Shanghai Women - 1920s and 30s

Love Lane in central George Town is so called, they say, because in former times it was the district in which Chinese businessmen were inclined to keep their mistresses. Today it is a fashionable street of terraced ‘link’ houses full of boutiques, tea houses and coffee shops, many with a nostalgic theme invoking the romance of this former era. The present author is staying in a cheap hotel just around the corner and not far from the Sunrise Sweetheart Café, a venue famous for ladies of easy virtue. It is in many of these shops and cafes on Love Lane - such as the very commodious number 41, the entrance of which is pictured below - that one can find reproductions of posters, advertisements and calendars from the golden era of Shanghai fashion, the 1920s and 30s – Chinese nostalgia. This ‘Out of Phase’ post is accordingly dedicated to the same. George Town is not all Chinese temples.

It was the fashion designers of Shanghai who transformed female attire and the Chinese female image under the Chinese nationalist Republic during the 1920s and 30s. After the turmoil of the revolution in the 1940s these same designers shifted to Hong Kong and Singapore and other outposts of Chinese culture, such as George Town, but by then the transformation they started had been complete. The attire of the Chinese woman had been changed forever. Chinese women were brought into modernity. The communists tended to regard the new fashions as ‘Western imperialism’ and, ironically, female attire after the revolution reverted to older, utilitarian, and hence more conservative styles. This regression into dowdiness reached its peak during the catastrophic Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. In more recent times, the increasingly open policies of the People's Republic have re-embraced the fashion revolution of the early XXth century, which is to say they have rediscovered style and good taste and the great sartorial revolution of the 1920s and 30s is at last widely acknowledged in mainland China.

At the centre of the Shanghai style is the garment called the cheongsam. This is a single-piece, tight-fitting full-body dress that became the characteristic garment of the modern Chinese woman. Contrary to claims that it was an importation of Western styles, its roots are in older Chinese garments and so is a continuation, or a modern adaptation, of distinctly Chinese traditions. The genius of the Shanghai design houses was to create a modern garment that is as Chinese as it is modern. Either way, the Moaists frowned upon it as bourgeois while, conversely, it has been a symbol of the anti-communist pro-capitalist Chinese, a badge of modernity and liberation. Here is a picture of the typical modern cheongsam:

Here is a picture of traditional women's attire - the forerunner to the modern cheongsam - from the period immediately before the Shanghai design houses reinvented the garment in its modern form:   

As still prevails in Islamic attire, the traditional Chinese garment was designed to completely obscure the female form and allowed no naked skin to be visible at all. The modern cheongsam, in contrast, is tighter fitting, accentuates the waist, makes a virtue of the feminine form, celebrating female beauty, and shows bare arms. The original Shanghai cheongsam is full length and goes down to the feet; later versions became knee length or three-quarter length.

The liberation of the female form from the dowdy sacks of past styles was then embraced and celebrated in Chinese popular culture. Women in the cheongsam began to appear in advertising and in items of popular visual culture such as wall calendars. Some examples:

Images from that golden era - China in the 1920s and 30s - are now highly collectible and are regarded as the finest fruits of early Chinese modernity. The blossoming of China, later interupted by the Moaist revolution, is on display in these images. They show the Chinese creating their own distinctive modernity. A similar blossoming occured in Japan too. These were closed societies, long insulated from modernity. Then - often with trauma and upheaval - they belatedly decided to embrace modernity on their own terms. This, finally, is what such images as these are really about. They are not just 'nostalgia' and even less are they 'soft porn'. They are a record of how the oriental genius came to terms with the realities of the modern mode, and even more so, confidently set out to forge a modernity of its own. 

There are many modernities. In some cases it is a mode imposed by European civilization upon others. The Chinese, like the Japanese, were never going to be content to receive modernity passively like that. After resisting modernity for a long while, when they finally opened their societies to the new modern world they were determined to do so in their own way, with their own aesthetic values. They were never going to be mere imitators. They were going to appropriate and transform. Insofar as these images show a Westernized sensibility, it has been appropriated and transformed.

Below readers can find a selection of pictures from the Shanghai golden era - advertising posters, calander girls, erotica - images that adorn the shops and tea houses of George Town, setting the high-point and standard of modern style in Chinese women's attire and conventions of beauty.

It is worth adding here that the Chinese (Asians in general) continue to have fine taste and that Asian women are undoubtedly among the best dressed in the world. This has been very noticeable to this present writer on his travels. The Indian/Hindoostani world has been nowhere near as succesful in creating its own modern aesthetic. Hindoo women remain beautiful in traditional attire but on the whole have not made a succesful transition to modern dress. There has been no equivalent to the modern cheongsam in India. (And Indian men, let it be said, are almost uniformly badly dressed, whereas the Asian gentleman's appropriation of the business suit has been entirely succesful.)

