Chiang Yee and His Circle

Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain,

1930–1950

Edited by Paul Bevan, Anne Witchard, and Da Zheng

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Contents

Foreword by Yi-Fu Tuan vii

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Note on Copyright xiii
Notes on Romanisation and References xiv
List of Contributors xv

Editors’ Introduction: Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and
Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950 1
Part One: Chiang Yee
1. Chiang Yee’s Hampstead 11
Paul Bevan
2. Chiang Yee as Art History 18
Craig Clunas
3. Being Chiang Yee: Feeling, Difference, and Storytelling 37
Sarah Cheang
4. Chiang Yee and British Ballet 51
Anne Witchard
5. The Silent Traveller at Home 71
Da Zheng
6. Chiang Yee in Wartime 89
Paul French

Part Two: Chiang Yee’s Circle

7. Navigating British Publishing and Finding an Anglophone Readership:
Five Chinese Writers 107
Tessa Thorniley
vi Contents

8. Chiang Yee and the Hsiungs: Solidarity, Conviviality, and the Economy of
Racial Representation 128
Diana Yeh
9. Shih-I Hsiung and Anglo-Chinese Films: ‘An Interesting Experiment’ 142
Paul Bevan
10. A ‘Chinese Shelley’ in 1930s Britain: Wang Lixi’s Transnational Activism
and Transcultural Lyricism 158
Ke Ren
11. Mahjong in Maida Vale 181
Frances Wood
Glossary of Chinese names 197
Selected Bibliography 199
Index 209
Illustrations

Cover: ‘Umbrellas under Big Ben’ from The Silent Traveller in London (1938)
Figure 0.1: Chiang Yee reading in his residence in the 1930s 4
Figure 1.1: Map of bombings in the Borough of Hampstead 16
Figure 2.1: Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye (1935), Plate XII, superimposed on
Zhongguo minghuaji 32
Figure 2.2: Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye (1935), Plate IV 34
Figure 3.1: Chiang Yee, ‘Charlie Chan and Myself ’ from The Silent Traveller
in Oxford (1944) 42
Figure 3.2: Chiang Yee, ‘Hair Raid’ from The Silent Traveller in Oxford (1944) 47
Figure 4.1: The Birds (1942) set design by Chiang Yee (see colour plates after
p. 70)
Figure 4.2: The Birds (1942), Cuckoo (Gordon Hamilton) and Two Cheeky
Sparrows (Margaret Dale and Joan Sheldon) 66
Figure 4.3: The Birds (1942), Hen and Sparrows (Moyra Fraser, Margaret Dale,
and Joan Sheldon) 67
Figure 4.4: The Birds (1942), Nightingale (Beryl Grey) 68
Figure 4.5: The Birds (1942), Nightingale costume design by Chiang Yee
(see colour plates after p. 70)
Figure 5.1: The front cover of A Chinese Childhood (1940) (see colour plates
after p. 70)
Figure 5.2: Budai Monk, painting, ca. 1934 79
Figure 5.3: ‘Up the Lu Mountain’ from A Chinese Childhood (1940) 84
Figure 6.1: ‘Sleeping in a Gas Mask’ from The Silent Traveller in War Time
(1939) (see colour plates after p. 70)
Figure 6.2: An illustration by Chiang Yee from M. P. Lee’s Chinese Cookery:
A Hundred Practical Recipes (1943) 98
x Illustrations

Figure 6.3: ‘Is He Mr. Winston Churchill?’ from The Silent Traveller in War
Time (1939) 100
Figure 10.1: Wang Lixi. The inscription reads: ‘Wang Lixi, 1938, in Belfast.’ 174
Contributors

(In alphabetical order)

Paul Bevan (co-editor)

Paul Bevan is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at
the University of Oxford. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in
Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum and his research focusses equally on
the visual arts and literature. Paul’s primary research interests concern the impact
of Western art and literature on China during the Republican period (1912–1949),
particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. His first book, A Modern
Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack
Chen, 1926–1938 (2015), was hailed as ‘a major contribution to modern Chinese
studies’; his second book, ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in
Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age, was published in 2020.

Sarah Cheang
Sarah Cheang is Head of Programme in History of Design at the Royal College
of Art, London. Her research centres on transnational fashion, ethnicity, material
culture, and the body from the nineteenth century to the present day, on which
she has published widely. Her work on Chinese material culture in Britain spans
consideration of ceramics, fashion and textiles, wallpapers, furniture, and dogs. She
is an active member of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion, and the
OPEN research initiative.

Craig Clunas
Craig Clunas is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Oxford,
and the author of numerous works on Chinese art and culture, particularly of the
late imperial and modern periods. His most recent book is Chinese Painting and its
Audiences (2017).

Paul French
Paul French was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and lived and
worked in Shanghai for many years. He is the author of the books Midnight in Peking
and City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, both currently being developed for television.
xvi Contributors

He is also the author of the Audible Original Murders of Old China as well as regular
contributor to the South China Morning Post magazine.

Ke Ren
Ke Ren is Assistant Professor of Chinese/East Asian History at the College of the
Holy Cross (Massachusetts). He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history
of modern China, Sino-Western exchanges, cosmopolitanism, and transnational
movements. He is working on a book manuscript entitled Fin-de-Siècle Diplomat:
Chen Jitong and Cosmopolitanism in the Late Qing World. He is also researching the
history of Chinese participation in transnational anti-fascist and peace movements
in the Global Second World War.

Tessa Thorniley
Tessa Thorniley is an independent researcher whose work focuses on writers of
Chinese heritage who have lived and worked in Britain. She is currently conduct-
ing research for the British Chinese Studies Network (BCSN). She completed her
doctoral studies at Westminster University where she also taught seminars in con-
temporary Chinese literature and society. Prior to her doctorate she spent seven
years living and working as a freelance journalist in China.

Anne Witchard (co-editor)

Anne Witchard is Reader in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University
of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse
Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (2007), Lao She in London (2012), and
England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War (2014). She is editor, with
Lawrence Philips, of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (2010)
and Modernism and British Chinoiserie (2015).

Frances Wood
Frances Wood is the retired Curator of the Chinese Collections in the British
Library. She has written a number of books on China including The Blue Guide to
China (2002), No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port life in China, 1843–1943
(1998), The Lure of China: Writers on China from Marco Polo to J. G. Ballard (2009),
and Great Books of China (2017).

Diana Yeh
Diana Yeh is Associate Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Arts
and Social Sciences, City, University of London, and Senior Lecturer in Sociology,
Culture, and the Creative Industries in the Department of Sociology. She is author
of The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity (2014) about
the playwright S. I. Hsiung, and co-editor of Contesting British Chinese Culture
(2018). She is currently principal investigator of two projects: (1) ‘Responding to
Contributors xvii

COVID-19 Anti-Asian Racial Violence through Community Care, Solidarity and

Resistance’, funded by Resourcing Racial Justice and the SASS Higher Education
Innovation Fund; and (2) ‘Becoming East and Southeast Asian: Race, Ethnicity and
Youth Politics of Belonging’, funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme.

Da Zheng (co-editor)
Da Zheng is Professor Emeritus of English at Suffolk University, Boston. He has
published articles on American Literature, Asian American literature, and diaspora
studies. He is the author of Chiang Yee: Silent Traveller from the East – a Cultural
Biography (2010) and Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman (2020).
Editors’ Introduction
Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and
Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950

In the 1930s, writer, poet, and painter Chiang Yee (1903–1977) was one of a small
group of Chinese writers and artists who made their homes in what was then the
Borough of Hampstead in Northwest London. At the time, this neighbourhood
was largely inhabited by a multicultural community of artists, writers, musicians,
philosophers, and critics, a number of whom had fled Nazi persecution in Europe.
Many of these intellectuals lived in Hampstead well into the 1980s and 1990s,
making it one of the most vibrant artistic areas in London over a period of several
decades.
It was in Hampstead, on the second floor of a large Victorian house, that Chiang
Yee shared a flat with Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung (Xiong Shiyi and Cai Daimei). Their
circle of friends and neighbours included the married couple Wang Lixi (Shelley
Wang) and Lu Jingqing, both of whom were writers and poets; Tsui Chi, a historian
and writer; Hsiao Ch’ien (Xiao Qian), essayist, translator, and newspaper reporter;
and the future literary translator Yang Hsien-I (Yang Xianyi), who visited London
at weekends while studying at the University of Oxford. Together with their friends
and families, this group comprised an important social and intellectual network of
Chinese writers and artists in London during the 1930s. Later, especially after the
outbreak of war, they scattered across London and to other parts of the country—
notably to Oxford and Cambridge—but continued to interact and were actively
involved in cultural and political activities in both the UK and China. The chapters
in this collection go some way towards telling a story about the Chinese in England
that up until now has received scant consideration. Although certainly not the most
ostentatious part of London during the pre-war period, Hampstead, where Chiang
Yee and Shih-I Hsiung made their home in the 1930s, was in striking contrast to the
well-documented Limehouse district, where most of London’s Chinese residents
lived at the time. By uncovering this understudied aspect of British cultural history,
this volume will help create a more balanced and nuanced picture of London’s
Chinese population and their artistic and intellectual contributions.
The subject of the Chinese in Britain has come a considerable way in just a
short time, both in terms of scholarship and general attention. As recently as 1993
Colin Holmes’s essay ‘The Chinese Connection’ was pretty much the only work on
2 Editors’ Introduction

the subject.1 Holmes’s aim was chiefly to examine the manifestations of a dispro-
portionate animosity directed towards the Chinese in Britain in the first decade of
the twentieth century. Britain’s first Chinese residents were seamen who settled in
the dockside neighbourhoods of London, Cardiff, and Liverpool. Despite the fact
that the Chinese were statistically just a very small group—comprising only 480 out
of a total of 15,246 foreign workers (UK census 1911)—Holmes demonstrated that
small groups can come under hostile scrutiny when they become linked to issues
of national economic or social concern. While the cheapness of Chinese labour
provoked localised anger, this was exacerbated with the outbreak of the First World
War, when claims of illicit sexual relations, illegal gambling, and recreational drug
use were mobilised in the service of a general dynamics of racial hostility. Late
nineteenth-century notions of a ‘Yellow Peril’ were revitalised and the dissemina-
tion of anti-Chinese sentiment in the daily press was pervasive. Holmes empha-
sises the role of popular culture in this, examining the interplay of the daily press,
literary potboilers, and lurid films with police and government reports, a potent
brew that filtered into a popular consciousness in which the Chinese presence, tiny
though it was, loomed large. London’s Chinatown in the Limehouse docks became
a byword for vice, exoticised by Thomas Burke’s bestselling Limehouse Nights: Tales
of Chinatown (1916) and demonised in Sax Rohmer’s tales of the evil mastermind
Dr. Fu Manchu.
Chiang Yee arrived in the UK in 1933. Two years earlier, the 1931 UK census
had recorded 1,934 Chinese living in England and Wales. Popular perceptions of
Chinese people continued to be based on sensationalist press stories while carica-
tured stereotypes in novels and films had become firmly established. In unpicking
the workings of this anti-Chinese discourse, ‘The Chinese Connection’ mapped out
a terrain of future scholarship on the Chinese in Britain which continues to develop
and broaden. Publications such as Christopher Frayling’s The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu
Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (2014) and Phil Baker and Antony Clayton’s
edited collection Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (2015)
have thoroughly excavated the popular ‘Yellow Perilism’ of pulp exotica. The per-
nicious impact of popular cultural representation of the Chinese found its most
detailed account in Robert Bickers’s Britain in China: Community, Culture and
Colonialism, 1900–49 (1999). While Bickers’s work is a study of British incursion
in China, the first chapter, ‘China in Britain, and in the British Imagination’, is con-
cerned with how the colonial mindset was informed by its mental baggage. Bickers
details the films, plays, and fiction, both for children and adults, in which the cruelty

1. Colin Holmes, ‘The Chinese Connection’, in Outsiders and Outcasts: Essays in Honour of William J. Fishman,
ed. Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1993), 71–93. This essay incorporated
Holmes’s previous attention to the Chinese in John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971
(London: Macmillan Education, 1988). It also built on an earlier article by J. P. May, ‘The Chinese in Britain,
1860–1914’, that Holmes had published a decade before in his edited volume Immigrants and Minorities in
British Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978). The essay remains a foundational source for the wide range
of studies that have come since.
Editors’ Introduction 3

and wickedness of ‘China and the Chinese—and the Chinese in Britain too—were
represented to the extent that those pleading for improvements in relations between
Chinese and Britons routinely joked about it’.2 Two significant works have explored
the ‘facts’, as far as they can be gleaned, of London’s early Chinatown in relation
to the fantasies it engendered. John Seed’s article ‘Limehouse Blues: Looking for
Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–1940’ (2006), utilises census and other data
to assess the discrepancy between exotic reportage and drab reality, while Sacha
Auerbach’s Race, Law, and ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ in Imperial Britain (2009) examines
the manner in which derogatory media representation influenced the treatment of
Chinese immigrants in the British judicial system and how the reports of these legal
judgments, in turn, reinforced the ways in which the Chinese were depicted in the
British media.
With The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present: Economy, Transnationalism, Identity
(2007), Gregor Benton and E. T. Gomez published the first comprehensive study
of the long history of Chinese migration to Britain. Most significantly, Benton
and Gomez revised accounts that treated all Chinese emigrants as one unified
diaspora. The Chinese in Britain are a highly diverse group, divided by points of
origin, reasons for leaving their homeland, and linguistic, ethnic, and class differ-
ences. Studies of individual Chinese in Britain include Da Zheng’s comprehensive
biographies, Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveller from the East (2010) and Shih-I Hsiung:
A Glorious Showman (2020), as well as Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London (2012)
and Diana Yeh’s study of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, The Happy Hsiungs: Performing
China and the Struggle for Modernity (2014). Further developments in the history
of the Chinese in Britain were prompted by the centenary of the First World War. A
series of Penguin Specials were published in 2014 to commemorate the involvement
of China in the war, the consequences of its aftermath, and the neglected contribu-
tion of the Chinese Labour Corps.3
In a welcome counterpoint to the more familiar negative narrative, a growing
body of work looks at the cultural impact of the Sino-British encounter in the early
twentieth century, exploring the ways in which the visual iconography of China con-
stituted a precursor of literary and visual modernism. Studies which include Patricia
Laurence’s Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (2003),
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins’s A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory
of Orientalism (2013), Ross Forman’s China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires
Entwined (2013), Elizabeth Chang’s Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and
Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010), and Anne Witchard’s edited col-
lection British Modernism and Chinoiserie (2015) demonstrate the ways in which

2. Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999), 27.
3. Including Mark O’Neill, The Chinese Labour Corps: The Forgotten Chinese Labourers of the First World War
(Melbourne, VIC: Penguin Group Australia, 2014); and Anne Witchard, England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia
and the Great War (Melbourne, VIC: Penguin Group Australia, 2014).
4 Editors’ Introduction

exposure to a Chinese aesthetic primed British sensibilities for the developments

of a European avant-garde. Heralding this reformation of Western aesthetics, in
the first decade of the twentieth century, Laurence Binyon, Keeper of East Asian
Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, sought to explicate to non-specialist
audiences the spiritual and unifying role of art, central to the communal traditions
of China and East Asia. Binyon’s diagnosis of a bankrupt contemporary culture
chimed with the modernists’ preoccupation with the reintegration of art and life.
Through pioneering works such as Painting in the Far East (1908) and Flight of the
Dragon (1911), his regular newspaper column in the The Saturday Review, and a
series of landmark international exhibitions, Binyon argued that the philosophies
which lay behind East Asian art had much to teach the twentieth-century West.
The 1930s saw a further development. Chiang Yee’s publications on Chinese art
and culture, along with his lectures broadcast on the BBC, marked a period in which
Chinese artists and writers began to communicate information and ideas about
their cultural heritage directly. Their work pushed back in various ways against the
prejudices and stereotypes about their country and its people that they had encoun-
tered. This marked a significant shift in perspective, one that in the years before
the Second World War was beginning to be welcomed by influential, often leftist,
magazine editors, critics, and book publishers. Chiang’s Silent Traveller series, with

Figure 0.1: Chiang Yee reading in his residence in the 1930s. Courtesy of San Edwards.
Editors’ Introduction 5

its alternative presentation of Britain, was an innovative attempt to synthesise two

diverse cultures at a time when the Yellow Peril discourse persisted as an influence
in the collective British consciousness.
Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain,
1930–1950 is a volume that addresses aspects of the life and work of Chiang Yee,
but it is equally, and importantly, about the Chinese intellectual community in
Hampstead, the network that sustained him both professionally and personally.
Exiled for different reasons but all highly educated, the small group of Chinese men
and women who settled in the Hampstead area would play an important role in
reshaping conceptions about China in Britain, interacting with London’s cultural
elites and engaging in political anti-fascist activism. Theirs was a world of literary
and artistic interconnectedness and wartime co-operation that is only now begin-
ning to be explored in scholarship. In considering their lives and achievements this
volume seeks to demonstrate just how important their unique contributions were to
intellectual and sociocultural life in Britain during the three decades spanned by the
research. It is our hope that it will stimulate scholarly interest in the field and lead
to more discussion and further discoveries about the Chinese in Britain during the
twentieth century and beyond.
In summer 2019, an audience of around a hundred academics, sinologists, art
lovers, curious locals, international participants, and some descendants of Chiang
Yee who still live in the UK gathered at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for a
symposium organised by Anne Witchard of the University of Westminster. It was
convened to celebrate Chiang’s life and work and to mark the occasion of the erec-
tion of an English Heritage ‘blue plaque’ in commemoration of his residency in
Oxford. This book, which includes revised papers presented at the symposium, as
well as some additional contributions, was inspired by that event.
The book is divided into two parts. Part One, ‘Chiang Yee’, contains six chap-
ters and begins with a contribution by Paul Bevan that sets the scene for all that
follows. Bevan’s introductory chapter takes the form of a brief survey of artistic life
in the Borough of Hampstead during the 1930s—the modernist architecture that
was appearing at the time and the eclectic groups of people who were attracted to
the area: modernist painters and sculptors, members of the Bauhaus, and artists
inspired by left-wing politics and Soviet Socialist Realism. Bevan draws professional
and social connections between painters, sculptors, writers, and designers—many of
whom were refugees or émigrés—and their Chinese neighbours. The extent of these
connections gives us a sense of the socio-geographical importance of Hampstead to
its Chinese residents before they were forced to relocate in the 1940s as a result of
the damage caused by the London Blitz.
The remaining five chapters in Part One focus more or less directly on the life
and work of Chiang Yee. Craig Clunas’s contribution places Chiang’s writings on
the arts of China in the context of their time, and looks at the development of his
thought over the course of his career. The Chinese Eye: An Interpretation of Chinese
6 Editors’ Introduction

Painting (1935) and Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and

Technique (1938) presented themselves as ‘authentic’ presentations of Chinese aes-
thetic principles by a Chinese author, contrasted with the existing literature on these
subjects by Westerners. Clunas submits that a close reading of these texts reveals
them to be part of a complicated process of the circulation of ideas about art in the
first part of the twentieth century, when ‘purely Western’ and ‘purely Chinese’ ideas
were enmeshed in a network of mutual appropriation. In her chapter, Sarah Cheang
explores how the persona of the Silent Traveller created by Chiang Yee steered clear
of making controversial remarks, although he had strong feelings about Chinese
politics, racism, and how Chinese people were regarded in Britain and America;
he could be an ‘Angry Traveller’. Cheang maintains that emotions, whether difficult
or joyous, do not fit smoothly into linear narratives, and make memory an unreli-
able witness to history; historians themselves may have a personal interest in the
subjects they study. Embracing the fragmented, the personal, the emotional, and
the misremembered, Cheang presents a series of moments about Chinese physical
presence. She asks: What was it to be a ‘Silent Traveller’? How can we understand
the things in that ‘silence’ that couldn’t be said?
As discussed by Anne Witchard, Chiang Yee was involved in the theatre, in addi-
tion to his many books, his art, and his poetry, and was at the heart of the wartime
revival of ballet in Britain. In 1942, Chiang Yee was commissioned to design sets
and costumes for the new ballet The Birds, which subsequently won many glowing
reviews from critics. This overlooked episode in his career has much to tell us about
his artistic versatility and his wider significance for British cultural life. Following
this, in Da Zheng’s contribution we step back in time to Chiang Yee’s early years,
and look at his book A Chinese Childhood, published in 1940. Zheng shows that
behind this peaceful narrative of childhood life lay sorrowful feelings and emotions.
Exiled in England, Chiang was tormented with anxiety and worry while working
on the book. Da Zheng maintains that by writing this book, the author attempted
to reconstruct a home that no longer existed, yet a home that could take him away
from the pain and anxiety of a life of exile in a foreign land. Finally, Paul French
looks at Chiang Yee’s work during World War Two. Chiang’s various contributions
to war-related propaganda speak both of his position in British society at the time
and his attempts to draw parallels between the twin struggles of Britain and China
against the Axis powers. Chiang’s The Silent Traveller in War Time (1939) sought to
portray British resolution in the face of war. Critically, as argued by French, it also
serves as an early example of propaganda work, documenting the wartime experi-
ence of solidarity, laughter in the face of adversity, and the ‘Blitz spirit’ under the
threat of gas attacks and evacuation.
The five chapters in Part Two, ‘Chiang Yee’s Circle’, introduce some of the
Chinese writers, artists, and friends with whom Chiang associated during his time
in the UK. Tessa Thorniley’s chapter considers the period during and shortly after
the war, when Chinese writers in Britain were enjoying something of a heyday. At
Editors’ Introduction 7

this time, a number of publishers who were sympathetic towards China helped
them to find new readers and achieve a measure of literary acclaim. The chapter
traces the rise to prominence of Chiang Yee, Hsiao Ch’ien, Chun-chan Yeh, Lo
Hsiao Chien (Kenneth Lo, 1913–1995) and Tsui Chi, and their individual relation-
ships with influential publishers. Diana Yeh’s contribution to the volume examines
Chiang Yee’s relationship with the Hsiungs, who, she maintains, were probably the
most famous Chinese couple living in Britain during the 1930s. In discussing the
major role that the Hsiungs, and Shih-I Hsiung in particular, played in both Chiang’s
career and personal life, she highlights how their relationship was one of mutual-
ity, solidarity, and conviviality as diasporic Chinese writers in Britain. However,
as she further expounds, this fruitful friendship was also impacted severely by the
economy of racial representation at the time, which admitted only a few Chinese
artists or writers to visibility. She discusses how, by pitching them as competitors
against one another, this economy ruptured solidarities and collective resistance,
and eventually tore apart their fragile bonds and those of their wider circle of
diasporic Chinese writers.
Another little-known aspect of the life of Shih-I Hsiung is introduced by Paul
Bevan, who explores his role as a screenwriter, specifically his collaboration with
the showman Lai Foun. A simple but fundamental question is posed in this chapter:
should Shih-I Hsiung’s Lady Precious Stream be seen as an example of serious
drama—as it was often said to be at the time—or as the author’s own contribution
to the populist, Orientalist world of Fu Manchu and other sensationalist films and
novels about China, as it was recognised to be by a number of Hsiung’s compatriots
who were active in his homeland during the 1930s? Ren Ke’s chapter focusses on the
Chinese writer and political activist Wang Lixi, who landed himself in political exile
in England for opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) regime.
Adopting the English name Shelley Wang, he joined fellow Jiangxi natives Chiang
Yee and Shih-I Hsiung to form a trio of displaced Chinese writers in London. The
most politically engaged of the group, Wang Lixi travelled widely to gather support
for China’s War of Resistance against Japan and became a key participant in trans-
national anti-fascist movements. At the same time, he established close relation-
ships with British leftist writers and publishers. These connections resulted in a
series of transcultural literary moments, such as the publication of Wang’s writings
in Left Review, public salons in Dorset and Ulster, and the reading of Wang’s poems
on the BBC. Finally, taking the discussion into the 1950s, Frances Wood uses an
oral history approach to introduce Shih-I Hsiung’s family, which formed part of the
small group of Chinese who settled in North London, exiled for different reasons
but all highly educated and determined to preserve something of a Chinese life-
style in unpromising surroundings. By the 1950s, Wood tells us, there were writers,
painters, and ex-diplomats getting together for games of mahjong and cooking
rather competitively! Their life in Hampstead is recalled through the memories of
the second generation.
1
Chiang Yee’s Hampstead

Paul Bevan

Although certainly not the most well-to-do part of London during the pre-war
period, Hampstead, where Chiang Yee and Shih-I Hsiung made their home in the
1930s, was in striking contrast to the impoverished Limehouse area where most
of London’s Chinese residents lived at the time. Their flat in Upper Park Road was
situated in the heart of what was arguably the most vibrant artistic area of London.
Herbert Read (1893–1968), art critic, poet, and theorist, lived just around the
corner at 3 Mall Studios, having moved there in 1934 with his wife ‘Ludo’ (Margaret
Ludwig) from a flat belonging to Henry Moore (1898–1986) on nearby Parkhill
Road.1 This was an area inhabited by several modernist painters and sculptors, a
group which Read later described with fondness:
Living and working together in Hampstead, as closely and intimately as artists
of Florence and Siena had lived and worked in the Quattrocento . . . Within this
inner group that worked within five minutes’ walking distance of each other in
Hampstead I do not remember any quarrels, any jealousy or spitefulness. It was
a ‘nest’ of gentle artists . . . a spontaneous association of men and women drawn
together by common sympathies, shared seriousness and some kind of group
criticism.2

This ‘nest of gentle artists’, a phrase Read would use on more than one occasion
to describe the group, included Ben Nicholson (1894–1982), Barbara Hepworth
(1903–1975), and Henry Moore.3 In the years that followed, the area saw the fruits
of this intellectual and artistic confluence, with the appearance of several modernist
buildings of real architectural significance, a reflection of the district’s progressive
stance in the world of the arts. Not far from the ‘nest’, at 13 Downshire Hill, was one
example, built in 1936 by Michael and Charlotte Bunney. By 1939, just around the

1. Charles Darwent, Mondrian in London: How British Art Nearly Became Modern (London: Double-Barrelled
Books, 2012), 28; Caroline Maclean, Circles and Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists
(London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 117.
2. Quoted in Maclean, Circles and Squares, 132–33; Christopher Wade, ed., The Streets of Belsize (London:
Camden History Society, 1991), 33. See also Herbert Read, Art in Britain, 1930–40: Centred around Axis,
Circle, Unit One (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1965); Herbert Read, ‘A Nest of Gentle Artists’, Apollo 77,
no. 7 (September 1962): 536–40.
3. See also Read, ‘A Nest of Gentle Artists’, 536–42.
12 Chiang Yee’s Hampstead

corner, at 1–3 Willow Road, Ernő Goldfinger’s contribution stood, facing directly
onto Hampstead Heath, a favourite place at this time for Chiang Yee to take his daily
walk. According to A Silent Traveller in London, he would stroll round the grounds
of Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath at least twice a week and, depending on
the route he chose to take on the day, would have frequently passed Goldfinger’s
house.4 Perhaps closest of all to the ‘nest’ was the Isokon Building, built on Lawn
Road in 1933–1934, just two minutes’ walk from both 50 Upper Park Road and
the English modernist enclave.5 The Chinese émigrés lived in close proximity to
a number of refugees from Europe. Among the residents of the Isokon flats were
artists and designers formerly attached to the Bauhaus, who came to London to
escape Nazi persecution.6 Walter Gropius (1883–1969) was resident from 1934
to 1937 and his colleagues Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) and László Moholy-Nagy
(1895–1946) both lived there when they first arrived in London in 1935.7 All three
Bauhaus designers were central to the work of the Isokon Furniture Company (run
by Jack Pritchard), while at the same time working for a number of other pioneering
companies. Gropius was given the title ‘Controller of Design’ of Pritchard’s company
and Breuer took over that role when Gropius emigrated to the US in March 1937;
Moholy-Nagy joined Gropius there just three months later, while Breuer was the
third of the ‘Bauhausler’ trio to emigrate to the US, departing England in December
of that year.8 The Isobar, the dining club and bar Breuer designed for the Isokon, was
a favourite meeting place for the local artistic community, including artists from the
‘nest’.9
Photomontage artist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968), who had
no direct links to the Bauhaus, lived on nearby Downshire Hill from 1938, after suf-
fering the indignity of being temporarily interned as an ‘enemy alien’.10 English artist
Roland Penrose (1900–1984) was his neighbour on the same road for a number of
years and it was from there that he established the British Surrealist Group. By the
time war broke out the photographer Lee Miller had joined him there and they were

