Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

Carl Crow arrived in China in 1911, made Shanghai his home and founded the country's first Western-style advertising agency. In Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, originally published in 1940, Carl recalls his twenty-five years in China and the many lessons that he learnt. He was almost unique among foreign commentators in taking the time to understand and appreciate the Chinese and their culture while also providing a vivid portrait of foreign life in Shanghai, a city, which Crow, in 1940, accurately predicted 'will only now live in memories'.

Genres: China, History

333 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 20, 2007

About the author

Carl Crow was a Missouri-born newspaperman, businessman, and author who managed several newspapers and then opened the first Western advertising agency in Shanghai, China. He ran the agency for 19 years, creating calendar advertisements and the so-called sexy China Girl poster. He was also founding editor of the Shanghai Evening Post.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Crow wrote 13 books; and his most popular book, 400 Million Customers (1937)won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1937.

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and made the city his home for a quarter of a century, working there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and groundbreaking ad-man. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a dull colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the thriving and ruthless cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s.

Among Crow’s exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on the Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of western hostages from a mountain bandit lair, and being one of the first westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met and interviewed most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao Zedong’s second-in-command Zhou En-lai. During the Second World War he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, co-ordinating US policies to support China against Japan.

Reviews

[Isham Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

We have a paradox of a book here, a compelling 300-page account of China with virtually nothing to tell us about life in China or the Chinese. How does Carl Crow, the famous Shanghai newspaper editor and American China hand of 25 years, pull it off? We are given the bigger historical picture, a sweeping discussion of the centuries of maritime trade up through the opium wars, the occupation by the Western powers and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, before the narrative circles inward to give us a close-up of life in foreign-occupied Shanghai over the early decades of the 20th century - right up to the day the author is forced out of the country upon the Japanese invasion in 1937. It is a fine historical introduction written by the sure hand and balanced objectivity of the experienced journalist.

But we soon realize that despite being less than a hundred years ago we are encountering an era as strange as that of Marco Polo's, or to be more exact, the US antebellum south, or the world of "gay cocktail parties" that a China-bound F. Scott Fitzgerald might have penned (when "gay" had a different meaning from what it does today), and Crow is not entirely able to extricate himself from the biases of his age - this was a time when it was still fashionable to be racist. It is a China peopled entirely by expat bachelors and families, bored bridge-playing wives, their China "boy" servants, amahs, and anonymous kitchen hands. Not a single fleshed-out Chinese person is described in the entire book, nor a single one even named, apart from the brief, touching mention in the final pages of one "Ching," a servant of Crow's hastily delivering some food as he and his family flee the Japanese attack. The remaining cast of hazy Chinese occupy the narrative background as ciphers, as so many shadowy and inscrutable Fu Manchus.

We do note changes in prejudices and attitudes. Before the First World War, when Shanghai was divided into the French, British and American concessions and effectively walled off from the rest of the city, the parks there had signs forbidding entrance to "Dogs and Chinese" (I presume the signs were in Chinese as well as English). It would never have occurred to anyone on either side to extend social intercourse beyond business relations or transactional necessities, not surprising considering the "very large class [of foreigners in China] who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people." After the war and start of the Republic, things began to relax and there was more mutual curiosity and gesturing across the cultural divide. But the Chinese remained as unknowable as ever. Here Crow succeeds with his knack for the telling anecdote, even when it doesn't reflect too well on the author himself. He relates without irony how he was once picked up by a taxi driver whom he failed to recognize he had previously employed as his personal chef of four years! Or the bizarre methods of communication designed to keep personal relations impersonal, such as between this American bachelor and his servant: "Seated at his breakfast table he would strike the table bell as a signal to put the eggs in boiling water and, watch in hand, would strike it again when it was time to take them out."

Even in its heyday of excitement and notoriety, gay Shanghai, the Paris of the East, seemingly had very little to do with China. The foreign community was too busy with their ponies, polo and racing matches, golf courses and drinking and yachting clubs to be much bothered with the Chinese. Crow spends considerable space detailing the controversies preoccupying the exclusive foreigner clubs - the restrictions on proper dress and the knotting of ties, the election of new members to a club, the etiquette of buying rounds of drinks. And yet it is these particulars that are oddly fascinating in their very remoteness to our own experience in present-day China, with the easy interaction of foreigners and locals meeting online or at Starbucks or in the workplace, and the burgeoning cohabitation and intermarriage between foreigners and Chinese.

Walls do remain in entrenched attitudes among many Chinese and foreigners even today: the parents who forbid their daughter to marry a foreigner (and vice versa), locals who are easily whipped up into anti-foreigner nationalist hysteria, foreign expats who after many years in the country can't count to ten in Chinese or remember how to say their Chinese-assigned name. One quote from the book could be lifted out and inserted into any current Western account of China, as we all know expats like this: "The foreigner was rarely tempted to try Chinese food and many of them lived a lifetime in China without every tasting roast duck or sweet-and-sour pork."

