The City of Canton may be rightly called the most up-to-date city of China to-day, when compared with other cities throughout the land. It is progressive, modern, prosperous and rich. It is the only city with modern conveniences, entirely constructed and controlled by Chinese.1
—Milton Chun Lee, May 1930
In Guangzhou, profound architectural change accompanied the dramatic political and social changes that swept China in the early twentieth century. The old dichotomy between the foreign neighborhoods and the Chinese city had blurred to such an extent by the 1930s that the visitor could no longer be sure from the outside of buildings whether they represented foreign or Chinese habitation and business. Some foreign businesses and missionary enterprises embraced the modernizing city, while Shamian remained socially conservative, continually confronting challenges to its insular status. Foreign interests collaborated with Chinese institutions to produce new institutions, from universities to utilities, which were accompanied by massive building projects. In some new suburbs, foreigners and wealthy Chinese began to live harmoniously as neighbors. The gathering storm clouds of Japanese occupation in the late 1930s effectively interrupted the Western presence. By this time, the racial divides that had accompanied the decades after the Opium War were beginning to heal, but many tensions remained unresolved. The modernizing city had opened new possibilities for cross-cultural relations, yet the sweeping trauma of twentieth-century global politics interrupted the further rebuilding of an architectural and social world between empires.
New Business, New Buildings, and Cross-Cultural Controversy in Twentieth-Century Shamian
While the late nineteenth century saw construction on nearly all of the lots on Shamian, the early twentieth century witnessed a burgeoning of business that transformed the built environment of the concession island. The looming neoclassical, multistory buildings marking many of the street corners today all date from this era. Demand for space and the accompanying rise in real estate prices caused a proliferation of multistory buildings. Increasingly, multinational corporations that harnessed the monetary power necessary for international academic design constructed these buildings. The historical transformation from the old, two-story suburban houses to a new commercial skyline on Shamian began around the years of 1905–06. The last of the arched verandah–wrapped houses on Shamian, the residence for Butterfield & Swire’s senior employees, was finished and occupied in April 1906 (Fig. 4.1).2 The company’s new buildings in the godown complex on Honam relieved their Shamian residence of the need to house much in the way of business facilities. Two decades later, even Butterfield & Swire would be pressed for space. In 1927, the company added a third story to their Shamian house, which included “a flat over agents quarters—living room, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms & w.c.’s, box-room, hall, pantry, kitchen, laundry, 3 boys rooms.”3 The increasing staff needed for the expanding business opportunities of Guangzhou, and the demand for lot space, resulting in the movement of Chinese employees’ quarters back into the main block, would come to characterize the first three decades of the century.
Fig. 4.1
Butterfield & Swire residence, Shamian, built 1906. The final expression of the nineteenth-century verandah-wrapped house type, the Butterfield & Swire house is only recognizable as a late expression by its contrasting red brick and stone components, reflecting Edwardian taste. The third story was added two decades after the initial construction. Photo by author, 2002.
While Butterfield & Swire’s house was being completed, Arnhold, Karberg & Co. was already constructing a more urban and technologically sophisticated building form immediately to the west (Fig. 2.13, bottom). The Danish-German-American firm hired the newly arrived Australian-American architectural partnership of Messrs. Purnell & Paget, who had taken up residence in the French concession, to design the building.4 The very bones of the building were something new on the China coast. One of the oldest surviving reinforced concrete buildings in China, the building uses the newly developed Kahn system of reinforcing.5 The system was only recently developed in America by Truscon, the firm of Albert and Julius Kahn, builders of some of the first great US automobile factories.6 Built by the Hong Kong contractor Mr. Lam Woo, the building also contained such modern features as an electric elevator, electric lighting throughout, telephones, and a gas plant for heating and cooking.7 The four-story building was conceived of as an urban project, but also made a bow to the green surroundings of Shamian in its roof garden. The modern structure of the building was cloaked in Beaux-Arts language, with a Renaissance, “Mannerist”-derived rusticated first story and monumental classical orders above providing a screen for recessed front verandahs. The spatial arrangements of the building would be repeated many times in the corporate buildings of Guangzhou through the early twentieth century. The ground floor contained the sales and storage facilities, consisting of a 2,500-square-foot machinery exhibition room and a 8,000-square-foot godown.8 The second story contained the general offices, and the living apartments of managers and principal assistants filled the upper floors.9
Purnell, son of an architect in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, and Paget, who had received his architectural education at Lehigh University, were simultaneously at work on other large structures on Shamian.10 These included Imperial Maritime Customs staff quarters in the French concession, and another large residential block, used in part by the silk trading firm T. E. Griffith, on the back road of the island facing the English bridge (Fig. 4.2). The customs staff quarters, three and a half stories tall and around twenty bays wide, still dominates the eastern end of the central avenue, and the Griffith building also survives in slightly altered form. These buildings adopted a broadly eclectic, late-Victorian language, which could loosely be associated with the “Queen Anne” style. They also employed perhaps as early as 1904 the rusticated first story and monumental orders tying the verandahs of upper stories together that seems to have been a trademark of their design, in the first building of the International Banking Corporation (IBC), predecessor of National City Bank, now Citicorp (Pl. 25).
Fig. 4.2
Buildings by Purnell & Paget, architects, in Canton. These buildings, illustrated as a page in a promotional publication, show much of the architects’ works falling within a very eclectic Victorian-Edwardian vein. The Griffith building (top right) and the Imperial Maritime Customs staff quarters (drawing, bottom left) are still extant. From Wright and Cartwright, Twentieth Century Impressions, p. 793.
The massive German consulate building (Fig. 4.3) was erected on the site of the old consulate in 1906, at the cost of $185,000.11 The designer was a Mr. W. Danby, a civil engineer.12 Like the Butterfield & Swire building, it is stylistically transitional. On the one hand, it sports the arcade-fronted verandahs of old Shamian, but, on the other, it has many more academic stylistic references, including domed roof towers, which may be a vague reference to a “nationalist” Neo-Baroque. This structure served its original purpose until the First World War, when the consulate as well as German firms were uniformly expelled from the British concession and took up residence in the Chinese city. The consulate building was acquired in 1920 by the British firm, Asiatic Petroleum, as their Guangzhou headquarters.13 A series of infrastructure improvements accompanied the influx of new investment in Shamian in the years around 1905. In 1904, a new drainage system was installed in the British concession. 14 The public gardens were remodeled in 1906 with a bowling and croquet lawn, a summerhouse, and late-Victorian-style flower gardens.15 The same year, telephone service came to both Shamian and the Chinese city.16 In 1908, septic tanks started to be installed on the island, and a swimming pool was constructed on one of the lots facing the canal, where it still exists as an indoor facility to this day.17
Fig. 4.3
German consulate building, built 1906. This enormous building, apparently in a nationalist Neo-Baroque style, was used by Asiatic Petroleum after the German consulate and German firms were expelled from the British concession during the First World War. Photo by author, 2006.
The late 1910s and 1920s saw continued construction in much the same vein as the Arnhold Karberg and IBC buildings. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) building (Fig. 4.4), possibly constructed in 1919–1920, maintains the same elaborated ground floor and monumental columns tying together second and third stories, but uses a formal Beaux-Arts classicism and marks its corner entrance with a cupola.18 Here, verandah space has considerably diminished—something that likely would only be contemplated after the introduction of electric ceiling fans. This new climate-control technology was undoubtedly responsible for the enclosure by the 1930s of many of the verandahs of older structures with wood-framed casement windows, a development that can still be observed in extant buildings of the period.
Fig. 4.4
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Building, built 1919–20. This restrained classical building makes the most of its corner lot with a corner entrance, emphasized by a cupola several stories above. Photo by author, 2002.
The building constructed for the American firm of Andersen, Meyer, & Co. is an example of a building so stylistically similar to the HSBC building that the same firm most assuredly designed it. Anderson, Meyer, & Co., a Danish company representing many American firms and with significant American investment (notably by Galen Stone and Willard Straight) and corporate registration, built its Shamian offices around 1920 (Fig. 4.5).19 The company was a prominent vendor of machinery and engineering expertise in China—on the one hand, it represented such important manufacturers as General Electric, International Harvester, American Radiator, Sherwin-Williams, Duraflex, and Masonite, while on the other, it provided consulting services for the new public works of Republican China, notably the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou.20 This corporate branch echoed the organization of other businesses of the period, with main offices in Shanghai or Hong Kong and a comparatively small staff in Guangzhou. The reason for this was simple: “Canton is so quickly and easily reached from Hong Kong, however, that the additional engineering staff of the latter office is at all times available in Canton.”21 Thus the photograph of the staff around 1930 (above that of the building) shows only one foreign engineer, seated next to two Chinese staff members in Western dress, with the lower-ranking employees in Chinese dress standing behind. While the offices and showroom of the company were on the ground floor, the great amount of space in the upper floors suggests that at least some Chinese employees were resident in the building.