4. See Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in War Time (London: Country Life, 1939), 113; Chiang Yee, The Silent
Traveller in London (London: Country Life, 1938), 29. Goldfinger’s house is now a National Trust property
open to the public, see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/2-willow-road. Accessed 2 September 2021.
5. Built by Jack and Rosemary ‘Molly’ Pritchard and designed by the architect Wells Coates. See Leyla Daybelge
and Magnus Englund, Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain (London: Batsford, 2019).
6. Darwent, Mondrian in London, 26.
7. Daybelge and Englund, Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, 80–93.
8. Daybelge and Englund, Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, 106. Their time at the Isokon is celebrated by an
English Heritage ‘blue plaque’.
9. Darwent, Mondrian in London, 26; Daybelge and Englund, Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, 157–63. These
included the Ukrainian former Weimar Bauhaus master Naum Slutzky (1984–1965), who lived in the Isokon
flats for some time, and his old friend the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo (1890–1977), who had taught
at Weimar Bauhaus’s successor in Dessau, and now lodged close by to the flats at 11 Lawn Road.
10. He was released after just six weeks due to ill health. Anna Schultz, ‘John Heartfield: A Political Artist’s Exile
in London’, in Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman, ed. Diana Dethloff et al. (London: UCL
Press, 2015), 254.
Paul Bevan 13

married later in the 1940s.11 From Downshire Hill, in the summer of 1936, Penrose
organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in collaboration with Herbert
Read, which was mounted at the New Burlington Galleries in London’s Mayfair. The
previous year, in February and March, the prominent Shanghai painter Liu Haisu
had organised the ‘Exhibition of Modern Chinese Painting’ at the same venue and
was a guest at Hsiung and Chiang’s Upper Park Road flat while he was in London.12
Down the road from Downshire Hill, opposite Belsize Park underground
station on Haverstock Hill, was a new parade of shops and flats, Hillfield Mansions,
built in 1934 by Hillfield Estates in the latest utilitarian style. Photographer Bill
Brandt (1904–1983) made his home at 58 Hillfield Mansions from the mid-1930s,
while his brother, Rolf Brandt (1906–1986), a follower of both Surrealism and
Bauhaus design, was also on the long list of artists resident at the Isokon flats.13 The
Haverstock Hill Odeon, which opened on 29 September 1934, was the focal point
of the Hillfield complex.14 This would become a favourite haunt for Piet Mondrian
(1872–1944), the Dutch artist who made London his home from 1938 to 1940,
living at 60 Parkhill Road, not far from Herbert Read’s home and those of Henry
Moore and Barbara Hepworth, off what is now Tasker Road.15
These modernist figures were not the only artists living in the area. In 1933 the
Artists’ International Association (AIA) was formed. This was an eclectic group of
individuals whose slogan, ‘Radical in Politics, Conservative in Art’, saw the pro-
duction of art largely inspired by Soviet Socialist Realism, as championed by art
historian Anthony Blunt (1907–1983).16 Blunt’s link to Chinese art in the 1930s
was through Trinidadian-born left-wing journalist Jack Chen (1908–1995), who
in 1937 mounted an exhibition in Charlotte Street in Central London for which
Blunt wrote a glowing review in The Spectator.17 At this time Blunt was a great fol-
lower of Socialist Realism, but not all artists involved in the AIA were necessarily
devoted to this political brand of art. Amongst the well-known names associated
with this group at one time or another were the portraitist Augustus John (1878–
1961); expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), who lived on nearby

11. Maclean, Circles and Squares, 156. Commemorative ‘blue plaques’ have been erected at Heartfield’s former
residence, 47 Downshire Hill—actually the house of the German painter Fred Uhlman (1901–1985)—and
that of Penrose and Miller at 21 Downshire Hill.
12. Da Zheng, Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveller from the East – a Cultural Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2010), 59.
13. Paul Delany, Bill Brandt: A Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 119; Daybelge and Englund,
Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, 80. For more on Rolf Brandt see https://www.englandgallery.com/artists/
artist_bio/?mainId=78. Accessed 2 September 2021.
14. The first film to be shown at the Odeon Haverstock Hill was Chu Chin Chow, starring George Robey and Anna
May Wong. http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/15082. Accessed 31 December 2020.
15. Darwent, Mondrian in London, 58–59.
16. For more on the AIA see Robert Radford, Art for a Purpose: The Artists’ International Association, 1933–1953
(Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987); Christine Lindey, Art for All: British Socially Committed
Art from the 1930s to the Cold War (London: Artery Publications, 2018), 29–34, 177–80.
17. See Paul Bevan, A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack
Chen, 1926–1938 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 204–13.
14 Chiang Yee’s Hampstead

King Henry’s Road; and cartoonist David Low (1891–1963), whose studio on Heath
Street was just round the corner from Hampstead underground station. Chiang Yee
was himself a one-time member of the AIA. Even though his political and artistic
aims may not have been in full accord with those propounded by the association, the
AIA did raise money for aid to the wars in Spain and Abyssinia, two conflicts about
which Chiang expressed great concern in his writings.18 This organisation was also,
in some small way, engaged in raising money for aid to China at the time of its war
with Japan (1937–1945), a role that was taken up in a rather more focussed manner
by the China Campaign Committee, one of several groups for which Wang Lixi,
Hsiao Ch’ien, and Shih-I Hsiung worked, together with their colleagues H. D. Liem
(Liem Ham-Djang)19 and Jack Chen (another one-time resident of the Hampstead
area and a member of both the AIA and the China Campaign Committee).20
According to the members’ register of the AIA (now in the Tate Gallery
Archive), a significant number of its members lived right in the heart of the ‘nest’
and the vast majority in the London postcode districts of NW3 and NW1, that is,
Hampstead, Belsize Park, and Chalk Farm.21 Henry Moore, in addition to being a
major figure in the Hampstead modernist circles, was a member of the AIA, but the
figure who seems to have been the strongest link between all the different artistic
groups in Hampstead—the Chinese intellectuals, Moore’s modernist clique, the
Bauhaus group, and the Socialist Realists—was Herbert Read.
By the late 1930s Read was even well known in China, to both the Chinese-
and English-speaking communities. His 1933 book Art Now had been published
in Shanghai in 1935, translated into Chinese by the influential writer Shi Zhecun
(1905–2003), and the following year an essay written by Read, ‘An Approach to
Modern Art’, appeared in the Shanghai-published English-language periodical
T’ien Hsia Monthly.22 His poetry, too, could be found in Chinese translation. In
1938 his ‘Bombing Casualties: Spain’ appeared in the Shanghai-published magazine

18. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in War Time, 1–2.

19. Liem Ham-Djang later became London correspondent of the Chinese Central News Agency: ‘Mr. H. D. Liem,
the first Chinese journalist to “cover” the British capital, who is the London correspondent of the Chinese
Central News Agency, addressed the China Campaign Committee luncheon yesterday, on Japan’s aims in the
Pacific.’ ‘Japan’s Aim in the Pacific: Chinese View of Thai Fighting’, The Straits Times, 23 January 1941, 10.
20. See Arthur Clegg, Aid China, 1937–1949: A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign (Beijing: Xinshijie chubanshe,
1989), 18–19, 35. For more on Jack Chen see Bevan, A Modern Miscellany, 192, 203–4.
21. Names and addresses listed in the AIA register include the following: E. Kapp, 2 Steele’s Studios, Haverstock
Hill; Naum Slutzky, 31 Lawn Road; Nancy Sharp, 30 Upper Park Road; Leila Leigh, 38 Upper Park Road. 38
Upper Park Road was also the address of William Coldstream (1908–1987) from 1930 to 1941, and W. H.
Auden lodged there in 1934. Many of the entries in this list include the addresses of those who lived within ten
minutes’ walk of Upper Park Road: Helena M. Clarke, 23c Belsize Park Gardens; Helen Kapp, 44 Belsize Park
Gardens; Morris Kestelman, 27 Belsize Park Gardens; F. D. Klingender, 45 Downshire Hill; James B. Lane,
37 Belsize Square; Mary Martin, 54 Belsize Park, all in the postcode NW3; and Lord Methuen, 6 Primrose
Hill Studios, Fitzroy Road, NW1. See ‘Ledger Book Recording Payment of Ledger Fees’, Artists’ International
Association, London, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 7043/11/1.
22. Herbert Read, ‘An Approach to Modern Art’, T’ien Hsia Monthly 4, no. 4 (April 1937): 329–41; Herbert Read,
Art Now (London: Faber and Faber, 1933); Li De 里德 [Herbert Read], Jinri zhi yishu 今日之藝術 [‘Art now’],
trans. Shi Zhecun 施蟄存 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935).
Paul Bevan 15

‘Candid Comment’ (Ziyoutan 自由譚), translated by the magazine’s publisher, Shao

Xunmei.23 In London, Read not only lived a stone’s throw away from the Chinese
artists but was, by all accounts, a personal friend of Chiang Yee.24 Even though
Chiang’s account of Read in The Silent Traveller in London gives the impression
that they were rather distant friends, by 1937 Read had already written a preface
to Chiang’s The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland (the first of his Silent
Traveller books), in which he deemed Chiang to be ‘a master of the art of landscape
painting’.25 Two decades later, Read would continue his hands-on support of Chiang
Yee’s work by writing another preface for the second edition of his book Chinese
Calligraphy, just before Chiang left England for the US in 1955.26 Read had clearly
read the book when it first came out in 1938, as he wrote in his preface that at the
time he had seen an ‘analogy’ between the aesthetic of Chinese calligraphy and that
of Western abstract art.27
Chinese Calligraphy was written at a time when Chiang had physically moved
further into the heart of the territory of the English modernist clique, as by then
he had taken up lodgings at 56 Parkhill Road. There he lived until 1940, when he
was bombed-out during the London Blitz, after which time he lived for a short
while with Hsiao Ch’ien before moving to Oxford.28 Hsiao left an account of his own
experiences of the bombing in Hampstead.
Just as I finished dinner the sirens sounded again. The area where I live, Hampstead,
is the highest part of London. A siren in the city centre, as usual, sounded first. This
distant sound – light and graceful – was like a herd boy playing a flute riding on the
back of his ox. Following this, each district answered in turn, the closer it got the
louder it became, until it was like a great church organ. As it began to sound close
around us, the noise became such that it could awaken the dead, yet it also signified
a mocking irony: after the Far East and Spain it was now London’s turn.29

23. Hebotuo • Lüde 赫勃脫 • 呂德 [Herbert Read], ‘Hongzha can’an: Xibanya’ 轟炸慘案：西班牙 [Bombing
casualties: Spain], trans. Zhong Guoren 鐘國仁 [Shao Xunmei 邵洵美], Ziyoutan 自由譚 [‘Candid comment’]
1, no. 1 (1 September 1938): 40.
24. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in London, 257–58.
25. Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland (London: Country Life, 1937). See also Anna
Wu, ‘The Silent Traveller: Chiang Yee in Britain, 1933–55’, V&A Online Journal 4 (Summer 2012), http://www.
vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-4-summer-2012/the-silent-traveller-chiang-yee-in-
britain-1933-55. Accessed 15 April 2020.
26. Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to its Aesthetic and Technique, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen,
1954). In the first edition of 1938 (also published by Methuen) the preface was written by Lin Sen 林森
(1868–1943), then President of the Chinese government. For the second edition (1954) Herbert Read sup-
plied a new preface.
27. Herbert Read, preface to Chinese Calligraphy by Chiang Yee, viii.
28. Zheng, Chiang Yee, 115. The Victorian house that once stood at 56 Parkhill Road is no longer there. In its place
is a more recent building, which stands next to number 60 (Piet Mondrian’s former residence). There is no
number 58.
29. Fu Guangming 傅光明, ed., Xiao Qian wenji 蕭乾文集 [Collected works of Xiao Qian] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang
wenyi chubanshe, 1998), 2:272.
4
Chiang Yee and British Ballet

Anne Witchard

I gained nothing in terms of money, but I thus became the first Chinese to do stage
design in the West.
—Chiang Yee1

Chiang Yee’s contribution to the art of ballet is little remembered today, maybe
because, as things turned out, it was to be a one-off. But it is an episode that has
much to tell us, not only about his artistic versatility, but also about his signifi-
cance as a Chinese artist to British cultural life. In the late summer of 1942, by now
well known as an artist and author, Chiang was requested by Constant Lambert
(1905–1951), musical director of the recently formed Sadler’s Wells company, to
design the sets and costumes for a new ballet, The Birds. British ballet as a national
art form was then very much in its infancy.
As Karen Eliot observes in her reassessment of this period, Albion’s Dance:
British Ballet During the Second World War, critics in the post-war decades were
inclined to present a distinctly British ballet as having ascended, phoenix-like, fully
fledged from the ashes of adversity.2 There was a tendency to skirt over the unglam-
orous war years and their privations, which had in fact confirmed the vitality of
many small companies, in particular of Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells, formerly
Vic-Wells, which in 1946 would become the resident ballet company of the Royal
Opera House (receiving its royal charter in 1956).3 Chiang’s account of his own
contribution to British ballet’s wartime development is, in characteristically modest
style, also rather underplayed, given just a couple of pages in The Silent Traveller in
Oxford (1944).
Constant Lambert’s commissioning of Chiang attests to a sincere cultural
engagement with Chinese artforms during the inter-war years. Lambert was central
to the artistic zeitgeist of the period—a musical prodigy, he was mentored by the
Sitwells (Edith [1887–1964], Osbert [1892–1969], and Sacheverell [1897–1988])

1. Quoted in Da Zheng, Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveller from the East – a Cultural Biography (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 162.
2. Karen Eliot, Albion’s Dance: British Ballet During the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018).
3. See Alexander Bland, The Royal Ballet: The First Fifty Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981).
52 Chiang Yee and British Ballet

and close friends included composers William Walton (1902–1983) and Lord
Berners (1883–1950), and writers and aesthetes Anthony Powell (1905–2000),
Harold Acton (1904–1994), and Cecil Beaton (1904–1980). When considering the
emergence of a British national ballet it is important to recognise that Lambert’s
role in establishing it was key. At the age of nineteen, he had the distinction of being
the first British composer from whom Sergei Diaghilev commissioned a ballet
score, for Romeo and Juliet (1926).4 In the wake of Diaghilev’s demise, Lambert was
one of the founding triumvirate—with de Valois and dancer Frederick Ashton—at
Sadler’s Wells, where, following Diaghilev’s influence, the tradition was maintained
of working with the most innovative of fine artists rather than theatre designers,
among them Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Edward Burra, E. McKnight Kauffer,
André Derain, and Rex Whistler (Whistler’s The Rake’s Progress was on the bill with
The Birds).5 Altogether, Chiang was in distinguished company.
Lambert would receive numerous accolades upon his untimely death, just
short of his forty-sixth birthday. Among them, de Valois mourned his loss as ‘our
only hope of an English Diaghilev’, while Powell memorialised his friend as the
composer Hugh Moreland in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), the fifth in his
twelve-novel sequence, ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ (1951–1975).6 The novel’s
‘grotesquely hybrid name’, as the blurb for the 1964 Penguin edition describes it, in
fact provides an esoteric clue, a poignant testament to what Lambert’s biographer
Stephen Lloyd describes as the composer’s ‘Chinese phase’.7 Lambert was something
of a sinophile, as we shall see. His engagement of Chiang as stage designer for The
Birds can be seen in relation to certain transcultural negotiations with ‘Chineseness’
on the British stage, cinema screen, and concert platform that were formative to
Lambert’s artistic development in the pre-war years, and concomitantly, I suggest,
to the influence of Diaghilev’s persistent attempts at presenting Hans Christian
Andersen’s chinoiserie tale, The Emperor’s Nightingale (1843), in his pursuit of the
ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk (a collaborative synthesis of choreographer, composer,
and scenic artist).

