{"id":37,"date":"2005-09-29T13:37:36","date_gmt":"2005-09-29T18:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=37"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:42:18","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:42:18","slug":"china-is-dirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2005\/09\/china-is-dirty\/","title":{"rendered":"China is dirty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many of our countless readers already know this resource, but one of the things I like to read and teach with is Tales of Old China<\/a>, a website put up by SinoMedia Shanghai. They have a nice collection of postcard pictures, snippets and larger pieces from various books and newspapers about life in the Treaty Ports. A lot of the pictures are annoying, in that they are interesting but unsourced and above all undated, so that it is hard to be sure what to make of them.<\/p>\n

Today I came across a piece on \u201cThe Fly Menace in China\u201d<\/a> from The China Journal, October 1937. It explains the dangers presented by the hordes of flies that have descended on foreign Shanghai in the aftermath of war.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe various flies must have been observed by almost every Shanghai resident armed with a swatter during these critical days. Our natural petulance at war conditions and aerial bombing has taken a common expression in animosity against our insect aerial foes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Flies\"<\/p>\n

Needless to say the reading provides all sorts of teachable moments, from the stunning callousness of the foreign community to the foreign concern with the infectious nature of the Chinese. I particularly liked the way that they provided pictures of all the types of flies so the scientifically-minded Shanghailanders could classify their kills.<\/p>\n

I assume that the readings here are so useful because someone with a sharp eye at SinoMedia Shanghai is going through and picking stuff out for web-posting. Most of this treaty-port stuff works well with American undergrads, since it is in English, it is obsessed with analyzing the Chinese, and it usually has a condescending tone that is easy for students to pick up on and use as the first step in an analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many of our countless readers already know this resource, but one of the things I like to read and teach with is Tales of Old China, a website put up by SinoMedia Shanghai. They have a nice collection of postcard pictures, snippets and larger pieces from various books and newspapers about life in the Treaty…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,126,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-general","category-republican"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5133,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/5133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}