1

DRAFT: Please, do not circulate or cite without author’s permission.

Elizabeth LaCouture

Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies and History, Colby College

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

elacouture@gmail.com

February 26, 2013

Designing Empire from the Inside Out:

House and Home in Republican-era (1911- 1949) Tianjin, China

This is the fifth chapter from my manuscript – Domestic Empires: House, Home, and

Cosmopolitan Cultures in Tianjin, China (1860-1960) – which charts how Chinese urbanites, at

the turn of the twentieth century, transformed the late imperial household into the modern

cosmopolitan home. To capture how experiences of family, house, and home changed in

twentieth century China, Domestic Empires focuses on the northern Chinese treaty-port city

Tianjin as a case. Tianjin was “opened” to foreign trade after the Second Opium War, eventually

becoming home to more foreign concessions, foreign-controlled settlements of Chinese

municipal land, than any other Chinese city. Thus, this chapter examines how Chinese people

designed house and home at the intersection of multiple foreign empires while rooted in local

Chinese soil.

2

When residents of Tianjin chose a house, whether intentional or not, they also selected a

set of spatial politics. Choosing to live in a particular district or concession meant agreeing to

live according to that political vision of spatial order and architectural design, whether along the

tree-lined streets of the British Concession’s garden city, or in the shadow of the new Chinese

district’s monumental civic institutions. Moreover, when Chinese families moved into a house,

the floor plan prescribed a certain social vision for everyday life whether in the separate private

bedrooms of an Italian villa or from a cosmologically designed bay of a Chinese courtyard house.

These politics of design were cemented in brick, wood and concrete, and Chinese individuals

could not re-route roads or tear down load bearing walls or beams; however, they could re-

fashion facades, decorate interior spaces and design furnishings.

This chapter examines practices of designing house and home in twentieth-century

Tianjin, and argues that as Chinese people navigated the multiple politics of style in treaty-port

Tianjin, they formed ideas about China’s place in the world and their own social position within

the city. Urban planning and architecture made the abstract politics of Tianjin’s multiple foreign

empires concrete, with imperial-era courtyard buildings in the old Chinese city co-existing

alongside Japanese modern, French Beaux-Arts and Georgian British. Thus, Tianjin urbanites

experienced the politics of multiple foreign empires everyday simply by taking a walk. These

many politics of style, however, also created gaps which allowed Chinese people to create their

own modern style and likewise form their own self-understandings on and for the global stage.

If style was political, then taste was personal and determined by factors such as

educational background, cultural knowledge, social network and the economic ability to

3

consume.1 In designing the modern home, taste could be a form of distinction, a means to signal

that a house’s residents belonged to a particular social class.2 But in treaty-port Tianjin

understandings of social class were still unclear. Japan historian Jordan Sand argues that a

growing bourgeois class in modern Japan enabled the rise of the modern home there.3 In China,

the modern home enabled a global vision of middle class to materialize on Chinese soil. In other

words, Chinese people designed the social space of the bourgeois home, before a self-

consciously bourgeois social class even developed, and designing that social space led to new

forms of social distinction.

The colonial capitalist system in Chinese cities like Tianjin sparked a rupture in Chinese

social relations, not only in helping to usher in the end of late imperial status hierarchies that had

centered around the imperial civil service exam, but by offering up new sites like the modern

home to explore new gendered and status identities. During this period of economic and political

transition there were no clear delineations of middle class, but, the modern house and home

became sites for Chinese people to experiment with social distinctions, leveraging different

forms of economic, educational, social and cultural capital, to create a common set of tastes that

signaled belonging to a particular social group.

This chapter, like the book, focuses broadly on Tianjin’s urban elites, the people who

bought or rented modern houses and designed modern homes. If we look at social status

1 Leora Auslander argues that while style is often political, taste is an aesthetic value formed in “a complex

interaction of desires for emulation, distinction, and solidarity.” Linking the story of French furniture consumption

to the historical trajectory of democratization, Auslander claims that furniture style in France began as a

representation of political power under the Old Regime, became “social power” with the consolidation of bourgeois

political identity, and ended with mass consumerism in the latter half of the twentieth century. In Auslander, Taste

and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Late imperial Chinese

design might be compared to Old Regime France in that furniture, objects, and art came to be classified according to

the dynasty in which they were produced. However, historical comparisons to France end with the collapse of the

Qing in 1911 and the rise of a foreign imperialist presence on Chinese soil. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Nice, trans., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1984). 3 Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-

1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

4

according to a household’s relation to production, or to the male household head’s profession,

then this group can be divided into militarist warlords and former Qing officials, compradors and

bankers, civil servants and office workers. Turning our lens to look at taste illuminates a more

complex picture of shifting social strata with warlords purchasing large villas in Tianjin’s foreign

concessions, and the educated daughters of civil servants actually knowing how to design and

manage the modern home within these new houses. During a period of shifting social classes, the

ability to perform social practices could be just as important as income to signaling an

individual’s membership in a particular social group.4

To understand how Tianjin urban elites designed the modern house and home on and for

a global stage this chapter begins by introducing the many politics of architectural style that

dotted Tianjin’s landscape, and then looks at how Chinese urbanites drew from this design palate

to create a new modern Tianjin style. The designers of Tianjin’s modern home were not simply

the people who lived in them, but designers also included experts like women’s magazine editors,

furniture designers, and manufacturers. Thus, the chapter next introduces how furniture

manufactures marketed their products to consumers, and how women’s magazines guided their

readers in new knowledge about these furnishings. Finally, modern home would never have

materialized without the people who made its furnishings. The chapter concludes with a look at

these people through the story of a single object – the Tianjin carpet. The designs on Tianjin

carpets were prime examples of Tianjin modern style, but the social life of this object tells a

history beyond signification. Various actors encountered the object at each stage of its life, from

production to distribution and consumption, with each actor imbuing a different meaning on it.

The social life of the Tianjin carpet not only illustrates the reach of the Tianjin modern home

4 For an understanding of how shifting class relations led to class anxieties during this period see period novel

Chang Hen-Shui, William A. Lyell, translator, Shanghai Express: A Thirties Novel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press, 1997).

5

beyond its walls into the city, China, and the world, but it also illuminates the social and

economic inequalities that made the rise of the global bourgeois home possible in Tianjin and

elsewhere.

The politics of style

The urban landscape of twentieth-century Tianjin allowed the city’s residents to

experience local, national and global politics through style. Modern architectural design was

political, and shaped through different political agendas with foreign empires building their

concessions, investors erecting banks and hotels, missionaries designing universities and the first

generation of professional Chinese architects debating what national Chinese style should look

like. In a rapidly growing city like Tianjin, the discursive debates about planning and style

quickly materialized in the built environment, and it was not long before Chinese people in

Tianjin could experience the politics of modern style simply by strolling through a foreign

concession, stepping onto a foreign campus, or visiting a bank. Tianjin’s residents witnessed

multiple politics of style, from each foreign concession’s municipal hall and consulate to the

Chinese rooflines of university buildings and the beaux-arts facades of foreign banks. As this

chapter will argue, the multiple politics of style presented a palate for Chinese people to design

from, but also exposed gaps in which Chinese people could create their own sense of modern

style, which they projected onto the global stage. In other words, Tianjin urbanites did not simply

consume empire; they also helped to design their role in it.

Designing empire from the inside out, Tianjin urbanites negotiated the multiple politics

of style that surrounded them. Urban plans and architecture, much like colonial treaties, were

discursive constructs, produced according to a certain set of political or moral ideals that in turn

6

projected to the street. Architecture allowed people to witness and experience political power on

the ground in very concrete ways, and as this chapter will later show, design, unlike treaties,

opened up space in which Chinese people could join the discursive discussion. But while a

Chinese housewife choose the furnishings for her living room, she did not design the house she

lived in. The architecture of the modern house required a particular expertise in planning,

engineering and building, an expertise held by the new professions of builder and architect.

Moreover, this expertise became connected to larger systems of political power – the concession,

the church, the state and the investor. Architectural design was in many ways a top down

political process.

In her analysis of French colonial architecture, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright

shows how architecture illuminates a connection between culture and politics. According to

Wright, every ornamental detail on a colonial building and each municipal zoning regulation

pointed to a greater political agenda.5 The French colonial political agenda was split between two

approaches: assimilation and association. Assimilation argued for the superiority of French and

European culture, while association respected cultural difference.6 An assimilationist approach

toward architecture in Hanoi meant that government offices, the opera house, hotels, and

residences were all built in grand European style. On the other hand, an associationalist approach

in Morocco meant that colonial builders took the local architectural heritage into consideration,

constructing buildings with pointed arches, tilework, and whitewashed walls.7

5 Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1991), 7-8. 6 Raymond F. Betts argues that assimilation, or the idea that people in the colonies could become “French” through

the civilizing process, governed nineteenth-century French colonial policy, whereas France in the twentieth century

increasingly turned toward a colonial policy of association, or the idea that colonial subjects were partners with,

rather than citizens of, the metropole. Conversely, Wright argues that the policies and practices of the two schools

were much more closely intertwined. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Wright, The Politics of Design, 74. 7 Wright, The Politics of Design.

7

The politics of architectural design in Tianjin was not clearly delineated according to

assimilation and association, largely because colonial policy was never defined as either. Even

when concession architecture appeared to be assimilationist it was not part of a larger colonial

political agenda to school the local Chinese in the style and practices of the home country.

Foreign empires in Tianjin did not consider their concessions to be colonial settlements, but

rather commercial extensions of empire. Imperial powers like France and Japan, for example,

never attempted to transform Tianjin’s local Chinese population into subjects of empire.

In a city of multiple foreign empires, the local Chinese population was not the only

audience of concession architecture. With a competition that mirrored the rivalry among nation-

states on the global stage, concession governments designed their districts with other concessions

in mind. As they planned out their concession, the Italians, for example, were not simply trying

to project authority over a Chinese landscape, but they were also broadcasting Italian power and

modernity through design to the French and British across the river. Several concession

governments commissioned municipal halls to be built in national style from the beaux-arts

building in the French Concession to castle-like Gordon Hall in the British, while the Japanese as

late-comers to European-style imperialism, designed all but two municipal buildings, a Shinto

shrine and an exhibition hall, in European style.

