Huaxia Click

Latest dispatches · page 8 of 14

Painted illustration of Tsuruga harbour in 1940, a steamer at a stone quay in a calm bay ringed by forested mountains

History

Where the Visas Led

The last image of Chiune Sugihara is the one history has chosen to keep: a Japanese consul leaning out of the window of a moving train at Kaunas station in the late summer of 1940, still signing, still stamping, handing papers down into a forest of outstretched arms until the platform ran out from under him.

15 min read

Painted illustration of the cream two-storey former Japanese consulate in Kaunas in summer 1940, with refugees waiting quietly in the street

History

Visas for Life

In the last days of August 1940, at the railway station of Kaunas, Lithuania, a crowd of Jewish refugees stood on the platform beside the departing train, and the Japanese consul, leaning from the window of his compartment, went on writing visas.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a cream-white apartment block on Beethovenplatz in Vienna in 1938, with a small queue waiting at its doorway

People

The Consul Who Kept Stamping

In the summer of 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy named Eric Goldstaub set out to find his family a way out of Vienna.

15 min read

Painted illustration of Shanghai's Garden Bridge and Broadway Mansions in 1939, with small figures crossing into Hongkew

History

The Port of Last Resort

In July 1938, at the French resort of Evian, the delegates of thirty-two nations met to discuss the Jewish refugees of Germany and Austria, and almost every one of them, expressing the deepest sympathy, explained why his own country could take no more.

15 min read

Painted illustration of the dark brown brick Park Hotel tower in 1930s Shanghai, seen across the open lawns of the race course

People

The Refugee Who Built Shanghai

In the autumn of 1918, a twenty-five-year-old prisoner of war jumped from a moving train somewhere in Siberia and walked into the chaos of the Russian civil war with nothing but his wits and his drawing skills.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a 1930s gramophone playing a shellac record by an open window over the rooftops of a Shanghai lane at dusk

Culture

When Shanghai Sang

In 1951, an American singer named Frankie Laine took a song to number three on the Billboard charts, a breezy love tune with an insinuating rhythm and an English lyric about a flower.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a 1930s Shanghai film studio stage, with a hand-cranked camera and arc lamps lighting a painted lane-house set

Culture

The Hollywood of the East

On the night of 7 March 1935, Shanghai’s most beloved actress went home from a farewell dinner with her colleagues, wrote two letters, took an overdose of sleeping pills, and died the following afternoon, on International Women’s Day, at the age of twenty-four.

8 min read

Painted illustration of the giant tan granite boulders on the golden beach at Tianya Haijiao near Sanya, Hainan, with small figures and a leaning palm

Places

The Island at the End of the Sky

On the southern shore of Hainan Island, where the beach ends in a scatter of enormous granite boulders under the palms, two of the rocks carry inscriptions that together form the most romantic address in China: tianya haijiao, the edge of the sky and the rim of the sea.

8 min read

Painted illustration of the Bund in Shanghai in the 1930s seen from the Huangpu, with the domed bank, the Custom House clock tower and the green-roofed Sassoon House

People

The Soong Sisters

There is a saying about them that every Chinese schoolchild used to know: of the three Soong sisters, one loved money, one loved power, and one loved China.

10 min read

Painted illustration of the Tiananmen gate tower seen from the north on an autumn morning in 1949, with its red wall, arched gateways and yellow double-eaved roof

History

The Road to Tiananmen

At three in the afternoon on 1 October 1949, on the rostrum of the Tiananmen gate tower in Beijing, above the walls where emperors had proclaimed their edicts for five hundred years, a tall Hunanese in a plain grey tunic leaned to the microphone and announced that the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China was hereby established.

10 min read

Painted illustration of the eleven-arched Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing at dawn in July 1937, with the walls of Wanping beyond

History

The War That Remade China

On the night of 7 July 1937, Japanese troops conducting exercises near an ancient stone bridge southwest of Beijing reported one of their soldiers missing, and demanded entry to the nearby walled town of Wanping to search for him.