Friday the Thirteenth, November 1942

The penultimate chapter of The Silent Traveller in Oxford is entitled ‘Friday the
Thirteenth’ and begins as a discourse on the global universality of certain supersti-
tions, brought to bear on the local frustrations of erratic train schedules.8 Removed
from his Hampstead home to Oxford on account of the Blitz, Chiang reflects on

4. Diaghilev’s only other British commission was Lord Berners’s The Triumph of Neptune (1926).
5. See Rupert Martin, ed., Artists Design for Dance, 1909–1984 (Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery, 1984).
6. Ninette de Valois, Come Dance with Me: A Memoir (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1957), 118.
7. Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964); Stephen Lloyd,
Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 530.
8. Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in Oxford (London: Methuen, 1944), 169.
Anne Witchard 53

the woes of his London commute given the inadequacies of the railway system,
patently due to the exigencies of wartime rather than because, as an old lady repeat-
edly remarks: ‘To-day is Friday the thirteenth—that’s what it is’.9 Having been com-
missioned to design ‘the décor and costumes for a Sadler’s Wells ballet called The
Birds’ he explains: ‘There seemed perpetually to be some detail or other for which
my attendance was required—some costumes had been finished and were to be
fitted, or certain materials that I had chosen had proved unobtainable and others
must be selected. And always the matter was urgent. No time to be lost.’10 Intricate
feathered dance costumes required frequent journeys back to London, invariably at
short notice.
The Birds was a comic ballet intended to showcase the talents of the company’s
up-and-coming young ballerinas Moyra Fraser and fifteen-year-old Beryl Grey (b.
1927).11 It was staged by the Australian dancer Robert Helpmann (1909–1986), the
company’s leading man and, after Ashton was called up for military service, its chief
choreographer. The musical inspiration was a 1928 orchestration by Italian musi-
cologist Ottorino Resphigi—assembled from pieces by various seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century composers that imitate bird sounds—respectively a Dove, Hen,
Nightingale and Cuckoo—music that represents not just birdsong but the sound
of their movements such as fluttering wings or scratching feet. The story or ‘action’
of Helpmann’s ballet was as follows: the handsome Dove (Alexis Rassine) falls in
love with the lyrical Nightingale (Beryl Grey) and the comical Hen (Moyra Fraser)
who has fallen for the Dove, attempts to charm him by trying to impersonate the
Nightingale. Meanwhile the arrogant Cuckoo (Gordon Hamilton) dons the plumage
of the Dove and tries to gain the favour of the Nightingale. The two imposters, Hen
and Cuckoo are a laughing stock for a pair of cheeky Sparrows (Margaret Dale and
Joan Sheldon) and the chorus of attendant Doves (Anne Lascelles, Moira Shearer,
Pauline Clayden, and Lorna Mossford). All ends happily with the nuptials of the
Nightingale and the Dove.
Chiang, we learn, managed to get to his rendezvous at the Soho studio of cos-
tumier Matilda Etches just about on time, despite the ominous date.12 Helpmann
was already there, erroneously attempting to ‘put on his head the tail-piece of the
male dove’s costume, which was fan-like and looked, on him, like a Red Indian’s
feathered head-dress’.13 Chiang was struck anew by Helpmann’s distinctive ‘big
round eyes’, recalling that ‘once I almost disbelieved him when he complained of

9. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in Oxford, 172.

10. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in Oxford, 169–70.
11. Beryl Grey would be the first ballerina from the West to be invited to dance in Mao’s China in 1964. She
worked with the Peking Ballet Company, then directed by Dai Ailian. See Beryl Grey, Through the Bamboo
Curtain (London: Collins, 1965), 40.
12. Muriel Matilda Etches (1898–1974), a film, ballet, and opera costumier, was also a well-known couturier
sticking out the war years in her Frith Street atelier despite the falling bombs. As ‘an interpreter of the costume
sketches of others she worked selflessly with . . . enthusiasm and sensitivity’. Cecil Beaton, ‘Matilda Etches –
Gifted Designer’, The Times, 26 April 1974, 20.
13. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in Oxford, 172.
54 Chiang Yee and British Ballet

being tired after travelling all night from Manchester to London because his eyes
were so wide-open and round’.14 Here we get a glimpse of the legendary wartime
stamina that propelled the fledgling Sadler’s Wells company into such fond national
regard. Despite the testing conditions of food rationing, bombing raids, conscrip-
tion, and the long, blacked-out train travel endured on provincial tours, Sadler’s
Wells nurtured leading dancers who would become famous all over the world. Beryl
Grey remembered her excitement that day and the novel ‘satisfaction of being fitted
for my very own costume, designed on me’.15 Chiang was understandably apprehen-
sive, especially when fitting Moyra Fraser for her costume as the Hen:
I had been anxious about the execution of the elaborate hen costume, for the hen
is an important character in the ballet, and her costume had to be perfect in every
detail. Very little had been accomplished at that time, but when I looked at the
broad smile on Moyra Fraser’s face and at her quickened humorous steps executed
to see how the roughly-made part of the costume would fit the movements, I was
confident that she would make the finished costume most attractive on the stage.16

As well as Helpmann and Etches, Chiang tells us, Madame de Valois herself was
there to help adjust each fitting: ‘The founder of the Sadler’s Wells ballet and its
very busy director, she compelled my great admiration for the hard work she put in
to make the new ballet successful. She even helped with the sewing of costumes!’17
Back in 1931, when de Valois started up her company, ‘one had to be a blind patriot
to talk of British ballet’, the dance critic Arnold Haskell noted of her stubborn ambi-
tion.18 Unlikely as it might seem, the Second World War was to prove the hothouse
in which the seedling of a native British ballet was to flourish.19
Until the arrival in London of Sergei Diaghilev’s groundbreaking Ballets Russes
in 1910, ballet on the British stage had been an amateur affair. The effect of the
Ballets Russes was to raise the status of ballet in Britain from a rather risqué music
hall entertainment to a respectable art form. As Eliot notes, ‘the events that plum-
meted Britain into another world conflict’ might well have resulted in the ‘stagna-
tion of this carefully nurtured but still youthful and fragile form’.20 On the contrary,
a wave of wartime patriotism swelled London audiences as soldiers on leave joined
Bloomsbury aesthetes and regular balletomanes. ‘One of the theatrical phenomena
of wartime London, and especially since the blitz began, has been the astonish-
ing vitality and popularity of ballet,’ commented The Tatler and Bystander.21 Arts-
funding bodies (such as the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts

14. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in Oxford, 173.

15. Beryl Grey, For the Love of Dance: My Autobiography (London: Oberon Books, 2017), 30.
16. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in Oxford, 174.
17. Chiang, The Silent Traveller in Oxford, 174.
18. Arnold Haskell, Ballet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1945), 121.
19. Bland, The Royal Ballet, 71.
20. Karen Eliot, ‘Starved for Beauty: British Ballet and Public Morale During the Second World War’, Dance
Chronicle 31, no. 2 (2008): 175.
21. The Tatler and Bystander, 12 March 1941; cited in Eliot, ‘Starved for Beauty’, 180.
Anne Witchard 57

the chinoiserie ballet, first in 1920 with choreography by Leonide Massine and again
in a 1925 Constructivist version by twenty-year-old George Balanchine, fresh from
the Soviet Union. Diaghilev had always sought out the most exciting artists rather
than theatre designers to work on his ballets, and in inviting a Chinese treatment
from a notable and newsworthy contemporary artist to design The Birds, Lambert
was following suit.

Chiang Yee and Ballet

Chiang first discusses ballet in Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic

and Technique (1938), where he alights upon the art of the ballerina as the most
instructive way to explain to non-Chinese readers the technique of Chinese
calligraphy:
After some experience of writing one begins to feel a movement springing to life
under the brush which is, as it were, spontaneous . . . The sensation is really very
like that aroused by a ballerina balancing upon one toe, revolving, leaping, and
poising on the other toe. She has to possess perfect control of her movements and
amazing suppleness. The same qualities are demanded of the writer. A dancer’s
movements follow the rhythm of the accompanying music: a writer’s movements
depend upon the length and shape of stroke of the style he is practising.36

During his three years in London (since 1933), Chiang continues, he had ‘heard a
good deal of the Russian Ballet’ and had ‘seen several of its performances’.37
After Diaghilev’s death in 1929, his Ballets Russes company dispersed. Some
years later, in 1932, a revived company, Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, was reas-
sembled by the partnership of French artistic director René Blum and White
Russian émigré Colonel Wassily de Basil. After a series of acrimonious disputes
Blum finally split from de Basil in 1935 and formed a separate company, Les Ballets
de Monte Carlo. This similarity of names and the fact that both companies were
performing concurrently in the West End during the 1936 season is undoubtedly
confusing and would explain why when Chiang came to write about his experi-
ence of seeing ‘the Russian ballet’ he would lump the two companies (and indeed
their separate venues) together. In The Silent Traveller in London (1938), published
in the same year as Chinese Calligraphy, Chiang repeats the analogy of calligraphy
and ballet dancing quoted above, giving it as ‘a reason special to myself for liking
Russian Ballet’.38 Here he describes attending the ‘Russian Ballet Season at Covent
Garden Opera House’, having been ‘taken there for the first time by Sir Alexander

36. Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique (London: Methuen, 1938),
129.
37. Chiang, Chinese Calligraphy, 129.
38. Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in London (London: Methuen, 1938), 170.
5
The Silent Traveller at Home

Da Zheng

In May 1940, Chiang Yee’s memoir A Chinese Childhood was published by the
London-based publisher Methuen. The book received rave reviews. Many pointed
out that, unlike other publications on China, which had been almost exclusively
by Western authors, this was a work done by a Chinese writer in England who
brought a fresh and intimate outlook.1 A review in the Times Literary Supplement
emphasised its authenticity, stating that the author presented the Chinese and cul-
tural life in Jiujiang ‘as they see themselves and not as others see them’.2 ‘Few books
could take us farther from the upheaval and disorder of the present day than this’,
commented one reviewer, while another recommended it as ‘a book to indulge in
when anxiety needs a sedative’.3 ‘The wisdom of the Chinese—this love of little and
lovely things, this passion for peacefulness, this glorying in gardens, this exalting of
contemplation and appreciation over noisy aggressiveness’—could benefit anyone
‘who seek a temporary escape from dismal wartime thoughts’, wrote another.4 A
Chinese Childhood underwent several reprints in England and was subsequently
published in the US, India, and China. Chiang became one of Methuen’s top writers.
What intrigues me the most is the phrase ‘Silent Traveller at Home’, the title of
a review article that appeared in the New York Times Book Review after John Day
brought out the US edition in 1952. In that article, John Espey tries to underline the
differences between A Chinese Childhood and other popular Silent Traveller books
by Chiang. While those Silent Traveller titles, on Oxford, Edinburgh, or New York,
offered the ‘unexpected pleasure of seeing familiar Western scenes through Chinese
eyes’, A Chinese Childhood, according to Espey, gives a record of the author’s life in
China, without his signature ‘contrast and surprise’.5

1. Maurice Collis, ‘Dreaming in Armageddon’, Time and Tide, 25 May 1940. There were only a few successful
English-language publications on China by Chinese writers at the time, and A Chinese Childhood was unique
because it was a memoir by a Chinese writer residing in Britain.
2. ‘Chinese Family: Intimate Picture of a Lost Home’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 May 1940.
3. G. A. G., ‘A Chinese Looks Back’, Hong Kong Radio Review 11, no. 14 (8 February 1941); Wilfrid Rooke Ley,
‘The Man Introduces the World to You’, Catholic Herald, 7 June 1940.
4. E. H. J., ‘A Bit of Old China’, Christian World, 30 May 1940.
5. John Espey, ‘Silent Traveller at Home’, New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1952.
72 The Silent Traveller at Home

There seem to me some problems in identifying this memoir as a straightfor-

ward recording and interpretation of the Chinese scene and in viewing the author as
‘at home’. Espey alludes to Chiang Yee’s general practice of using geographical loca-
tions in his Silent Traveller titles, such as The Silent Traveller in London, The Silent
Traveller in Oxford, or The Silent Traveller in New York. Logically, this book, about his
childhood experience in Jiujiang, China, should have been titled The Silent Traveller
in China, or The Silent Traveller in Jiujiang, rather than The Silent Traveller at Home.
Chiang could not possibly be at home. As is mentioned in the book, he had been
‘in exile’ in England for six years.6 He actually used the phrase ‘in exile’ next to his
signature in his Chinese inscription on the front page of the author’s copy: ‘At the
beginning of the eighth year in exile in England.’7 In other words, he was conscious
of the physical distance from as well as the emotional connections with his home
country on the other side of the world. Besides, the cultural environment and many
of the traditional practices described in the book had disappeared forever, owing
to the advent of the sociocultural revolution and the concurrent modernist move-
ment of 1919. They existed only in memory. Aside from that, the phrase ‘at home’
may denote another meaning here: feeling comfortable and at ease in a place or
situation. Is it possible that Chiang in fact felt ‘at home’ and happy in England even
though it seems very unlikely?
This chapter will examine Chiang Yee’s perception of and writing about home
through the study of A Chinese Childhood. It will first highlight the feature of nos-
talgia in the memoir, then discuss the author’s diasporic experience in England as
the Silent Traveller, and finally argue that writing serves as an effective way for the
author to construct a home away from home.