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Views of a Chinese Graveyard

In the hilly region towards the centre of the Prince of Wales Island – or Pe Nang as it is called – is the old town of Bilak Pulau. Stranded there an entire afternoon awaiting return buses to George Town the present author wandered into the surrounding jungle and about three miles out of town encountered an old traditional Chinese cemetery. The photographs on this page are views of the cemetery, the graves and the funerary art from that site, along with a few rudimentary notes on the symbolism of Chinese graves. 

The Chinese constitute an ethnic majority in modern Pe Nang – the only area of the Malay peninsula or the Malacca Straits where they do so – and have been an established community for many centuries. Although there are a few graves from recent times, this cemetery is from an older era and is the burial place of many of the progenitors and ancestors of the illustrious Chinese clans who still populate the island. These were Chinese – mainly from southern China – who ventured to the Straits in search of fortune, or at least a better life. 

Although remote and buried in forest, the cemetery is still tended. In the photos shown on this page readers will notice the profusion of slips of paper strewn all about; this is from a recent festival in which graves are decorated with messages to the dead, as in this instance:

The remarkable thing about traditional Chinese graves is their shape. In contrast to the boxed rectilinear graves of Europeans, they are almost always semi-circular in shape, or what is often described as 'horseshoe' shaped, or else the shape of the Greek letter omega. The deceased is buried with the head at the top of this curved shape and so the "head stone" is actually where the feet are. Burial is usually quite shallow - compared to the mandatory six feet of the european grave - and so a tumulus or mound is usually shaped over the area inside the omega/horseshoe. The grave therefore is elevated above ground level.

There is much discussion about the significance and meaning of the curved burial plot, although very little of it is informative or sensible. As with nearly all things Chinese, readers will find an abundance of reports stating that the shape is regarded as "lucky" and is designed to bring "good luck" to the deceased in the afterlife. This tells us nothing. 

More useful are accounts that tell us that the shape is developed from the theories and practices of feng sui - Chinese geomancy - where it is considered beneficial for the dead to be buried in a valley or a concave formation of hills; where this is lacking then the grave itself is mounded up and shaped accordingly. This is evident in the graveyard depicted here. It is, as it happens, on a western-facing hillside that conforms in part to the feng sui requirements, and clearly individual graves have been shaped into small hills to accentuate the natural lay of the earth in an appropriate way. 

Other accounts of the omega/horseshoe grave remark upon the fact that sometimes the tumulus is decorated like a tortoise shell, and so the entire construction seems to allude to the shape of a tortoise. Why? Because, we are again told, "tortoises are good luck." Certainly, but why? The key idea is that the tortoise shell is cosmological. This is a very common symbolism found throughout Chinese cosmology (and the Chinese tradition is strongly cosmological.) The symbolism concerns an over-arching shell such as the sky is supposed to be in traditional cosmological understandings. The grave then becomes a microcosm of the world. There is, however, also the fact that tortoises, according to legend, are supposed to seek out a suitable (re: "lucky") place to die. By making the grave tortoise-like it becomes - by extension - a good place for the dead to be buried. It is, in any case, all about a suitable location. For the traditional Chinese the location of the grave is paramount. 

What most accounts of Chinese burial practices neglect to mention, though, is that - very obviously - the shape of the traditional grave is uterine. The earth is a womb. The grave is the uterus. The dead await rebirth (either by resurrection or in the Pureland - Chinese accounts of the afterlife are diverse.) The shapes and curves of the Chinese grave are, in any case, distinctly feminine. This is the deepest, most primordial and most important symbolism. Compared to the utilitarian Western burial box (coffin) the Chinese grave is distinctly anatomical and the curved shapes emphasise the idea of the earth as womb, the living earth, which is the key underlying metaphor of geomancy. Chinese burial practices are above all geomantic. This fact is on display everywhere in a traditional Chinese cemetery. We will hopefully have occasion to explore this further at a later date. 

Note the semi-circular "forecourt" in front of the grave marker and the lines of salt that families draw at various points around grounds along with offerings to the dead. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Secret of England's Greatness

This is a famous depiction of the British Empire by Thomas Jones Barker, 1861, 'The Secret of England's Greatness'. It is so called because it depicts the apocryphal story commonly told of Queen Victoria that, when asked how the British Empire had grown so strong, she pointed not to ships or guns but to the Bible and said, "Tell them that this is the secret of England's greatness." Here we see Her Majesty handing over a copy of the Holy Writ to an African envoy in the Audience Room at Windsor.

