Knowledge Is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

1. Shanghailanders

In the mid-1930s the American artist Eva Dunlap painted a map of Shanghai, showing the way to her friend Florence Ayscough’s home, the Grass Hut, at 72 Penang Road (now Anyuan Road) (Figure 2). On her map Dunlap called the house ‘Mecca’—a destination for innumerable seekers, and a place she had been welcomed, first as a stranger, then as a close friend. In Shanghai Ayscough had become a discerning host, known not so much for lavish entertainment or the social equity of her guest list (there were plenty of establishments in Shanghai to meet these desires) but instead for the calibre of her conversation, the depth of her knowledge, and her generosity in sharing it. Her guests found her, quite simply, an inspiration. In the room where she entertained she displayed a bowl of pebbles gathered from the Nanjing hills. Her guests seemed to find her as refreshing and enlightening as these ‘eye-washing stones’ in clear water. How much of our knowledge is shaped by the places we inhabit? Eva Dunlap’s cheerfully idiosyncratic map of Shanghai provides many pointers as to how Ayscough acquired hers. These are the streets and landmarks that formed the backdrop to her life in China, and to the lives of the expatriate readers who were her 1 Shanghailanders Guns, Gardens and Long-gone Houses 8 Knowledge Is Pleasure Figure 2 Eva Wyman Dunlap, drawing of a map of Shanghai, after a painting by the artist. Reproduced by permission of Dorothea Mordan. 9 Shanghailanders initial audience. But human interactions with place are reciprocal. Shanghai helped form Florence Ayscough, but she and her family also made an impact on the city that was their home over a period of 70 years. Dunlap’s map, then, seems a good starting point from which to explore Ayscough’s life. Shanghai’s spectacular riverfront, the Bund, is the obvious place of embarkation. A painting dating from 1867–68 depicts the Bund’s extraordinary development since 1842, when Shanghai had become one of the five Treaty Ports, opened to British trade and residents who lived in the city under British law and their own administration (extraterritoriality). Twenty five years later, this painting portrays a handsome sweep of buildings fronting the western bank of the Huangpu River, which is bustling with steamships and sailing craft, some under the ensign of the Royal Navy.1 The breeze moves with soot and the snap of white sails. Between the larger ships scuttle the tenders and tugs that would later remind Ayscough, as a child watching the same scene, of industrious black beetles. The British Consulate presides at the northern tip, a rather modest bulwark for the financial and trading institutions muscling into line to its south. It is clear that commerce instructs governance . The city’s major Western shapers are there: Jardine, Matheson and Co., and David Sassoon and Sons, both initially major opium dealers; Russell and Co., the American shipping firm and Dent, Beale and Co., traders in silk and tea (though both earlier opium dealers); the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and the Oriental Bank, both prestigious British financial institutions; and the bastion of elite British male social life, the Shanghai Club. Two buildings north of the Shanghai Club on the corner of the Bund and Canton Road (now Guangdong Road) is Wheelock and Company’s auction house. In the painting it is a sturdy, blondecoloured building, but in reality its solidity was a fiction. Already 10 Knowledge Is Pleasure by the 1860s it had become an anachronism, as the Bund evolved from a dockyard lined with warehouses and merchants’ living quarters to the site of powerful banks. The warehouses and auction rooms were shuffled behind the Bund; the Wheelock building was soon to move south to the French Bund. Its disappearance from its former position, though, did not signal any reversal of fortune. By the time Florence was born into this family, the company had brought the Wheelocks great fortune and social stature. Not that they had come from insignificant beginnings to create themselves anew in Shanghai. Florence Ayscough’s father, Thomas Reed Wheelock (c.1843–1920), belonged to a prominent Nova Scotia family that could trace its ancestors to the Reverend Ralph Wheelock, a Puritan emigrant to Massachusetts in 1637.2 A branch of this family moved to Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century. Although most were initially farmers, some established themselves in...