Earnshaw Books has republished a book first printed in China in 1926 called Silhouettes of Peking by D de Martel and L de Hoyer, illustrated by Sapajou and with a new foreword by Adam Williams.
In 1926 the expatriate community in China was bracing itself for an uncertain future. The previous year British policemen in Shanghai had shot several students protesting against imperialism. Commerce was still suffering from the subsequent general strike. Now China was in a state of civil war. From Canton, the ‘Northern Expedition’, an army consisting of Nationalists and Communists, was advancing towards Wuhan, easily smashing the Warlord forces ranged against them. Nobody was clear what the Nationalist leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, wanted, but they feared the worst. With his Russian advisers, Galen and Borodin, he was thought to be as Red as his paymaster Stalin. Western interests seemed threatened. The International Concession in Shanghai was taking all precautions. Its boulevards began to sprout barbed wire and sandbags as British troops patrolled the streets.
It was therefore a welcome diversion in this charged up atmosphere when the small Peking publishing house, China Booksellers, produced a slim novel, rumoured to be wickedly salacious and gorgeously illustrated by the popular Shanghai artist and cartoonist, Sapajou. The biggest surprise, however, was that one of the authors of this scandalous sensation was the Minister of the French Legation in Peking, the seasoned diplomat, Le Comte Damien de Martel. The foreign community forgot their troubles and scattered off to the beach resorts in Tsingtao and Peitaiho, a copy of ‘Silhouettes of Peking’ in their hand luggage.
What they read was sheer escapism. The delicious roman took them away from the louring tensions of the revolutionary 1920s back a decade to the early days of the Chinese Republic. In their minds that had been a golden age, the China many dreamed of when they took the steamer from Europe. Nobody then was threatened by warlords or Bolsheviks. An amenable military strongman, Yuan Shikai, listened respectfully to the top-hatted representatives of the Powers, who in their leisure moments, lived a luxurious existence, dining, racing and picnicking among the picturesque ruins of a romantic Imperial China. […]
‘Silhouettes of Peking’ is one of a remarkable number of excellent novels, written in the early years of the 20th Century by expatriates living in Peking. Authors were aesthetes like Sir Harold Acton, diplomats like Daniele Vare, travellers like W Somerset Maugham, or ‘spouses’ like Anne Bridge. It is from these novels, as well as the memoirs of Sir Reginald Johnston, John Blofeld and George Kates and guidebooks like Nagel and Juliet Bredon’s ‘Peking’ that we draw our very vivid portrait of the rarefied life these privileged foreigners experienced. If there is one word that always is repeated, it is “magic”. ‘Silhouettes of Peking’ takes an honourable place in the pantheon …
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Click here to visit the Earnshaw Books website and order Silhouettes of Peking online.
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