Nostalgia in A Chinese Childhood

On the dust jacket of A Chinese Childhood is an eye-catching colour self-portrait

with the caption ‘Three Stages of My Hair’. As one’s hairstyle is an indicator of age,
social status, or aesthetic taste, the three figures in that self-portrait represent the
artist-author at three different stages: aged six, fifteen, and thirty, each marking a
significant turning point in his life. At five, Chiang lost his mother, who had offered
him tender maternal love as well as his childhood identity; at fifteen, he lost his
father, whose care and affection had nurtured his artistic and literary identity; at
thirty, he departed from his motherland which had endowed him with a cultural
identity and became an exile overseas.

6. Chiang Yee, A Chinese Childhood (London: Methuen, 1940), 303.

7. Chiang Yee’s inscription is as follows: ‘This book was originally scheduled for publication in mid-November
last year, but the outbreak of war caused its delay until May 2 this year. On April 15, Alan [White] came
and brought me the first copy. I am touched by his kindness, and I record this in writing. Chung-ya, at the
beginning of the eighth year in exile in England.’ Chiang Yee, handwriting, in the author’s copy of A Chinese
Childhood.
Da Zheng 73

The memoir outlines the vicissitudes experienced by Chiang’s family, his early
upbringing, and the cultural practices of the first two decades of the twentieth
century. In a placid yet mirthful tone, Chiang delves into his childhood experiences,
gently unfolding an encyclopedic and panoramic portrayal of life in Jiujiang, a port
city on the Yangtze River in South China.
The history of the Chiang family can be traced back to the first century BCE,
when Chiang Hsu (69 BCE–?) was appointed by Emperor Ai (26–1 BCE) to serve
as government inspector and governor of Yanzhou.8 Being ‘an upright and sincere
man’, he was unwilling to render his service in the royal court after Wang Mang
(45 BCE–23 CE) usurped the power to the throne. He resigned from the post and
returned to his native place, Chang’an, to live a reclusive life. He met no one except
for occasional visits from two well-known poet friends. He made three footpaths in
front of his house for them to travel by. Hence the phrase ‘three footpaths’ became
known as a poetic function in Chinese literary history.9 In the early eighteenth
century, a member of the Chiang family moved to Jiujiang on the south side of the
Yangtze, built a new house, and settled there. Ten generations later, at the beginning
of the twentieth century, the house had developed into a compound of two walled
enclosures. The main enclosure had forty-two rooms, where Chiang and most of
the family lived. It was a close-knit unit of four generations, about fifty members in
total, living in that spacious family compound under the unquestioned authority of
his great-grandparents. To the right side of the main enclosure stood a smaller one,
which was the living quarters of his third great-uncle, with two large rooms being
used as a family school, as well as a big garden.
It was a world of peace and happiness: deliberate protocols and manners, rever-
ence for elders and ancestors, the respect paid to scholars and poets, and the joys
of celebrating festivals. The family followed the Confucian tradition, caring for
the young and respecting the elderly, and maintaining a harmonious relationship.
There was hardly any dispute among them; if disagreements did occur, they would
be settled with the advice of the elders. Throughout the year, members of the family
worked hard, yet they took time to rest and enjoy themselves at the beginning of
the Chinese New Year. Like all other families, the Chiangs took weeks to prepare
food, clean the house, and decorate the rooms and halls with new paintings and
hang red paper couplets on the entrance gate to welcome prosperity. On Lunar New
Year’s Eve, the family gathered to enjoy a sumptuous feast and celebrate the annual
reunion. After that, the elders would take out the family genealogy in the central
hall, where the ancestral shrine stood, and narrate the family history to younger
generations.10

8. Yanzhou in the Han dynasty encompassed approximately southwest Shandong and northeast Hebei of China
today.
9. Chiang, A Chinese Childhood, 11.
10. Chiang, A Chinese Childhood, 75.
76 The Silent Traveller at Home

the whole scene became bright red and sparkling. The great ball of fire rose slowly
from the water, and diminished as it climbed above the horizon. Father did not
speak, and I could not express my wonder and excitement.16

It was such a magnificent and divine moment! How he wished it could last forever.
And it did, but only in his memory. His father died soon after. Chiang tells the
reader poignantly that he visited the mountain a few times later, ‘but never again
with my dear father’.17

A Chinese Exile in England

Chiang Yee, when writing his memoir, was in exile. He was literally homeless,
thousands of miles away from his war-torn homeland, where his former home had
been burned to the ground by the Japanese. As he said years later, ‘only experienced
political exiles can understand what I went through’.18 A discussion of his diasporic
identity, as represented by his pen name, the Silent Traveller, may help to explain
the layers of pain and lamentation registered in his memoir and other artistic and
literary representations.
In 1932, around the time of his preparation for departure to England, Chiang
created a pen name for himself: Zhongya 重啞. Like most of his contemporaries,
he had a school name in childhood, which was Zhongya 仲雅, meaning ‘second’
(in order of birth) and ‘grace’. Homophonous with Zhongya 仲雅, Zhongya 重啞
is loaded with multiple new meanings. Ya 啞 means ‘mute’ or ‘dumb’, and zhong 重
denotes ‘heavy, weighty’, ‘considerable in amount or value’, or ‘discreet, prudent’. A
combination of these two characters generates a rich variety of connotations, and
probably from this came Yaxingzhe 啞行者, that is, the Silent Traveller, which later
became his signature penname overseas.19 It needs to be pointed out that, while the
phrase xingzhe 行者 denotes a walking man, pilgrim, or traveller, it carries another
meaning, that is, a monk or a Buddhist practitioner.
As indicated by the new names Zhongya and Yaxingzhe, silence, or ya, is
emphatically valued. In China and Confucian tradition, silence has been celebrated
as a virtue of elegance, grace, modesty, and steadiness. In the case of Chiang Yee,
this aspect is far more complex. It underlines his disillusionment with the corrupt
government and politics of China. He studied chemistry at college in China, hoping
that science could effectively help make China a prosperous and powerful nation
in the world. Upon graduation, however, he found that his lofty dream to ‘bring
prosperity to China with scientific knowledge’ was shattered by reality because he

16. Chiang, A Chinese Childhood, 275–76.

17. Chiang, A Chinese Childhood, 276.
18. Chiang Yee, China Revisited, after Forty-Two Years (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 34.
19. For a full discussion of the name Silent Traveller see Da Zheng, ‘The Traveling of Art and the Art of Traveling:
Chiang Yee’s Painting and Chinese Cultural Tradition’, Studies in Literary Imagination 37, no. 1 (2004): 176.
6
Chiang Yee in Wartime

Paul French

When winter comes how harsh is the long night!

This winter the night is even longer.
Again and again I fall into brief dreams:
Too brief to transport me to my homeland!
—Chiang Yee, September 19391

The Second World War in Europe (1939–1945) saw Chiang Yee’s career and repu-
tation grow with the publication of a number of books, additional invitations to
speak, frequent appearances in magazines such as Country Life and The Listener,
new commercial commissions, translation work, and participation in a continuing
series of gallery exhibitions.2 However, Chiang’s wartime experiences also included
seeing his Hampstead lodgings take a direct hit on the first day of the London Blitz
and the entire contents of the house, including much of his previous work, collec-
tion of Chinese paintings and library, destroyed. Shortly afterwards he was blown
unconscious by a falling bomb in Hampstead and after a hasty search relocated to
new lodgings in Oxford for the duration of the war.
Throughout the war Chiang worked with both British and Chinese war propa-
ganda entities and with Aid to China organisations, as well as on his own publish-
ing and design commissions. Much of this was a continuation of work that Chiang
had begun in the summer of 1937 when he became involved in efforts to promote
awareness of the Second Sino-Japanese War to British audiences and, beginning
in the autumn of 1939, awareness of the European war to Chinese readers, having
become involved with multiple organisations promoting the wartime Sino-British
alliance. Chiang was able to write for wartime audiences in both countries, in several
instances arranging for translations into Chinese of his observations of the war in
Britain to be distributed as part of Britain’s war propaganda in China.
This chapter considers the work undertaken by Chiang Yee during the European
war years (September 1939–August 1945), both his commercial art and writing, as
well as specifically war-related commissions. Also, given the focus of this collection,

1. Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in War Time (London: Country Life, 1939), 33.
2. Several of Chiang Yee’s wartime exhibitions are noted below. For his contributions see also ‘Changing China’,
The Listener, 16 April 1942, 491–92.
90 Chiang Yee in Wartime

it looks at Chiang’s involvement with various organisations and events that con-
tinued, broadened, and varied his British circle of contacts. It is perhaps interest-
ing to note that Chiang’s most specifically war-related work, The Silent Traveller in
War Time (1939), is an early contribution to a genre of what might be termed ‘war
morale literature’: writing and film (and other artforms) showing the peculiarities of
Britain at war and invariably accentuating the resilience and fortitude of the British
people.
It is my contention that Chiang was able to produce such a work as The Silent
Traveller in War Time due to the fact that he had, since the start of the Second Sino-
Japanese War in the summer of 1937, been deeply aware of the worsening situation
in Nationalist China brought starkly home by the death of his elder brother, Chiang
Ta-ch’uan. Ideas of ‘war morale literature’, the fortitude of civilian populations and
national unity in the face of war, had been prominent in his thinking. This was
especially so after the Japanese occupation of his hometown of Jiujiang in July 1938,
which he notes in the dedication of The Silent Traveller in London, published later
that year, after the Japanese attack on China but prior to the commencement of the
European war. When we look back now on the rise of British ‘war morale literature’
after September 1939 it is important to note that one of the first and most popular
examples of this new genre was The Silent Traveller in War Time, published just
weeks after the start of the war.
In general, we can divide Chiang’s war into two phases. First, the period from
September 1939 to September 1940, beginning with the outbreak of war between
Britain and Germany and the aerial bombing attacks on London (the Blitz) that
saw Chiang’s home on the Belsize Park/Hampstead border rendered uninhabitable.3
And, second, from December 1940 to the end of the war in 1945, a period that saw
Chiang often absent from London and living in lodgings in Oxford. Despite the
difficulties of transportation during the war, Chiang retained his involvement with
many key London-based organisations—the British Ministry of Information, the
War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), and the London office of the Ministry
of Information of the Republic of China. While Chiang largely maintained his
London circle of friends, he also developed overlapping and additional contacts
and circles in his new home of Oxford.

The Silent Traveller in War Time

In late August 1939 Chiang Yee had just finished his first children’s book, Chin-Pao
and the Giant Pandas.4 He felt he needed a rest and, despite being aware of the
probability of war between Britain and Germany breaking out, he decided to visit
Geneva to see the Prado Museum in exile’s Les chefs-d’oeuvre exhibition, which was

3. At the time, both Hampstead and Belsize Park were in the ‘Borough of Hampstead’.
4. Chiang Yee, Chin-Pao and the Giant Pandas (London: Country Life, 1939).
8
Chiang Yee and the Hsiungs
Solidarity, Conviviality, and the Economy of Racial
Representation

Diana Yeh

This chapter examines Chiang Yee’s relationship with the Hsiungs, arguably the
most famous Chinese literary couple living in Britain during the 1930s. Their rela-
tionship, though one of evident mutuality, solidarity, and conviviality as diasporic
Chinese writers in Britain, was also shaped by the economy of racial representation
at the time. Arguably, despite his highly popular Silent Traveller series, Chiang Yee
did not achieve the level of visibility enjoyed by the Hsiungs. Shih-I and Dymia
Hsiung were a couple who arrived in Britain from China in the 1930s and who,
in an extraordinary twist of fate, unexpectedly shot to worldwide fame thanks
to Shih-I Hsiung’s play Lady Precious Stream. Hsiung became known as the first
Chinese stage director ever to work in the West End and on Broadway. With her
book Flowering Exile Dymia Hsiung became the first Chinese woman in Britain
to publish a full-length work of either fiction or autobiography in English. During
the 1930s and 1940s, such was their fame that the Hsiungs were household names
in a way Chiang was not. However, it is also probably the case that Chiang Yee’s
legacy survives in a way that the Hsiungs’ has not. For while Chiang Yee is still
known to general readers today, thanks in part to the number of his books that can
be found in second-hand bookshops around the UK, what is extraordinary is that,
until recently, the story of the Hsiungs had been almost completely forgotten, erased
from history.1
In this chapter I will discuss the major role the Hsiungs played in both Chiang’s
career and personal life as a diasporic Chinese, exiled from his home country. In
doing so, I seek to navigate an interdiscplinary path between approaches to the study
of transnational migration and of immigrant and racialised minority cultural pro-
duction in cultural studies, art historical, and literary research. I examine Chiang’s
forging of ethnic ties in diaspora but also explore how, as a migrant who was also an
artist, his ethnic ties were compromised by the way in which he and other diasporic

1. Diana Yeh, The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2014).
Diana Yeh 129

Chinese writers at the time, including Hsiung, were inserted into the economy of
British culture. The significance of ethnic ties for migrants is well recognised in
social science literatures, so much so that in some, for example, culturalist accounts,
it has become a taken-for-granted narrative based on an assumed pre-existing com-
munity. Critical of such accounts, this chapter seeks to render visible the significant
labour required to achieve community in diaspora and then addresses an issue that
has attracted less attention—the way in which these ethnic ties may be fractured by
economies of racial representation.
As Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer have written about contemporary Black
cultural production, the structures of racism that have marginalised Black artists
in Britain confer upon them a burden of representation, such that they are seen
as ‘representatives’ who speak on behalf of, and are therefore accountable to their
communities.2 As Mercer continues:
In such a political economy of racial representation where the part stands in for
the whole, the visibility of a few token black public figures serves to legitimate, and
reproduce, the invisbility, and lack of access to public discourse, of the community
as a whole.3

Chiang’s relationship with Hsiung was one of mutuality, solidarity, and con-
viviality, and even shared calling—that of contesting dominant perceptions of the
Chinese circulating in Europe and the US. Yet, in an economy of racial representa-
tion, where only a few Chinese artists or writers were admitted to visibility, but were
burdened with representing their ‘culture’ or nation, it was also one fraught with
tension, almost from the very beginning.
I first discuss the significance of Shih-I Hsiung in helping to launch Chiang
Yee’s career as an artist and a writer, not only through commissioning him to
produce drawings to accompany his own writings but also through introducing and
recommending him to significant cultural figures, both Chinese and British. I then
go on to discuss the role of the Hsiungs’ homes in London and Oxford in providing
emotional sanctuary, a ‘home away from home’ through the convivial gatherings
they held for Chiang and a range of other Chinese students, artist, and intellectuals.
I then examine the political mission shared by Shih-I Hsiung and Chiang, who both
sought to contest racialised representations of the Chinese circulating in Europe
and the US. In the final section, however, I highlight how these different forms of
solidarity could be ruptured as a result of the political economy of racial representa-
tion that the two writers found themselves in. In doing so, I bring to light not only a
less known dimension of Chiang’s life, but more broadly, illuminate how economies
of racial representation can shape the everyday lives of artists who are also migrants,
fracturing solidarities and rupturing even the most intimate of relations.