The nature of colonial real estate development in Tianjin further enhanced this sense of

competition. Unlike in some French colonial cities where the colonial government established an

urban planning department or even a housing bureau to oversee the design and construction of

houses, in Tianjin, concession governments turned to real estate developers to build housing.8

Developers and concession governments competed to make their district desirable to wealthy

Chinese, tax-paying investors or renters. While foreign municipal governments may not have

8 Wright, The Politics of Design.

8

designed their concessions to indoctrinate the local Chinese population into subjects of empire,

they planned their districts to attract investors’ capital. Thus, the British Municipal Council

declared itself to be a British Garden City on Chinese soil, while the Italians set zoning laws to

ensure that its residential community would only be built in European style.

Tianjin’s concession governments never commissioned associationalist buildings, but as

elsewhere in China, American religious and educational institutions proposed new Chinese

associationalist designs. The initial pioneer of this architecture was an American architect named

Henry Murphy. In 1914, Yale-in-China commissioned Murphy to design their Changsha campus,

and Murphy later designed several buildings for other universities and mission colleges and the

YMCA.9 Murphy’s buildings put a Chinese façade on an American civilizing or Christianizing

mission. Or rather a Chinese roof, as Murphy understood the essence of Chinese architecture to

be the tiled roof. In actuality, the principles of Chinese architectural design emphasized post and

beam construction, modularity, and feng-shui planning. Roofs were regional, and Murphy based

his designs on a northern roofline.

Murphy’s designs inspired the first generation of Chinese professional architects, many

of whom trained in the States and went on to integrate Murphy’s design ethos into their own

work. Lu Yanzhi, who was born in Tianjin, graduated from Cornell University with a degree in

architecture in 1918 and began his career in the “Oriental Department” of Murphy’s US-based

firm, Murphy and Dana. Lu later returned to China to head up the firm’s Shanghai office, and

eventually started his own firm. Though Lu continued to work for foreign clients, he also began

to convert this foreign, Chinese-style institutional architecture into a national design, with his

9 Jeffrey W. Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914-1935 (Sha Tin, N.T.,

Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001); Jeffrey W. Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870-2000 (New

York: Routledge, 2003).Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern

China (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002).

9

most well-known design the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing being completed shortly after

his death in 1929.

Whether providing a Chinese-friendly face for a foreign institution or forging a new

national style, this new associationalist architecture incorporated similar elements: a northern

Chinese roofline with simple, extended eaves and glazed tiles. Rooflines came to epitomize

modern Chinese architectural style, dominating debates on architectural aesthetics among

Chinese architects through the 1950s.10

Focusing on the decorative top rather than the entire

socio-spatial and technological package, architects seemed to misunderstand the core meaning of

Chinese building as a technological system of post-and-beam construction, a technology that

allowed for modularity and standardization across regions and types of buildings and blurred

distinctions between public and private buildings. But Chinese architects were very much aware

of the historical foundations of Chinese architecture facilitated by the rediscovery and

subsequent publication in 1925 of a Song Dynasty imperial architectural manual the Yingzao

fazhi.11

Architect and teacher Liang Sicheng led the movement to study Yingzao fazhi alongside

existing imperial architecture in order to understand China’s architectural past. Turning Chinese

late imperial architecture into a modern academic subject, Liang translated what he called “the

grammar of Chinese architecture” into the “universal” language and drawings of modern

architectural knowledge.12

In other words, Liang applied the beaux-arts universal architectural

language he had studied under Paul Cret at University of Pennsylvania to Chinese architectural

10

Rowe, Architectural Encounters. 11

Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 144. 12

Liang Sicheng, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Development of Its Structural System

and the Evolution of Its Types, edited by Wilma Fairbank (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984),

xvi. Many of Liang’s studies of traditional Chinese architecture were published posthumously, including a Chinese

language study of the Yingzao fazhi and an English illustrated history of Chinese architecture. Liang Sicheng,

Yingzao fashi zhushi , 營造法式註釋 (Beijing : Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, Xinhua shudian, 1983).

10

designs in order to establish Chinese architecture as a technical system on par with the West.13

In

doing so, however, Liang mapped a Western architectural understanding of public and private

onto Chinese buildings, thus, the courtyard houses that surrounded Beijing’s palace never

received meticulous attention like the palaces they surrounded.

China’s first generation of architects, Chinese and foreign alike, largely ignored housing.

In 1935, the editor of The Builder, a Shanghai-based trade journal, criticized Chinese

professional architects for debating the merits of Chinese architecture, while ignoring housing.

According to the editor, architects had only “superficial knowledge of palaces and temples” and

did not understand what society needed in terms of housing. He argued that if Chinese society

were to progress, housing needed to be improved to protect against the elements and disease and

to promote modern hygiene. 14

In other words, housing could be a form of social engineering.

But while The Builder may have called for housing reform, very few of its readers (professional

builders) took up the call. While architects designed new Chinese style public buildings, they

never proposed Chinese-style housing. Thus, faculty at Tianjin’s Nankai University may have

held classes in a modern Chinese-style architect-designed building, but they lived in Western-

style bungalows.15

Moreover, while a few developers experimented with middle class housing in

Shanghai’s suburbs, in Tianjin, government planners did not propose middle class housing until

after WWII, when the city became wholly Chinese once more.16

Living in a city with a patchwork of architectural styles, Tianjin urbanites negotiated

multiple politics of design from foreign concession governments and civilizing universities to

13

Li Shiqiao, “Writing a Modern Chinese Architectural History: Liang Sicheng and Liang Qichao,” Journal of

Architectural Education 56, No. 1 (2002): 35-45. 14

Jianzhu yuekan 2.6 (June 1934). 15

Nankai faculty housing is described in Eleanor McCallie Cooper and William Liu, Grace: An American Woman

in China, 1934-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2003). 16In 1934, Shanghai’s New China Bank (Xinhua yinhang) proposed a housing development named “New China

Village (Xinhua yicun),” located in the Guomindang government’s new Shanghai development. 中國建築

Zhongguo jianzhu (Chinese architect) (Feb. 1934), 10.

11

Nationalist architects and real estate investors; not to mention the Qing dynasty’s politics of style

that still lingered in the old Chinese district of the city. But unlike in many other colonial cities,

the multiple competing politics of style and their neglect of housing opened up a space for

residents of Tianjin themselves to design modern style at home. Thus, while the French

established a Bureau of Economic Housing in Madagascar in 1929 to regulate even what kinds

of building materials should be used in building new houses, in Tianjin they contracted much of

the concession’s building to the Belgian bank Credit Foncier.17

Tianjin’s colonial capitalist urban

planning presented multiple politics of style, but it also exposed gaps that allowed personal taste

to squeeze in between the politics.

Taste and personal identity

To understand how Tianjin’s residents navigated the multiple politics of style to design

their houses, imagine visiting the British Concession in 1924. You are strolling along the

sidewalk, and under the trees, on Glasgow Road. Once you reach the corner with Singapore

Road, you cannot help but notice a unique, newly built house. (See Figure 1.) The three-story

modernist box shape with its curved balconies and alternating stripes of white plaster and red

brick are strikingly handsome, but not unlike similar modernist, almost Bauhaus-like style,

houses that were constructed in the British Concession around the same time. What makes you

take notice of this particular house, as you raise your eyes up to the top, is the Chinese pavilion

with a yellow tile roof. If you are fortunate enough to be invited to the rooftop to take a closer

look, or to enjoy a cup of tea, you find white, modernist, boxy columns supporting the pavilion

17

According to Gwendolyn Wright, the French launched their plan to redesign Madagascar’s capital city in 1918

with every street and district laid out carefully. The plan even proposed the type of housing that should be built –

single family rather than apartments. In 1927, the colonial administration established a Bureau of Architecture and

Urbanism, and two years later they added the Bureau of Economic Housing. See Wright, The Politics of Design,

273-88.

12

roof and decorative geometric metalwork surrounding its base. This unique design in its

juxtaposed imperial-era yellow tile with modernist white plaster would certainly have caught

people’s eye in 1920s Tianjin, and they may also have wondered how this house could have been

built in a foreign concession with some of the strictest zoning laws in the city, laws that

explicitly forbid the construction of Chinese architectural style. In fact this was the only house in

the British Concession with Chinese architectural details visible to the street.

How might a Tianjin urbanite passing by this house in 1924 have understood this

architectural style, and what might the owner have intended by commissioning this design?

Viewed in the context of the politics of concession architectural style, the house could be

understood as a British associationalist attempt to control the local Chinese population through

adopting Chinese style, or even an individual British colonial’s Orientalist consumption of

empire. But the house actually belonged to a Chinese man named Chen Guangyuan, a militarist

warlord turned real estate investor. Chen commissioned this house, built in 1924, around the time

that Tianjin’s concession real estate market was taking off, and when he chose the design for his

house, Chen may have been inspired by a similar home in the Italian Concession, an Italianate

villa adorned by two rooftop pavilions one Romanesque in style, the other Chinese. (See Figure

2.) The house in the Italian Concession belonged to a warlord named Bao Guiqing, who

eventually headed a northern railroad company, and most likely chose to live in the Italian

Concession due to its proximity to the railroad station. Bao bought the house in the early 1920s,

renovating it to his taste, and based on the difference in architectural details of the pavilions and

the main house, the pavilions were likely part of this later renovation.

There are no records of whether Chen or his architect based their design on Bao’s design,

nor are there any similar examples of public architecture in Tianjin today from which either man

13

might have been inspired. While a Chinese-tiled pavilion atop a roof might seem reminiscent of

Murphy or Lu’s associationalist designs, these rooflines did not reference China’s palace or

temple architectural history; instead, pavilions were garden structures, sites for personal

contemplation or rest among nature. Indeed, in deciding to construct a garden on their rooftops,

both men were summoning up a centuries old practice in which scholar gardens were sites of

literati taste and masculine identity.18

But while literati-scholars of late imperial China often

obtained elite status through their mastery of imperial sanctioned texts, neither Chen nor Bao

were learned scholars. Instead, their economic capital enabled them to express their elite status,

through individual taste, purchasing a large house in Tianjin’s foreign concessions and erecting a

garden pavilion on its roof.

Rooftops were not the only place where garden pavilions could be found in Tianjin’s

concessions. Down the road from Chen’s house, the British Concession’s Victoria Park included

a Chinese-style pavilion that provided shelter for Chinese nannies looking after foreign children.

The British Concession may have forbid building in Chinese-style, and they may have

constructed municipal and consular buildings to project a British national style, but they

permitted a Chinese-style pavilion in the public park. While individual houses signified the

masculine identity of the homeowner and municipal buildings represented the power of the men

who ruled over the district, parks were sites for feminized pursuits of leisure and childrearing.