Fig. 4.5
Andersen Meyer & Co. building and branch staff, c. 1930. Typical for the early twentieth century, this tidy building of the Danish and American firm that prominently marketed engineering and machinery goods had both offices and residences in it, where a combined foreign and Western staff passed their days. From Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer, & Company of China, p. 141.
The more delicate classicism of HSBC, the also still extant Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, and Andersen, Meyer, & Co. drew more explicitly on the precedents of eighteenth-century European monumental architecture than Purnell & Paget’s work of the first decade of the century. Whether the firm of Purnell & Paget designed these buildings or whether they were the products of another firm is difficult to determine in the absence of good corporate and architectural practice archives. The former firm was still the most established in Guangzhou, but by 1915 they had competition in the form of the three offices of Thomas Adams & Wood, Weaser & Raven, and A. Abdoolrahim.22 The prolific Hong Kong firm of Palmer and Turner could also have contributed designs. The 1910s, incidentally, saw the emergence of Japanese firms, and their accompanying new business facilities, in the British concession. The Japanese firms adopted wholly Western building forms and languages. The Bank of Taiwan (then a Japanese colony) took up residence in a still-extant, very formal three-story building with Doric columns tying together the upper-story verandahs. Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, Ltd., also built a massive four-story facility on the back canal road, apparently in 1915 (Fig. 4.6).23 This building sports somewhat naïve Neo-Baroque decoration, notably a broad broken pediment over the entrance porch.
Fig. 4.6
Mitsui Bussan Kaisha Building (detail), built 1915. Japanese firms arrived on the British concession a bit later than those of many other nationalities, so they tend to be found towards the north side of the island, like this building, which faces the canal. The mixture of a baroque classicism with some more modern touches, like the round window that breaks through the pediment, makes this a striking building. Photo by author, 2002.
The mid-1920s saw the last great building projects on Shamian of the first half of the twentieth century. On Shamian in the early 1920s, the International Banking Corporation built a new branch office, designed by the New York- and Shanghai-based architectural firm of Murphy & Dana, opening it in 1924.24 The bank’s Beaux-Arts exterior, with stone cladding on a reinforced concrete structure, has a monumental Ionic order in antis that was part of a corporate program of “uniformity of design” being carried out by IBC in its foreign branches (Fig. 4.7).25 Here, the interest in a sort of brand recognition caused the building to resemble contemporary American bank facilities in a way hitherto not witnessed in Guangzhou. The interior arrangements were a main banking floor on the ground story, with a still-intact monumental central staircase leading to offices on a mezzanine above. The rest of the building’s interior contained “commodious living quarters on the upper floors for the staff members,” but to what extent this represented the spaces of Western versus Chinese employees is unknown.26 The early twentieth century did, however, see an increased proximity of Chinese and Westerners in the new large buildings. In 1911, there were 323 foreigners and 1,078 Chinese residing on Shamian, and, in 1937, there were 412 foreigners and 1,350 Chinese residents.27 With the disappearance of “back lot” servants’ quarters that resulted from the new construction at the beginning of the century now taking up entire concession lots, the resident Chinese employees were brought back inside the building. Where some relationships between foreign firms and Chinese employees were apparently growing more casual and perhaps close, other settings retained conservative, segregated spatial arrangements.
Fig. 4.7
Second IBC Building/National City Bank, built first half of 1920s (Murphy & Dana, architects). This example of American Beaux-Arts classicism, with its “triumphal arch” façade, resembles banks of the period throughout the United States. Photo by author, 2002.
First and foremost among the architectural reassertions of late nineteenth-century foreign, segregated privilege was the new British consular complex, constructed in the early to mid-1920s. Shamian and expanses of Guangzhou’s riverside suburbs suffered a severe flood in July 1915. While many buildings were simply repaired after this disaster, the British consulate buildings, still much the same as when they were built in the 1860s, were deemed damaged enough to warrant complete rebuilding.28 Much of the original arrangement of the structures was retained. The first building to be built, the consul’s residence, had the most ornamented exterior. The British Office of Works approved the rebuilding of the assistants’ quarters and offices (Fig. 4.8) in 1922, and this building was occupied on April 7, 1924.29 This building is the most dramatically changed and enlarged in comparison to its nineteenth-century antecedent. Standing two full stories high, it had a projecting, pediment-capped verandah that almost certainly was a self-conscious architectural quotation of the pediment-capped verandah of the British East India Company’s main factory during the Shisan Hang era. The room on the ground floor was the consul’s office, the interior of which was furnished in a wholly Western style. Above this room was a “sleeping porch” appended to the second-story assistants’ quarters. The vice-consul’s house, designed in 1922 but not completed until 1927, finished out the complex as an elegant essay in climatic adaptation underneath Beaux-Arts cladding.30 An elegant ink-wash rendering by one of the Office of Works architects (Fig. 4.9) shows a two-story verandah on the south harmoniously integrated into an overall classical whole, notably featuring a triumphal arch motif on the eastern elevation. These buildings, all of which were presumably designed by Office of Works employees, display a strong Beaux-Arts affinity, with a certain sparseness that prefigures the emerging “stripped classicism” that in the 1930s would become a worldwide language for institutional architecture.
Fig. 4.8
Assistants’ residences and office wing, British consulate, built 1922–24, destroyed 1948. A much grander centerpiece to the consular compound than its predecessor, this building probably self-consciously refers to the British Factory of East India Company days. Used with the permission of The National Archives, Kew, UK (WORK 55/2).
Fig. 4.9
“New Vice Consul’s House,” August 1922 (by “B. C.”). This handsome rendering by an Office of Works architect shows the vice-consul’s house, which stands today little changed, excepting that the southern verandah is now enclosed. The eastern elevation features a triumphal arch motif symmetrically overlaying both verandah and house. Used with the permission of The National Archives, Kew, UK (WORK 10/299).
Though only the consul and vice-consul’s residences survive at present, a plan of the complex as completed remains in the Office of Works files (Fig. 4.10).31 It reveals two major aspects of the retrenchment of a conservative, truly imperial mode of spatial organization, on the eve of the waning of British global power. One is an increased allocation of space to ceremonial and social purposes. The office building contained a large vestibule at the center of its first floor, behind the entrance to the complex from Shamian’s central avenue. This was labeled simply “public space.” The vice-consul’s residence had a ground floor completely allocated to social space, with a drawing room of impressive dimensions, a study, and a dining room. The consul general’s residence contained a large colonnaded hall, with no functional assignment, inside its west entry that dominated and occupied over a third of the ground floor. The second notable feature of the complex was the continued relegation of Chinese staff quarters to wings, apart from the main body of the buildings. The designations of “cook,” “gardener,” “amah,” and the by-now-anachronistic “coolie” and “boy” are the scattered labels of cramped rooms throughout the service wings. The amahs were the only servants with second-story quarters, owing to their intimacy with the consular families, necessitated by their childcare responsibilities. The staunchly classist, and potentially racist, prejudices of the British upper and upper-middle classes, ignoring the evolving social trends in the surrounding city and even in Shamian, were solidified in the plan of the consular complex.
Fig. 4.10
Plan, British consular complex, drawn 1938. The smaller plans outside of the central block are of the second floors of adjacent first-floor plans (bottom left: consular residence; bottom right: vice consular residence; top: assistants’ residences and office wing). The overall layout echoes the arrangement of the buildings that preceded these on the site. Used with the permission of The National Archives, Kew, UK (WORK 10/301).
