Tag Archives: Treaty Ports

Introducing China Families

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Over the last couple of years I have been working with colleagues to transfer some of the scattered sets of biographical information that I have developed during research projects over the last two decades onto a new platform. The site, China Families, is now live, and still growing. Through various projects I had built up substantial sets of biographical information about men who served in the Shanghai Municipal Police (when developing Empire Made Me), the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (Chinese and foreign staff), and the shipping line China Navigation Co (whilst writing China Bound). An interest in the history of cemeteries and memorialisation amongst treaty port communities in China left me with sets of historic cemetery lists. These have now been combined with lists of civilian internees, neutral European nationals in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and British government probate records, into a single searchable database. There are at least 60,000 records available. In addition I have developed a list of all the digitised copies of residents’ and business directories that I could find online, and provided guides for looking for men and women who lived in Hong Kong, and in Shanghai.

The sources are diverse. Much of the information comes from archival documents in Shanghai, Nanjing, and in London, from my own research in local newspapers and printed records. Some of the materials used have subsequently been withdrawn from public access, especially material from archives in China. I have also recently published an introduction to the history that underpins this, and set out some of the resources available for those researching their treaty port China family histories (and I identified some that you will not find).

The site is free to use, and requires no registration, and is designed to be useful for historians and genealogists alike, and also sits alongside the Historical Photographs of China platform. Do play around with it, and let me know what you think. I would be interested to know what you find there, and what you do with the information.

 

Handover songs

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I’m currently in Hong Kong, which is buzzing with excitement about a new song and video, commissioned by the government to commemorate the twentieth anniversary this summer of the handover of the former colony to China. Perhaps I exaggerate, but ‘Hong Kong Our Home’ the ‘Hong Kong SAR 20th Anniversary Theme Song’ has not had a warm reception.

Something about it seemed familiar to me. Then I realised that we might place it not simply in the history of lamentable Hong Kong handover songs, and there is such a history, for it is not the original musical commentary on this momentous political change. The first accompanied the handover itself at a special concert, and then another was released for the tenth anniversary. Suffice to say that a parody of that song has apparently received rather more viewers on Youtube.

But handover songs commence rather in 1943, with the transfer of the International Settlement at Shanghai to the control of the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei on 1 August that year. Here are the words of the ‘Greater Shanghai March Song’ penned, at least nominally, by quisling mayor Chen Gongbo, and performed for the first time at a ‘special patriotic concert’.

“Greater Shanghai! Greater Shanghai!

Overlooking the Middle Pacific

Guarding the mouth of the Yangtsze River

Your bold face shines on Asia

Your name is known throughout the world!

Greater Shanghai! Greater Shanghai!

Our wealth is every growing;

Our civilization is ever progressing.

Let us rejuvenate China,

Safeguard East Asia

And perfect our freedom and independence.”

Of course, this is most unfair, for the lyrics and sentiments are very different to those of ‘Hong Kong Our Home’:

“That’s why I treasure Hong Kong

That’s why I admire Hong Kong

We love her  with an eternal glowing flame

that grows as time goes by

revealing her true strength

Our beautiful Hong Kong shining ever brighter

Our beautiful Hong Kong up on the world stage

Step by step, we will carry on

astounding the world as we always have

Step by step, we will carry

on astounding the world as we always have

This is our home”

Ah. Well, the politics are of course, quite, quite, different, but I rather think, on reflection, that in many, many, ways, the song, at least, remains the same.

Out of China: now in paperback, and shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize

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Shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize, my most recent book, book Out of China, now published in a Penguin Books paperback in the UK, and in hardback in the US by Harvard University Press, narrates the struggle of China’s peoples across the twentieth century to roll back foreign power, and explores the explosive legacy today of the era of foreign domination. Starting in 1918 it charts the decline, fall and afterlife of the foreign enclaves that had been established in many of China’s great cities (as well as in some quite out-of-the-way backwaters). It shows how the battle to restore China’s dignity and sovereignty took place on battlefields, and in conference chambers, but also in museums and galleries, in Hollywood, in print, and on stage. Out of China is concerned with struggles over ideas, and political power, but I also draw out the human dimension, and the stories of those caught up by design or chance in this now largely vanished world. The battle for China was not over even when the last foreign colony, Macao, was handed back in 1999, and tensions over the record of foreign powers in China, and over the wider legacy and impact of the West remain live today.

 

 

Media links: Out of China reviews

‘Barbarians Out’, review by Rana Mitter in New York Review of Books, 7 December 2017 (paywall).

Open Letters Monthly, review by Steve Donoghue, 11 September 2017.

Review by Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books, 8 May 2017.

Interview in South China Morning Post, 3 May 2017.

‘Nationalism by another name’, review by Julian Gewirtz, in The Financial Times, 25/26 March 2017.

‘Power games’, review by Michael Sheridan in The Sunday Times, 26 March 2017 (paywall).

‘Boxed in Rebellion’, review by Gavin Jacobson, Times Literary Supplement, 19 April 2017.

Review in Prospect Magazine, by Julia Lovell, 11 April 2017