Indeed, female spaces, not only in Tianjin, but especially in the metropole, became sites to

consume the objects and styles of empire. Looking at the American home in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, for example, US historian Kristin Hoganson terms the practice of

18

Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

14

incorporating the spoils of empire into interior design “cosmopolitan domesticity.”19

Like other

historians of North America and Europe, who look at the consumption of empire at home during

this period, Hoganson argues that everyday practices, such as interior decorating, consuming

cosmetics and soap, or reading travel novels are just as integral to understanding empire as

diplomatic treaties and trade agreements, and that by consuming the world at home, American

women celebrated empire through everyday practices which reinforced the racial, national and

gendered imperial imperatives of empire.20

If the cosmopolitan domesticity of North American and European women, who lived at

the edges of empire, reinforced the power of foreign empires, what did cosmopolitan domesticity

mean for Chinese men like Chen and Bao who lived at the very heart of the foreign imperial

order? When American women decorated their parlors with an Oriental rug from Tianjin, or

Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen, they were reinforcing a global power structure through

Orientalist consumption that feminized the East. Placing Chinese style on the architectural

façade, Chen and Bao turned the Orientalist paradigm on its head. Taking the East out of the

feminized interior, and installing it on the masculine façade, Chinese style became masculine and

Chen and Bao’s Chinese pavilions atop their foreign-style houses projected the power and wealth

that some Chinese men could wield over the colonial landscape. The colonial capitalist system

relied on the capital of warlord turned businessmen to develop the concession’s infrastructure

and its businesses; thereby, empowering these two men to transform their economic capital and

political connections into an expression of personal taste that defied the strictest zoning laws in

the city.

19

Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 20

See for example Allison Blunt, “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925”

Volume: 24, Issue: 4, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1999), Pages: 421-440; Anne

McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995).

15

Chen and Bao may have chosen to juxtapose Chinese and Western architectural elements

in their houses’ facades, but they did not invent this style. In fact, in districts with more lenient or

non-existent zoning regulations, the mixing of styles was expressed across a variety of housing

stock. In Tianjin’s old Chinese city, for example, a courtyard house that most likely belonged to

a local Tianjin resident with a similar economic standing to Chen and Bao included a Western

style villa as a bay of a Chinese-style courtyard house.21

(See Figures 3-8.) The foreign poured

concrete used to embellish the house’s western-style exterior suggests that it was constructed in

the 1920s. The grey brick that the house was constructed in, however, was thoroughly Chinese,

fired through a different oxidation process than foreign red brick, and assembled according to

Chinese bricklaying techniques that emphasized a uniform, seamless wall rather than exposed

mortar.22

The combination of Chinese and European building materials was also evident in the

architectural plans of this Chinese-Western courtyard house. In keeping with neighboring

courtyard houses, the house was enclosed by a high brick wall, but the main entrance to the

compound was located to the east instead of the south, which would have been more appropriate

geomantically. And rather than a post-and-lintel doorway, typical of the surrounding courtyard

21

Today the home is a restaurant where staff claim that the building is “over one hundred years old.” However,

building materials, such as decorative concrete that was not used in Tianjin until the 1920s, suggest that the house

could not possibly have been built that early. While there is no official record of who owned the house, the

restaurant claims that it was at one time home to the fourth concubine of warlord turned Beiyang President Cao Kun.

According to Liu Haiyan of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, the home was most likely built by a merchant

or businessman. It is unlikely that a warlord would have let a concubine live in the Chinese section of the city during

the 1920s, a period of violent unrest and feuding between warlords. In fact, during this time, many warlords

purchased or built homes for their families and concubines in the concessions, where foreign governments offered

security. Cao Kun himself lived in the Italian Concession. See also Elizabeth LaCouture, “Tianjin’s Western-Style

Chinese Villa,” China Heritage Quarterly No. 21 (March 2010). 22

Most urban courtyard houses in Beijing and Tianjin tended to be built from gray bricks, whereas even as late as

the 1930s, less than a quarter of rural dwellings had brick walls. Knapp, China’s Traditional Rural Architecture, 69.

Makers of Chinese gray bricks reduced oxidation in the final stages by adding water. The finest bricklaying

technique first ground the individual bricks to fit a joint and then applied mortar from the inside, making the seams

almost invisible from the outside of the wall. Ivan Chi-ching Ho, The Study of the Chinese (Grey) Brickwork in the

Vernacular Buildings in Hong Kong (MA thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2002).

16

homes, the main entryway was octagonal, a modest opening that was more in keeping with an

entrance into a Chinese garden than an entry-gate into a high-status house. While the inhabitants

of neighboring courtyard houses most likely projected their status to the outside through the

materials, carvings, and postings on their doorway, this building projected the owner’s status

much in the same way that Chen and Bao’s villas in the foreign concessions did – through its

towering architectural façade. Indeed, the architectural centerpiece of the house, a two-story

dome and spire, was visible from the street and probably towered over neighboring one-story

courtyard houses at the time of its construction.

But unlike villas in the foreign concessions, which could at most add a Chinese pavilion,

this domestic compound included a sprawling complex of mixed Chinese and European features.

In addition to the Western-style courtyard at the main entryway, the compound included a

second courtyard to the south that was constructed in Chinese style. The Chinese courtyard,

framed by the villa to the north and a Chinese post-and-beam building to the south, was

surrounded by a veranda covered in a tile roof, and adorned with wooden latticework. An

octagonal door on the Western side of the Chinese-style veranda, which recalled the octagonal

entrance to the compound, opened onto a European-style arcade of arches and pillars, decorated

with ornate capitals, made mostly from concrete and plaster. These arcades led to a glass-domed

conservatory in the back garden, which was topped by a spire identical to the one found atop the

dome on the main house. Viewed in the context of the entire complex, this building was not

simply a Western-style villa built in the old Chinese city. Rather, the villa was a single structure

in an architectural garden of Chinese- and European-styled structures.

In the Japanese concession, the mixing of styles was more subtle with Chinese design

elements adorning Western-style homes. One villa, for example, included red-painted wooden

17

doors carved in Chinese floral motifs and red wooden latticework on the gateway the street.

Tianjin’s new Chinese district included a cozy single-family bungalow hidden behind a high wall

reminiscent of the courtyard houses across the river, while down the road, a series of identical

alleyway houses, built by a real estate investor, used poured concrete to attach western-style

columns and ornate windowsills onto Chinese grey brick. (See Figure 9.) Thus, the juxtaposition

of Chinese and Western styles in architectural design and facades was not the exclusive taste of a

select few warlords, but part of a Chinese-initiated Tianjin modern style that spanned the elite

classes of the city.

Combining foreign and Chinese styles to make something new seems in many ways to be

similar to Homi Bhabha’s idea of hybridity – a colonial cultural crossover in which colonized

writers expressed themselves in the language and style of the colonizer, yet in doing so created

something new, thus displacing colonial authority.23

But unlike a typical colonial hybrid, in

which the two parts fused to form a single entity, I argue something different: that these

architectural examples were more properly a chimera: a collection of unique parts, all grafted

together while maintaining the integrity of each individual portion. Hybrid and chimera refer to

the science of cell fusion and grafting. A hybrid results from the fusion of dissimilar genetic

materials, while in a chimera, the two types of genetic material remain distinct. The Chimera is

also a mythic beast of multiple parts from ancient Greek mythology: the body of a lion, the head

of a goat, and the tail of a snake. This image of a chimera could apply to this architectural style

as well – a combination of Chinese and Western styles and tastes, each maintaining its own

integrity. And in this juxtaposition of Chinese and Western styles, Tianjin’s Chinese urbanites

23

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

18

produced a new modern Tianjin style that challenged the claims of foreign empires to aesthetic

authority over modern design.

Female taste

Chimeric design was not limited to architectural facades, it also appeared in discussions

and practices of interior design among Tianjin’s elite classes who combined new foreign

furnishings, like upholstered chairs, with Chinese accessories, like ink-painted hanging scrolls. If

the walls built the modern house, furnishings, interior decoration and everyday objects

transformed the interior into a home, and women were responsible for mastering the new

knowledge of home. As they designed the interior, women had to familiarize themselves with

new styles that signified modernity and new tastes that distinguished the family’s social identity,

as well as navigate new material objects that transformed cultural and social practices of

everyday life: light bulbs that extended daylight, bathtubs that enhanced bathing with new

commercial soaps and perfumes, and dining tables that brought families together for meals.

The interior design of the twentieth century Chinese urban home was increasingly

becoming a feminized practice, which was a change from late imperial China, when taste was

central to a literati man’s individual identity, and men published manuals on aesthetic design and

encyclopedias on household management.24

In the twentieth century, a rising commercial

popular press re-gendered this knowledge female, and women and family magazines became the

new manuals of household taste and management. Historians cannot always surmise who the

authors and editors of these ephemeral magazines were, and indeed many were men, or in some

cases, men writing under female pen names, but regardless of the writer, the magazine’s contents,

24

Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1991).

19

unless otherwise noted, were assumed to be woman’s knowledge, gendering expertise over the

modern household female.

The female-managed interior of the home signified social status differently than the

exterior of the house. While men leveraged economic or political capital to project individual or

family status through the façade of a house, women summoned up cultural and educational

capital to design the modern home. It was not enough to be able to consume the modern home,

women had to know how to consume. In other words, when it came to interior design, or

household management, the daughter of a warlord like Chen and Bao was not necessarily better

equipped than the daughter of a civil servant who had been educated in one of Tianjin’s several

new schools for girls. In fact, the knowledge of the interior provided by new school subjects like

domestic science and print material like women’s magazines and domestic manuals would have

enabled women and girls with a lower economic status to participate or imagine themselves as

members of the same or higher social status as the wives and daughters of wealthy men like

Chen and Bao.25

Thus, shifting our lens from the property of the house to the design of the home,

and from the economic and professional status of the male household head, to the educational

and cultural capital of women and girls, we find an even more complex and fluid picture of

social relations in colonial capitalist Tianjin.

The history of women’s magazines in China dates to the late nineteenth century, but the

first women’s magazine produced in Tianjin was published in 1923, around the same time that

Tianjin’s housing market was taking off. Published twice a month for one year, this magazine

titled Kuaile jiating or “happy home,” cost 25 cents per issue, or about half the daily wage of the

25

Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China

(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).

