Rise of Cosmopolitan Shanghai

I’m reading a wonderful book, a highly readable account of life in Shanghai in the early part of the 19th Century. I can hardly put the book down. It’s called Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Crow, a Missouri native, was an adventurer, newspaper proprietor and groundbreaking advertising man in Shanghai from 1911 until the late 1930s.

Crow’s firm was partly responsible for coming up with the “sexy modern girls” that adorned the cigarette and face cream ads that went up around China.

In the 1930s, he wrote the book 400 Million Customers, setting off a rush into China’s market, not unlike what is happening again today.

I find Crow’s story, and the description of Shanghai, really compelling. Perhaps it is because Crow was once a reporter for United Press, the precursor of UPI. So was I. Or because he once worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which also happens to be one of the papers in the McClatchy chain that supplies my paycheck.

But at the same time, the book only underscores the differences with modern China. I happen to be visiting Nanping, a small city in Fujian province where my grandparents lived from 1922 to 1926 as Methodist missionaries. As I look at old photos of the raging Min River that was the main transportation route, and hear stories of the pestilence, war lords and other plagues of the era, I can’t help but think how much greater an endeavor it was to live half way around the globe then compared to now. You’ll read more in an upcoming article about what kind of impact early missionaries, like my grandparents, have left on modern China.

Hong Kong University Press, by the way, publishes the Crow book, and its author is Paul French, a modern-day marketing analyst in Shanghai.

Comments

[Xiao Zhu]

Finally I find out what you are doing in Nanping.

[howard]

Here's a link to some of those posters: http://www.zitantique.com/poster.html

[Daniel Worcester]

Tim, My grandmother and her family were Methodist missionaries in Nanping from 1913-1931. We are putting together materials for on upcoming family reunion and I'm tying things together for her. Could you please contact me? I can also provide a home project book she wrote about her time there. Dan Worcester