12 min read

Painted illustration of Beijing's Zhengyangmen gate tower in winter 1916, with mule carts and rickshaws on the road below

History

The Broken Republic

On the first day of January 1916, in the same Forbidden City from which his dynasty had abdicated four years earlier, Yuan Shikai ascended a throne of his own.

12 min read

Painted illustration of Peking's grey Tartar Wall above the Legation Quarter during the siege of 1900, with sandbag barricades and the Qianmen gate tower beyond

History

The Last Years of the Dragon

For fifty-five days in the summer of 1900, the diplomatic quarter of Beijing was a fortress under siege.

13 min read

Painted illustration of the white Marble Boat with its two-storey pavilion at the Summer Palace in Beijing, reflected in Kunming Lake

History

The First Answer to the Gunboats

On 18 October 1860, British soldiers set fire to the Yuanmingyuan, the vast complex of palaces and gardens northwest of Beijing where, forty-four years earlier, Lord Amherst had been turned away at dawn from a closed gate.

14 min read

Painted illustration of the British ship of the line HMS Cornwallis at anchor on the Yangzi off Nanjing in 1842, with junks and the city wall along the shore

History

The War Nobody Would Name

On 29 August 1842, in the great cabin of the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Cornwallis, anchored in the Yangzi River off Nanjing, three Qing commissioners sat down with Sir Henry Pottinger and signed away the settlement of a war.

12 min read

Painted illustration of labourers destroying opium in long brine-filled trenches beside the Pearl River at Humen in 1839

History

The Poison That Opened China

For twenty-three days in June 1839, on a muddy flat by the mouth of the Pearl River, five hundred labourers destroyed the most valuable cargo in the history of the China trade.

15 min read

Painted illustration of weary European travellers climbing down from Chinese mule carts before the gate of the Yuanmingyuan at dawn in 1816, watched by Qing officials

History

The Envoys Who Would Not Kneel

At about five o’clock in the morning of 29 August 1816, a procession of exhausted Englishmen arrived at the gates of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial summer palace northwest of Beijing.

20 min read

Painted illustration of Longwood House on Saint Helena, a low cream house with a green trellised porch on a windswept plateau

History

Napoleon Predicted China’s Rise From His Prison Island

On 27 June 1817, the East Indiaman Caesar dropped anchor off St Helena, a volcanic speck in the South Atlantic where the British government kept the most famous prisoner in the world.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a Go game in progress on a wooden board by a window overlooking a canal of timber houses in Wuzhen

Culture

Go and the Chinese Art of Territory

In the last week of May 2017, in the canal town of Wuzhen, a place of whitewashed walls and stone bridges that China had lately turned into the venue for its World Internet Conference, the best player alive sat down to the oldest board game on earth.

14 min read

Painted illustration of a writer's desk with a red notebook and old Chinese books by a window over foggy wartime Chongqing

People

The British Writers Who Explain China

In the summer of 1943, a Cambridge biochemist arrived in Chongqing, China’s battered wartime capital, carrying little more than a red notebook and a question that would occupy the rest of his life.

15 min read

Painted illustration of the red-brick Saint Sophia Cathedral in Harbin with its green onion domes on a snowy winter morning

Places

How Harbin Became China’s Ice City

Every winter, workers on the frozen Songhua River at Harbin cut the ice into heavy blocks.

16 min read

Painted illustration of the brick Ohel Moishe Synagogue in Shanghai's Hongkew district, with refugees in the lane outside

History

Jewish Shanghai of Refugees and Tycoons

Between 1938 and 1941, as country after country closed its doors to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, a Chinese port city under Japanese military pressure became one of the last places in the world they could reach.

15 min read

Hand-painted watercolour of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge and the Yellow Crane Tower in pale morning haze

Places

How Three Towns Became Wuhan

Wuhan is not one city.

18 min read

Painted illustration of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge stretching low across the Pearl River estuary in the morning haze

Places

How the Pearl River Delta Became a Megalopolis

Fly into the Pearl River Delta at night and the old map stops making sense. There is no visible gap between Guangzhou and Foshan, or between Shenzhen and Dongguan.

16 min read