20

carpenters who built the modern house.26

Women needed a certain level of economic capital to

obtain access to information about the modern home, or they could summon up their social

capital to borrow an issue from a friend. A young woman might have formed her social capital in

one of the city’s new co-educational or girls’ schools. Schools opened up a new social space and

introduced new kinds of academic knowledge to young women and girls, but they did not

necessarily revolutionize female literacy since women had been reading and writing in the inner

chambers in imperial China.27

The girls who attended Tianjin’s new schools like their

grandmothers before them belonged to China’s elite. Women from the laboring classes, by

contrast, may have attended one of the night schools established by Tianjin government’s Social

Bureau, or they may have been illiterate; thus they lacked the economic, social and most likely

educational capital to read Kuaile jiating.28

The limited social reach of Chinese women’s

magazines defined their readers as members of a distinct social group, and suggested that even

when women may not have had the necessary economic capital to consume all the trappings of

the modern home, having the necessary social and educational capital to read about home in a

women’s magazine already distinguished them as part of a particular social group.

For women who could obtain and read a copy of Kuaile jiating, the pages opened up onto

a world of knowledge including content on cleaning, menu-planning, child-rearing, short stories

26

In 1927 a skilled carpenter in Beijing earned 75 cents per day, an unskilled carpenter 45 cents. Sidney D. Gamble,

“Peiping Family Budgets,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 152, China (Nov.,

1930), pp. 81-88. 27

See for example, Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century

China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 28

Scholars of Japanese women’s magazines have noted that factory girls in Japan read women’s magazines, sharing

issues among one another. See for example, Sarah Frederick, Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s

Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). On Tianjin night schools for workers

(male and female) see Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, Tianjin tebie shi shehuiju天津特別市社會局, Annual

Report (1929) and Minjiaoguan funu yinranban (The printing office of the people’s education), j113-107, TMA

(1939). While the Tianjin Social Bureau ran several schools, as late as the 1940s many workers signed their

company savings passbooks with a thumbprint, suggesting they were illiterate. Savings passbooks in collection of

author.

21

much like that which you might have found in American magazines at the time such as Ladies’

Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens. In fact, Kuaile jiating and magazines like it often

included translated articles from American magazines, features on the latest lifestyle trends in

Europe and photographs from Japan. You might say that women’s magazine like Kuaile jiating

put forth a new global vision of home. But Kuaile jiating was also connected to the local site

where it was published, and articles on home management and design traversed global and local.

The first issue of Kuaile jiating included an article on interior design with photographs of two

different rooms. 29

(See Figures 10 and 11.) The first room depicted “the arrangement of a

Western style library” and could have depicted an English country estate, a Tokyo suburban

home, or a Tianjin villa.30

Devoid of people, the photograph of the library allowed the reader to

enter the room and imagine herself inside this global fantasy of the modern home. The second

room, titled “a hall in the style of Chinese furnishings” was self-referentially local.

The accompanying text guided the reader as she explored the interior of the room

depicted in the photograph. The western-style library had a “natural ceiling” with exposed beams

from which a “Greek-style chandelier” hung. While the chandelier may have lit the room at night,

a large glass window provided natural sunlight to read by during the day, and three fireplaces, as

noted in the accompanying text, provided warmth on a cold northern winter afternoon. An

upholstered armchair and a chair with a high wooden back were placed facing one another by the

fireplace for warmth or for a chat. Indeed, this “library” may actually have been a room for

socializing or relaxing rather than reading; as the accompanying text suggests, the small seats in

29

Kuaile jiating (happy home) (Tianjin: Issue 1, January 1, 1923). 30

In his history of the home, Witold Rybczynski notes that English houses continued to be built and decorated in the

Georgian style of the eighteenth century well into the twentieth century as it epitomized the height of comfort in

English design. In fact, the arrangement of the library pictured in Kuaile jiating sounds nearly identical to

Rybczynski’s description of a typical Georgian-style library, with “easy chairs…set in front of the fireplace to create

a cozy corner” and “cut flowers and potted plants” as part of the decor. Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an

Idea (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987, 1986) 104,118.

22

front of the square table at the center of the room could easily be moved, allowing two or three

people to gather around the fire for conversation. While the text claims that books were present,

the photograph suggests otherwise; there are no books in the photo, let alone a bookshelf. In

place of books, the room is decorated with large framed paintings hung high on the wall,

decorative plates placed on the fireplace mantel, a vase of flowers on a table in the center of the

room, and a large carpet on the floor.

Rather than oil paintings, the Chinese hall featured an ink-painted hanging scroll hung

above a table displaying a potted plant. A large armchair was placed next to the table and

surrounded by a Chinese calligraphy couplet31

and two lamps – one hanging, one standing, and

both “fastened in silk thread.” A table and chair made of “famous Fujian lacquer” with a “luster

beyond compare” and other objects in the “ancient Chinese style” decorated the room. The text

noted that the room is “especially lively and elegant, while being solemn at the same time.”

While the text also claimed that the furnishing and decorations were all of “ancient Chinese

style,” the arrangement was distinctly modern. The crowding and cluttering of furniture, lamps,

artwork, and antiques, seemed to contrast late imperial Chinese design aesthetics with its

emphasis on geomantic symmetry and order. In a typical late imperial Chinese dwelling,

furniture and objects occupied particular places in the hall, leaving space around them that

accentuated the size and height of the room. Side tables flanked by wooden chairs were placed

against the side walls. The back wall (reserved for display or an altar) usually featured a high,

long table, adorned by a plant, a ceramic vase, or another object, with a scroll hanging above. A

table and chairs would often be in the center of the room. While the writer commenting on the

31

Couplets or duilian 對聯 are two complementary poetic or auspicious phrases written vertically in Chinese

characters on two long and narrow sheets of paper. They are always displayed together. They can be for temporary

display, like the couplets written on red paper and displayed on either side of a household’s door at Chinese New

Year, or they may be more permanent, written on high quality paper or silk and mounted on hanging scrolls like the

couplet in the picture.

23

photograph in Kuaile jiating noted that “everything appears in perfect order,” from a late

imperial eye, the room displayed complete pandemonium. With couplets clustered in a corner

instead of symmetrically displayed, and with multiple styles of seating and too many lamps for

such a small corner of a room, this Chinese hall was chaotic and cluttered, a thoroughly modern

space.

Even if the Chinese hall did not display classical Chinese tastes, according to the article’s

author, it suggested that Chinese style was “different but in no way inferior to western style,” so

much so that “there is no reason for all people to claim with gusto that [western style] is more

fashionable.” While these words, at first glance might seem to be a nationalist celebration of

Chinese style, seen in the context of the article and its photographs, they were actually part of an

aesthetic treatise on the chimeric modern, claiming that Chinese style was just as good, but not

necessarily better than western. Indeed, to understand the concept of chimeric modern design put

forth by Tianjin’s Happy Home, the photographs of the Western library and the Chinese hall

must be viewed together. The modern is not found in either room by itself, but in the

juxtaposition of Western and Chinese rooms – with lacquer next to glass, Chinese lantern beside

Greek chandelier. In the modern interior, objects, which tend to be mistakenly classified into

binaries of new and old and Chinese and Western, are actually part of an organic aesthetic whole.

Moreover, this modernity needed the lingering elements of a not-so-distant past in order to

define itself. The chandelier was considered to be a new kind of lighting when juxtaposed against

a lantern; and yet the lantern gained its “Chineseness” only in comparison to a foreign chandelier.

They derived their meaning reciprocally, as part of a modern whole. Together these layers of

newness and Chineseness, glass and lacquer, formed the Tianjin modern aesthetic of the urban

interior.

24

The way in which Kuaile jiating talked about designing the modern home was in many

ways more in keeping with the chimeric design of Tianjin’s architecture than with depictions of

interior design in similar women’s magazines published in Shanghai. Shanghai magazines

labeled visual depictions of interior design as modern – modeng – and contemporary – xiandai,

but never foreign.32

As the modern metropole of China, and possibly even Asia, Shanghai could

hold its own in the global contest to represent universal modern style. With the tallest building in

Asia, Shanghai’s skyline rivaled Tokyo, and with a thriving nightlife, its jazz scene compared

with New York’s.33

But the global stage of modern culture and style was fraught with politics

and power. Thus, examining this so-called “universal” Shanghai modern in its semi-colonial

context, literary scholar Shih Shu-mei argues that the identity of modernist Shanghai writers was

“bifurcated” between their belief that they were participating actively in a universal literary

globalism and the reality of being constrained within the power structures of the colonial

capitalist global system.34

Tianjin urbanites never made such bold claims to represent the universal modern, and

instead were always acutely aware of being on the periphery of Shanghai and foreign

modernities. Moreover, living at the center of multiple foreign empires, made Tianjin urbanites

acutely aware of the systems of power that divided up the global modern stage. Unlike residents

of Shanghai who understood their city as a series of streets and alleyways, Tianjin residents saw

32

See for example Ling long magazine, published in Shanghai 1931-37. 33

By the 1930s, Shanghai boasted the tallest building in Asia, the 275 foot (22 story) Park Hotel, whose art deco

façade alluded to skyscrapers in New York. By comparison, the Empire State Building, which was constructed

around the same time, was 1,050 feet tall (102 stories), and remained the tallest building in the world until 1972. The

Park Hotel was financed by Chinese banks and designed by Ladislav Hudec (1893-1958), a stateless Hungarian

expatriate residing in Shanghai. On Shanghai nightlife and music see Andrew Field, Shanghai’s Dancing Worlds:

Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010) and Andrew

Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University

Press, 2001). 34

Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2001).

25

their city as a patchwork of colonial districts. Even after World War II, when the concessions had

been abolished, many Tianjin urbanites still gave addresses starting with the concession name,

only then followed by street names and numbers.35

Thus, chimera was not simply a style but a

way of understanding the space of the city as distinct foreign and Chinese parts grafted together.

Tianjin never claimed membership to the universal modern, but instead invented its own

chimeric modern, which in its juxtaposition of foreign and Chinese styles in some ways

challenged the aesthetic authority of foreign empires. While western tastemakers may have

celebrated consuming the spoils of empire in the “cosmopolitan domestic” interiors of the home

country, when Chinese people combined styles it was labeled bricolage or pastiche. In 1928, the

American journalist Nathanial Peffer described the “typical” Chinese interior with disdain. Peffer

had travelled to China, armed with a Guggenheim Foundation grant, to study China as a

civilization in conflict. Interior design was one of the areas in which he located “conflict”

between native/Western and traditional/modern ways. He observed:

The Chinese… if he prospers, builds himself a foreign house with wooden floors

and electric lights and bathrooms and, unfortunately, mongreloid furniture that is

of no hemisphere but blends the hideous in both. [He] sits in a Grand Rapids

mission chair sipping tea out of a violently beflowered teacup which he sets on a

fringed doily of the atrocious 1880’s… His eye roams … over a chromo on a wall

in which a lady stands on a pseudo-Italian terrace pensively kissing a dove… One

35

According to Tianjin local historian Liu Haiyan, Tianjin residents, unlike their counterparts in Shanghai, gave

addresses beginning with the concession name first. Conversation with Liu Haiyan, October 2006. On the Tianjin

civil servant family background surveys some Tianjin civil servants listed their address as the “old British” or “old

Italian” concessions. Jiating zhuangjuang dengji biao家庭狀況登記表 (Report on the registration of family

conditions), TMA, J2-5810, 5811, 5812, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5827, 5818, 7084 (1946).

