Two yanks in shanghai - The changing Shanghai landscape as glimpsed in old postcards

George Seward (1840-1910) of Florida, New York was the nephew of William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State. In 1861, at the ripe young age of 20, having departed Union College without a degree, he was appointed US Consul to Shanghai.

Seward Road first appeared on a Shanghai map in 1866. The name was not the result of public honor; rather, it reflected the fact that Seward had become the leading landowner in the district – and had laid the road himself.

Seward served as US Consul to Shanghai for 14 years (1862-1876), and then as US Minister in Peking (1876-1880). His successor in Shanghai found, among other things, that he had used his position for personal gain; that there were irregularities in the Consular records and accounts; and that he had collaborated in deceiving the Chinese government in order to build a railroad in Shanghai. Among those contributing evidence was the ex-Confederate cavalry leader, John Singleton Mosby, then serving as US Consul in Hong Kong. In 1879, Seward was impeached. The debate in the US Senate was fierce. Partisan rancor had been at a high pitch since the tainted election of 1876. Seward was acquitted only because the Republicans refused to vote, preventing a quorum.

Seward returned to Peking, but was recalled by President Hayes in 1880, and became an insurance executive in New York City. In 1882, one of his successors in Shanghai, Owen Denny, accused him of lining his pockets by having built a new consulate and renting it to the government through a British front man. Again the mud flew thick and fast. Nevertheless, Seward retained the esteem of the Shanghai foreign establishment, and Seward Road retained his name into the 1940s. Today it is called Changzhi Lu.

By the early 20th century, the Hongkou district through which Seward Road runs had become the center of the Japanese settlement in Shanghai, and gradually filled up with Japanese institutions and businesses. See Illustration 1, a postcard which portrays a section of Seward Road c.1908-10. Card by Tonboya of Yokohama, Japan. The card shows two Japanese hotels, the Toyokan (on the left), and beyond it and across Minhang Road, the Manseikan. The view is looking northeast. Shanghai’s trams began operation in 1908, which gives us the earliest possible date for this view. The fork in the rails allows us, with the aid of an early tramway route map, to pinpoint the location.

An advertisement for the Toyokan, found on a 1909 Japanese map of Shanghai (not shown), features four interior photographs, with Western only furnishings (pool hall, etc.). The décor indicates the hotel served an educated, Westernized clientele. Illustration 2, a photo of the corner of Changzhi Lu and Minhang Lu taken in 2006, shows the old Toyokan and Manseikan still there. The top of the corner tower on the Manseikan was pulled down during the “cultural revlolution”, according to local residents.

Illustration 3 (postcard 2), East Seward Road c.1925 by the Universal Postcard & Picture Co., Shanghai, is just one of hundreds the company produced over some three decades. If we continue north/northeast on Seward Road, the neighborhood changes sharply when we cross Hongkou Creek. East Seward Road here runs parallel to the Huangpu River, two blocks from the waterfront. It was an industrial, warehouse and dock district, with a working-class Chinese population. The shop signs included a pawn shop, grocery, dry goods and a clothing shop.

Jimmy James
Joseph James Skalicky was born in the small southern Minnesota town of Jackson in 1902, dropped out of college to join the army, and wound up with the 15th Infantry in Tientsin. He had himself discharged in China at the end of 1922, and in 1924 opened a hamburger stand in Chefoo (now Yantai), on the north coast of Shantung. Chefoo was a summer anchorage for foreign navies, not least the US Asiatic Squadron.

There was an acute, unsatisfied craving for hamburgers in Chefoo in 1924, and the stand was a smashing success. By the end of the year, Jimmy opened a restaurant on Broadway (now Daming Lu) in Shanghai’s dock district. Success bred success, as Americans and other foreigners poured into China in the booming 1920s. Jimmy continued to expand (and move upscale) in Shanghai, and to other cities on the China coast, and simplified his name to Jimmy James. At the peak of his prosperity he owned a nightclub and a small amusement park.

Jimmy lost everything in the war, when Japan took over Shanghai’s international settlement after attacking Pearl Harbor. However, before his internment, he earned the undying gratitude of Shanghai’s foreign community by providing a full Christmas dinner to several hundred people in Japanese internment camps at the end of 1942.

In the 1970s, he was living in Texas when he told his story to writer David Ellsworth. The result, Shanghai Diary: 1918-1945, although misleadingly titled, and weak on Chinese history and geography, is very readable, and more or less reliable.

Illustration 4 (postcard 3) shows Nanking Road, looking east toward the Bund and the Huangpu River. In the distance on the left we see the tower of the 1929 Cathay Hotel. The foreground shows the second block of Nanking Road, between Sichuan and – behind us – Jiangxi Roads. Jimmy’s is the second shop on the right, at No. 133. The sign bears his characteristic yellow lettering on a green background. Two doors further down, at No. 125, we can make out a sign reading ‘MacTavish Photo Shop’ over the second floor windows. Originally called MacTavish, Lehmann & Co., this firm was established in Shanghai in the 1880s and one of the first to publish Shanghai postcards. On the far left, at No. 142, we see the sign for Macbeth, Gray & Co., ‘Tailor’s and Gentlemen’s Outfitters’.

Illustration 5 (postcard 4) is a Japanese military postcard, c.1938-39, probably produced by Matsumura of Tokyo (one of the two leading publishers of Chinese postcards in this period as the design is similar to cards that bear their name). The Japanese Army had taken over the Chinese sectors of Shanghai in 1937; the foreign sectors remained autonomous until December 1941.

The card shows Jimmy’s on Shandong Road in Qingdao, c.1940, with the familiar sign. Across the street is the Japanese Residents’ Association, with a large, late architectural addition dominating the street. Up to 1914, when Qingdao was a German colony, this was the German Seamen’s home. After the Japanese invaded Qingdao in a brief war in late 1914, it became the Japanese Resident’s Association, the function of which was to maintain social order in Japanese overseas communities, and to mobilize Japanese subjects for collective goals. On the balcony of the six-story building on the right, we see the “Tex” of Texaco; on the far right, the Lone Star of a small Texaco station.

Sources: Information on Seward came from the Dictionary of American Biography and chapter five of David Andersonís 1985 Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861-1898, as well as Congressional records. Biographies of Mosby and Denny were also helpful.