2. Paul Gilroy, ‘Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective’, Third Text 2, no. 5 (1988), 33–44; Kobena Mercer, Welcome
to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994), 240.
3. Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 240.
Index

Note: Page numbers in bold refer to figures; page numbers in the front matter are in italics.

Anti-Bolshevik (AB) League, 160 Background to Chinese Painting, A, 26

Ackland, Valentine, 171, 175 Bahr, A. W., 34
Acton, Harold, 52, 110, 118, 120n67, 126 Bakst, Leon, 55, 69
Aestheticism, 62 Balanchine, George, 57
Aid to China, 89. See also United Aid to ballet, 6, 51–70, 98, 150–51
China Royal Ballet, The, 70
Aladdin, 59 Ballets Russes, 54–58
Alhambra Theatre, 58 Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, 57–58,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 134 60n51
All-China Union for National Liberation, Bauhaus, 12–14
168 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 4,
Allen, Donald, 118, 120, 124 7, 55–56, 58n39, 97, 109, 113, 118, 153,
Allen, Walter, 120n67, 121 157, 159, 179
Allied Artists’ Exhibition, 96 BBC Far East Service, 97
American Standard Oil Company, 77 BBC Forces Programme, 55
Anand, Mulk Raj, 119–20 BBC Home Service, 97
Ancient Melodies, 189, 194 BBC Overseas Service, 109
Andersen, Hans Christian, 52 BBC Radio, 4, 7, 56, 97, 159, 179
Anglo-Chinese films, 150 BBC Television, 153, 157
anti-fascism, 5, 7, 103, 106, 159, 164–67, Beaton, Cecil, 52, 53n12
178, 180. See also fascism Belfast, 99n35, 159, 172–76
Appadurai, Arjun, 113 Bell, Clive, 110n13, 183
Armlet of Jade, 130 Bell, Julian, 110, 120, 183, 192
Artists’ International Association, The Bell, Vanessa, 52, 110n13, 120, 183, 192, 194
(AIA), 13–14 Belsize Park, 11–17, 90–91, 93, 94n17, 103,
AIA members’ register, 14n21 185. See also Hampstead
Ashmolean Museum, 5, 181–82 Bemelman, Ludwig, 193
Ashton, Frederick, 52–53 Benois, Alexandre, 55–56, 69
Asther, Nils, 147 Bergson, Henri, 29–30
Autobiography of a Chinese Girl, 112n26, Bertram Mills Circus, 149–50
123 Bickers, Robert, 2
Avenue Pavilion, The, 63, 144n6, 145 Bijou Film Company, 148, 150, 151n45
Binyon, Laurence, 4, 22–23, 26, 49n34,
Babel, Isaac, 166 95–96, 122, 132
210 Index

Birds, The, 6, 51–53, 55, 57, 61, 64–70 Buddhist revival, 33

Blackbirds, The, 61 Buddhist temples, 78
Blitz, The, 5, 15, 46, 52, 54, 78, 89–90, Buddhist texts, 20n9
93n15, 94, 102, 112, 134. See also Maitreya, 80
bombing Zen, 78n26
‘Blitz spirit’, 6, 93 Buñuel, Luis, 144
Bloody Saturday, 94 Burke, Thomas, 2, 147
Bloomsbury Group, The, 109–10, 120, 131, Burlington House, 143, 173,
181, 194 Burlington Magazine, The, 34n62, 35
Blue Plaque, 5, 12n8 Burma Road, 95, 100–102
Blum, René, 57–58 Burra, Edward, 52
Blunt, Anthony, 13, 94n16 Butterfly Wu (Hu Die), 146, 155
bombing, 15–16, 40, 78, 90, 93n15, 94–95, Byron, Lord, 163
145n16, 178, 186. See also Blitz
‘Bombing Casualties: Spain’, 14–15 Cai Chusheng, 145–46
of Chongqing, 94, 102 Cai Tingkai, 161
‘Guernica’, 178 Cai Yuanpei, 22
of Hampstead, 5, 15–16, 40, 52, 78, calligraphy, 6, 15, 19–20, 26, 34–35, 57, 84,
89–90, 94–95, 134 109, 140, 180, 191–92
of Jiujiang, 78 Chiang Yee, 15, 18–21, 26, 34–35, 57,
of London, 40, 90, 94–95, 145n16, 186 78–79, 180
of Shanghai, 94 Hsiung, Shih-I, 140
Book Society, 120–21 Sye Ko Ho, 191–92
Bottomley, Gordon, 123 Xu Zhimo, 109
Bradley, Lionel, 66–69 Calligraphy and Paintings by Chiang Yee,
Brandt, Bill, 13, 16 78–79
Brandt, Rolf, 13 Cambridge, 1, 114n33, 143, 188
Breuer, Marcel, 12 Carrington, Noel, 94–95, 107, 110, 114–18,
Bridge of Heaven, The, 139, 157 125
Brighton Pavilion, The, 69 Carroll, Lewis, 134
Britain at War (Zhanshi Buliedian), 99–100 Casanova, Pascale, 108
British Museum, 4, 19, 21, 26–27, 30, 95, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, 52, 61, 63
143, 181 Cathay, 62
Broadway, 128, 130, 132, 140, 143, 156n72 census (UK), 2–3, 130
Brush Drawing in the Chinese Manner, 182 1911, 2
Brussels, 134, 145, 151n44, 167–68, 171 1931, 2, 130
Buck, Pearl, 21, 125, 126n96, 147, 156 Chan, Charlie, 40–46, 48, 137. See also film
Budai, 78–81 ‘Charlie Chan and Myself ’, 42
Budai Monk, The (painting) (1934), 78, Chant du Rossignol, Le, 56
80 Chaplin, Charlie, 64
Budai Monk, The (painting) (1972), 78, Chen Jitong, 25
81 Chen Mingshu, 160–62, 167–68
Buddhism, 24, 33, 78–81 Chen Yuan, 113n27, 182–84, 187, 194–95
Buddha, 18, 20, 80 Chen, Jack, 13–14, 169
Buddhist monk, 76, 78–81, 177 Cheng Kwang Movie House, 154
Buddhist painting, 18, 20, 22, 78–81 Chiang Hsu, 73
Index 211

Chiang Kai-shek, 7, 77, 157, 161, 166, 168, propaganda, 6, 89, 91, 100–103, 117
195 Read, Herbert, 14–15, 35n64
Chiang Ta-ch’uan, 90 silence, 6, 38, 40–41, 49, 76, 77, 81,
Chiang Yee (Jiang Yi) 83
AIA, member of, 14 Silent Traveller (Yaxingzhe), 38–41,
ballet, 51–70 44–50, 70–72, 76–78, 80–88
ballet and calligraphy, analogy between, Silent Traveller books. See individual
57–58 titles
BBC Radio, 4, 97, 102, 113 Six Laws (Six Principles), 22, 27–31
Buddhism, 20, 22, 24, 33, 76, 78–81 School of Oriental Studies (SOS), 19–20,
calligraphy, 15, 18–21, 26, 34–35, 57, 22, 34–35, 78, 80, 92, 132, 184
78–79, 180 ‘Uncle’ Chiang, 135–36, 182, 188
Carrington, Noel, 93–95, 107, 110, wartime, 89–103
114–18 Wellcome, 91–93, 102
Charlie Chan, 40–46, 48 Xu Beihong, 18, 96n23, 96n24, 98,
childhood, 72–76, 78, 87–88 130–31
children’s books, 78, 90, 93–94, 94n16, Zhongya (Chung-ya), 19, 79
102, 107, 112, 115–17, 125 China but not Cathay, 59
Chin-Pao and the Giant Pandas, 90, China Campaign Committee (CCC), 14,
94n16, 95n21, 188 101, 110–11, 159, 169–72, 176, 178
Dabbitse, 116–17, 102n41 China craze, 142–43, 145–46, 149
Lo Cheng: The Boy who Wouldn’t China Fights Back, 170
Keep Still, 94n16, 102n41, 116 China House, 135
Story of Ming, The, 94n16, 102n41, China Institute, 96
116 China Today, 171
Herdan, Innes (née Jackson), 22–23, 78, China, representation of, 180
93, 131, 175, 183 Chinese Cabaret, 150–52
International Exhibition of Chinese Art, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to its
21, 26, 36, 131 Aesthetic and Technique, 6, 15, 18, 35n64,
Jiujiang, 19, 71–75, 77–78, 81, 84–86, 88, 57, 78, 117n57
90, 92, 94, 96n24, 102–3, 184 Chinese Childhood, A, 6, 71–76, 88
Lake District, 82–83, 85, 115n42, 130 Chinese Children at Play, 86–87
Lambert, Constant, 51–52, 55, 57, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 157,
60–61, 65–66 160–61, 168–69
lectures and talks, 4, 19, 22, 35, 95–97, Chinese Cookery: A Hundred Practical
109–10, 134 Recipes, 97–98, 189
London Zoo, 93–94, 116, 188 Chinese Embassy, 97, 100, 188–90
New Burlington Galleries, 13, 21–22, Chinese Eye: An Interpretation of Chinese
131–32 Painting, The, 5–6, 18, 21–23, 25–28,
Oxford, xi, 15, 37–50, 129, 134, 158, 186 31–33, 34, 35, 78, 131–32, 134
painting (and illustration), 15, 18–22, Chinese film, 63, 142–50
24–36, 74, 78–81, 83, 89, 95, 96n24, ‘Chinese Peasant in Spring, The’
97n26, 102, 116, 130–32, 135–36, (Nongren zhi chun), 145–46
138–40, 180, 184 Hsiung, Shih-I, 142–43, 152–57
poetry, 6, 24, 79n28, 81, 83–86, 97, 102, Rose of Pu-Chui, The (Xixiangji), 63,
158–59, 163, 180 143–45
212 Index

Song of the Fishermen (Yuguang qu), Chung-ya. See Chiang Yee

145–46 Churchill, Winston, 93, 99, 100
Chinese Fluteplayer, The, 176 Chuter, Florence (aka Florence Kaye,
Chinese Labour Corps, 3 Florence Lambert), 63
Chinese League of National Revolution, 168 Cicio Mar. See Ye Junjian
Chinese National Salvation Association, 168 Circle of Chalk, The, 63, 145, 154
Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang; citizen diplomacy (guomin waijiao), 170
Guomindang), 7, 20, 97n32, 101, 140, Clark, Kenneth, 49n34, 99
152, 169 Clayden, Pauline, 53
Chiang Yee, 20 Clegg, Arthur, 169
Shih-I Hsiung, 140, 157 Cold War, 35
Wang Lixi, 7, 160, 169 Collet’s Chinese Bookshop, 181–82
Chinese News Service, New York, 101 ‘Colloquy on Ballet’, 56
Chinese painting, 13, 18–36, 74, 78–81, 83, commedia dell’arte, 55
89, 96, 111, 116, 130–32, 138, 180–82, Communist Party of Great Britain, 171
191 Connard, Philip, 130
Buddhist painting, 18, 20, 22, 78–80 Connolly, Cyril, 111, 120n67
Chiang Yee (painting and illustration), Constantine, George Hamilton, 96
15, 18–22, 24–36, 74, 78–81, 83, 89, Constructivist, 12n9, 57
95, 96n24, 97n26, 102, 116, 130–32, Contemporary Chinese Short Stories, 125
135–36, 138–40, 180, 184 Council for the Encouragement of Music
Chinese Eye: An Interpretation of Chinese and the Arts and Entertainments
Painting, The, 5–6, 18, 21–23, 25–28, National Service Association (CEMA),
31–33, 34, 35, 78, 131–32, 134 54–55, 69
Exhibition of Modern Chinese Painting, Country Life (publishers), 82, 91, 107, 115
13, 21–22, 28, 131–32 also Country Life, 89
Xie He’s Six Laws (aka Six Principles), Covent Garden Opera House, 57–58
22, 27–30 Crescent Moon Society, 110, 131
Chinese Peasant in Spring, The. See Chinese ‘Critical Review, The’ (Xueheng), 24
film oddments, 37, 50
Chinese Republic. See Republic of China, also cultural ‘oddment’ 37
The Curwen, Charles, 181
‘Chinese Seaman, A’, 121–22
Chinese Society, The, 95 Dabbitse, 116–17
Chinese Student Union, 135 Dai Ailian, 53n11, 150–51
Chinese Writers’ Associations War Area Daily Sketch, The, 65
Interview Group, 179 Daily Worker, The, 171
Chineseness, 43, 48, 52, 60, 132–33, 136, Dale, Margaret, 53, 66, 67
141 ‘Dance to the Music of Time, A’, 52
Chinnery, Ying, 181, 187, 197 Dancing Times, The, 70, 150
chinoiserie, 52, 55–62, 63n74, 65 Daylight, 110n13, 111n20, 118
Chin-Pao and the Giant Pandas, 90, 95n21, de Basil, Colonel Wassily, 57–58
102n41, 188 de Lion, Leon M., 133
Chongqing, bombing of. See bombing de Valois, Ninette, 51–52, 54
Chu Chin Chow, 13n14, 133, 137, 154 de Zoete, Beryl, 120
Chu Chin Chow, 147 Deansway, 186
Index 213

