sources of 造洋飯書 Foreign Cookery in Chinese

造洋飯書 Foreign Cookery in Chinese  (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1866, 1885, 1909) was written by the American missionary Martha Foster Crawford of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. The content is as follows (details to be added later):

目錄
廚房條例
湯
魚
肉
蛋
小湯
菜
酸果
糖食
排
面皮
朴定
甜湯
雜類
饅頭
餅
糕
雜類

I decoded that part of the content is from Eliza Leslie's, aka Miss Leslie, cookery books, which were highly popular and affordable in mid-nineteenth-century U.S.A. Three of her books can be downloaded from Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project. Miss Leslie was more than a cook book writer but an author of etiquette and domestic management books as well.

Decoding mission to be continued...

In defense of food

a draft written in 2010...

How much do you on your meals in a typical workday? Less than $10 for a sausage bun in the morning? Below $30 for a McDonald combo? Between $30 and $40 for a set dinner in a fast food restaurant? No more than $80 a day. Fantastic. Not too soon. Think about the food you eat and the way you eat. Is this life? Pathetic. After all, food is not the smartest place to economize. 

Can you distinguish food and food products? Pick up a pack of chips on your desk or a loaf of bread, cottony soft and snowy white ones, from any supermarkets, and try to read the food labels. You find it hard. Right? Can you recognize and/or pronounce the ingredients on the it at all?

Michael Pollan's In defense of food: the myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating (London: Allan Lane, 2008) provide you with answers and food for thought.

As Pollan explains, the book starts out with seven words and three rules. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Eat meat as a side dish than as a main. (1)

you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food products is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat. (2)

three pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the "nutrient"; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. After all, food is considered as a matter of biology, thus we must try to eat "scientifically". (p. 8)

Pollan writes that the most important fact about any food is not its nutrient content but its degree of processing. We should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature. "[W]hole foods and industrial foods," Gyorgy Scrinis says, "are the only two food groups I'd consider including in any useful food 'pyramid.'" (p. 143)

The book is divided into three chapters. Pollan unfolds his discussion by an interesting introduction, An Eater's Manifesto.

Chapter One: The Age of Nutritionism. From foods to nutrients; Nutritionism defined; Nutritionism comes to market; Food science's golden age; The melting of the lipid hypothesis; Eat right, get fatter; Beyond the pleasure principle; The proof in the low-fat pudding; Bad science; Nutritionism's children.

Chapter Two: The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization. The aborigine in all of us; The elephant in the room; The industrialization of eating, which comprises of five sections: From whole foods to refined; From complexity to simplicity; From quality to quantity; from leaves to seeds; From food culture to food science.

Chapter Three: Getting Over Nutritionism. Escape from the western diet. Eat food: food defined. Mostly plants: what to eat. Not too much: how to eat.

One of the problems with the products of food science is that they lie to your body. Foods that lies leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses. (p. 149)

The last chapter is the most interesting part and provides straight straightforward rules of thumb about food.

• Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. (doesn't sound scientific but listening to old wisdom merits some reflection) Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims. (What can you choose after all?) All plants contain antioxidants, all so-called scientific studies on plants are guaranteed to find something on which to base a health oriented marketing campaign. (emphasis original)
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle, where processed food products dominate.
• Get out of the supermarket (and the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet) whenever possible. (rather obvious)
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
• You are what what you eat eats too. (what do the caged chickens eat?)
• If you have the space, buy a freezer. (to freeze quality meat in bulk)
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
• Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks. the foods a culture eats and how they eat them. Cuisines can have purely cultural functions; they're one of the ways a society expresses its identity and underscores its differences with other societies.
• Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
• Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet. there is no magic in food.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• Pay more, eat less. (pay more, eat more is rather commonplace) Quantity vs quality. The better the food, the less of it you need to eat in order to feel satisfied.
• Eat meals. (too simple? too hard?) It is at the dinner table that we socialize and civilize ourselves and our children, teaching ourselves and them manners and the art of conversation.
• Do all your eating at a table.
• Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone.
• Consult your gut.
• Eat slowly.
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion, with other people as well as with other species - with nature.

The earliest maps naming Hong Kong as "Fan-chin-cheo" (1775-1788)

It seems to be:

1775 and 1778

1775: A Chart of the China Sea Inscribed to Monsr. d'Apres de Mannevillette the Ingenious Author of the Neptune Oriental: As a Tribute Due to his Labours for the Benefit of Navigation; and in acknowledgement of his many signal Favours to A. Dalrymple. Paris ; Brest, [France] : Chez Demonville, Imprimeur-Libraire de l'Academie Francoise ; Chez Malassis, Imprimeur-Libraire de la Marine, 1775.