The increasing density of habitation on Shamian, as well as the increasing unease felt by certain residents with the changing world of early Republican China around them, formed the impetus for increasing regulation of the concession. In 1903, a barracks for a police force was erected, and it was in turn expanded for a larger force in 1919.32 Even more notable was the increasing number of regulations set in place by Shamian’s “Municipal Council.” The original set of regulations seems to have been drawn up in 1908, and these were revised again in 1919.33 These regulations included a ban on setting off fireworks, a ban on “Chinese” dogs on the concession and a requirement to register other breeds on the island; a ban on “spirit shops, houses of entertainment, or public lotteries”; the requirement of all persons passing through the concession after dark to carry lighted lanterns; and the enforcement of a fine for any person “willfully damaging trees, flowers, or turf.”34 Residents were carefully enumerated, as indicated by one regulation: “The Secretary of the Municipal Council shall keep a register of all Chinese domestic servants and employees residing in the British Concession, and no person of Chinese nationality who is not so registered shall be allowed to reside in the British Concession.”35
Tensions, and regulations in response to them, reached a peak in the mid-1920s. Strikes, protests, and the bombing of the hotel by a Vietnamese nationalist during the visit of the French governor of Indo-China all resulted in more stringent bylaws.36 In 1924, the council drew up a new series of traffic regulations. Many of these were meant to bar casual access to the island by the Cantonese, although, notably, the regulations themselves, which were posted by the bridges and river landing steps, make no mention of race.37 This type of regulation set a curfew for those without a permit at ten in the evening, set hours when the amahs were allowed to take the children out to the riverfront “bund,” and banned non-residents from using the island as a promenade.38 Some regulations were also aimed at both the Chinese and Westerners who used the island, including a regulation on bicycle and sedan chair traffic and a rule against walking on the grass “unless that allotted to recreational purposes.”39
Although the expanding regulations show attempts at restricting movement on Shamian, the reality was probably never what the Municipal Council desired. Photographic evidence like an Underwood & Underwood stereoscope view indicates that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, it apparently would not have been unusual to see Chinese girls from a missionary school out for a stroll on the Shamian riverfront.40 Though, presumably, the increasing number of regulations was intended to stem casual use of the island by non-residents, the minutes of the meeting to draw up the 1924 traffic regulations indicate a differing reality. From the rather complicated exchange in the formulation of the regulations comes a statement from H. Davenport Browne of Asiatic Petroleum:
Will a serious attempt be made to enforce the new regulations? I have frequently observed a neglect to do so. If the regulations do exist, they ought to be enforced. At present Chinese use the seats, walk on the Bund, and use Shameen as a thoroughfare, just as much as they ever did before.41
Though Mr. Browne might find Shamian more peaceful without Chinese traffic, his argument is strikingly more concerned with consistency than segregation. Though it is difficult to infer personal feelings from the minutes of the meeting dominated by early twentieth-century businessmen, there was discomfort with the regulations in some sectors. After some discussion, J. W. Taylor of Butterfield & Swire convinced the council to amend the regulation, “The roads on Shameen shall not be used as a thoroughfare from bridge to bridge or from landing steps to the city,” by adding on, “except as regards the latter, by those whose business connection with Shameen residents necessitates it.”42 The discussion indicates that Taylor was greatly concerned that the regulations might offend the Cantonese with whom he had business, and he explicitly did not want them to be stopped and pestered by the Shamian police.43 Despite the introduction of state-of-the-art business and architectural practices onto Shamian in first decades of the twentieth century, in many ways the municipal council and other conservative forces on Shamian wanted to maintain a feeling of bucolic segregation. These desires were manifest in the increased attempts to regulate boundaries and behaviors on the concession island, only partly successful and not universally agreed upon. Such measures were, however, increasingly out of place in a Chinese city at the forefront of efforts to forge a modern, globally involved nation.
Shamian’s insularity did not dissolve. Though many local employees of Western interests lived on Shamian, the district remained closed to habitation by the general populace. When, in the 1930s, the promoter of “Modern Canton” Edward Bing-Shuey Lee attempted to inquire about renting an apartment on the island, he was turned away by individual building owners despite numerous signs advertising vacancies.44 He pointed out the inherent contradictions of the continued segregationist practice:
The foreign business men of Shameen are the ones who are most anxious to cultivate the friendship of the Chinese residents of Canton for that it brings in business, and that is the main reason for their enthusiastic participation in such organizations as the Canton Rotary Club, the Thursday Club and the Canton branch of the Pan-Pacific Association. How much more good-will would be created if these very same residents of Shameen took the initiative to perform voluntarily a really friendly act by lowering the bars against the Chinese people, which cannot but be regarded as insulting to the race as a whole?45
The backwardness of Shamian’s policies, whether sanctioned by the municipal council or informally put into unspoken practice by individual building owners, truly became apparent when compared to developments involving foreigners and the Cantonese elsewhere in the city.
Learning and Living Together: Foreign Philanthropic Institutions
The late nineteenth century saw the increasing engagement of foreigners of the missionary class with the city. The lessons learned in these years were implemented in the early decades of the twentieth century, most prominently the desire of the Cantonese to understand the West and use what it could offer in the ways of technology and global knowledge, as opposed to a self-evident desire to convert to Christianity. Thus, missionaries began to coordinate with each other to produce institutions that, while still containing a religious education component, were increasingly secular in their emphasis. Educational institutions, often constructed and maintained by both foreign and Chinese donations, became the center of their efforts. The development of schools involved larger numbers of Westerners becoming close neighbors to the Cantonese population and participating in joint enterprises. These institutions profoundly shaped mutual understanding during the early years of the Chinese Republic.
The most architecturally significant and socially important of these schools was the Canton Christian College, known in Chinese and later, as it became more secular, by all as Lingnan (in Cantonese, Lingnam) University. Having begun in the 1890s as a small school sponsored by the American Presbyterian Board, the school became formalized as an institution of higher education in the first decade of the twentieth century.46 In 1904–05, the institution acquired land at Honglok on Honam and commenced construction of a campus.47 In these years, the board of trustees of the university, which frequently met in New York City, sent Columbia University–trained architect Charles W. Stoughton, of the small architectural firm of Stoughton and Stoughton, on a site visit to draw up a campus plan.48 The architectural practice of Stoughton and Stoughton, whose office was on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, generally focused on small civic buildings in New York (the Jacob Reis Free Bathing Pavilion, police stations, hospitals, structures on the Bronx Parkway, etc.), but also produced campus plans for institutions in Puerto Rico and India.49 Charles Stoughton and trustee/architectural advisor Professor Warren Powers Laird, head of the architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania, were responsible for much of the evolving appearance of the campus.50 The architectural patterns they set would largely be followed by American architects J. R. Edmunds and Henry K. Murphy, who made architectural contributions to the campus in the later 1910s and 1920s, respectively.
The Stoughton and Stoughton concept for Lingnan is best illustrated in a campus plan revised by J. R. Edmunds in 1918, showing the extant and projected building projects (Fig. 4.11). It shows a typically Beaux-Arts scheme with a grand central axis and a series of cross-axes giving a formal, processional aspect to the whole. Remarkably, all of the shaded buildings (indicating extant structures) survive in some form as part of the main campus of Zhongshan University, even the swimming pool near the river entrance. Early photographs show massive buildings rising formally out of the open plain on the southern bank of the Pearl River with the new institutional buildings looming over young banyan saplings, which, now fully grown, complement the buildings and give the campus much of its pleasant and shady character.
Fig. 4.11
Plan of buildings proposed (white) and buildings completed (shaded), Canton Christian College/Lingnan University, 1918 (J. R. Edmunds). This campus, designed by New York and Philadelphia architects, is the most unified Beaux-Arts building complex in the city. Most of the buildings indicated as “completed” still survive. From Edmunds, Canton Christian College, p. 36.
The buildings are uniformly of reinforced concrete construction with red-brick cladding and, for the most part, Chinese tiled roofs. Structurally, Charles Stoughton consistently employed Triangle Mesh Wire reinforcement, produced by the United States Steel Products Company, in the early buildings.51 The initial campus buildings, therefore, paralleled the contemporary Arnhold Karberg building on Shamian in its groundbreaking use of reinforced concrete. The exterior style of the buildings, on the other hand, tended to evolve over time. The first permanent building on the Lingnan campus, Martin Hall (Fig. 4.12), built with donations from Mrs. Henry Martin of Cincinnati in memory of her husband, was a fairly functional affair.52 Deep verandahs stretch around the building, with ornament being confined to segmental arches on the first story and monumental verandah piers with sunken panels and abstracted “capitals.”
Fig. 4.12
Martin Hall, built 1905–07 (Stoughton & Stoughton, architects). The first permanent classroom building to be erected on the campus, it already employed modern reinforced-concrete construction. From Edmunds, Canton Christian College, p. 52.