Some commentators suppose that the envoy is generic and that the implication is that the British lay claim to the whole of Africa. A sinister interpretation. More likely, he is understood to be or is based upon or alludes to Ali bin Nasr, governor of Mombasa. Victoria was on good terms with him. He had been invited to and attended her coronation in 1838 and travelled to England to see her again in 1842. The costume in the painting can be identified as specifically east African.

I point out that if this handsome African is (or is based upon) Ali bin Nasr then he is, obviously, a Muslim and that, therefore, he would acknowledge the Bible as one of God's Books and would understand Queen Victoria and the British as 'People of the Book'. It would therefore not be at all insulting or demeaning or imposing for him to be presented with a Bible. He would entirely expect her to give him a Bible. The scene, therefore, does NOT signify the imposition of Christianity upon heathens, which is usually how it is taken, or always how it is taken in post-colonial intellectuality.

I think that is a simplistic interpretation. No doubt it was understood as having that meaning at the time - it was a widely reproduced and very popular picture - but I doubt that it is, as it were, a simplistic endorsement of missionary Christianity in Africa. The British did not usually try to convert Muslims to Christianity. Like among the Muslims themselves, there was a distinction between 'People of the Book' and those deemed religionless, between 'Musselmen" and "savages". Savages were given Christianity. British missionaries worked to convert Muslims (they still do) but the task was more difficult and less urgent than was the baptism of savages.

I do not think this is a picture of a savage. I do not think it is a picture of a heathen. It is a picture of an African Muslim chieftan. He is depicted with considerable sympathy. He is not depicted as an ape or as sub-human, as Africans sometimes were in European ideas. He is regal - not some khalhari bushman. He is handsome, muscular, proud, dignified, strong, albeit kneeling appropriately before Her Majesty. But the British themselves knelt before her in exactly the same way. So rather than this being a depiction of raw subjugation and surrender, we see an African dignitary (with his dignity fully acknowledged by the painter) in an act that shows him as "one of us". This is the peculiarity of the scene. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, along with Prince Albert and the Mistress of Robes, look on watching the remarkable way in which the British Empire had brought diverse peoples - even Africans! - into a single edifice under a single sovereign.

That is how I understand this picture. I don't indulge in post-colonial demonizing of everything British. My world-view isn't formed by the resentful post-colonial Leftism that pervades the intellectual culture of my age. Of course this picture is about Empire, and of course it combines themes of patriotism and piety, and of course the polite deference of the chieftan disguises the fact that the British were probably stripping his country of natural resources, but it also celebrates those benevolent and benign aspects of the Empire that we no longer admit.

That is: as Empires go, the British Empire wasn't too bad. I remember talking to a guy in Java who told me how envious he was of the Malays. "They were conquered by the British," he said. "Lucky!" He complained that his country had been conquered by the Dutch, who were complete bastards, whereas any country that was part of the British Empire he regarded as enormously fortunate. I heard the same thing in India too - Indians who told me that they counted themselves lucky to have been conquered by the British and to have been part of the British Empire. I was sitting talking to a man in a Hindu temple outside of Bangalore. "What about Gandhi and all that?" I asked. Of course he revered Gandhi, but he didn't believe the British had been too bad. Indian nationalists had demonized them, but he said that most Indians were glad to have had that experience under the British. His mother loved the British, he added. The British brought tinned food. His mother regarded British tinned food as a veritable emblem of civilization.

I was educated in the usual post-colonial narrative. The evil British raped and pillaged their way around the globe in a racist rampage of colonial exploitation. The reality of travelling knocked that out of me. The reality was much more nuanced. I think this painting is more nuanced than we take it too. It is a good painting with which to deal with this post-colonial bias. It seems a straight-forward, heavy-handed paean to imperialist ideology, everything your standard post-colonial Leftist hates. It's got it all. Empire, religion, racism, monarchy, hierarchy. A picture we can love to hate. But if we understand that the African is a Muslim man, its' meaning alters just enough to make it interesting. (Notice, by the way, that  he wears a knife. He has not been disarmed.)

I do have to add here that the pervasive feminist treatments of this painting are vacuous and tiresome. Do a google search for 'The Source of England's Greatness'. Follow links in the first thirty or so results. All you'll find are people trying to find some "gender" angle in this painting. I don't think it has one, really. There's no cogent "women's angle" on this painting. But that doesn't prevent my gender obsessed contemporaries from inventing one. The 'Women in World History' page at George Mason University gets the prize for feminist stupidity this time. Regarding 'The Secret of England's Greatness' it states:

"Despite the frequent depiction of empire as a masculine world, the queen was the symbolic figurehead of the British Empire...."

That's really scratching. Apart from this being an utterly inane observation, as far as I can tell the Empire was always referred to and depicted as feminine. Britannia is female. Always. I'm so annoyed by this stupid comment that here's a couple of pictures just to prove my point - the British Empire is female:

- Harper McAlpine Black