There are a few copies on the internet: RareMaps.com, National Library Australia (gigantic file size: 1 Gb), Bibliothèque nationale de France (zoomable), David Rumsey Map Collection (1810 edition), Biblioteca Nacional de España (an earlier 1771? edition without "Fan-chin-cheo")

In 1771, in his Journal of the Schooner Cuddalore, Oct 1759. On the Coast of China. London: Alexander Dalrymple, Esq., 1771. (available on Google Book), Dalrymple, on 12th February, 1765, writes:

"The Wind favouring us kept under fail, and ran againft the flood till abreaft of the E. End of Lantao, when, the Ebb making, we drove with the Tide through what is called Cowbee Paffage. And at 5 PM were abreaft of the SW point of Chinfalo, when we haul'd to the ESE to go to the Northward of the Ifland Heong-Kong (a) and at 6 PM, the Tide being done, anchored in 6 Fath. mud, diftant Heong-kong about a mile, Lantao Peak bearing W 8°. S."

original footnote: "(a) What he calls Heong-Kong is Fanchin-chow"

Fanchin-chow is used more often than Heong-Kong in his another book published in the same year, i.e. Memoir of the Chart of Part of the Coast of China, and the Adjacent Islands near the Entrance of Canton River. Containing Observations in the Schooner Cuddalore in 1759 and 1760. And in the Ship London, 1764. With Several Views of the Lands. London: Alexander Dalrymple, Esq., 1771. (also available on Google Book)


1778: A Chart of the China Sea from the Island of Sanciam to Pedra Branca with the course of the river Tigris from Canton to Macao. London: Printed for Robert Sayer and John Bennett, No. 53, Fleet Street, 1778. Two later editions were printed in 1780 (see the reference below) and 1794.

Available in the National Library of Australia (very large file size: 214Mb). Later edition (1794) could be found on the internet.

It reads "Fan-Chin-Cheou or He-ong-kong"


Also reference: Henry D. Talbot, "A British maritime Chart of 1780 Showing Hong Kong," Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 10 (1970), pp.128-133. Available in the Map Library of the Department of Geography and Geology.

Sydenham Moutrie in Yokohama [to be continued]

Before establishing his piano import business in Yokohama in 1890, Sydenham Moutrie, who had over 14 years' experience in Shanghai, announced his arrival in May 1889 in the Japan Gazette to provide musical instrument repairing service to customers. 

Source: The Japan Gazette, 10 May, 1889 (Friday), p. 8. 

モートリー商会, No. 59 Main Street, Yokohama 

additional sources about Moutrie in Yokohama: 
ピアノ製造と横浜華僑／伊藤泉美 「開港のひろば」 第51号 - 横浜開港資料館
大阪音楽大学音楽博物館東洋楽器関係索引補遺 － 漢字表記の楽器をどう扱うか
民間吹奏楽の創建秘史／池田辰五郎述 堀内敬三記（『音楽之友』 第2巻第6号 1942年06月 ｐ.34-39）
周筱生がピアノ製造の技術を学んだのは、上海のモートリー商会であった
横浜中華街 開港当時、ここは西洋文化の入り口だった
明治期の横浜外国人居留地を通した洋楽受容

Columbia Records and J. Ullmann

How Columbia Records Are Made in China and the Men Who Make Them

[hoito: 烏利文洋行=J. Ullmann. Headquartered in Shanghai, it operated branches in Tientsin, Hong Kong, and Vladivostock at the time]

Source: The Music Trade Review, vol. 42, no. 11, Mar 1906, p. 44.

Lane Crawford's 1870s adverts in Japan

From The Japan Mail. A fortnightly summary of intelligence from Japan, for transmission to Europe and the United States, via Suez and San Francisco (a forerunner of today The Japan Times, Japan's largest and oldest English-language daily), published in Yokohama, of which the compositor and pressman rooms were staffed by Macanese and Japanese craftsmen respectively in the 1870s.

John Hartley and Chipman, Stone & Co.

Japanese advertisements of two foreign books importers in the early Meiji period: John Hartley and Chipman, Stone & Co.

John Hartley

Source: 《万国新聞紙》，第3集，1867年3月。

Source: 《横浜毎日新聞》，1873年11月14日。

Source: 《横浜毎日新聞》，1874年1月15日。

---   ---   ---   ---   ---

Chipman, Stone & Co.

Source: 《横浜毎日新聞》，1873年9月2日。

Events at Gaiety Theatre, Yokohama in December 1875

The events organized by Mr. and Mrs. Vertelli and St. Andrew's Society of Japan on 10th Dec and 13th Dec respectively

source: The Japan Gazette, 10 December, 1875, p. 3.

source: The Japan Gazette, 28 December, 1875, p. 3.

Balzac in Shanghai, Chinese American Publishing Company, and Ling-feng Yeh (葉靈鳳)

Recently a 1928-edition of Balzac's Droll Stories with Ling-feng Yeh's (葉靈鳳) bookplate, aka ex libris, resurfaced in Hong Kong antique book auction.

It probed me to browse through my NCDN database to find Balzac's books in the foreign book market of Shanghai in late 1920s and early 1930s. 

The 1930 advertisement of the Chinese American Publishing Company (中美圖書公司) below caught my attention. The American bookshop offered a 18-volume set of Balzac at a relatively affordable on-sale price $75 (originally $150). 