Later building designs by Stoughton would attempt to tackle a fundamental stylistic goal. In the promotional, well-illustrated university history and status report of 1919, university president Charles Edmunds outlined the “architectural problem” of the campus.53 Of the issue of style, he wrote:
Assuming the value to the Chinese students and people of an environment of scholarly and dignified architecture, in contrast with the prevalent nondescript adaptations of ill-sorted European styles, it is the aim of the designers to give the buildings individual distinction while subordinating them to the general unity of the scheme.
The type of permanent building adopted combines modern construction with a Chinese aspect, chiefly expressed in the roofs which are of green glazed tile and ornamented and curved according to the best native style…. It is the distinct aim of the College to so build as to exemplify structurally and artistically the best combination of Western and Chinese architecture and thus as well as in other ways to be of help in this period of change in China.54
The idea of individually distinct buildings united into a whole by materials, style, and a formal plan reflects contemporary American Beaux-Arts planning and design ideals, largely a legacy of a generation that espoused the “City Beautiful” in their civic projects. A stylistic synthesis of modern Western architecture and “Chinese aspect,” however, was something newly developing. This design trajectory would be fully articulated in the more “archaeologically correct” work of Henry K. Murphy of the New York and Shanghai firm Murphy and Dana, as well as the first generation of Chinese professional architects.55 Murphy himself would add two buildings to the Lingnan campus in the 1920s, including Willard Straight Memorial Science Hall.56
Charles Stoughton’s attempts at a stylistic synthesis of Chinese and Western building styles were tentative and somewhat fanciful. Many of the early classroom and dormitory buildings were, like Martin Hall, sparsely ornamented, their main “Chinese” feature being low spreading tile roofs. More ornamental Stoughton designs include Swasey Hall (Fig. 4.13) and many faculty residences. Swasey Hall, one of the focal points of the campus, was designed in 1913 and completed in 1915, funded by a donation of Ambrose Swasey of Warner & Swasey Company of Cleveland for a Christian Association building.57 Standing nearly at the southern tip of the campus’s grand axis, Swasey Hall sports twin three-story towers on the front office block of the building, and the campus auditorium in a shorter rear polygonal projection.
Fig. 4.13
Swasey Hall, built 1913–15 (Stoughton & Stoughton, architects). The relative complexity of the design, with regard to massing and materials (including local glazed tile and stone panels), reveal the Arts & Crafts–influenced flavor of much of Stoughton & Stoughton’s work for the campus. The tile roofs and abstracted brackets are explicit references to classical and local interpretations of traditional Chinese architecture. From Edmunds, Canton Christian College, p. 18.
The details on the Swasey Hall façade include green tile vertical bands, red tile panels, stone medallions and ornament, and ornamental barge and ridge boards on the roof. The porch piers have capitals that allude to the dougong of traditional Chinese monumental architecture. The auditorium wing is capped with octagonal vent cupolas modeled on Chinese garden ornaments and roof finials. This polychromy and ornament echo late-Victorian medieval revival styles, and perhaps even more relevantly the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement blended with Chinese precedent.
This sort of whimsical interpretation of a campus with a “Chinese aspect” generally comes to an end in the early 1920s. The later additions to the campus were generally more restrained. Henry Murphy’s Willard Straight Science Hall of the mid-1920s (Fig. 4.14) is a fairly plain institutional building, the Chinese gestures being confined to the roof and tile panels beneath the windows. Lingnan never possessed buildings that so thoroughly quoted Chinese imperial architecture as Murphy’s designs for northern Chinese campuses like Yenching (Beijing) University. The closest to the trend of applying more literally derived Chinese ornament, including dougong brackets, which had become so prevalent in other parts of China, is exhibited only in the Bell Pavilion, which was a gift of the Class of 1928.58 Here the tile roof, with its ridge animals, sits upon dougong and columns of a classical Chinese model, the whole thing resting on a circular marble platform, directly quoting the imperial architecture of the north.
Fig. 4.14
Willard Straight Science Hall, 1920s (Murphy & Dana, architects). One of Henry Murphy’s design contributions to the campus, this building reveals a restraint typical of the later (1920s and 1930s) buildings. From Ling Naam: The News Bulletin of Canton Christian College 6, no. 2: 6.
Though the Lingnan campus was important as an early attempt at merging Western Beaux-Arts planning and Chinese stylistic references (with an additional influence of an Arts and Crafts movement aesthetic), the institutional functions that the campus housed were perhaps even more important. The Canton Christian College/Lingnan University was truly a collaborative enterprise. While many of the most elaborate structures were products of Western, largely American, donations, by 1919 approximately a third of the buildings had been contributed by Chinese and overseas Chinese.59 The institution brought Western teachers together with Chinese teachers and students. By the late 1910s, campus photographs of the faculty and staff of the university are striking, as Chinese, American, and British faculty stand next to and intermingle with each other. Gone are the hierarchical arrangements so prevalent in earlier business and missionary group photos—an egalitarian spirit prevailed.
The evangelical mission of the university had faded by the late 1910s:
The college is nondenominational. The doors are open to all students qualified by character and scholastic attainment to enter, irrespective of religious belief. Great care is taken to make the atmosphere of the campus wholesome and tolerant.60
Religious instruction was of course still available to those who sought it. The mission of the school, however, had become one of social improvement and reform parallel to the normal schools and other colleges in contemporary “Progressive Era” America. Teacher training, science education, and agriculture, complete with extension service efforts, all became emphases of the university’s work.61 It was also a comprehensive educational enterprise, hosting an elementary and middle school in connection with its teacher training program. Though apparently never completed, Lingnan also hosted a “model village,” which, on the one hand, was meant as housing for the university’s “subordinate employees” and, on the other, apparently as a demonstration of modern home economics.62 The progressive atmosphere of Lingnan was not limited to the course work and extension efforts alone. American travel writer and suffragette Grace Thompson Seton wrote of her visit to campus in the tumultuous mid-1920s:
Located on the outskirts of the city, with its large campus and modern buildings, this institution seemed like a bit of America, well assimilated into a Chinese community. The occasion was stamped with unusual interest because it was my first address to Chinese men. There were over seven hundred of them, and it seemed strange to watch their interested faces as they listened to the story of woman’s emancipation throughout the world, the topic they had chosen themselves.63
The faculty and students at Lingnan fostered attitudes that could be considered modern anywhere in the world in the 1920s.
Progressive philanthropic and Western-sponsored educational institutions began in various parts of Guangzhou during the 1910s and 1920s. Structures such as the main building of True Light Middle School (Fig. 4.15), a project sponsored by the American Presbyterian Mission, followed the same stylistic model as Lingnan. This building was constructed in 1917 at Paak Hok Tung (Baihedong), the suburban district just south of Huadi where the school had been founded.64 The building apparently survives, along with additional buildings for the institution from the next two decades, although it is not accessible to the general public in the now heavily industrial area.65 The original architectural rendering, however, reveals the intent was an up-to-date, red-brick school building with symmetrical wings and large windows. Were Colonial Revival details substituted in place of the Chinese Revival tile roof, the building would be at home in almost any community of the period in the United States. By the 1930s, the Baptists had added a kindergarten, an elementary school, and separate boys’ and girls’ secondary schools in Dongshan, though by this time all of the management of the schools was turned over to Chinese citizens in accordance with new national laws.66
Fig. 4.15
True Light Middle School, constructed 1917. One of the foreign-run schools dotting the suburbs of Guangzhou from the 1910s to the 1930s, this building shows contemporary Western school design ideas in its symmetry and large windows for ample reading light and hygiene, while also sporting a Sinified tile roof. From History of the South China Mission of the American Presbyterian Church, 1845–1920, facing p. 124.
The increasingly ecumenical nature of missionary and philanthropic institutions necessitated connections through which their efforts were coordinated. They also rapidly became parallel with and complementary to Chinese internal efforts at modernization. Western-sponsored Chinese organizations like the local YMCA, whose headquarters were situated in the new “bund” district, and the YWCA, for which Stoughton designed a building with a “Chinese aspect”—sporting a moon gate entry—at Baihedong, became active parts of modern Cantonese social life.67 The Rotary Club and the International Women’s Club had both Chinese and foreign members.68 The lines between Chinese and foreign were blurring, if not disappearing altogether, while the remaking of the architecture of the city subsumed visual distinctions into an overall appearance of modernity.