[Eveline Chao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am actually reading a 1940 First Edition my friend bought and not the recently published one from this listing, so no Paul French forward. But anyway, this is my first Carl Crow and it's amazing so far.

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Finished and it was still amazing. There were so many passages that felt like they could have been written yesterday regarding dynamics between foreigners and Chinese, foreigners' habits, Chinese habits, etc. And even a part about how much Chinese people love ketchup. (Which nowadays seems most evident in China in the number of times I see people slather it all over pizza.)

The most fascinating chapter to me was about how finances worked in the Shanghai overseas community. Because international currency fluctuated so much, foreigners signed "chits" instead of carrying money, which would get tallied up every month and sent as a bill to the Chinese compradore who managed their business.

I know it wasn't the thing to do back then, and not Carl Crow's thing either way, but I do wish there'd been more personal narrative to the book. In the very last chapter he describes what it was like being evacuated from Shanghai when the invasion started, and then it ends abruptly when I would have happily followed him into an additional 300 pages of full-on memoir.

Definitely a fair bit of casual racism in the book too but, you know, it's the 1930s so whatever.

Some boring chapters in the middle but giving this 5 stars anyway.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before the August 1937 Japanese attack on Shanghai (the wider Sino-Japanese war had already started in early July with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident), Carl Crow's advertising business seemed to be entering an era of prosperity. He had lived in Shanghai's International Settlement for over 25 years. The worldwide Great Depression was still biting at him. Yet 1937 seemed to be a turnaround year. Then, it all crumbled around him. Crow made his way out on an American evacuation ship going to the Philippines. He lost his business and most of his accumulated savings, not to mention his home and the Chinese servants he says he had come to regard as family. Eventually, Crow would make his way back into China and to the wartime capital of China, Chungking. Foreign Devils documents his time in Shanghai, while providing a rather interesting connections oriented theme of Chinese culture and history.

Reading Foreign Devils is to enter a world unimaginable today. Shanghai's International Settlement was a center for a mixture of nationalities, with the British, Americans, and French predominant, and a Chinese servant class also in abundance. Everyone lived amid strict class and racial distinctions. Crow himself compares things to the civilization of the pre-Civil War South in the United States.

Being a bit of a social crusader, Crow writes as a critic of this Shanghai system, even as he looks back on it nostalgically. Indeed, it is clear that there are three things that Carl Crow loves. In order, they are the International Settlement of Shanghai, Chinese people, and China. Yes, he mostly expresses himself in a paternalistic way. But in just about every comparison he makes between China and the Chinese and Americans and the US, it is the latter that come out lacking. Such is never more clear than towards the end of the book, when Crow describes the visit of two American congressional delegations. The Americans steal everything but the hotel towels (maybe they stole those, too), according to Crow, including silverware, place settings, and porcelain. And they fight over costly gifts presented to them, with each congressman and his entourage trying to cheat the others. Meanwhile, the rest of the Europeans in the city also maintain a clear color divide that has very little room for mixing with Chinese other than as house servants.

In truth, Crow's attitude is typical of a certain sort of expatriate, especially one who really only has the experience of one particular place over a long period of time. He's a basher. But not only of the country in which he lives but of his fellow expatriates as well. He simply cannot keep his mouth shut whatever the topic. And all the while posing as someone above it all who keeps track of both sides' weaknesses. In essence, he is the expatriate "wise man," the guy who has figured it all out and cannot wait to give "advice." I see it all around me every day, where I live in Southeast Asia. The expatriatus dinosaurosipid is ready to comment, criticize, laugh, and smirk at everything from immigration, the country's government, and especially the stupid fellow expatriates who haven't got all the bases covered the way he has with private health insurance, large multiple pensions, demand for under the table work, and success in the stock market, all while posting continuously to expatriate websites.

Sure, that's harsh. And Carl Crow actually isn't all that. But he made the species possible. Meanwhile, Crow's own book is well written in the convincing style of a journalist turned ad-man. He does give a pretty thorough history of the International Settlement and what made it tick. That he did so from an entitled perspective shouldn't discredit his observations. If he has a racial angle, then it should be remembered that so did/does everyone else in East Asia and Southeast Asia. If you're looking for kumbaya moments, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, et. al. just might not be the place for you. Crow recognized that.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authentic and emphatic rendering of life in China in the golden 20ies. Carl Crow clearly loved the country and its people and he explains the special circumstances of how east met west in the 19th century and how this encounter created one of the worlds greatest cities in the former marshlands along the Huangpu river. The Japanese invasion was the ultimate disruption of this prospering and liberal society. Now more than 70 years later Shanghai is again one of the worlds leading cities and Carl Crows insights have gained a new meaning.