26

with an unfailing sense of beauty and artistic integrity in the tradition to which he

was born will be lost in a tradition completely alien.36

Peffer’s observation implies that the power of chimeric design lay not only in defying colonial

zoning laws, but also in its ability to offend. In this example, Chinese elites leveraged their

capital to produce a chimeric design that combined national styles - Italian chromos with

mongreloid furniture - and mixed periods – 19th

century Victorian doilies with 20th

century arts

and crafts chairs, all challenging the aesthetic authority of foreigners.

Peffer’s description of chimeric interior design in a home outside of Tianjin also suggests

that chimeric style may have been celebrated in other parts of China as well. Indeed, in his study

of modern material culture in China, historian Frank Dikötter argues that it was precisely this

mixing, what Dikötter calls “creative bricolage,” that drove Chinese mass consumption, and that

Chinese consumers created cultural and stylistic meaning through mixing (qipaos with

overcoats), recycling (Western oil barrels transformed into cook stoves), and inventing

(Chinese/Western dishes like eggs and tomatoes).37

Thus, while Peffer suggests that Chinese

consumers were passive, unschooled recipients of Western material culture, Dikötter argues that

people actively and eclectically engaged multiple styles. Yet both Peffer and Dikötter overlook

the methodical knowledge required to consume modern material culture, a knowledge prescribed

in women’s magazines or by manufacturers themselves. Indeed the process of selling and

consuming furniture illuminates the multiple forms of economic, social, educational and cultural

capital that Chinese urbanites leveraged to design the modern home.

Selling and consuming furniture

36

Nathaniel Peffer, China: The Collapse of a Civilization (New York: The John Day Company, 1930), 123. 37

Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2006) 54, 200, and 219.

27

As urban real estate expanded, so did the need and desire for new furniture. As one 1907

British guidebook stated, “in no branch of commercial and industrial activity in Shanghai is there

greater competition than in the manufacture and sale of furniture.”38

Starting in the nineteenth

century, Chinese and foreign businessmen set up furniture shops along Shanghai’s Nanjing Road,

offering both imported sundries and locally constructed furniture.39

Years later, when businesses

and families in Tianjin wanted to decorate their homes with Western-style furnishings, they

ordered from older Shanghai stores like the Chinese owned and managed Tai Chong and

Company, established in the 1870s, or Shanghai department stores that had a branch office in

Tianjin, like Hall & Holtz. Tianjin consumers also shopped at local furniture dealers like the

Chinese-managed Sun Chong and Company, located in the French Concession, or the foreign-

operated Sims and Company, in the British Concession. Tianjin’s Chinese population also

purchased furnishings and utensils from one of a number of workshops and stores in the Chinese

section of the city.40

The market in Western-style cabinetry, dining tables, and sofas may have been sparked

by the demand from foreigners setting up offices and residences, however foreign consumption

alone could not have sustained these businesses in a city like Tianjin. When it came to

purchasing domestic furnishings, Chinese consumers not only made up the majority of

concession residents, but were simply more affluent than their foreign neighbors; moreover,

foreign offices such as consulates, the Post Office, and the Customs House were notoriously

38

Seaports of the Far East, Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, & Resources

(London: A.Macmillan, 1907), 156. 39

One foreign-owned factory, for example, employed 120 workers. Ibid. 40

Muqi jiaju paimaihang gonghuigongyuan dengjibiao 木器家具拍賣行工會會員登記表 (Registry of wooden

utensils and furniture auction houses), TMA, j128-1399, 1917.; Muqi jiaju ye tongyegonghui shanghao diaocha biao

木器家具業同業公會商號調查表 (Registry of wooden utensil and furniture companies), TMA, j129-364, 1942.

28

penny-pinching.41

Foreign furniture companies seemed to target Chinese consumers, often

adopting a Chinese name with local marketing appeal. Tianjin-based Sims and Company, for

example, chose a Chinese named that transliterated their English name while highlighting the

nature of the business. The Chinese name Senmu si not only sounded like the English Sims, but it

was comprised of the Chinese characters that meant “forest” and “wood” – appropriate for a

furniture company.

Sims and Company, which claimed to operate the preeminent furniture factory in north

China, operated two locations in Tianjin’s British Concession: a factory on Racecourse Road in

the outskirts of the concession and an office-showroom on Victoria Road in the commercial heart

of the British Concession.42

Visiting the Sims showroom, consumers encountered a shopping

experience designed to cultivate the consumer as much as sell products. While producers of new

mass-produced or readymade items may have communicated with consumers through newspaper

or magazine advertising, salespeople at the Sims and Company showroom began a conversation

with consumers, showing them sample pieces of furniture on display or offering catalogues for

browsing. Sims and Company was not only a furniture designer, manufacturer, and retailer, but

also a social visionary with a particular prescription of what furnishings in the modern home

should look like.

According to the Sim’s catalogue, each room should be decorated in a consistent style,

and the company offered a repertoire of styles to choose from, listed by style numbers, such as

41

In 1940, for example, the Tianjin Customs House sent a memo to their central office requesting permission to

reupholster a couch purchased in 1915. Tianjin haiguan 天津海關 (Tianjin Customs House), TMA, 1940. 42

Sims claimed to own the only wood-drying kilns in the area to ensure that carefully selected timbers would shrink

up to 12% before being built into furniture, and since Tianjin and many of China’s coastal cities could be quite

humid, Sims coated their furniture in a special moisture-resistant varnish that they believed to be “an exclusive

feature” of their products. As for upholstery, Sims relied on English webbing, coils, and horsehair as well as coir

fibers from coconuts and down feathers from chickens. Sims and Co. memo to Haiho Conservancy, July 1928 in

Haiho Conservancy, Youguan dichan gouzhi jiaju gouzhi, yiji hedao wenti de shiwu lianxi de laiwang wenjian 有關

地產購置家具購置，以及河道問題的什務聯係的來往文件 (Documents related to property and furniture

purchasing as well as miscellaneous problems related to the riverway) TMA, w3-66, 1926-8.

29

B104 or A44, or, by an exotic style name that invoked images of a stately European interior,

such as British-sounding “Sheraton-style” or French-sounding “Louis XVI.”43

In addition to

adhering to a particular style, a room needed to include particular furnishings with proper

function. Starting with the entryway, Sims offered hat and umbrella stands. They manufactured

sofas and armchairs for the living room, dining sets for the dining room and desks, bookcases

and lounge chairs for the study. To outfit a kitchen and pantry, they offered ice boxes, China

cupboards, scales and stoves, and for bedrooms they sold bed frames, springs, and mattresses of

varying quality along with furniture such as wardrobes and dressing tables.44

Decorating a house with all of the above necessities and in a consistent style came with a

hefty price tag. In 1928 Sims and Company estimated the cost of completely furnishing the

newly remodeled home of the foreign Secretary of Tianjin’s Haiho Conservancy at over $2,500,

or approximately 25 times the rent of a three bedroom concession villa.45

Sim’s estimate to

decorate a bedroom was between $657 and $838, while the drawing room would have cost

between $345 and $419. Even the most financially secure Chinese families would have found

such a bill to be quite daunting, and most families probably decorated their homes purchasing

furnishings piece by piece.

If most Chinese urbanites could not afford to decorate their homes according to the

prescriptions of furniture companies, then they had to turn to other sources for advice on how to

selectively consume modern furnishings. Women’s magazines were one of these sources as they

highlighted and described new kinds of furniture for their readers. The sofa, for example, 43

Haiho Conservancy, TMA, W3-66, 1928. 44

Ibid.; Tianjin haiguan 天津海關 (Tianjin Customs House), Gongyong jiaju 公用家具 (Common-use furniture),

TMA, W0001-003581, 1923 and 1940.; Hebei Postal Administration Office, Guanyu caiwu hui bokuan xiang piao

kuan yishi jiaju gongju shebei de laiwang hanjian 關於財務匯撥款項票款遺失家具工具設備的來往函件

(Correspondence regarding finances, remittances, furniture, and equipment), TMA, w2-295, 1924 and Guanyu jiaju

shebei gongju de laiwang hanjian 關於家具設備工具的來往函件 (Concerning correspondence dealing with

furnishings and equipment), TMA, w2-358, 1926. 45

Memo from Sims and Co. to Haiho Conservancy, July 2 1928, TMA, W3-66, 1928.

30

universally came to represent the modern sitting room, or keting, in women’s magazines. When

foreign furnishings, like the sofa, were incorporated into the Chinese interior, they needed a

Chinese name. Names could translate the function of the object, telephones, for example, became

known as “electric talk,” or they could be a transliteration of a foreign term. In Tianjin’s Kuaile

jiating, sofas were called changyi, long chair, pointing to the physical description of the furniture,

or they were called tangyi, chair to recline in, describing one of its uses. Other, later women’s

magazines used the transliterated English term shafa, which has come to signify sofa today.46

While sofas were a new form of seating, Chinese people had long been sitting in chairs,

moving from mat to Chair in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).47

Chairs in late imperial

China were made from wood with an almost architectural design of simple lines and geometric

forms, but also with a curved back that fully supported the body.48

As art historian Sarah Handler

argues, the move to chairs in late imperial China inspired a host of changes in the Chinese

interior from the type of furnishings and utensils used to new social practices.49

Likewise, sitting

in sofas in twentieth-century China required new social practices, new understandings of the

social space of home, and of course, new decoration. Women’s magazines were there to help

guide readers in making those changes.

46

1930s Shanghai women’s magazine Ling long used the term shafa. A tangyi, according to a magazine photograph,

was an outdoor lounge chair. Ling long (Shanghai: Issue 70, 1932), 938. 47

Sarah Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2001). 48

The Lu Ban jing carpenters’ manual in addition to houses, included instructions on building furniture. Klaas

Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Fifteenth-Century Carpenter’s Manual

Lu Ban jing, edited by E. Zurcher (Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1993). 49

For example, high square tables joined chairs, and people began to take meals together, eating from a common

bowl with chopsticks rather than from individual trays. The move from mat to chair also changed architectural space

and interior decoration. Chairs raised the level of vision, bringing windows and ceilings up along with it.