Xin Guangzhou: Foreigners and the Modernization of Canton
The traditional city of Guangzhou was radically transformed in the first half of the twentieth century. The modernization of the city fabric of Guangzhou has been treated fairly thoroughly elsewhere.69 A discussion of this transformation is here inserted to give context to the foreign presence, to briefly sketch the role of foreigners in the process, and to allow a further examination of where some foreigners lived.
Dramatic changes to the city’s urban fabric would, by the 1930s, inspire the Cantonese to proudly call their city Xin Guangzhou, literally “New Guangzhou.” The modernization commenced with the construction of a “bund” district, the Changdi, on the northern bank of the river. The construction of a massive embankment to control floods and of its accompanying broad road and walkway was planned in the later years of the Qing Dynasty and finally (at least in its initial phase) completed in 1914.70 The project soon attracted new investment, both foreign and Chinese.
The first landmark building to be built along the new riverfront throughway, excluding the electric power plant that predated the construction was the Daxin (or Tai Sun) Company (Fig. 4.16). Constructed in the 1910s, sporting neoclassical details and a cupola, this was the first reinforced concrete “tall building” of the city. It represents the extent to which Cantonese expectations and tastes had modernized or, perhaps, Westernized. An article from The Far Eastern Review in 1921 described the building’s contents and features (such as the roof garden, Pl. 26):
Besides a full-fledged department store in the American style, the company includes in its new home a modern hotel and roof garden called “Hotel Asia,” which caters to foreign as well as Chinese patrons. The building is of concrete and cost $700,000 Hongkong currency. From the tower wonderful views of both the city and the harbor of Canton are to be had.71
Fig. 4.16
The Hotel Asia and Sun Company. This building, with its classically detailed façade and high-tech construction, was Guangzhou’s first “tall building.” In the 1910s and 1920s, it contained a department store and “Hotel Asia” in its upper floors, where both Chinese visitors and many foreigners (shunning Shamian) stayed during their visits. Photo by author, 2006.
Here was a commercial establishment whose modernity was attractive to Cantonese as well as Westerners. As a tall building with panoramic views of the city, it offered everyday Cantonese a distinctly new way of seeing their city and a democratizing one, given that the view from above had hitherto been mostly reserved for the imperial or military gaze. The department store was a significantly new institution on the China coast, and thus required a new building type. It was in the Chinese-run Hotel Asia that Grace Thompson Seton stayed during her visit when she lectured at Lingnan University.72 Besides the somewhat academic classicism of the Western-managed Chinese institutions of the still-extant main post office and the Customs Building, both probably finished in the early to mid-1910s, most of the buildings on the bund lack the flashiness of the Daxin Company. Not until the mid-1930s would the Aiqun Hotel, Guangzhou’s Art Deco skyscraper then newly built on reclaimed land that was part of a section of the “New Bund,” surpass its predecessor in height and stylishness.73 The majority of new buildings on the bund, and later (starting circa 1920) accompanying the dramatic alteration of the city fabric with the destruction of the city walls and with wide avenues, called “malu” (literally, “horse roads”), were of a modern but somewhat hybrid type (Fig. 4.17). These new buildings of the city’s center were sometimes masonry and often concrete. Sometimes now dubbed “shop houses,” they formed a continuous street front, with the first story containing a covered sidewalk with commercial space behind, and projecting upper stories containing living quarters. The building type occurs in much of coastal South China, Taiwan, and in some parts of Southeast Asia, but proliferates in few places or with as much flair or extent as Guangzhou.74 The Westerner did not always approve of these structures. The Far Eastern Review asserted, “most of the buildings are a curious combination of Western and Chinese ideas and are not always as carefully built as they should be.”75 The streetscape these buildings and the recessed sidewalks create is a truly local, early twentieth-century vision of modernity, and characterizes the districts now newly revived and treasured by the Cantonese for one of their historically favorite pastimes, shopping.
Fig. 4.17
“Contrasts on a Modern Street in Canton,” c. 1920s. This view shows Guangzhou’s modern “shop house” typology as well as modern transport (autos from America and rickshaws from Japan) going down the malu. The arcades shelter commercial space and pedestrian sidewalks (upon which the goods of individual shopkeepers routinely still spill). The upper residential floors of these buildings often have classical or Art Deco stylistic touches borrowed from the West, as well as more traditional local touches, like manzhou stained glass windows. Keystone Stereoview Card, author’s collection.
The new urban fabric of Guangzhou was part of a massive reorganization of the city. Modernized utilities, efficient transportation, and general civic amenities were all part of the effort, which catalyzed around 1920 under the mayoral tenure of Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen’s son. The transformation was reported in the Far Eastern Review:
The city wall has been torn down. Around the labyrinth of narrow lanes that have been the city’s only streets for centuries is a belt of newly made broad roads. It is now possible to ride in motor cars as well as sedan chairs. Inside the city houses and shops are being torn down to make new thoroughfares where the streets have been from eight to twelve feet wide. Old temples are being made over for schools and charitable institutions.76
The redesign of the city would proceed at a rapid pace through the early 1930s, under the supervision of several progressive mayors. The construction of new roads peaked in the years 1930–33.77 Both secondhand and direct foreign involvement worked in conjunction with Chinese talent to modernize the city. Chinese graduates of American universities, a result of the Boxer Rebellion indemnity fund, played a leading role in the transformation of the city. Leading the efforts in the early 1920s was Director of Public Works Cheng Tien-tow, who had studied in America.78 Mr. H. L. Wu, educated initially at Lingnan University and then in civil engineering at Ohio Northern University and the University of Illinois, succeeded Cheng in the office.79 Joining the heads of the public works (generally engineers) were other American-educated professionals. Yeung Sik-chung (Yang Xizong), also a graduate of Lingnan University who in the mid-to late 1910s attended Cornell University to receive a bachelor’s degree in architecture, became head of the public park bureau.80 The chief of the municipal land bureau was Luan Chang, who had a Master of Science degree from the University of Illinois.81 The list might well be further expanded. Foreign firms had a hand in all of these improvements as well. Andersen Meyer & Company was engineering consultant on two of the major municipal projects of circa 1930. The first of these was Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (erected 1929–31), an enormous civic auditorium designed by Cornell architecture graduate Lu Yanzhi in the newly formulated, academic Chinese Revival national style.82 The auditorium, which seats 5,000 people, required the foreign firm to supply and supervise the erection of 650 tons of structural steelwork.83 The second project was the Zhujiang Bridge (started in 1929), the first bridge in Guangzhou to span the Pearl River, linking Honam with the main body of the city.84 Andersen Meyer and Company worked in conjunction with the Scherzer Rolling Lift Bridge Company to draw up the plans and acquire the materials for the long span, which were then assembled by another foreign firm as contractor.85
Efficient transportation was an important part of the “modernization” of the city. The city wall was demolished not only for the construction of broad new avenues but also for the installation of an electric tramway.86 As the new roads were being constructed, automobiles began to proliferate. In April 1921, the city hosted about forty-five automobiles, the majority of which were of American manufacture.87 By July of the same year, 125 cars were registered with the municipal government.88 Bus companies began to spring up and, in 1922, one line was operating fifteen four-wheel-drive buses, with Wisconsin-made cores and Chinese-manufactured bodies.89 By the mid-1930s, the bus companies had expanded to a fleet of 200, operating on fifteen different routes. The buses were known by the name “Canadian,” as one of the early transport companies was founded by overseas Chinese from Canada operating under the title “The Canadian Company.”90 The rapid increase in motor traffic was noticed. One visitor of the mid-1920s described Guangzhou’s boulevards as “honking with Fords” and noted “ungreased autobuses constantly snorting to and from Tung Shan [Dongshan].”91
Complementing the city’s new infrastructure for automobile traffic was an older network of railways that provided important links to other major centers. The three major railways of the era were the Canton-Samshui Railroad and the Canton-Kowloon Railway, both completed during the last years of the Qing Dynasty, as well as the Canton-Hankow railway, which would finally see completion in the 1930s.92 These great works projects were jointly produced by the Chinese government and foreign interests, and had employed staff members from both China and the West. The technology and design of the train stations were entirely Western.93 The Canton-Kowloon Railway, perhaps the most important new link between Guangzhou and its close economic partner Hong Kong, provided an important factor in the development of Dongshan, the newest eastern suburb of Guangzhou.
