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Tientsin the Cosmopolitan Ford of Heaven

By the 1930s, seventy years after the start of the foreign concessions in Tientsin, the number of foreigners living there reached a total of 10,000, half of them Westerners and half Japanese. Meanwhile the Chinese residents of the concessions, who had always outnumbered the foreigners, increased to 170,000. But even that was a drop in the ocean compared to the 2,000,000 who lived in the ancient walled city and surrounding districts. With such numerical superiority one would expect signs of hostility from the Chinese, but ever since the failed Boxer Uprising they showed, at least on the surface, a strange willingness to accept the status quo. They competed with foreigners in most major sports. A few young of their wealthy attended British, American, and French schools.

But ever mindful of their peril, foreign colonials tossed aside traditional enmities and reached out to each other. In so doing they created a spirit of affi nity that was the envy of the troubled outside world. One year it was the German Eight that took top honours at the regatta, next the British, then the Russian. In basketball it was the 15th US Infantry over the Trumpeldors, in soccer the Italian Marines over the French Army. At the 100 yards fi nishing post the famed Eric Liddell was nosed out by Dimitri Tomashevsky of St Louis College. In the ring Americans, Russians, French, and British met in some memo-rable bouts. And in the pool, Consty Ovchinnikoff, in overtaking the sensational Chinese Charlie Huang in the fi nal lap, smashed the 220 free-style record held for six years by Dr Ohlwein of Deutsch Sport Verein.

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Where else in this world could you have fi shed for pike (Chinese huang zhuan) in the Curling Pool (Yes, in winter they curled there on the hard frozen surface, the hardy Scots did), and in the blazing af-ternoon watch the US Infantry take on the Peking Marines on the baseball diamond at Can Do Field, everyone joining in the rambunctious rooting and hooting, and then an hour or so later be sipping tea in the cricket pavilion where the odd burst of po-lite handclaps broke the solemnity of the occasion.

In November 1934, no sooner had the Worcester Regiment arrived in Tientsin to replace the Queens as the British garrison than they were challenged by the multinational Tien-tsin Association Football Club to a “Welcome Match”. Standing on the far left with the Worcesters is Tommy Wade (who refereed the match) and on the right with TAFC is Freezer Frost, both prominent in sports circles and the Volunteer Corps.

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From the earliest days of the foreign presence in Tientsin, the Sport of Kings played an important part in the lives of their military and civilian settlers. Paper chase meets or-ganized by the Hunt Club were eagerly attended. The sport soon developed into steeple chase, polo, and fl at racing for which Tientsin Race Club built a superb track and grand-stand beyond the perimeters of the British and German Concessions. Not to be outdone,

the Chinese owned International Race Club created a similar track but with a less impos-ing grandstand northeast of the Russian Concession. Smaller than the Arab horse of the European and American race tracks, those that raced in Tientsin (referred to as “Ponies” by the local community) were descendants of Przewalski’s Horse. Every spring, yearlings of the herds that ran wild on the Mongolian steppe were rounded up and the sturdiest and most spirited sent to Peking’s “Pony Auction”. The ones that arrived in Tientsin not only still bore their shaggy winter coats, they were much given to throwing their riders or bit-ing their legs despite taming by Chinese or Russian grooms.

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Even going back to the days of the Last Emperor, horse racing appealed as much to the Chinese as it did to the foreign residents. In the above photo (my father in the foreground walking away from the totalizator booth) the Chinese on the left and the one on the right are wearing their obligatory Manchu queues. Race Days grew so popular among them that by the 1920s and 1930s they far outnumbered the foreign spectators. On a visit to Tientsin in 1984, I noticed the strangest phenomenon. Whereas the concessions’ colonial street names had been changed (Victoria Road was now Liberation Street) there was one notable exception. Race Course Road (Ma Chang Dao in Chinese) retained its original name - Ma Chang Dao.

Never mind our diverse backgrounds, we were equally at home on a rip-roaring Fourth of July, Quatorze Juillet, Empire Day. And on any day of the week we’d be at the street stalls relishing the irresistible piroshky, jian bing guozi, tang d’er. On the surface we were pretty staid, judging by the well attended churches, synagogues, social clubs. Can any of us forget the spine-tingling choir at the Orthodox church on Easter Morning? For the chic and sophisticated wasn’t there the Forum Ballroom in the Italian Concession, and for the not so chic, Little Club in the ex-German Concession where Earl Whaley’s Coloured Boys shook the foundations with their red-hot jazz?

In Weihsien prison camp I got to know Earl Whaley as well as members of his group Reg Jones - double bass and Wayne Adams - clarinet.

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In May 1937, the English surpassed themselves in their festivities for the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth when they converted their piece of the Ford of Heaven into a corner of Merrie England. On Min Yuan sports ground, 1st Bn the Lan-cashire Fusiliers trooped the colour as though they were on Horse Guards Parade. The service of Thanksgiving at All Saints Church followed exactly that decreed by the Arch-bishops of Canterbury and York for the Abbey Church of St Peter, Westminster. Ye Olde English Faire launched on Country Club’s grounds boasted of a coconut shy, Punch and Judy show, Hampden Court maze, Aunt Sally booth, a country pub - Ye Olde Pig and Whistle, and a Tudor maypole. The buildings on the main roads were illuminated for fi ve straight nights, the fi fth culminating in a grand fi reworks display in Victoria Park.

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How did the Chinese react to all that pomp and circumstance of the British Empire being thrust upon them? Well, on Coronation Night they poured into Victoria Park to take in the fi reworks display (see above). Throughout Coronation Week I heard the slogan shouted many times over: “Ying Huang Wan Sui - May the English Monarch live Ten Thousand Years!” Figure of speech? Perhaps not. In 1984, I stood on Sacred Way leading to the Ming Tombs. For 500 years the pairs of giant marble fi gures lining the way as far as the eye could see were poised curiously: an elephant standing an elephant reclining, a mythi-cal creature standing a mythical creature reclining, and so on. I asked our guide. “Why is every other fi gure lying down?” He stared at me agape. “Don’t you know that those rest-ing have completed their guard duty and in time will rise to their feet while the ones now standing will take their hard earned rest?” It hit me then and remains with me to this day that fused into the very soul of the people of China is the truth that time is on their side.

So to the Chinese it must have been just the blink of an eye, the twelve years that passed from King George’s Coronation to Chairman Mao’s Declaration of Independence at Tiananmen Square. To those foreigners who re-fused to pull up stakes it was the fi nal blow. They were now obliged to join the general exodus that followed the loss of the concessions. Fortunately, some wrote about their experiences. I especially like Richard Dyott’s chapters on Tientsin in his memoir An Edge In Wordways in which he captures to a T the admixture of cultures a foreign lad was exposed to while growing up in Tientsin. We were classmates at the ultra English Grammar School until his parents moved him to École municipale française. They knew of what they were doing, for he mastered French and went on from Tientsin to Harrow and to a brilliant career in electronics and a world authority on fi bre optics. An Edge In Wordways sticks to the facts, no embellishment, no fabrication, which, regrettably, is so often not the case. You come across memoirs so heavily fi ctional-ized that cannot rely on any of their contents being factual.

There is so much fantasizing in my brother Brian Power’s book about his upbringing in the ancient city called the Ford of Heaven that I felt obliged to write a commentary replacing fairy tale with fact. You will see that commentary if you do a Google search on Brian’s Real Upbringing in the Ford of Heaven. Don’t forget to click on “Read in classic mode” on the right hand side at the foot of the page.