Decorations followed, with high, long tables placed against walls to display ancestor offerings, plants, a clock, or

other luxury items, and on the walls behind these tables, a hanging scroll or Chinese character couplet was often

hung at or above the eye level of someone seated at a chair. Sarah Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical

Furniture. For a comparative look at how changes in furniture transformed social relations in France see Mimi

Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth Century France,” Eighteenth-Century

Studies 32, No. 4 (1999): 415-45.

31

Upholstered sofas introduced contradictions into the modern home’s interior. On the one

hand, as the centerpiece of the parlor, the most public room of the modern home, sofas were to

be sites for socializing among family members and with guests, but sofas made these public

social interactions more intimate bringing guest and host together in a shared seat, unlike the

separate wooden chairs of the late imperial interior. A sofa could also transform a public guest

room into a private parlor, a respite for interior contemplation. Describing a sofa in a photograph

of an “elegant western room,” as a tangyi, or reclining chair, the accompanying text in Kuaile

jiating suggested that the sofa was “very comfortable and that laying upon it elicited a feeling of

“joyful bliss.” 50

While wooden chairs may have been draped in textiles, sofas upholstered in

horsehair cushions provided new sensory experiences for reclining bodies described as “comfort.”

New interior designs added to the visual, and sometimes olfactory, experiences of enjoying a

comfortable sofa, as in the same example from Kuaile jiating in which a vase full of flowers was

placed on a table in front of the sofa to inspire “delight.”

As the primary signifier of the modern sitting room, sofas re-designed the classical

Chinese keting or guest hall into a modern sitting room. Since they were lower to the ground than

wooden Ming-style chairs, sofas brought bodies and down to a new lower level, and thus

required new side tables, or a long table placed in front to display a vase of flower, a book, or a

cup of tea. Sofas were considerably larger than earlier forms of seating. At around seven feet in

length, they took up a considerable amount of space in a sitting room, and made from wood,

horse-hair and thick sturdy textiles, they were quite heavy. Thus, while people in late imperial

China could quickly transform the function of a room, simply by re-arranging comparatively

light wooden furniture, the size and weight of the sofa made the social function and use of the

sitting room far less flexible. Sofa’s also represented a large purchase for a Tianjin family. The

50

Kuaile jiating (Issue 1.3, 1923), 33.

32

average cost of a sofa was around one month’s rent in the foreign concessions. Thus, to purchase

a sofa, a family needed both sufficient space to place it and sufficient expendable income to

purchase it. As an expensive purchase and a spatial commitment, a sofa was a status item. Still,

less affluent families, or those who lived in small spaces without multiple rooms, could have

purchased a piece of modern seating such as an upholstered armchair, or at the very least a rattan

chair.51

The story of producing and consuming furniture suggests that designing the modern

home was far from arbitrary. The high expense of furniture meant that Chinese people had to

make deliberate decisions in how to furnish the modern home, and as they made these decisions,

they navigated the multiple prescriptions of taste-makers from manufacturers to journalists. A

wealthy family may have been able to afford the entire line of Sheraton-style furniture, but other

families had to rely on other forms of capital – cultural, educational and social – to make

selective decisions. Indeed, reading about how it felt to recline in a sofa, in some ways, could

bring a girl membership into the elite social classes that could afford to purchase a Chesterfield

sofa. Thus, viewed as aesthetic treatises, women’s magazines suggest that chimeric design in the

modern home was not an accident of consumption, but a deliberate production that generated

new social identities and relations. Furnishings in treaty-port China, however, were more than

just status signifiers; as products of a colonial capitalist city, they had a larger story to tell about

China’s place in the world.

Producing chimera for the world

51

Frank Dikötter argues that by the 1920s, increased production of rattan furniture by prison labor made these

objects highly affordable, thereby “democratizing the easy chair.” Dikötter, Exotic Commodities, 170.

33

From Tianjin to Tokyo, and Boston to Birmingham the rise of the urban modern home

was not only a global phenomenon, but more importantly, home became a site for experiencing

the world. Designing everyday life at the heart of multiple empires, Tianjin urbanites produced a

chimeric style that combined the new material culture of foreign empires with lingering elements

of an imperial Chinese past to create a new Chinese modern style that challenged western

aesthetic authority. Women from Philadelphia to London, who by contrast lived on the edges of

empire, consumed an imperial bricolage that celebrated and confirmed the racial and nationalist

imperatives of empire. Thus, the mixture of objects and styles in a Tianjin sitting room may have

resembled those of a Philadelphia parlor, but depending on the decorator’s position in global

empire, each arrangement communicated a different message to the global stage.

Consuming the world at home reached beyond signifying the home’s connection to

empire; indeed, domestic consumption drove global capitalism. American and European

manufacturers tried to crack a market of “400 million Chinese customers” to peddle their

products, while the exotic demands of American housewives fueled global trade networks.52

In

some instances, cosmopolitan domestic consumption even sparked new handicraft industries.

The Tianjin carpet, for example, invented by American and European Orientalist tastes,

illuminates the complicated networks that forged global capitalism. Initially manufactured in

Tianjin for export, rugs reinterpreted Tianjin’s chimeric tastes for foreign interiors, but they were

later incorporated into Tianjin homes as new furnishings, transporting European Orientalism into

Chinese homes. The story of the Tianjin carpet also connects the multiple sites of global empire

from the private interiors of European and American homes to export companies’ halls of

capitalism and the dusty floors of Tianjin workshops.

52

Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers (Soul Care Publishing, 2008), first published 1937.

34

By the 1920s, Tianjin had become the leading producer of the “foreignized” Chinese

carpet. Nankai University economist H. D. Fong coined this term in his study of the carpet

industry noting that rugs were not indigenous to the Beijing-Tianjin region, and that US and

British trade companies invented the industry when World War I shut off trade routes with rug

producers in the Near East.53

The invention of the “foreignized” Chinese carpet began with the

Orientalist demands in the cosmopolitan domestic interior to produce a “Western style for

dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” but as carpets were knotted in

Chinese workshops, Chinese producers, designers and commentators became co-producers of the

carpet’s image as a Chinese object on the global stage.54

In other words, while Orientalist

signification at the moment of consumption in an American parlor claimed to speak for the

Oriental other, thereby rendering it mute, the object, in its social life, as it moved through each

stage and process, from production to circulation and consumption, enabled the people who

interacted with it to speak. The social life of the Tianjin carpet also reveals how global capitalism

and empire worked. Consuming the world in an American parlor did not simply reproduce the

images and ideals of empire; it produced and reinforced the economic and social inequities of

colonial capitalism in the places where the objects were made. Thus, the social life of the Tianjin

carpet reveals how foreign demand for an invented Chinese object changed social relations and

aggravated economic inequalities in the colonial capitalist city.

Foreign demand invented the Tianjin carpet, but Chinese and foreign commentators co-

produced a history of the rug that authenticated the Chineseness of the export commodity for the

global stage. Publishing his account only one year after American rug connoisseur Gordon

Leitch and Tianjin-based economist Fong wrote a strikingly similar history of the Tianjin rug

53

H. D. Fong, Tientsin Carpet Industry (Tianjin: Chihle Press, 1929). 54

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) 3.

35

industry.55

Fong and Leitch published for difference audiences. Fong wrote for social scientists,

policymakers, and business people, while Leitch’s audience included consumers and collectors.

The two men may have met and collaborated on their histories of the rug industry, but it is just as

likely that they drew from an oral history of Tianjin carpets crafted by the members of the

industry, the manufacturers and exporters, themselves.

Leitch and Fong’s histories of the Chinese carpet began in the imperial capital Beijing

where rugs were an integral part of the Manchu Qing’s empire.56

The nomads from the north

were reputed to use rugs as saddle blankets, and less utilitarian ornate carpets were said to

decorate their Beijing palaces and fill their imperial coffers. In this story, rugs not only

connected the alien rulers to their nomadic past but they also became physical manifestations of

empire since rugs offered as tribute from the steppe connected the capital city to the edges of

empire.57

According to legend, during one such tribute mission during the 1860s, a Tibetan lama

decided to stay in the capital and establish a rug workshop for the poor, the first manufacturing

site for carpets in the Beijing/Tianjin area. The legend of the Chinese rug in many ways followed

practices of historical periodization that were just coming into being at the time that depicted a

Chinese imperial tradition transformed by the introduction of Western capitalism and culture in

the late nineteenth century. Thus, in this history of the Chinese carpet, the imperial object was

first introduced as tribute and next as philanthropy, but did not become a commodity until

foreigners demanded it.

Both Fong and Leitch proposed that two global events introduced the Chinese carpet to

the overseas market. The first was post-Boxer Uprising looting, when foreign soldiers plundered

55

Fong, Tientsin Carpet; Gordon B. Leitch, Chinese Rugs (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., 1928). 56

Ibid. 57

On Manchu ethnicity and empire see Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in

Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

36

houses and palaces in northeast China, sending the spoils of war home, and the second event was

the American 1904 St. Louis Exposition.58

In the 1920s, these two events would have loomed

large in the popular Chinese memory as moments of foreign encounter. While the memory of the

Boxer Rebellion would have been one of humiliation for China, the memory of the St. Louis

Exposition would have been one of redemption and pride. It was the first time since the

Exclusion Act of 1882 that the Chinese had been courted to appear at an exposition in the US.59

China’s participation in the St. Louis Exposition made news on both sides of the Pacific.

The exposition’s representative to Asia, John Barrett, a former minister to Siam, traveled to

China and even met with the Emperor and the Empress Dowager to plead with them to

participate in St. Louis as a means to stimulate trade with the West.60

On the American side, the

press sang Barrett’s praises for bringing all the “nations of the Orient” to St. Louis. For the

Chinese delegation, the exposition offered an unparalleled opportunity present Chinese culture to

a global audience even if this self-presentation came under the direction of the British head of the

Imperial Maritime Custom Service Robert Hart. In an article in the St Louis Dispatch a Chinese

representative stated, for example, that the China pavilion would feature “embroideries, silks,

porcelains, teas and other products of Chinese industry, and a great many other things illustrative

of Chinese resources and progress.” 61

58

Fong, Tientsin Carpet; Gordon B. Leitch, Chinese Rugs. 59

At the time, the Qing imperial commission claimed that it was the first time China had participated in an

international exposition, even though Chinese customs officials had participated in the Philadelphia Centennial

Exhibition of 1876, and Chinese businessmen in the United States organized China’s representation at subsequent

fairs. Irene E. Cortinovis notes that in an article in the St. Louis Dispatch, Wong Kai Kah, the imperial vice-

commissioner, claimed that China’s participation in the 1903 National Industrial Exposition in Osaka, Japan was not

“official” because it was organized by the Customs Service. In Irene Cortinovis, “China at the St. Louis World’s

Fair,” Missouri Historical Review 72 (1977): 59-66. On China’s participation in world fairs in the United States see

Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 60

Cortinovis, “Fine Showing of Orientals,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1903, A1. 61

St. Louis Dispatch, July 3, 1903.