Situated on the other side of the railway and its Daishatou station terminus from the city center, Dongshan hosted the rise of a technologically and stylistically up-to-date suburb on Western models during the 1920s and 1930s.94 The promotional literature of the 1930s tends to describe the new neighborhood as a model of new development:
This is intended to be an exclusively residential district, and modern town planning methods have been employed to some extent in its development. The district has grown rapidly, and hundreds of modern dwelling houses have been built over a comparatively larger area than other districts, providing more hygienic living conditions than obtaining elsewhere in the city.95
The new suburb seems to have been influenced by the British Garden City movement and American trolley suburbs of the era. It had its own separate commercial main street, surviving with some alteration as Guigang Street/Dongshan Main Street. Its architecture obviously has links to the shop/apartment buildings going up in the main block of the city. Flanking the commercial center on either side was an assortment of residential architecture ranging from detached “villas” to townhouses and apartment buildings. Street trees shade most of these dwellings and some even have commodious yards and lawns. Early in the development of Dongshan, the contrast between modernity and the surrounding agricultural countryside was striking, as illustrated by an early postcard (Pl. 27) showing a modern Mediterranean Revival–influenced villa with water buffalo lined up outside its garden walls. By the 1930s, however, the district became densely built with houses of a great variety of stylistic influences. Flanking the commercial center on either side is an assortment of residential architecture influences, ranging from the Mission Revival (Pl. 28) to Art Deco, and even a sort of stripped-down modern Gothic (Pl. 29).
The raison d’être of the suburb was explained by Edward Bing-Shuey Lee:
While the aristocrats formerly lived in the extreme west, it is now considered fashionable to live in the eastern suburb of Tungshan. This popular residential section among the officials of Modern Canton, consisted of open territory and paddy rice fields previous to the construction of the Piu [sic] To Girls’ School in 1906 and the Piu [sic] Ching Middle school a year later. In those days there were no roads. The growth of Tungshan as a residential section is attributed to the purchase of real estate and construction of foreign-style houses by oversea Chinese for rental, and since these residences are more comfortable and contain more modern conveniences than the old-style houses in Honam and Saikwan, foreignized officials, merchants and educators find it more convenient to live in the district.96
The buildings of the Pui To girls’ schools, initially missionary enterprises that in the 1920s and 1930s were transferred to Chinese administration, survive today, stylistically ranging from verandah-clad late-Victorian types to more academic Chinese/Beaux Arts design.97 In addition to the core of Dongshan (Lee uses the variant spelling Tungshan), in 1929 Plum Blossom Village was developed on the north side of the Canton-Kowloon Railway to house many of the top provincial and municipal officials.98
Added to Dongshan’s mix of overseas Chinese and well-to-do Cantonese was a mix of foreigners. Travel writer Harry A. Franck described Dongshan in the early to mid-1920s as “a mere knoll about which are scattered many foreign houses, mission schools, a cluster of residences of the higher employees of what is now in name only the railway to Kowloon.”99 The railroad employees were still in this era quite likely to be foreigners. The significance of the scattered suburban residences of many foreigners is further clarified in Franck’s writings:
In fact, if all of the foreign communities scattered about Canton, the original home of foreign trade and Protestant missions in China, were gathered together in one town, Shameen, the hub of them all, would indeed be a little island by comparison.100
The foreign community now found comfortable habitation throughout many sections of a modern city, where the destruction of the ancient city wall heralded modern architecture and transportation that made the architectural distinction between Western and Cantonese increasingly less significant. Franck, instead of staying on Shamian or even the Hotel Asia, rented an apartment, “in quite the modern sense,” in the western suburbs.101 A 1926 publication of the US Department of Commerce stated monthly rental rates for the Bund ($50 for 625 square feet of office space), Dongshan ($75 to $100 for an eight-room unfurnished house minus utilities), the Chinese city ($20 for 625 feet of office space or $15 to $50 for a five-room house of the type used by the Chinese middle class), and Shamian ($300 for a three-story building with first-floor offices and apartments in upper stories and a whopping $150 to $200 for an unfurnished suite of rooms).102 Increased real estate costs on Shamian, combined with a growing fellowship felt by some Westerners with the Cantonese of the “New Guangzhou” fostered a new pattern of living as close neighbors.
Civic Visions: The Sights of Republican Guangzhou
After 1911, Western visitors to Guangzhou experienced the city altogether differently than their predecessors had a decade or two earlier. The city was no longer for the West a repository of the traditional or ancient, but rather a site of cultural transformation. Even before the great transformation of the city’s urban fabric of the mid-1910s through the 1930s, foreign understanding of Chinese politics allowed the visitor to see the city differently. Carl Crow, in his 1913 The Traveler’s Handbook for China, gave an assessment of the city that would be repeated much over the next few decades, calling it “the most advanced, largest, and most turbulent city in the country.”103 This assertion was based not so much on the architecture and urban fabric of the city, but by the progressive politics of its inhabitants. He explained that it was the seat of power for revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen, Wu Tingfang, and Tang Shaoyi, and that “It is from Canton that practically all the Chinese in America came. . . . Many of these emigrants returned to their loved birthplace, bringing with them advanced ideas of government.”104 Two decades or so later, the Intimate Travel Guide for 20 Oriental Cities would assert, “The motif of the city is change. Everything seems to be in the process of being improved. Yet, at the same time, the old continues, so that it remains charming.”105 In reality, during the twenty-five years before the Japanese occupation of the city, drastic changes in urban fabric transformed visitor expectations by demolishing former tourist sites and constructing new ones. The evolving identity and self-representation of the Cantonese were now shaping the foreign visitor’s experience.
With modernization, the municipal Cantonese government perpetually made decisions about what to preserve and what to destroy. The 1919 dismantling of the city wall for road space was perhaps the easiest, as it answered the demands of modernizing infrastructure while displacing the least amount of facilities currently in use.106 A profound change for tourists visiting the city would be the ever-decreasing number of what in the nineteenth century were “regulation” sites. During the years of Sun Yat-sen’s government, the city took over the sites not only of the former imperial government, notably the official yamen, but also most of the Buddhist, Taoist, and local temples.107 These were converted for use as barracks or schools, or were demolished altogether for city parks and municipal government buildings. Around 1931, a revival of Buddhism in the city, combined with the preservation interests of academics, led to renewed interest in remaining sites.108
The list of surviving tourist sites in city guides possessed some continuity with past itineraries, as well as more recent additions in the form of buildings whose significance had been rediscovered. The Temple of Five Hundred Lohan, later destroyed during the Cultural Revolution but recently reconstructed, and the Temple of the Five Immortals, whose main interest had been and is still its association with the foundation myth of the city, both of which had been standard on the nineteenth-century itinerary, remained. The Flower Pagoda always had been to foreign tourists a remarkable feature of the city’s skyline but not a site to visit, due to its bad state of repair. It was restored in 1935, allowing visitors to ascend it for a view of the city, and has remained a standard attraction ever since.109
The Guangxiaosi, the city’s most ancient Buddhist temple, had been largely ignored by visitors of the nineteenth century, but by the 1930s it was actively preserved due to the increased interest of Chinese and foreigners in architectural history, though part of it was used as the Government Law College.110 The Ocean Banner Monastery did not fare as well, its eight acres subject to partial demolition for the new Ocean Banner Park, office space for the Municipal Public Education Institute, the Honam Telephone Exchange, the Third Free Clinic, a children’s playground, and police and fire stations.111 In the process of the monastery’s demolition, two of the main halls of the temple were left standing, the restoration of which was in 1936 “under contemplation.”112 It should also be noted that a new “traditional” site was rapidly added to the touring routes. The Chen Clan Academy (Chenjiaci) was built only in 1898, but less than fifteen years later was hailed as “the most elaborate and costly in all China.”113 Though in the 1920s it was utilized as a military barracks, the academy was back on the tourist route by the 1930s, when one guide pointed out that “the elaborate carvings cannot fail to arouse the admiration of all and sundry.”114 This site, now a folk arts museum, is still the likeliest to have tourist buses parked in front of it at any given time.
