite a number of Norwegians). Although the initiative to build a memorial came from the service, it was unable to see it through. Hart was the subject of something akin to a cult within the Customs, but its leaders could not use public money to honour their former chief, and not enough money was donated by its staff. It was also felt that it would be politically sensible to have a monument erected not in Peking, where Hart had spent most of the five decades after 1861, but in foreign-controlled Shanghai. So there it was that the statue was unveiled by the Danish Consul-General. Its epitaphs were composed by the President of Harvard University, and its designer was British. A German conducted the Town Band as proceedings got underway. Chinese texts were carved on to the plinth as well, and it was largely paid for by licence fees paid by the Chinese residents of the International Settlement.

Robert Hart statueThe statue shows Hart back bowed with the weight of his responsibilities, so it was hardly a subtle object, but unusually for the Bund memorials it also had a didactic text (see below). Hart, the words on panels attached to the plinth stated, was a ‘True Friend of the Chinese People’. He was ‘Modest, patient, sagacious and resolute’, it continued, ‘He overcame formidable obstacles, and / Accomplished a work of great beneficence for China and the world’. These are the words composed by Harvard’s Charles Eliot. Your ‘true friend of the Chinese people’, might well be my ‘black hand’ of British imperialism of course (to use a Chinese term), but the most controversial aspect of the memorial for some, at least until the Japanese takeover of the city in December 1941, was that the plinth was too small, and that the statue faced the wrong way. As those who Shanghai can see, it was positioned so that Sir Robert looked north, but this put it out of line with most of the other memorials on the Bund which were designed to be viewed with the river behind them, facing the buildings that lined the west side of the road.

In 1927 the statue was moved  a little way north, and placed on a new, much higher plinth (more in proportion with the statue itself, which was designed to be viewed from below), and at the same time the plaques were renewed. The text had been too closely placed together, because of the size of the plinth, and some of it was by then quite indistinct. There were also mistakes in the Chinese inscription. But the main reason for the refurbishment was the deliberate use of Hart’s reputation by his nephew, Sir Frederick Maze, who was to take over Hart’s position as Inspector-General in 1929. The actual occasion was the rebuilding of the Customs House at Shanghai in 1925-27, where Maze was Commissioner. After he took the post, Maze had a glossy brochure published as a Circular (a Customs Service high-level order or announcement) , which was sent to retired former senior officers and many others. Look, Maze aimed to say, Hart and his legacy are safe with me.

statue1928In its new location the statue now faced west, and stood on a traffic island in front of the main entrance to the Shanghai Customs House, with its back to the Customs Examination shed. Presumably it then functioned to shame those sloping off early from work. Perhaps they snuck out the back of the building instead, in order to avoid his gaze. (But as the service also had photographs of Hart officially on display in offices, there was a limit to how far they could avoid the old ‘I. G.’). This was not the only one of the Bund side statues to move, in fact all did so, over the years. We might well be accustomed to thinking about the meanings of memorials shifting (or simply fading), but think less about the fact that the objects themselves, seemingly so rooted, are often shifted. Roads are widened or re-routed; anxieties lead to monuments being re-sited on private, instead of public land; political change demands a cleansing of a cityscape. Hart’s statue, along with all the others on the Bund, was taken down in September 1943, at the insistence of the Japanese authorities in the city.

Removal of statue of Sir Robert Hart, September 1943

Removal of statue of Sir Robert Hart,September 194

Aside from the Shanghai War Memorial, this was the monument that foreign observers seemed most invested in emotionally. In a couple of accounts published in wartime Britain, the statue is pointed to as representing all that was positive about the British presence in China, and what was presented as the selfless contribution of men like Hart to its development. I have discussed the nuances and realities of such thinking in The Scramble for China, and Hart’s role in particular, but it is telling how much this statue came to symbolise what were argued to be the positive aspects of the British presence in modern China, which it became important to articulate after December 1941, when Britain and China were formally allies in the war against Japan. The ‘savagery’ of the Japanese — this was the type of language used — was highlighted in these accounts by the pulling down of the statue of Sir Robert Hart. The sense of a lack of proportion is more telling yet.

In early December 1945, the Customs Service leadership, which had been based in Chongqing since February 1942, started to take back over the organs of the service based in Shanghai which had continued to function under Japanese control during the occupation. One would have thought that with a harbour to rehabilitate, a population to feed, and an economy to help reconstruct, there would be little time or resource to spare to think about a statue. But no: a team was despatched to relocate Sir Robert and get him back on show. The statue and all the side the panels had been transferred to the Shanghai Customs when the memorial was dismantled — I have held in my hands the signed receipt that was issued (such are the things which survive in archives) — but they were now missing. At some point late in the war, as shortages pushed up the price of metal, someone in the Customs House quietly sold them off to a scrap-metal merchant. The investigation team followed the trail to a couple of scrapyards, but there it went cold. Or not so cold: evasive replies from those interviewed at the yards suggested to the team that the deposed Inspector-General and the plaques proclaiming all of his virtues and titles in English and in Chinese had been melted down.