Depero, Fortunato, 56 Fang Zhaoling, 182, 184, 191

Derain, André, 52, 58–59, 69 fascism, 103, 109, 164–67, 178, 183
Design and Industries Association, 115 Fauvism, 58
Deva Surya Sena (Herbert Charles Jacob Fei Chengwu, 182, 185, 193
Pieris), 153, 154n54 ‘Fifty Quatrains from Exile’ (Quguo wushi
Di Baoxian, 31–33 jueju), 176
Diaghilev, Sergei, 52, 55–58, 65 film, 2–3, 7, 41–44, 60–61, 63–64, 137,
Diaspora, 3, 128–30, 133–34, 141 142–57, 190. See also Chinese film
Doll’s House, A, 156 Bijou Film Company, 148–51
Dover Street to Dixie, 61 Charlie Chan, 41–44, 147
Driesch, Hans, 29–30 Charlie Chan in Panama, 41
Drummond, Lindsay, 119 Charlie Chan in Shanghai, 147
Drury Lane Theatre, 56 Chien Andalou, Un, 144
Du Fu, 25–26 Chinese Cabaret, 150–52
Dummy Talks, The, 149 Chu Chin Chow, 13n14, 133, 137, 154
Dunbar, Evelyn, 99 Dummy Talks, The, 149
Dunsany, Lord, 139 Fu Manchu, 2, 7, 41–42, 142, 146–47,
153–54
East End (London), 48–50, 64, 184, 190 Gardner, Ava, 190–91
East Ender, 50 Good Earth, The, 126n96, 147, 156
East London College, 184 International Revue, 151–53
Limehouse, 1–3, 11, 48, 63, 189–90 Lai Foun, 148–52
Eastern Cabaret, 153–54 Leyda, Jay, 144–45
Edinburgh Congress, 165 Moscow Film Festival, 145–46
Edwards, Evangeline Dora, 35 Pacific Films Corporation, 157
Eglevsky, André, 58–59 Piccadilly, 145
Eight Poems of Li Po, 63, 145 Reviving Rose, A (Fuhuo de meigui), 144
Ellington, Duke, 61 Rose of Pu-Chui, The (Xixiangji), 63,
Emperor Ai, 73 143–45, 154–55
Emperor’s Nightingale, The, 52 Shadow Sweetheart, 148, 152–53
English Heritage, 5, 12n8, 17n33 Wong, Anna May, 61–65, 145, 154
English policemen, 37–38 Finchley, 186, 190
Espey, John, 71, 88 Firebird, The (L’Oiseau de feu), 58
Etches, Matilda, 53–54 First World War, 2–3, 29, 56, 91n8
Etching of a Tormented Age, 118 also Great War, The, 56
Eumorfopoulos, George, 142–43 Flight of the Dragon, 4
Evans, Edwin, 55 Flowering Exile, 128, 135, 182, 186–88,
Exhibition of Ballet Design, 69 192–95
Exhibition of Modern Chinese Painting, 13, Fokine, Michel, 58–60
21–22, 28, 131–32 Fong, Wen C., 35
Exile and Wars (Quguo Cao), 158–59, 170, Forgotten Wave, The, 114, 122
174–77 Forrest, George, 134
Forster, E. M., 113, 118, 121, 166
Fairbanks, Douglas, 62 Foss, Dora, 64
‘Famous Paintings Collected by PingTeng Ke’ Fraser, Moyra, 53–54, 65, 67
(Zhongguo minghuaji), 30–31, 33 Friends of the Chinese People (FOCP), 169
214 Index

Friends’ Ambulance Unit, the, 181 Guo Taiqi, 97n 32

Fry, Margery, 111 Guohua, 20n7, 21, 25
Fu Manchu, 2, 7, 41–42, 142, 146–47, guoxue (National Studies), 30
153–54 guqin, 24
Fujian Rebellion, 160–62, 168
Futurism, 56 Hahn, Emily, 109n 6, 110–11, 123n84, 126
hair (Hair Raid), ix, 46–47, 72
Gardner, Ava, 190–91 ‘Hall of Three Footpaths’, 74–75
German Hamilton, Gordon, ix, 53, 66, 67
artists and writers, 12, 13n11, 165, 179 Hampstead Heath, 12, 93–94, 162, 164
Bauhaus, 5, 12–14. See also Gropius, Hampstead at War, 16, 202
Walter; Breuer, Marcel Han Suyin, 114, 119, 123n84
translations of Li Bai (Li Po), 145n17 Harp with a Thousand Strings, 119, 123n84
Germany Harris, Buddy, 150n43, 151n45, 152
exhibitions in, 22 Harvard University, 35
Teng Gu in, 28–29 Haskell, Arnold, 54, 69
war with, 90–91, 94, 102 Hayward, John, 120
Gesamtkunstwerk, 52, 56, 69 Heartfield, John (Helmut Herzfeld), 12,
Gest, Morris, 140 13n11
ghosts, 49–50 Helpmann, Robert, 53–55, 61, 64–65, 69–70
Gide, André, 166 Hepworth, Barbara, 11, 13
Giles, Herbert, 27, 29, 36 Herdan, Innes. See Jackson, Innes
Gilroy, Paul, 129 Hertford House, Manchester Square, 97
Goldfinger, Ernő, 12 Heseltine, Philip (pseud. Peter Warlock)
Goldrush, The, 64 61–62
Gollancz, Victor, 96n22, 101, 109–12, 122, Hewitt, John, 159, 172, 173n55 and 57,
124–25, 169–71, 179 174–76, 178n75, 180
See also Left Book Club Hewitt, Roberta, 172
Gomez, E. T., 3 Heyford Hill House, 186
Goncharova, Natalia, 58, 69 Hitler, Adolf, 150n42, 152
Gong Zizhen, 177–78 Ho Sze Ko, 140
Good Earth, The, 126n96, 147, 156 Ho Wai-kam, 35
Gorky, Maxim, 166 Ho, Grace (aka Lau, Grace), 135, 181, 186,
Graham, Cunninghame, 137 188, 190–91
Grant, Duncan, 52, 183 Ho, Lily, 140, 183–84
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 96 Hogarth Press, 110n13, 124
Gray, Basil, 95 Hollywood, 62, 63n74, 138, 143n1, 147
Greek Street, 64 Holmes, Colin, 1–2
Greene, Graham, vii, 95n 20, 134, 186 Holmes, Winifred, 142, 143n1, 148, 150
Grey, Beryl, ix, 53, 54n15, 64, 68 Holocaust, 39
Gropius, Walter, 12 Homesickness, 81, 83n43, 85, 103, 135,
Grotrian Hall, 153 187–88
Gu Yuncheng, 31, 197 Hong Kong, 26, 91, 99n37, 103, 120, 124,
‘Guernica’, 178 135, 149n33, 150n42, 154, 157, 182, 186,
Guomindang. See Kuomintang 190
Guo Moruo, 161, 163 Hong Shen, 155–57
Index 215

Honourable Pussy Cat, 40, 43–45 International Settlement, Shanghai, 91,

Horizon, 111 99n37, 147
Horsnell, Horace, 60, 65, 67 International Stories, 120
Hosie, Lady, 98, 99n35 International Union of Revolutionary
Hou Yao, 63n74, 143n5, 144 Writers, 164
Hsiao Ch’ien (Xiao Qian), 1, 7, 14–15, 59, Irish Citizen Army, 173
95–97, 100–101, 107–15, 118n33, 119, Irvine, John, 98, 99n35
123–24, 125n92, 126–27, 140, 184 Isherwood, Christopher, 120
Hsiung Dymia (Cai Daimei), 1, 3, 93, 116, Isokon, 12–13
128, 132, 135, 137, 148n27, 162, 182–88,
191–95 Jackson, Barry, 133
Hsiung Shih-I (Xiong Shiyi), vii, 1, 7, Jackson, Innes (also Innes Herdan), 22–23,
11, 13–14, 21–23, 31, 36–38, 82, 91, 29, 34n62, 78, 81, 93, 96, 131, 175, 177,
93, 95–97, 101, 108–9, 113, 123, 126, 179, 183
128–43, 146–48, 150–57, 159, 162–63, Japan, 7, 14, 29, 40, 44, 58n43, 74, 76, 78, 90,
166–67, 170, 179, 183–87, 195 92, 97, 98n34, 101, 103, 109–10, 119–20,
Hsiung Shih-I (Xiong Shiyi) as screenwriter, 124, 134, 161, 166, 168–69, 171–73, 178,
7, 142–57 182, 192, 194
Hsiung, Deh-I, 135–36, 181, 186–88, Jenyns, Roger Soame (Soame Jenyns), 26
193–95 Jiang Guangnai, 161
Hsiung, Delan (aka Hsiung, Diana), 116, Jiangxi province, 19, 23, 35, 36, 77, 86, 130,
117n51, 185 134, 160
Hsiung, Deni, 139–40, 185, 195 Jing Youru, 162
Hsiung, Dewei, 185 Jiujiang, 18–19, 72–74, 77, 84, 94, 96n24,
Hsiung, Diana. See Hsiung, Delan 102
Hsiung, Wei, 139 John Day, 71
Hu Qiuyuan, 161–67 Johnson, Reginald, 35
Huang Zunxian, 176 Joint Broadcasting Commission, 134
Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, A, Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club,
172–73 83
Huxley, Elspeth, 97 Journey to the West (Monkey), 79n28, 126
‘Julian and Maddalo’, 163
Ibsen, Henrik, 118, 156
Iffley Turn, vii, 95n20, 134 Karloff, Boris, 41, 147
Ignorant and the Forgotten, The, 120 Keats, John, 163–64, 176
Illustrated London News, The, 59, 93 Kelvingrove Galleries, Glasgow, 98
Independent Labour Party, The, 172 Kipling, Rudyard, 156
International Congress of Writers for the Kirsova, Helene, 59
Defence of Culture, 159, 166–68, 171 Kokoschka, Oskar, 13
International Exhibition of Chinese Art, 4, Konin Corporation, 157
21, 26, 36, 131, 143, 173 Koo, Wellington, 44–45, 97n32, 98, 121
International Peace Campaign (IPC); Kung-chao, George, 100
International Peace Campaign Congress, Kuomintang (KMT); (Guomindang, GMD),
134, 159, 167n33, 168–70, 178 7, 20, 22, 100, 140, 160, 167, 169, 177
International PEN, 165 Nationalist Party, 7, 20, 97n32, 101, 140,
International Revue, 151–53 152, 157, 161n8
216 Index

Labour Monthly, 169 Lin Yutang, 108, 123n79, 123n84, 140, 186,
Lady Precious Stream, vii, 7, 21, 109, 126, 191, 194
128, 130–34, 137–40, 142–43, 146–48, Ling Shuhua, 113n27, 131, 182–83, 186–87,
151, 153, 155, 156n70, 157, 179 189, 191–95
Lai Foun (also Four Lai Founs; Five Lai Listener, The, 89, 91n10, 109, 120, 122
Founs; Lai Foun and his Chinese Little Theatre, The, 143, 156n70
Wonders; Lai Foun Troupe; Six Lai Liu Haisu, 13, 22, 25, 28, 30, 96, 131, 162,
Founs), 7, 142, 148–54, 157 185
Lai Man-Wai, 144, 154 Liu Songnian, 23
Lake District, 82–83, 85n42 Living China, 109, 124
Lambert, Constant, 51–52, 55–57, 60–65, Lo Cheng: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Sit Still,
145 94n16, 102n41, 116
Lane, Allen, 115–16 Lo Ming Yau, 154
Lascelles, Anne, 53 Lo, Kenneth (Lo, Hsiao Chien); (Luo
Laski, Harold, 170 Xiaojian), 7, 107, 113, 121, 184, 188–190
Lau, Grace. See Ho, Grace Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman,
Laver, James, 63 172, 178
Lawn Road, 12, 14n21 London Zoo, 93, 188
Lawrence, Sir Alexander W., 57–58 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 145
Lee, M. P. (aka Li Mengbing), 97, 189 Lord Berners, 52n4
Left Book Club, 109–10, 159, 169–72 Low, David, 14
Left Review 7, 109, 159, 164–66, 169, 171, Lu Jingqing, 1, 162–63, 167, 185
179 Lu Xun, 109, 125, 147n24
Lehmann, John, 107, 110–14, 118–22, Luo Changhai, 77
124–25
L’Epreuve d’amour; or Chung Yang and the Ma Xiangbo, 168
Mandarin, 58–59 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 165
Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, 57–58, Madeline, 193
60n51 mahjong, 7, 181–83, 191–92
Lethaby Gallery, 70 Maida Vale, 183, 186
Lewis, Sinclair, 166 Maitreya, 80. See also Buddhism
Leyda, Jay, 144 Malraux, André, 166
Li Bai. See Li Po Malvern Theatre Festival, 132–33
Li Chu-tsing, 36 Manchu dress, 151
Li Gongpu, 168 Mao Zedong, 53n11, 160
Li He, 163, 176 Map of Hearts, A, 119
Li Mengbing. See Lee, M. P. Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 78, 109
Li Po (Li Bai), 62–63, 97, 145 Martin, Kingsley, 111, 119, 122, 178
Li Ruiqing, 24, 33 Masculinities, 37, 43
Li Yu, 81 Massine, Leonide, 57–58
Lianhua Film Studios, 154 Matisse, Henri, 56, 58
Liao Hongying, 183 May Fourth, 63n74, 163
Life and Letters Today, 109, 119 McKnight Kauffer, E., 52
Limehouse (East End Chinatown), 1–3, 11, Medway Film Company, 150n42, 151,
48, 63, 190 152n51
Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown, 2 Mei Lanfang, 146, 156, 185
Index 217