The Zhenhai Lou and the portion of the city wall around it were left standing. The five-storied building was restored in 1928, with poured concrete used to replace the timber columns.115 This was part of a plan to provide tourists with an interesting site to visit, as well as maintain the local landmark. In the 1930s, the building was used as the city’s natural history and fine arts museum—today, it is the city’s history museum.116 A Keystone View Company stereoview card depicted the structure (Fig. 4.18), probably in the early 1930s, and recounted the museum’s contents on its obverse:
on the first and second floors, collections of the animal and bird life of south China; on the third, cases containing miscellaneous natural history objects of the same region; and on the fourth and fifth, an art gallery displaying examples of ancient and modern Chinese art. Among the latter, to the surprise of the Occidental visitor, are many works showing the newer forms of Cubism and Futurism, to which the younger Chinese artists seem to have turned with enthusiasm.117
Even in the “ancient” tourist sites, the Cantonese were enthusiastic to show off their modern accomplishments. Increasingly, the historic, traditional Cantonese sites became a more minor part of the foreign visitor’s experience.
Fig. 4.18
Zhenhai Lou (Five-storied “pagoda,” here misidentified as a Buddhist temple), c. 1930. This view shows the building restored as the city’s natural history and art museum, a process in which all of its timber elements were replaced with cast concrete replica parts. Note the addition of the Guomindang sun disk ornament in the gable. Keystone View Company card no. 23978, from author’s collection.
The Cantonese had now taken publicity for their city into their own hands. English-language city guides, such as Edward Bing-Shuey Lee’s Modern Canton and Yong Sang Ng’s Canton, City of the Rams, now became the visitor’s reference.118 Lee’s guide seems to follow the model of promotional chamber of commerce books on cities that were then popular in the United States. His intentions are evident in the first lines of his introduction:
It has been the favourite contention of certain foreign conservatives that China can never develop as a modern nation without foreign political domination. The rapid transformation of Canton from a mediaeval walled city with narrow tortuous lanes into a modern city with wide asphalt roads and public conveniences possessed by any American or European city provides an answer to this antiquated point of view.119
While paying some attention to the traditional sites of tourist interest, and detailing travel facilities and shopping opportunities, Lee devotes most of his attention to chronicling the city’s efforts towards modernization. Everything is carefully surveyed, from the planning efforts involved in revising the city’s fabric, to utilities, social services, and educational institutions. Though certainly useful to the Western traveler, it is also a work seemingly intended to attract broader foreign interest and investment by portraying the city as filled with all necessary modern conveniences and infrastructure.
Ng’s Canton, City of the Rams, subtitled “A General Description and Brief Historical Survey with Four Stories from Popular Cantonese Folk-Lore,” was friendlier to the general interests of the foreign traveler. The “human interest” aspects of the historical narratives and folktales Ng included are accompanied by descriptions of modern aspects of the city, even down to its industrial zones. To both of these promoters of Guangzhou, the modern city offered more attractions than the traditional. They devoted considerable space to modern places of leisure and interest, including the municipal parks, the newly constructed Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, and even the Dr. Sun Memorial Library, then under construction, designed by French-trained architect Lin Keming in an “adaptive Chinese” style.120 The latter building was constructed partially with funds donated by overseas Chinese in the Americas.121
The municipal library was not the only new attraction funded by the Cantonese living overseas. The monument that perhaps more than any other represented the international pretensions, and indeed real state, of Guangzhou during the Chinese Republic, the Huanghuagang (Mound of Yellow Flowers, or 72 Martyrs Park), wears such contributions on its face. This monument (Fig. 4.19) was built in a suburban park northeast of the main city around 1920, to commemorate the seventy-two revolutionaries killed during an April 1911 Guangzhou uprising against the imperial government. This was one of several new monuments dedicated to recent history and billed as being of top interest to foreign visitors, including the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, erected on the site of the Guanyin Temple described in early Western tourist guides.122 This memorial, behind the mass tomb of the martyrs, consists of a rusticated stone plinth supporting stepped marble slabs with a replica of the Statue of Liberty surmounting the whole. On the stone slabs are inscriptions recording the donors to the monument, clubs of overseas Chinese from far-off, exotic locations such as Pittsburgh and other cities all over the Americas, Asia, and even Africa. The identity of Xin Guangzhou as a center of national and international note could not be announced more clearly. The monument did undergo a few changes over time. In the mid-1930s, Liberty was replaced with the sun disk emblem of the Guomindang.123 During the Cultural Revolution, this was in turn replaced by a flaming torch.124 Today, Liberty has returned to her post. The monument itself mirrors the continual reinvention of Guangzhou, now to some extent returned to its former international progressive spirit.
Fig. 4.19
“The Tomb of the Seventy-two Heroes” (Huanghuagang), before mid-1930s. The creation of new sites for the modern visitor can be seen in this monument to martyrs of the 1911 revolution, surmounted by a small Statue of Liberty replica. Keystone View Company Card No. 23988, from author’s collection.
1. Milton Chun Lee, “Public Construction in Canton,” The Far Eastern Review, May 1930, p. 217.
2. JSS I 6/2, Swire Property Book, p. 26. SOAS, University of London.
3. Ibid.
4. Wright and Cartwright, Twentieth Century Impressions, p. 788.
5. See Jeffrey W. Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 41.
6. Ibid., p. 37.
7. Wright and Cartwright, Twentieth Century Impressions, p. 788.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid. See pp. 794–95.
11. Ibid., p. 788.
12. “Imperial German Consulate, Canton,” The Far Eastern Review, September 1906, p. 118.
13. Foreign Concession Dossier—Shameen (Canton) 1919–1925, FO 228/3193, p. 11 (no. 46). The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
14. Smith, Diary of Events and the Progress on Shameen, 1859–1938, p. 23.
15. Ibid., p. 24.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 25.
18. Though the Guangzhou branch of HSBC opened in 1909, the date of construction is derived from the fact that in 1915 HSBC had a very small staff in Canton and a rare surviving land record refers to the rental of an apartment to an “American, Mr. Kelley, who is employed on the new HSBC building” in March 1920. See Foreign Concession Dossier—Shameen (Canton) 1919–1925, FO 228/3193, p. 7. The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. Funds were appropriated for construction in 1919. See Frank H. H. King, The Hong Kong Bank between the Wars and the Bank Interned, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 105.
19. Charles J. Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer, & Company of China (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, Ltd., 1931), pp. 4, 138.
20. Ibid., passim.
21. Ibid., p. 141.
22. Directory and Chronicle for China, Japan, Straits Settlements, . . . (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Daily Press, 1915), pp. 1041–53.
23. The date here comes from applied letters in the pediment over the entrance.
24. Number 8 (the IBC corporate newsletter), November 1924, and Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000, pp. 68–69.
25. Ibid.
26. Number 8 (the IBC corporate newsletter), November 1924.
27. Smith, Diary of Events and the Progress on Shameen, 1859–1938, p. 27.
28. WORK 10/299. The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. This is a loose miscellaneous file of notes and letters regarding the construction of the Guangzhou consular complex in the 1920s.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. The offices and assistant’s quarters were destroyed in a protest against the British eviction of squatters in the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong in January 1948. The records they contained, which would have allowed a much fuller exploration of the history and development of Shamian, were completely destroyed as well. WORKS 10/301. The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. The plans were provided in conjunction with this incident.
32. Smith, Diary of Events and the Progress on Shameen, 1859–1938, p. 23.
33. FO 228/3193, Foreign Concession Dossier—Shameen (Canton), Dispatch No. 101. PRO, Kew.
34. Ibid., enclosure 2.
35. Ibid.
36. Smith, Diary of Events and the Progress on Shameen, 1859–1938, p. 23.
37. FO 228/3193, Dispatch No. 203. PRO, Kew.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. No. 12 from the series: James Ricalton, China through the Stereoscope (New York: Underwood & Underwood, 1901).
41. 13 Nov. 1924 Minutes of general meeting of ratepayers of the British Concession in FO 228/3193, Dispatch No. 147. PRO, Kew.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Edward Bing-Shuey Lee, Modern Canton (Shanghai: Mercury Press, 1936), p. 28.
45. Ibid.
46. For a comprehensive history of the institution, see Charles Hodge Corbett, Lingnan University (New York: Trustees of Lingnan University, 1963).
47. Corbett, Lingnan University, Chapter 6.
48. Ibid., p. 39.
49. See Charles W. Stoughton architectural drawings collection, Archives, Avery Library, Columbia University. and Henry F. and Elsie Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (Deceased) (Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Co., 1956), p. 577.
50. Corbett, Lingnan University, p. 61. Laird was the brother of Lingnan chemistry professor Clinton Laird.
51. “Triangle Mesh Wire Concrete Reinforcement,” The Far Eastern Review, February 1915, p. 360.
