From belle époque Shanghai to occupied Hong Kong, the literati who broke down cultural barriers

T’ien Hsia magazine set out to be a platform for cross-cultural exchange until war intervened; managing it was this correspondent’s mother, who fled to Hong Kong, where she bought opium for Emily Hahn, and almost became personal aide to Madame Chiang

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A party at Repulse Bay in 1939 organised for the staff and writers of T’ien Hsia magazine, including chief editor Wen Yuan-ning (standing, centre), Lesley Chan (standing second from right) and poet Shao Xunmei (standing far right). Seated (from left) are Chuan Tsen-kuo, his sister Mei-Mei, writer Emily Hahn, Arthur “Paddy” Gill (fourth from right), Chan’s wife Mildred (with their two children) and Louise Mary Newman (second from right). Picture: courtesy of the Gill family

Published: 8:45pm, 17 May 2018Updated: 11:30am, 18 May 2018

A photograph in our family album captures an extraordinary scene at Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay in 1939. People in the British colony at that time were acutely aware of social and racial distinctions, and yet the beach party in the picture has Chinese, Eurasians and Westerners – most of them in swimwear – all relaxing together.

The multiracial gathering consisted mostly of displaced Shanghailanders – writers and staff of cultural magazine T’ien Hsia Monthly, which launched in Shanghai in 1935 and moved to Hong Kong after the Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937. T’ien Hsia, which translates as “everything under heaven”, was distinctive in being a Chinese-edited, English-language publication aimed at an international readership. It began at the height of an era of unprecedented openness in China, with the goal of promoting international cooperation through cultural ties.

Two of the better known figures in the photograph are Chinese poet Shao Xunmei and American writer Emily Hahn, whose intimate relationship shocked even some of the Shanghai literary set. Also shown are T’ien Hsia’s editor in chief, Wen Yuan-ning, and his colleague Chuan Tsen-kuo, who hosted the summer party with his younger sister, Mei-Mei.

Seated second from right is T’ien Hsia’s “backroom girl”, Louise Mary Newman, who was involved in every aspect of the magazine, from its inaugural issue until its abrupt closure in dramatic circumstances. Newman, who would marry Arthur “Paddy” Gill, the Irishman sitting next to her, became my mother after the war.

T’ien Hsia Monthly editions published in Shanghai in September 1936 (left) and in Hong Kong in April-May 1941. Picture: courtesy of the Gill family

Newman helped set up T’ien Hsia after an initial experience that was hardly auspicious. In the spring of 1935, the 19-year-old Chinese woman – born in Changsha, Hunan province, adopted by a British man and his Chinese wife, educated at Shanghai’s British schools and trained at Reuters news agency – arrived at an address on Shanghai’s Yuyuan Road. She was puzzled because she was responding to an advertisement for a manager of a Chinese publication. She wondered why a publishing enterprise would be in a block of flats quite far from the commercial district.