37

Writing twenty years later with a lingering memory of Chinese pride in this moment of

global self-presentation, both Leitch and Fong claimed that the Chinese carpet won first prize at

the exposition, however, there is no evidence to suggest that Hart or the Chinese delegation even

selected rugs to represent China.62

Leitch also credit the St. Louis Exposition with creating a

demand for Chinese carpets that resulted in the establishment of a carpet factory in Beijing per

imperial decree.63

The Exposition may have indeed resulted in an increased demand for Chinese

goods. Comparing the Japanese and Chinese pavilions at the Exposition, Carol Ann Christ

argues that the Chinese exhibit was more trade show than national display, set up to attract

importers and businessmen rather than a broader public, and that the Exposition did indeed drum

up business for China.64

Chinese carpets may indeed have been part of this new export business,

but neither Fong nor Leitch offered any textual evidence or trade statistics to support this story.

Fong’s statistics on carpet exports begins in 1912 and show Tianjin’s carpet exports growing

from around 12,000 pieces annually to over 90,000 pieces in 1922.65

The impetus for this nearly eight-fold growth was World War I when trade routes to the

Near East shut down, and the United States and Great Britain looked elsewhere for carpets.

China became the home of this new industry, and by the time H.D. Fong published his economic

study of the Tianjin rug industry in 1929, China was exporting almost 180,000 pieces annually.

Tianjin became the central port in the Chinese rug trade, exporting over 90% of Chinese carpets

mostly to the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Japan.66

In addition to being the main

exporter of rugs, Tianjin became the chief manufacturer as well, since the heavy cost of domestic

62

See for example Carol Ann Christ, "The Sole Guardians of the Art Inheritance of Asia": Japan at the 1904 St.

Louis World's Fair” positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 2000, pp. 675-709 63

Leitch, Chinese Rugs, 24. 64

Christ, “The Sole Guardians.” 65

Customs figures compiled in Fong, Tientsin Carpet, 3. 66

In 1925, for example, Tianjin exported 93.3% of all Chinese carpets, while number two exporter Shanghai

exported only 3.4%. Ibid., 3, 38.

38

transportation and transport taxes encouraged workshops to locate closer to the port and forced

workshops that were further from the port to shut down.67

The history of the “foreignized” Chinese carpet, as told by Fong and Leitch, is an

ephemeral legend of a commodity, most likely co-produced by Chinese and foreign members of

the carpet industry to invent a Chinese authenticity for a global commodity, and to understand

their industry’s place in the history of global capitalism. But while there may be little textual

evidence to support this history of the carpet industry, the manufacturing process that produced

the “foreignized” Chinese carpet has left material and archival traces that illuminate the ways in

which Chinese and foreign actors co-produced this commodity. These actors included Western

exporters, Chinese compradors (middlemen), and Chinese manufacturers. Exporters initiated the

global market for carpets with their access to and information on overseas markets. Chinese

compradors connected Western export houses to the local Chinese manufacturers who made the

rugs, but the exporters controlled prices, determining what price would be paid for a job and

sometimes changing their mind before issuing payment upon completion.68

Export companies drove the global market for the “foreignized” Chinese carpet, but did

they also design the rugs? If you asked the foreign export companies they would argue that

designs were foreign-led. Describing the history of rug motifs in his study of Chinese carpets,

Gordon Leitch credited the development of modern rug design to “a few western nationals who

understood the Chinese better than their brothers,” creating a style that “combine[d] the best

elements of the Western and Chinese designs into a harmoniously blended whole, typical of the

67

Ibid. 68

Most rugs were sold on commission, with spot rugs fetching a much lower price. Chinese manufacturers, without

direct access to foreign markets, were subject to the whims of exporters who at times changed their price mid-job.

H.D. Fong claimed that during a depression, export firms were known to claim that a rug was defective in order to

get out of having to pay for it. Ibid., 16.

39

New Age in China.”69

Indeed in the production of modern carpets, the carpet-maker was no

longer the designer; instead this position was given over to a professional who worked for the

export company rather than in the rug workshop.70

Removed from the site of production,

designers worked with the market in mind, creating painted paper templates, or miniature paper

rugs, usually about nine by twelve inches in size.71

The templates would be duplicated with the

factory or trading company filing away a copy, and duplicates being sent out to rug workshops.72

There is little information about these designers: who they were, how they were trained,

what nationality they were, and how much autonomy they had in creating the templates for

Tianjin carpets. But, whether or not the designers were Chinese or foreign, they lived and

worked in Tianjin, and the city’s chimeric map, architecture and interiors could not help but

influence their designs. Thus, while the rugs were supposed to be designed for overseas tastes

and demands, the patterns and motifs were grounded in a local chimeric modern. Take a 1937

template of a rug as an example.73

(See Figure 12.) This beige, brown and peach colored rug

design includes motifs from three different traditions – traditional Chinese motifs, art deco lines,

69

Leitch, Chinese Rugs, 84. 70

Designs for earlier Chinese rugs were passed down in workshops where weavers learned by doing and design

knowledge became embodied. The process of modern rug-making took design out of the hands of the weaver and

placed it with foreign export companies and factories, where designers often ranked alongside managers in

importance and pay grade. According to H.D. Fong, designers were often paid as much as managers and certainly as

much as foremen. Fong, Tientsin Carpet Industry, 28. 71

After completing a rough sketch of the rug, designers would draft a precise drawing on tracing paper. They would

trace over this drawing in chalk before transferring it to a background color that had been painted and left to dry on a

piece of paper. Next, the designer would go over the chalk lines and fill in the design in the requisite colors. Once

the paint had dried, the design would be coated with shellac and was ready to be duplicated. Fong, Tientsin Carpet

Industry; Leitch, Chinese Rugs. 72

Ibid. 73

This template was purchased in 2007 at a Beijing antique market along with other templates purportedly from a

Tianjin rug factory. As work units and factories are shuttered by Chinese market economy, the archives and records

of these companies are finding their way into antique and book markets. The front of the rug design is stamped

“office copy” and “Levon J. Evrenian.” The back is stamped Y.K. Pei (百玉？). Evrenian was most likely the name

of a carpet dealer of Armenian descent. Y.K. Pei may have been the designer, but more likely was the

factory/workshop owner. The design number, #847, and date, April 1937, are written in cursive in black ink.

40

and Rococo flowers.74

The template is framed by two medallions – one in the upper right corner

and one in the lower left – that are both surrounded by Chinese “traditional” clouds. The bottom

right medallion displays a Chinese-style shan shui painting with a tree in the foreground, boats

on the river and a small mountain in the background. Tucked behind this medallion, is the

Chinese “shou” symbol of long life and branches of plum blossoms. The upper left medallion

includes a yellow, pink, and green floral motif, which looks more French Rococo than Chinese.

An art deco arrow, perhaps evoking Native American designs, shoots out of this medallion. The

entire composition of the rug is framed in a modern art deco linear border that starkly contrasts

with the eighteenth-century Chinese and French medallions adorning the corners. The design is a

modern reimagining of antique Chinese and European design, employing the decorative tropes of

Chinese landscape painting and European florals in an overall composition that appears chimeric

rather than organic.75

But this unsettling mixture of Chinese and Western was undeniably a

product of Tianjin modern style; however, in this case, this chimeric Chinese modern style may

have been intended for a foreign rather than Chinese customer.

While the primary consumers of Tianjin carpets lived overseas, these “foreignized”

Chinese commodities also found their way into local interiors. Some Chinese people purchased

carpets, and rugs were regularly depicted in photographs of the modern home in Chinese

women’s magazines, suggesting that, at the very least, they had become an integral part of the

74

The rug’s palette – beige, brown and peach – is the first clue that this was a modern foreignized Chinese carpet.

Early Chinese rugs used vegetable dyes in only five colors: red, yellow, blue, white, and black. Chinese students

returning from studying abroad experimented with foreign aniline dyes in the early 1900s, and by the 1930s,

manufacturers were most likely using chrome dyes that allowed for a wider palette than vegetable dyes. Vegetable

dyes were of a higher quality but more expensive. Aniline dyes were intended for cotton and degraded wool. Leitch,

Chinese Rugs, 67. 75

Two other templates in my collection, one of which is dated 1940, suggest that European-looking floral carpets

were popular designs at the time.

41

idealized domestic environment.76

Before Tianjin produced rugs, few local Chinese people

decorated with them, and in parts of China where people did have rugs, they were not typically

used as floor coverings. In imperial Beijing palaces, carpets were hung from walls or draped on

furniture. In northern China, rugs were placed on kang or heated platforms. The photographs of

both the western library and the Chinese hall from Kuaile jiating suggest that by the early 1920s,

people in Tianjin had imported the decorative ideal of carpets as floor coverings from Europeans

and Americans, for whom oriental carpets were foreign and exotic to begin with. When Chinese

people covered their floor with a Tianjin carpet, they were incorporating global bourgeois tastes

into their own ideal interior designs, even when those tastes included a locally produced Chinese

style that had been invented for a global market. Moreover, when a women’s magazine like

Kuaile jiating placed the Tianjin carpet in both a Chinese and a Western style room, they were

suggesting the flexibility of a chimeric object to signify Chinese or foreign style depending on

the context.

Global markets and commodity flows allowed Tianjin urbanites to partake in a global

vision of middle class domesticity, but this global consumption of the modern home also

generated social inequalities. Moving beyond signification at the moment of consumption, the

object tells a story about changing social structures and urban life. But the story of the Tianjin

carpet first begins in the countryside of northern and northwest China where farmers and nomads

raised and shore the sheep to provide wool for the urban-produced carpets.77

Merchants brought

76

According to a report on Tianjin rug workshops in the Chinese Economic Journal, the limited number of rugs that

were purchased locally found their way into “government offices, large business establishments and wealthy

families.” While the market was mostly foreign, Tianjin’s foreign manufacturer Elbrook did advertise to a Chinese

consumer in the Shanghai-based housing trade journal The Builder, “Tientsin Rug Workshops,” Chinese Economic

Journal 4 (1929): 404-10. 77

The majority of raw wool exported from Tianjin was from the northwest province of Gansu or from Mongolia.