52. Charles K. Edmunds, Canton Christian College, Ling Naam Hok Hau: Its Growth and Outlook (New York: Trustees of the Canton Christian College, 1919), p. 52.
53. Ibid., p. 37.
54. Ibid.
55. An extensive and compelling discussion of this can be found in Jeffrey W. Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914–1935 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001).
56. Cody, Building in China, pp. 159–61.
57. Corbett, Lingnan University, p. 60, and Charles W. Stoughton Drawings, Avery Library.
58. Dougong are the bracket sets in classical Chinese architecture that surmount the columns and are the basis for the proportional scales of buildings.
59. Corbett, Lingnan University, pp. 22, 24–25.
60. Ibid., p. 32.
61. The agricultural extension efforts of Lingnan included setting up agricultural improvement clubs in rural communities. The club and winners of the silkworm cultivation contest at the village of Yung K’ei are illustrated in Lingnan: The News Bulletin of Lingnan University 5, no. 4 (November 1928): 4–5.
62. Ibid., p. 37.
63. Grace Thompson Seton, Chinese Lanterns (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1924), p. 238. The energetic Ms. Seton was also the wife of one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America.
64. Noyes, History of the South China Mission, p. 134.
65. See The Architectural Heritage of Modern China: Guangzhou, pp. 101–3. The author attempted a site visit but was unable to find access to it.
66. Ng Yong Sang, Canton, City of the Rams (Canton: M. S. Cheung, 1936), pp. 75–76.
67. Directory and Chronicle for China, Japan, Corea . . . for the Year 1927 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Daily Press), p. 878, other yearly directories, and Charles W. Stoughton drawings, Avery Library, Columbia University.
68. Ng, Canton, City of the Rams, pp. 38–39.
69. See Delin Lai, “Renewing, Remapping, and Redefining Guangzhou 1910s–1930s,” in Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from Treatuy Ports to World War II, edited by Jennifer Purtle and Hans Bjarne Thomsen (Chicago: Center for the Art of East Asia/Art Media Resources, 2009). See also Michael Tsin, “Canton Remapped,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, edited by Joseph W. Esherick (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000). For the impact of American planning on the redesign of Guangzhou, see Cody, Building in China, Chapter 5, and also Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000, pp. 111–17 passim.
70. Jeffrey W. Cody, James R. Richardson, and Wallace Chang (eds.), Changdi, Guangzhou, PRC, June 2002: A Report on an Urban Environmental Design Charette in the Pearl River Delta (Hong Kong: Department of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and others, 2002), p. A10.
71. “Canton in the Changing,” The Far Eastern Review, October 1921, p. 706.
72. Seton, Chinese Lanterns, Chapter 10, passim.
73. See Cody et al., Changdi, Guangzhou, PRC, June 2002, p. A10. The sources I have located for the date of the hotel’s completion are all secondary and contradictory, but range between 1933 and 1937.
74. The type has a fairly definite presence in Shantou and Xiamen. Its presence in the other geographic areas was confirmed by the author through conversations with my Cornell peers Zhao Hua-yu and Edson Cabalfin.
75. “Canton in the Changing,” The Far Eastern Review, October 1921, p. 706.
76. Ibid., pp. 705–6.
77. Lee, Modern Canton, chart facing p. 160.
78. “Canton’s New Maloos,” The Far Eastern Review, January 1922, p. 22, and Cody, Exporting American Architecture, p. 111.
79. “Canton’s New Maloos,” p. 22.
80. Ibid., and alumnus file, archives, Cornell University.
81. “Canton’s New Maloos,” p. 23.
82. Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer, & Company of China, p. 140, and Cody, Building in China, p. 63.
83. Ferguson, Andersen, Meyer, & Company of China, p. 140.
84. Ibid., and “Canton—A World Port,” The Far Eastern Review, June 1931, pp. 352–54.
85. Ibid.
86. “Canton in the Changing,” The Far Eastern Review, October 1921, p. 706.
87. “Industrial Canton: An Adventure and Some Trade Reports,” The Far Eastern Review, April 1921, p. 257.
88. “Canton’s New Maloos,” p. 23.
89. Ibid.
90. Ng, Canton, City of Rams, pp. 82–83.
91. Harry A. Franck, Roving through Southern China (New York: The Century Company, 1925), pp. 222–23, 231.
92. See Lee, Modern Canton, pp. 2–3.
93. See “Chinese Imperial Railways—Canton-Kowloon Railway,” The Far Eastern Review, May 1911, pp. 468–73, and “Opening of the Chinese Section, Canton-Kowloon Railway,” The Far Eastern Review, October 1911, pp. 149–54.
94. There is still much study to be done on Dongshan, which is perhaps the greatest concentration of “academic” domestic architecture of the early twentieth century still extant in Guangzhou. Difficulties have been posed for the researcher, however, as original sources on the district’s development are hard to come by. This is probably partially due to the destruction of records, but information about the neighborhood may also be restricted since many high officials of the provincial and municipal governments still reside there. Photography of Dongshan (particularly in its Plum Blossom Village section) is sometimes strongly discouraged or forbidden by local police.
95. Ng, Canton, City of Rams, p. 8.
96. Lee, Modern Canton, p. 29.
97. Ibid., p. 114, and Architectural Heritage of Modern China: Guangzhou, pp. 72–76.
98. Ibid., p. 29. Fewer historical buildings survive in this region of Dongshan today, though there are still a few in the same range of early twentieth-century revival and “modern” styles.
99. Franck, Roving through Southern China, p. 229.
100. Ibid., p. 258.
101. Ibid., p. 233.
102. Julean Arnold, China: A Commercial and Industrial Handbook (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926), p. 429.
103. Carl Crow, The Travelers’ Handbook for China (San Francisco: San Francisco News Co., 1913), p. 178.
104. Ibid., pp. 178, 180. It is interesting to note that Tang Shaoyi, a Columbia University graduate, was the nephew of Jardine & Matheson’s comprador.
105. Stuart Lillico, Intimate Travel Guide for Twenty Oriental Cities: Tokio to Singapore (Shanghai: Mercury Press, 1935?), entry for Guangzhou.
106. For a description of this project, see Lee, Modern Canton, pp. 13–14. The process of transforming wall to avenue could be quite literal, as wall materials were often transformed for use as paving materials.
107. Franck, Roving through Southern China, p. 277, and Ng, Canton, City of the Rams, pp. 57–58.
108. Ng, Canton, City of the Rams, pp. 57–58.
109. Ibid., p. 60.
110. Ibid., p. 59.
111. Lee, Modern Canton, p. 135.
112. Ng, Canton, City of the Rams, p. 63.
113. Crow, The Travelers’ Handbook for China, p. 186.
114. Franck, Roving through Southern China, pp. 277–78, and quote from Lee, Modern Canton, p. 137. An interesting feature of this building, much of which is a grand elaboration on the Cantonese vernacular, is that some of its columns are in fact made of cast iron.
115. See Wu, Guangzhou jianzhu, pp. 64–66.
116. Lillico, Intimate Travel Guide for Twenty Oriental Cities: Tokio to Singapore.
117. Keystone View Company. Card #23978, “The Buddhist Temple Which Has Become a Public Museum, Canton, China” (Meadville, PA: Keystone View Company, no date). The building in fact was never a Buddhist temple.
118. Lee, Modern Canton, and Ng, Canton, City of the Rams.
119. Lee, Modern Canton, p. v.
120. See particularly Ng, Canton, City of the Rams, Chapter 7, “Public Grounds and Buildings.” For information on the Zhongshan Library, still the home of the municipal archives, see Wu, Guangzhou jianzhu, pp. 163–64. For Lin Keming, ibid., pp. 256–58, and Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 219. In 1932, Lin founded the first school of architecture in Guangzhou, the Guangdong Provincial Xiangqing University.
121. Ng, Canton, City of the Rams, p. 54.
122. Notably, graduates of Cornell University’s architecture school in the late 1910s were responsible for both monuments. Lu Yanzhi designed the architectural homages to Dr. Sun in Yuexiu Park. His sometime classmate, the less well-known Yang Xizong, in addition to being in charge of the municipal parks department, was primarily responsible for the design of the Huanghuagang. See Lu Jiefeng, Huanghuagang (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2006), particularly Chapter 4.
123. Ibid., p. 92.
124. Johnson and Peterson, A Historical Dictionary of Guangzhou (Canton) and Guangdong, p. 53.