Jottings from the Granite Studio

We live in China. We complain. We drink beer. We complain. We go home, we log on to Talk Talk China, we complain some more. It’s what Lao Wai do. And, apparently, it’s what we have always done.

“A hot night is the very devil in Shanghai. Sleeping under an electric fan is apt to give one problems of the bowels. Not sleeping under an electric fan means not sleeping at all. If one lives in a quiet district the groans of the fat ladies and the blood-curdling imprecations of the adipose men who live within a hundred yards of one are so distressing that any hopes of sleep must be finally abandoned.”

Nearly a century ago a young British griffin named Jay Denby traveled to Shanghai. Pampered, pompous, and utterly confident of the superiority of European civilization, Denby found Shanghai to be both a fascinating and flumoxing experience.

At a dinner hosted by a Chinese business associate, Mr. Denby encounters his first 1000-year-old egg:

One dish, however, caught my eye and held it. Lying right in the middle of the table, surrounded by stewed grass- hoppers, were some eggs cut in half, with black yolks. I asked my. companion why they dyed their eggs.

“Dyed?” he replied; “those aren’t dyed, the colour comes with age.”

“But what are they here for? ” I enquired.

” The Chinese eat them.”

He explained that many foreigners wondered why they kept their eggs to a ripe old age, and yet they-the foreigners-ate cheese in an advanced stage of decomposition. I explained that cheese was cheese always, but that eggs, after the copy- right expired, became a public nuisance; yet he couldn’t see the point somehow.

He argued that an egg, after it had died, stunk with all its might for a few months, and then resumed its odourless state from sheer exhaustion and became beautiful once again; whereas cheese gathered strength and energy to stink with a continually increasing violence as time elapsed.

What is the use of arguing with a benighted savage like that?

Needless to say, the dinner didn’t go very well after that point. Very little in Shanghai does for Mr. Denby. There are too few white woman for matrimony, he berates his business associates, shopkeepers, and especially his Chinese man-servants for their dishonesty, and the sport of shooting is difficult because the Chinese farmers tend to insist on cash payments when they or their livestock are accidentally shot.

“The price of accidents has also advanced out of all reason. Should a native be inadvertently punctured by a careless or incompetent gunner, trouble spreads like a prairie fire, and the whole countryside is roused within half an hour. When one finds that this admittedly righteous indig- nation has for its sole object the acquisition of gain, one cannot help losing a certain amount of sympathy for the agitators, for the indignant relatives are immediately soothed to placid con- tent by the transfer of a satisfactory number of dollars.”

But in the end, Young Denby, like most of us, develops a bedgrudging but growing awareness, if not exactly an appreciation, of China’s situation, in a tongue-slightly-in-cheek final thought:

“Notwithstanding the disadvantages under which their lives are spent however, our civilization doesn’t appear to better them, despite the fact that we do all we can to improve their lot. We sell them millions of cheap cigarettes which smell like a wet dog that has crawled under the stove; they take over most of our Australian horses that bave got spavins or string halt, and our provisions that were stored too close to the ship’s boilers.

We send them missionaries who would do far more good at home, we sell them rifles in order that they may kill themselves like civilized beings, and build them war ships so that we may have something to sink if we go to war with them, The Municipal Council takes numbers of them in hand, and teaches them useful trades, such as making coconut fibre matting, road-mending, stone-breaking, etc., and is so considerate as to chain them together in case they might get lost.

We allow them to come into the settlement and trade, spit on the floor of our offices, and give us both aural and ocular demonstrations as to the ridiculous way we waste our money in the purchase of handkerchiefs We lend them money Upon land at the absurdly low rate of 12 per cent., taking upon our own shoulders all the risk of that land being stolen during the night.

We allow them the privilege of mixing socially with our Indian police, and, in short, do all that we can to show them that our aims are not selfish, and yet these ingrates call us “foreign devils.”

These and other stories can be found at the wonderful site Tales of Old Shanghai. The complete edition of Jay Denby’s correspondence, Letters of A Shanghai Griffin, can be found there in the library. A warning: some of the vivid language, descriptions, and illustrations in Denby’s book are of another time and an unfortunate worldview and should be understood as such.