There were at least three sets of this 18-volume edition in the 1900s published by three different publishers (the 1842 edition by Charles C. Bigelow should be presumably an antique collection), the Philadelphia-based Avil Publishing Company (1901), and two New-York-based publishers: Merrill & Baker (circa. 1901) and Harper & Brothers (1900). 

Although the bookstore was, among others, an agent of Harper & Brothers, I am not absolutely sure which edition was on offer. I will look through my database later. 

source: NCDN, 9 March, 1930 (Sunday).

宋王臺與香港革新會 Sung Wong Toi and the Reform Club of Hong Kong

歷史，始於創造，成於製造，終於利益。

source: Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection (Library of Congress)

宋王臺的歷史，涉及面廣，包含地市發展和規劃、晚清和民國遺民情懷、英國殖民懷柔統治、地區慈善組織、歷史記憶的想像和製造等。

一直以來，以遺民對異質空間和戀物幽情的視角，檢視製造宋王臺歷史的學術論文和普及文章，不勝枚舉。晚近，學者另闢蹊徑，以冷戰背景和國共對峙的視角，討論歷史記憶的製造，開拓新視野，將宋王臺研究推向另一層次，造福英語讀者群。

國族情緒過熱，遺民書寫佔據了宋王臺研究的主線，奈何令多元聲音和歷史被消失。宋王臺研究變成最不學術的學術研究。孤陋寡聞，好像未不見有人認真爬梳歷史檔案（如HKGRS的HKRS156-1-4457和HKRS410-10-3）和中英文報章（尤缺South China Morning Post），看看當年政府如何決策，華民政務司（the Hon. Brian Charles Keith HAWKINS [1900-1962], 1955-57）如何處理，NGO（樂善堂和九龍城街坊福利會）如何呼籲，市政局（戰後代議政制）如何討論，乃至一個由英國人主導的反對派政黨－－香港革新會（Reform Club of Hong Kong）－－在整件事上的角色。

由宋王臺為起點，連繫香港政府（葛量洪）的戰後殖民治理性（colonial governmentality）和冷戰視角下的文化政治政策和取態，諸如1) 李鄭屋被發現（1955年8月，與宋王臺同期）和保護的討論和決定，2) 英國文化協會（British Council）及在港英人對中國文化的態度，例如南來畫家（如李研山、丁衍庸、呂壽琨等於1957年組成七人畫會。李、呂等人組成的香港中國美術會經過兩年的審批，方能在1958年8月10日正式成立）應英國文化協會的邀請，在其圖書館舉辦畫展。推陳出新，指日可待。

香港革新會(Reform Club of Hong Kong)在保護宋王臺一事上立場和角色，參見其致South China Morning Post編輯的信如下：



South China Morning Post, Dec 10, 1955, p. 17.
Sung Wong Toi
(To the Editor, S.C.M. Post)

Sir, - The Reform Club notes that in answer to a Petition from the Lok Sin Tong Benevolent Society and the Kowloon City Kai Fong Welfare Association, the Secretary for Chinese Affairs has stated that Government has been giving most serious consideration towards ensuring the preservation of the Sung Wong Toi Stone and that plans had been prepared and funds allocated for the construction of a garden in which the Stone would be placed.

The Reform Club feels that this statement of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs does not bring out the fact that the question as to the future of this Stone was considered by the Urban Council some eighteen months ago and that the decision to preserve the Stone was taken largely on the initiative of the Reform Club. The Chairman of the Club, Brook Bernacchi [Member of the Urban Council, 1952-1981, 1983-1986, 1989-1995. Bernacchi grew Ceylon tea in his All-Knowing Lotus Villa 覺蓮苑 at Ngong Ping on Lantau Island ], prepared a long Memorandum for the benefit of Government on the history of the Stone. Government has accepted the recommendations of the Urban Council in this matter and the construction of a public garden in which the Stone will be placed arises directly out of the Council's recommendations.
The Reform Club of Hongkong

---   ---   ---   ---   ---

South China Morning Post, Aug 2, 1956, p. 6.
Re-sitting of historic Chinese stone
"Sung Wong Toi" preserved in garden in Kowloon City. Work nears completion

Work is nearing completion on the re-siting of part of the historic Chinese stone known as "Sung Wong Toi" (Terrace of a Sung Dynasty Emperor) in a garden west of Kam Tung Road, with the inscription facing Sung Wong Toi Road, Kowloon City. To the north is the hill, now being levelled, on which the Stone stood originally.
Existence of the Stone was threatened by the Kai Tak development scheme and the Lok Sin Tong Benevolent Society and the Kowloon City Kaifong Welfare Association petitioned Government last year asking that consideration be given to preservation of the Stone. The Secretary for Chinese Affairs, the Hon. B. C. K. Hawkins, then replied that plans had been prepared and funds allocated for the construction of a garden west of Tam Kung Road in which the inscribed portion of the Stone would be placed. The work was put in hand this year.