This wool was transported by camel, boat, cart, and rail before it reached the port city. Chu and Blaidsdell cite a

report on the “China Advertiser” which estimated that 50% of wool came from Gansu, 15% from Shanxi, 25% from

Mongolia, and 10% from Chili and Shandong. High-quality rug makers were known to travel to Mongolia on

42

the wool to the city. Many merchants hailed from the wool-producing provinces and stayed in

their native place association hall, or huiguan, while sojourning in Tianjin; thus, participating in

a social and economic network of men from the same home province, which had become a

common feature of treaty-port social life during this period.78

The manufacturing process began not in modern factories, but in individual households

where local Tianjin families, or families from wool producing regions like Hebei and Shandong,

carded, washed and span the wool.79

Thus, while the rug was bound for a modern urban home,

predicated on a separation of private domesticity from public industry, its life began in a

household workplace. Once the wool was spun, it was ready to be dyed and made into a carpet.

Most Tianjin carpets were produced in small Chinese-run workshops.80

While the United States

had developed mechanized carpet looms by the late 1920s, the quality was perceived not to be as

good as hand-knotted carpets.81

Thus, Tianjin workshops produced rugs on wooden frame looms,

where three to four men sat in front of a cotton warp, onto which the rug’s pattern had been

traced, knotting the rug from the bottom up, and tamping the knots down with a metal fork. Rug

knotters were young, mostly between the ages of 17 and 29, and largely from the outlying rural

region of Hebei.82

Most rug knotters were not married, and if they were, usually did not have

buying trips twice a year to select the finest quality wool. In C. C. Chu and Thomas Blaisdell, Peking Rugs and

Peking Boys: A Study of the Rug Industry in Peking (Beijing: Peking Express Press, 1924), 6-7; and Fong, Tientsin

Carpet Industry, 21, 45. 78

Ibid.; Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 79

At the time H.D. Fong published his report, only three foreign factories had mechanically-spun yarn: Elbrook,

Nichols, and Karagheusian. According to Fong, their output only made up 1/10 of yarn used in rug-making. Ibid., 24. 80

The majority of rug workshops were Chinese-owned. According to H.D. Fong’s 1929 survey of 303 rug

establishments, only three were foreign-owned and only 105 counted as factories, defined as having more than 30

employees. Ibid., 13. 81

Even in the large foreign factories, Tianjin carpet looms were not mechanized. By the close of the 1920s, the

United States had developed mechanized carpet looms, however, the US mechanically woven carpets were of much

lower quality than Tianjin carpets. Ibid. 82

In their study of Beijing rug workshops, Chu and Blaidsdell suggest that apprentice or child labor was widespread

in Beijing. H.D. Fong found differently in Tianjin, stating that 94% of weavers were between the ages of 17 and 29.

Fong suggests that the age difference in laborers was reflected in the quality of the carpets, Tianjin being of a higher

43

children.83

Home in Tianjin for most rug workers was the workshop where they ate their meals

amid the dust and discarded yarn by day and slept on the workshop’s dirt floors at night.

As a commodity for consumption in the modern family’s domestic interior, photographs,

advertisements, even the carpet itself, concealed this history of production. A book published by

Tianjin rug dealer Adolf Hackmack, for example, included an advertisement for foreign-owned

Tianjin rug maker Elbrook that featured a photograph of their spacious, clean, mechanical

spinning factory and not family households where most wool used in carpets was actually spun.84

(See Figure14.) And when the book showed weavers at the loom, it used an image from an

industrial school in Shandong with conditions far more sanitary than those described by social

scientists upon observing rug workshops.85

(See Figure 15.)

The social life of the Tianjin carpet, by contrast, shows how the production of a new

commodity for global middle class consumption exacerbated an already deep socio-economic

divide among urban groups. But economic differences did not naturally lead to class

consciousness even when merchants and workers both formed associational groups in the

1920s.86

In her study of Tianjin workers during this time, historian Gail Hershatter was surprised

to find that Tianjin lacked the rise in modern workers consciousness when compared with other

industrializing cities like Shanghai.87

Indeed, Tianjin’s Social Affairs Bureau suggested that only

quality. Also according to Fong, only about one in thirty rug workers was born in Tianjin. Chu and Blaidsdell,

Peking Rugs; Fong, Tientsin Carpet Industry. 83

Of the Tianjin workers who were of marriageable age (among 323 surveyed by Fong), only 37% were married.

According to Fong, this number was low and reflected the carpet weavers’ low status. 79% did not have children,

21% had one child and 13% had two children In Fong, Tientsin Carpet Industry, 44. 84

Adolf Hackmack, Chinese Carpets and Rugs (Tianjin: La Librairie Franc aise, 1924). 85

Advertisement and picture in Hackmack. On working conditions See for example Chu and Blaidsdell 86

The Carpet Manufacturers’ Association was established in January 1924, and the Carpet Workers’ Union in 1928.

The Manufacturers’ Association, included 450 members in 1924 which declined to 220 in 1929. In Ibid and Fong,

Tientsin Carpet Industry. 87

Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

44

about 15% of the city’s carpet workers actually belonged to the union.88

The small number of

unionized worker may have been partly due to unionization’s complicated process. Workers had

to seek government approval to unionize by applying to the local labor board and Guomindang

government, and based on the records of labor unrest, most unions seem to have been at large

factories, especially foreign ones.89

Indeed, when local workers went on strike, it became a

global incident, instead of a class issue, as was the case with a strike at the Elbrook factory in

August 1929. The factory had to call in both the British concession and local Chinese municipal

police to put down the strike, while the local government and US consulate were called in to

negotiate with the factory’s head office in New York.90

Moreover, unions may not have

represented the interests of their workers, with reports in 1948 of workers were acting out against

the Union to organize illegal strikes on their own.91

Economy and society underwent radical change in twentieth-century Tianjin as the city

became a center for consuming, producing and trading global commodities. These economic

changes may not have led to the development of a clear class consciousness among social groups

in the city, but the social life of the “foreignized” Chinese carpet illuminates how a commodity

created multiple moments of social distinction, from the migrant worker who knotted the rug and

the manager who looked over him to the exporter who controlled global markets and the

American or Tianjin housewife who covered her living room floor with an oriental carpet. Social

status in Tianjin was relational, just as it was produced on a global stage.

88

In Fong, Tientsin Carpet Industry 89

TMA union process 90

Fong, Tientsin Carpet Industry 67-8. 91

According to a letter to the Tianjin Municipal Government from the Karagheusian factory dated April 15, 1948,

workers had staged an illegal strike outside of their official union. Tianjinshi shehuiju 天津市社會侷 (Tianjin Social

Bureau), Ditanye gongzi tiaozheng zanxing banfa 地毯業工資調整暫行辦法 (Adjustment to wages in the carpet

industry), TMA, j25-3453, 1948.

45

Conclusion

Style and taste in treaty-port Tianjin formed on a global stage. With its multiple foreign

concessions, Tianjin’s urban landscape reproduced the global stage where foreign empires

competed to represent the universal modern. Style in Tianjin was political with French beaux-

arts banks, Italian villas, Japanese modernist school buildings, and the British garden city all

claiming to stand for the pinnacle of modern style. This global competition of national styles also

exposed gaps that allowed a new Tianjin modern style to emerge. Juxtaposing Western styles

from the foreign concessions with Chinese elements from the lingering Qing imperial city, the

Tianjin chimeric modern challenged the aesthetic authority of foreign empires. Moreover, when

Chinese people in Tianjin displayed this chimeric modern on the facades of their houses, in the

interior of their homes or through export commodities like Tianjin carpets, they were co-

producing an image of China and Chinese style for the global stage. Thus, while a Boston

housewife may have understood the Tianjin carpet on display in her parlor to be an authentic

representation of an unchanging traditional East, its style was actually invented through the

intersection of national styles and tastes facilitated through the interconnectedness of the modern

global market. Thus, designing house and home was truly a cosmopolitan experience.

Living at the center of multiple foreign empires, Tianjin cosmopolitans were at home in

the world. In fact, while historians have long credited the rise of the modern home elsewhere to

industrialization or the development of a middle class, in Tianjin, the modern home formed with

Chinese urban elites navigating new global visions of the modern middle class home before

industrialization and the formation of a self-conscious bourgeois class in China. Instead,

leveraging different forms of economic, cultural and social capital to encounter the world at

home, Chinese urbanites formed new social distinctions.

46

Taste and consumption as a means of distinguishing social status was not entirely new to

China. During the early modern period, for example, a growing merchant class, tried to leverage

economic capital to enhance their social position vis-à-vis literati scholars whose cultural and

educational capital assured them a place among China’s social elites. But, the shifting and

uncertain economic and political landscape of treaty-port Tianjin made social status even more

uncertain. Thus, while warlords with large amounts of economic capital could purchase their

social position in the city, in many ways knowledge, or knowing how to live in a changing

colonial capitalist and global city, became an increasingly valuable form capital. In Republican-

era China, women’s magazines helped to gender this knowledge female. Women were not only

responsible for designing the modern home, but they became proprietors of knowledge about all

kinds of worldly goods that entered the modern home. If life at the intersection of multiple

empires made Chinese people encounter the world at home, then Chinese women became the

directors of that encounter.

47

FIGURE 1. Chinese Pavilion on top of a “Bauhaus-style” Villa in the British Concession,

1920s. SOURCE: Author, 2007.

FIGURE 2. Chinese and Roman Pavilions in the Italian Concession, 1920s.

48

FIGURE 3: Entrance into the Western-Style Chinese House. SOURCE: Author, 2007.

FIGURE 4: New Entrance into the Compound, with Domed Roof Peering above Wall.

SOURCE: Author, 2007.

49

FIGURES 5 & 6. Western Villa. SOURCE: Author, 2007.

FIGURES 7 & 8. Looking at the Chinese Courtyard from the Entrance and above.

SOURCE: Author, 2007.

50

FIGURE 9. Alleyway homes in the new Chinese district, Xin hebei qu. SOURCE: Author,

2011.

51

FIGURE 10. “Arrangement of a western style library.” SOURCE: Kuaile jiating (Tianjin,

1923).

FIGURE 11. “Hall in the style of Chinese furnishings.” SOURCE: Kuaile jiating (Tianjin,

1923).

52

FIGURE 12. Tianjin Carpet Template. SOURCE: Author’s collection.

53

FIGURE 13. Tianjin Carpet Template. SOURCE: Author’s collection.

54

FIGURE 14 Advertisement for Elbrook Rug Factory. SOURCE: Hackmack (1929).

FIGURE 15. Photograph of Shandong Industrial School of Weaving. SOURCE: Hackmack

(1929).