Tianjin Expatriate Community

The Jewish community in Tianjin was a very active one. It had fewer members than similar immigrant communities in Shanghai or Harbin , but nevertheless ran its own hospital, school, culture club (the famous Kunst-Club) and synagogue. Much of the material on Jewish life in Tianjin as displayed in the exhibit came from Mr. Joseph Schulhof. Joseph Schulhof was born in 1903 in Brod, about 20 miles east of Prague. He attended gymnasium in Prague, and continued his education at the German University in Prague to study engineering. After graduation, Schulhof occupied posts with various companies, one of them in Ostrova, near the Hungarian border, where he met his wife Charlotte. They were married in 1932. In 1937, he was called back to the main office of his company in Prague to assume an executive position there. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (March 15, 1939), the Schulhofs (now with an infant boy, Peter), migrated to Shanghai, the international city open to everyone who could show that s/he had a minimum of US $500 as "landing money". The money was procured, and the Schulhof family sailed from Genoa, Italy, to Shanghai, China. They spent ten months in Shanghai before resettling in Tianjin in 1941, where they were to remain until communist troops advanced into North China in the fall of 1948. They packed up their belongings and relocated again, this time to the U.S., where they still live today, in good health. Joseph celebrated his 100th birthday in the fall of 2003. Courtesy does not permit us to disclose Charlotte's age.

Brian Power: The Ford of Heaven - The Autobiography of A Western child raised in Tientsin.

An amazingly detailed account of a childhood in Tientsin. This book is on academic readings lists at universities, together with other accounts of this nature, for example Pearl S. Buck's My Several Worlds.

Boston, MA: Printed for the Author by the Womans' Foreign Missionary Society Methodist Episcopal Church, [c1923].

In 1912, Eva Gregg, a registered nurse, went to China and became the Superintendent of the Isabella Fisher Hospital, part of the Methodist Episcopal mission in Tientsin. The hospital was built in 1881 along the Taku Road and was devoted to caring for sick women and children. It played a different role in 1900, however, during the battle of Tientsin, when it was used as a base hospital for the U.S. China Relief Expedition. In 1915 the hospital moved into the new compound of the Womans' Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (WFMS) located near the former location of the South Gate.

The volume consists of "round robin letters to friends" which describe the unfortunate situation of the poor and the sick, and record observations of Chinese scenes and customs. There is a description of the memorial service for the Dowager Empress in Peking in March 1913. The hospital's efforts to aid refugees during the widespread famine of 1920 are detailed. Tientsin is described as having "people from every country" and Gregg has pointed remarks about the foreign concessions: "At the time of the Boxer trouble these people all stepped in and helped themselves to a slice of the city, but our own Uncle Sam, who was the only decent one in the lot, kept his hands off. I think the United States is the only country in the world which does not own a part of Tientsin so the Chinese feel very friendly indeed toward the U.S.A."

By Desmond Power (brother of Brian Power, whose book Ford of Heaven is also on display in the exhibit), a third-generation Old China Hand, weaving together true life experience with a rare collection of contemporary photos, sketches, and news clippings to capture the spirit of the life and times of foreigners in China's treaty ports: their heyday, their humiliation in Japanese prison camps, their exodus from China. Desmond Power, born in Tianjin in 1923, left for North America in 1946, and lives now in Vancouver, BC.

The title story in this collection of short stories unfolds a culture clash between East and West. The author attempts to provide local color by describing The lovely young Mrs. Wing Tee (of course married reluctantly to an aged husband) nurses a young British gentleman who is thrown from his horse outside her gates, despite having been warned about the hated foreign devils. She dreams about a future with him, while he dreams about his fiancée back home. When the husband returns, tipped off by a nosy neighbor, there is a feast in which a ginger jar figures prominently (and tragically).

Frances Mathews (1865?-1925) was a prolific writer of plays, mostly comedies, many of which were produced on the American stage. She also wrote novels as well as short stories. The author provides local color in this story by describing an exotic milieu, and by attempting to render the heroine's dialogue in pidgin English. There is no evidence the author had any direct knowledge of Tientsin (or indeed China), but an oriental setting would appeal to a popular audience at the time.

Many Christian denominations operated schools and hospitals in China in the 19 th and early 20th century while seeking converts.

Clara Cushman, born in 1851 to missionary parents, became a leader in the Womans' Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (WFMS). After two earlier appointments in the Peking Girls' School, and a furlough in the U.S., she was assigned to reopen the Keen Girls' School in Tientsin in 1909.

Cushman's “scribbles” were written (from 1911 to her retirement in 1924) as events happened, rather than retrospectively and had not been intended for publication. She focuses on the role of the mission in providing services for women and children, but includes many observations on daily life in Tientsin, as well as devotional reflections.

There are many photographs of the school, other buildings, street scenes, and people. Five stories and a poem for children are included.

The Keen School, located in the French concession on the Taku Road, had been damaged extensively in 1900 when, “Walls were punctured by Boxer bullets”. Cushman got the school operating, and in 1915 new buildings were opened “…in Chinese quarters on the street running from what was the South Gate of Tientsin before the city wall was torn down after Boxer troubles”.

Unwelcome at the Northeast Gate

The autobiographical memoir by Margaret May Prentice, a missionary who helped to establish and run a hospital in Tientsin, and who spent some time in a Japanese internment camp during the early years of World War II.

Expatriates and their Stories