Hart died in England in 1911, and was buried in the pretty Thames-side churchyard at Bisham, near Marlow. In early 2013 with funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council,  I worked with fellow-historians to restore the grave of Hart and his wife Hester, which was rededicated in a ceremony in February 2013 (you can find a write up here). Several of Hart’s descendants came to the event, as well as the children and grand-children of Customs staff. I also collaborated with a Bristol-based company on a short film about this process and about Hart’s career and contributions to Britain-China relations (for more on that look here). Hart is also remembered in the name of a primary school in his homeland. The last time I visited the Shanghai History Museum he was just about the first person I saw, in the shape of an actor playing the Inspector-General in the introductory film, but the statue remains conspicuous by its absence, as all the Bund memorials do.

And my beef with that word ‘cosmopolitan’? Well, this was never an innocent word, and it was in general a statement of power for the foreign residents of Shanghai who lauded their little league of nations on the banks of the Huangpu river. It was cosmopolitan on their terms, and those terms were shaped by the power relationships which shaped the city. After all, Chinese residents were forbidden from walking on the Bund lawns on which Sir Robert Hart was placed, and so would not have been able to read those inscriptions, which went through the cosmopolitan motions of speaking in Chinese, but which spoke to a deliberately emptied air.

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Fisher Island mystery

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Nelly O’Driscoll’s grave, from Findagrave.com

Who was Nelly O’Driscoll? I have been asked this more than once, and you can find numerous Chinese tourist blog posts and others asking the question. Her grave sits next to the Hsiyu 西嶼) Lighthouse — formerly known as Fisher Island Light — in the Penghu group (or Pescadores) west of Taiwan. The map of the site shows a ‘洋人古墓’ — a ‘foreigner’s old grave’ just outside the compound. A colleague just sent me a postcard of the lighthouse, one of those designed by scottish engineer David Marr Henderson, who served as Engineer in Chief of the Chinese Maritime Customs from 1869-1898.

I do not have an answer, but I have got closer. Thomas O’Driscoll joined the Customs as a Third Assistant Lightkeeper in January 1887. After serving on Ockseu (Wuqiu) Island, he was posted to Fisher Island where he was serving by July 1890. Nelly might have been a child, for there is only a single year engraved on the stone, but may also have been his wife: ‘Nelly’ is as likely to be an English name given to a Chinese woman, as the name of a foreign spouse: and an Assistant Lighthouse Keeper only three years into his post was more likely to have a Chinese or indeed a Japanese wife or housekeeper than a fellow national. It is possible that he did not know her precise age.

O’Driscoll himself has left few further traces in the records. He left the lights service in 1902, after a period of leave, and moved to the ‘Outdoor’ staff of the Customs as a Tidewaiter at Shanghai, but stuck that for barely a year. Therafter he surfaces as a supervisor of some sort for a firm of Civil Engineers, Davies and Thomas, overseeing some bunding at Wuhu in 1907, testifying in a court case related to building at the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai in 1909, and taking part in the Customs Club Fancy Dress Ball in 1911 (he wore a Chinese costume — such are the odd traces we leave behind us). In 1912 his 33-year old wife Helen died at their home in Shanghai, but by the time he died in the city on 15 May 1915 he had remarried. O’Driscoll is listed as a ‘Clerk of Works’ in the consulate records, and his last appearance in the North China Herald was a member of the Committee of the St. Patrick’s Society at Shanghai.

O’Driscoll most likely fetched up in China as a seamen, joining the Customs Lights Service in Amoy (Xiamen), as a softer perch than one afloat. Lives like his on the China coast generally throw up few traces. The lIves of their partners, wives or daughters are even less accessible. I can only approach Nelly through the man O’Driscoll, although it is her gravestone and name that has eingmatically remained, while Thomas O’Driscoll himself has been buried in the archive.

Shanghai Amateur Circus

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Human pyramid, SACHere are Shanghailanders at play, in the third of the Shanghai Race Club Amateur Circus events, in 1901, a year after the Boxer War, while foreign troops still occupied parts of north China, and were stationed at Shanghai. The first two circuses were held in August 1894 and 1895, a hot and steamy time of year for the foreign community to be masquerading as Sophie Skylark, Tottie Chuckerout and Professor Nankin Roady (to select a few from the programmes). The leading light was British merchant Frank Maitland (‘Frankini’), sportsman, sometime Master of the Shanghai Paper Hunt Club, Race Club Steward, founder of the Shanghai Society for the Prevention of Cruely to Animals, proprietor of the newspaper Sport and Gossip, and then of the Shanghai Times.

It was, as far as I can see, an entirely masculine enterprise, originating in a ‘circusette’ put on one sultry Wednesday evening in June 1893 in the Race Club Grand Stand. A lavishly illustrated souvenir of the 1901 performances surfaces at auctions, and sells quite handsomely. Amongst its photographs is this pearl: Tottie Longsocks — who ‘wins all hearts’.

tottie longsocks