Memories of China, 121 Nelun Devi (Julia Pauline Winifred de

Men of the Trees, The, 21 Silva), 153–54
also Men of the Trees Exhibition, The, Nemtchinova, Vera, 58, 60
132 ‘Nest of gentle artists’, 11, 17
Methuen, 21, 71, 95, 99, 101, 113–14, New Burlington Galleries, 13, 21–22, 25,
130–31 131–32, 143, 173
Michieli, J. W., 93 New Statesman, 109, 174
Miller, Lee, 12 New Statesman and Nation, The, 109, 111
Mills, Florence, 61 New Theatre, 63, 65
Milner, Sir William, 95 New Writing, 109–11, 118–20, 124, 164n21
Ming dynasty, 31n55 New York, 60n51, 61n58, 71, 101, 118, 125,
Ministry of Information of the Republic of 130, 150, 191
China, 90, 100–101, 116 New York Times Book Review, 71
Ministry of Information, British, 90–91, Newman, Ernest, 60
99–100, 119–20 Newman, John Henry, 134
Ministry of Information, Far Eastern Nichols, Robert, 61–62
Bureau, 91 Nicholson, Ben, 11
Minxin Motion Picture Company, 63, 144, Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Elizabeth Noble),
154 29
Modern Chinese Painting Exhibition, 13, nostalgia, 72, 84, 86–87, 176
21–22, 28, 131–32 ‘Notes to the Chinese Exhibition’, 173
Modern Miscellany, 147
Moholy-Nagy, László, 12 Obata, Shigeyoshi, 62
Moment in Peking, 157 Oboukhov, Anatole, 58
Mondrian, Piet, 13, 16–17 Observer, The, 60, 65, 120
Montague, Ivor, 144 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 164
Moore, Henry, 11, 13–14, 16 Odeon, Haverstock Hill, 13, 16
Moscow Film Festival, 146 Okakura Kakuzō, 27, 29
Mossford, Lorna, 53 Oland, Warner, 42n14, 147
Mount Lu, 75, 83–86 Olivier, Laurence, 145
Mountain Village, The, 120 Olympic Games (Berlin), 152
Moy Long, 150 Orientalist (Orientalism), 7, 60, 133, 137,
Music Hall, 54, 148, 150–51, 154 142, 147, 151, 153, 180
Music Ho!, 61–62 Orwell, George, 113, 118
Over-Seas League, 97
Nanjing, 75, 160–61, 166–67, 182 Oxford (Oxford, University of), vii–viii, 1,
Nanyang University, 35 50, 135, 184
Nash, Paul, 99 Oxford Union Debate, 45
National Book League, 99
National Central University, 182 Pacific Films Corporation, 157
National Revolutionary Army, 77 Painter, Joan, 157
Nationalist Party (China). See Kuomintang Painting in the Far East, 4
Nature, 21n10 panda, 93, 116, 135–36, 188
Nazi persecution, 1, 12, 39n6 also pandamania, 116
Nazism, 95n18, 96–97, 165 Pantheon Theatre, The, 154
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 179 pantomime, 59
218 Index

Paris, 26, 28, 35, 91, 144, 166–67, 169, Professor from Peking, The, 139
194–95 propaganda, 6, 89, 91, 100–102, 113, 117,
Parkhill Road, 11, 13, 15–17, 91, 94n17, 170, 179
122, 185–86 Puffin Books, 114
Parliament Hill, 162–63
Pater, Walter, 29–30 Qi Baishi, 24, 96
Pathé, 149, 150n40 Qian Zhongshu, 30
Paulet, Reine, 153–54 Qin Shihuang, 172
Payne, Robert, 110, 125 Qing dynasty, 31, 175
Peking Opera, 130, 146, 156–58, 191 qipao, 191
Penguin Books, 3, 52, 112, 114–16 Queen Mary, 95n21, 97, 130
Penguin New Writing, The, 109, 111, 122,
124 race (racism), 6, 39–40, 43n15, 46, 50, 70,
Penrose, Roland, 12–13 108, 129, 152
People of China, 124 racial representation, 7, 20, 117, 129, 136,
People’s Republic of China, 36, 157, 184 141
People’s Revolutionary Government, The, Radio Times, The, 149
162 Rassine, Alexis, 53, 66
Peter Bernard and his Ragtimers, 152 rationing, 54, 92, 97, 114, 116, 136, 187
Phoney War, 94 food, 54, 97, 136, 187
Piccadilly, 63, 143, 145, 154 paper, 92, 114, 116
Pilot Press, 114, 119 Read, Herbert, 11, 13–15, 29, 35n64
poetry, 24, 62, 110, 114, 125–26 Red Army, 181
Chiang Yee, 6, 24, 79, 81, 83–86, 97, 132, Red Star Over China, 170
180 Redfern, James, 65
Ho, Lily, 140, 184, 192 Red-Maned Steed, The, 130, 143. See Lady
Ho, Sze Ko, 140 Precious Stream
Irvine, John, 98 Republic of China, 25, 90, 100–103, 117,
Kipling, Rudyard, 156 163, 175, 185n8
Li Po, 62–63, 97, 145 Republican Government. See Kuomintang
Lo, Kenneth, 122 ‘Research Monthly, The’ (Dushu zazhi), 161
Lorca, Federico Garcia, 144–45 Resphigi, Ottorino, 53
Shi Zhecun, 14–15 Revolution (1911), 44, 160
Su Dongpo, 189 Reynolds, S. E., 150
Tao Yuanming, 85–86 Rhythmic vitality (qiyun shengdong), 27–30
Waley, Arthur, 172–73 Rickword, Edgell, 164, 171
Wang Lixi, 7, 158–60, 163, 172–79 Robeson, Paul, 131
‘poetry talks from overseas’ (haiwai shihua), Robey, George, 13n14, 154
175 Rohmer, Sax, 2, 146–47, 154
Pool of Ch’ien Lung, The, 98 Romeo and Juliet, 52
Poon Lim (Pan Lian), 122 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 130
Pound, Ezra, 62 Rose of Pu-Chui, The (Xixiangji [Romance
Powell, Anthony, 52, 61–63, 64 of the Western Chamber]), 63, 143–45,
Poyang Lake, 85 154–55
Priestley, J. B., 113, 120, 130, 138 Ross, Alan, 119
Pritchard, Jack, 12 Rossignol, Le, 55–56, 62
Index 219

Rothenstein, Sir William, 99 Short History of Chinese Civilization, 110,

Royal Academy of Arts, 21, 34, 131, 143 122
Royal Opera House, The, 52, 65–66, 70 silence. See under Chiang Yee
Royal Society of British Artists, The (RBA), Silent Traveller in London, The, vii, 12, 15,
96, 99 38, 49–50, 57–58, 72, 78, 82n38, 90, 92,
Rylands, George ‘Dadie’, 120 134, 136, 138
Silent Traveller in New York, The, 72
Sackville-West, Vita, 194 Silent Traveller in Oxford, The, 37, 39, 40, 42,
Sadler’s Wells, 51–55, 65, 70 46, 47, 50, 51–52, 64, 66, 72, 99, 158
Said, Edward, 87 Silent Traveller in War Time, The, 6, 9,
Sansom, William, 119 91–94, 100, 103
Savoy Theatre, 63, 143 Silent Traveller, The (Silent Traveller books),
School of Oriental Studies (SOS); School of viii, 6, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40–41, 44–50, 70,
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 72, 76, 80, 92–93, 101, 115, 138
19–20, 22, 31, 35, 78, 80, 92, 109, 132, Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in
182, 184 Lakeland, The, 15, 82
Scottish National Gallery, 96 Singapore, 101, 148, 186
Second Sino-Japanese War. See War of Sinophilia, 52
Resistance Against Japan Sitwell, Edith, 51
Second World War, The, viii, 4, 40, 52, Sitwell, Osbert, 51
54, 89, 93, 103, 108, 112, 114, 121–22, Sitwell, Sacheverell, 51
145n16 Six Laws (Six Principals), 22, 27–30
Senate House, 91n8, 99–100 Sketches About London in Wartime, 91
Serge, Victor, 166 Smedley, Agnes, 170
Shadow Sweetheart, 148, 152 Smith, Amy, 173–74
Shanghai, 13–14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 63–64, 91, Snodland, 148, 151, 157
94, 96n24, 99n37, 101–2, 143, 143n4, Snow, Edgar, 109–10, 124, 170
143n5, 144, 147, 154, 160–62, 168, 184 Snow, Helen Foster, 110
Shanghai Restaurant, 64 Socialist Realism, 5, 13, 164
Shanghai War of 1932, 160–61 Song dynasty, 23, 81
shanju (dwelling in the mountains), 163 Song of the Fishermen, 145–46
Shao Xunmei, 15 Songs of Chu, 176
Shaw, George Bernard, vii, 55 ‘Sonnet: To Japan on Her Chinese Policy’,
Shearer, Moira, 53 173
Sheldon, Joan, 53, 66, 67 Southeastern University, 19–20, 24, 30
Shelley Memorial, The, 10 Southmoor Road, 95, 134
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 158, 163–64, Soviet Union; (Union of Soviet Socialist
176 Republics, U.S.S.R.), 57, 164–66
Shelley Wang, 2, 7, 159, 163–64, 171, 173, Spanish Civil War, 91–92, 164, 178
185. See Wang Lixi Spectator, The, 13, 63n74, 65, 121
Shen Congwen, 125 Spencer, Herbert, 29–30
Shen, Mary, 182, 191 Spencer, Stanley, 186, 191
Shenzhou guoguang she, The, 160–61 Spender, Stephen, 119–20
Shepherd, Graham, 93, 94n16 Spillett, Helen
shihua (‘poetry talks’), 174–75 Spinners of Silk, The, 119
Shishi xinbao, 18 Sri Lanka, 153
220 Index

St. Albans, 93, 185–87 Tsui Chi, 1, 7, 96, 107, 110–17, 119, 122–24,
Story of China, The, 96n22, 116, 117n51, 127, 185, 193
123
Story of Ming, The, 94n16, 102n41, 116 UNESCO, 155, 183, 195
Strachey, John, 170 Union of Democratic Control, 169
Strachey, Marjorie, 194 United Aid to China, 96
Stravinsky, Igor, 56, 62 University of Cambridge, 101, 108n4, 112,
Stroheim, Erich von, 144 120, 184, 186
Su Dongpo, 189 University of London, 19, 22, 109, 181, 184,
Sullivan, Michael, 35 190
Sun Moqian, 78 University of Manchester, 182, 184
Sunday Times, The, 60 Upper Park Road, 11–13, 14n21, 16–17, 91,
Sung Hua, 193 94n17, 122, 130, 162, 185–86
Surrealism (Surrealist), 12–13 US (United States of America), 12, 15, 35,
Swann, Peter, 182 58, 72, 101, 116, 117, 123, 125, 127,
Swiss Cottage, 185–86, 195 129–30, 140–41, 150, 151n44, 155–56,
Sylvan Press, 114, 120 186, 194

Ta Kung Pao (Dagong bao), 118 Val Baker, Denys, 114, 120
Tang dynasty, 26, 28, 32, 62, 81, 97, 145, Variety, 149, 152, 154
163, 192 Victoria and Albert Museum, 143
Tang Poetry, 62, 97, 145, 163, 192 Victorian, 1, 3, 16, 29, 62, 67
Tao Xingzhi, 167–68 Vic-Wells, 51
Tao Xisheng, 161 Violin Song, 148n28, 152
Tao Yuanming, 85–86 Visiting The British War Artists’ Exhibition,
Tatler and Bystander, The, 54 99–100
Teng Gu, 28
theatre design, 70 Wade-Giles, 23, 24
Theory of the Six Laws in Chinese Painting, Wales, Nym (Helen Foster Snow pseud),
The, 28–29 110
They Fly South, 120 Waley, Arthur, 27, 36, 120, 123n81, 126,
Thief of Baghdad, The, 61 172–73, 194
Thomas, Myfanwy, 64 Walton, William, 52
Three Seasons and Other Stories, 120 Wang Chi-chen, 125, 126n96
Tian Han, 113n27, 155–57 Wang Lixi, 1, 7, 14, 158–80, 185
T’ien Hsia Monthly, 14 Shelley Wang, 2, 7, 159, 163–64, 171,
Time and Tide, 109 173, 185
Times Literary Supplement, The, 71, 109, Wang Shifu, 143n5
120, 122, 127 Wang Wei, 32
Times, The, 65 War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC),
‘To China on the Fall of Shanghai’, 173 90, 99
Toler, Sidney, 42 War Artists’ Exhibition, 99
Toller, Ernst, 165, 179 war morale literature, 90
Tolstoy, Leo, 121 War of Resistance against Japan (aka
Transatlantic Arts, 117–18, 125 Second Sino-Japanese War), 7, 40,
Tregear, Mary, 182 89–90, 109, 119, 134, 159, 169, 171, 175
Index 221

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 159, 171–73, 175, Yang Bin, 194

178–79 Yang Buwei, 187n16
Wartime Diary (Zhanshi riji), 161 Yang Hsien-I (Yang Xianyi), 1, 162, 184
Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 55 Yang Zhiyi, 175
Wellcome Historical Medicine Museum, Yao Xueyin, 125
91–93, 102 Yaxingzhe (Silent Traveller), 76, 19n28, 80
Wells, H. G., 130, 144, 165, 166 Yazvinsky, Jan, 58
West End (London), 21, 57, 129–30, 154, Ye Gongchuo, 22
185, 190 Ye Junjian (Yeh Chun-chan); (George
‘What Can I Say About Ballet’, 58 Yeh), 7, 95, 97, 107–8, 113–14, 119–20,
Whistler, Rex, 52 120n66, 183
White, Alan, 21, 23, 95, 99, 101 also Cicio Mar, 110n12, 125
Willow Leaves, 98 Yeh, Nienlun, 120
Winkworth, W. W., 34 Yellow Peril, 2, 5, 43n15, 60
Wong, Anna May, 61–62, 64–65, 145, 154 Yellowface, 41–43, 60, 70, 146–47, 150
Wong, Diana, 148 Yenching University, 182
Woodman, Dorothy, 111, 116, 119, 122, Yetts, Walter Perceval, 33–34
126, 169, 179 Youzheng shuju, 31
Woolf, Virginia, 110n13, 183, 192–94 Yu Shangyuan, 146
Works of Li Po, The, 62 Yuan Chia-hua (Yuan Jiahua), 110, 125
World Conference on the Boycott of Japan Yuan Mei, 175
and Aid to China (London), 169 Yui Shufang, 86–87
World of Art (Mir iskusstva), 55–56
World Peace Congress (Brussels), 167–68 Zeng Yun, 75
Writers’ International Controversy, 164 Zhang Daqian, 182
Wu Mei, 24 Zhang Qianying, 182, 192
Wuhan University, 120, 183 Zhang Tianyi, 109, 111, 125
Zhao Yuanren, 187n16
Xiandai pinglun (‘Contemporary Review’), Zhongya, 19, 76. See also Chiang Yee
183 Zou Taofen, 168
Xiao Jun, 109, 113n26
Xiao San, 166
Xie Bingying, 122–23
Xie He. See Six Laws
Xixiangji. See Rose of Pu-Chui, The
Xu Bangda, 36
Xu Beihong, 18, 24, 96, 98, 130–31, 135,
162, 182, 185
Xu Zhimo, 109, 131, 191n27