Tracing back to China
Updated: Sep 12, 2023
Contributed to PEM / 06 NOV 2015 /
By Tom Paine
The CCTV (China Central Television) film crew working with award-winning director Gu Jun on the forthcoming Chinese documentary Maritime Silk Road found its way to PEM because they wanted to follow the story of an American working in China whose family also had long ties with China. For some reason, they ignored all the other better qualified candidates that are surely out there…and chose me.
When I first visited the Peabody Museum in the early 1960s, I had no idea that I had an ancestor involved in the China trade. Nor did I know it when I first went to Asia in 1976-7, practicing as a landscape architect in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. My wife had been named a Henry Luce Scholar that year. To prepare for our year in Taiwan, we took beginning Chinese at Harvard Summer School with a Harvard undergrad named Nancy Berliner, later a curator at PEM and the genius behind Yin Yu Tang. We next ran into Nancy, by chance, on the streets of Beijing in 1988. Small world. Around then I finally learned I had a China trader ancestor. For years all I knew about my ancestor John Bryant was that he formed a firm called Bryant & Sturgis. Full stop. The first hint of a China connection emerged in an article published in 1943 in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. I soon discovered that the sea voyage memoir Two Years Before the Mast took place on Bryant & Sturgis ships. After I spent 2007 in a Shanghai design firm, I decided to see what Baker Library at Harvard Business School and PEM had on Bryant & Sturgis. While the former had an account book in Bryant’s hand, the latter had two logbooks, one in Bryant’s hand telling tales of pirate attack in the Pearl River and the other illustrated with vivid watercolors of ships on the Pearl River. Now I was hooked.
Log book in Bryant’s hand telling tales of pirate attack. Courtesy photo
In early 2014, Colin Lin, a Guangzhou-based entrepreneur, approached me requesting help in organizing a Boston cultural and trade delegation to Guangzhou. He wanted to commemorate, on August 28, 2014, the 230th anniversary of the first direct contact between Americans and Chinese, when the Boston built ship Empress of China, carrying the future first envoy to China, a Bostonian named Samuel Shaw, dropped anchor on the Pearl River. I was all in. Though I had worked all over China over my eight years with AGER, a Chinese design firm (running its Boston office), I had never even been to Guangzhou. John Bryant, who arrived in 1809, would have asked me, “What took you so long?” So might my great Aunt Helen Paine Kimball, who visited China both just before and just after the 1911 Revolution and took thousands of photographs of ordinary Chinese people, and newly elected President Sun Yatsen, close up.
In extending invitations to cultural institutions to join in the delegation, I approached PEM, the Forbes House Museum and the Chinese Historical Society of New England. Back in 1977 while working at the Taiwan Tourism Bureau I had organized a historical tour of Taiwan for Crosby Forbes’s Museum of the American China Trade, now part of PEM, so filling his shoes this time out was his son, historian and Forbes Museum Trustee Rob Forbes. I also engineered a State Resolution proclaiming August 28, 2014 as Guangzhou Guangdong Boston Massachusetts Day through State Rep. Jonathan Hecht, a fellow Overseer at Massachusetts Historical Society who had spent time in China.
On the big day in Guangzhou, I presented a first edition of the memoir of Samuel Shaw to Gu Jianqing, chief sponsor of the delegation, chairman of the Guangzhou Association of Social Science Studies and a China trade history buff. Mr Gu loved the Empress of China story and was thrilled to get the book. Now CEO of Guangzhou Daily Media Company, Mr. Gu would indeed love to visit PEM someday.
But there was more. I learned that the founder of my profession of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, long before he found his calling, but already with the eye of a journalist, had shipped to Guangzhou as a common sailor in 1843, and somehow gotten himself into the city where foreigners were not allowed. He had been welcomed, despite his lack of status, into the homes, shops, temples and shipyards of ordinary Chinese people. This lesson in kindness toward strangers, which he called “civility,” came to mind later when he formed his vision for parks for the people, beginning with Central Park in New York. In its way, Guangzhou had helped inspire that vision. I thrilled the Mayor of Guangzhou when as a member of the delegation I told him this story at his banquet on that commemorative day last year.
It was my turn to be thrilled after wondering aloud how moving it would be if a descendant of Howqua, the fabled hong merchant and mentor to the Forbes brothers, could join us, when sure enough, Wu Lingli, Howqua’s descendant, a civil engineer, joined us in a Starbucks near People’s Park in Guangzhou and showed Rob Forbes and me family photos over the generations on his laptop.
Guangzhou Daily loved the Bryant and Olmsted story, and so did Rui Huang of CCTV, who was scouting for the forthcoming Maritime Silk Road production. Fortunately I had brought copies of my monograph on John Bryant to give people like her. It is illustrated with many images from the PEM collections, including its wonderful view of Guangzhou painted ca. 1800. I was amazed at what survived in the city from the China trade era — not the famous 13 factories, but an ancient pagoda and watch tower clearly depicted in PEM’s view, perhaps the most accurate view of the entire city from that era.
Fortuitously, my book on urban public open space best practices, Cities with Heart, was just then being published in a bilingual edition by the China Architecture and Building Press, and I was planning a book tour. CCTV wanted to include that and my whole story in China, which meant from John Bryant in 1809, to Helen Paine Kimball in 1908-13 to Tom Paine in 2007-2015. The CCTV film crew made a visit to PEM in late October.
All this interest from the Chinese side in the Old China Trade and the good far outweighing the bad that it brought to China — and to the West — is most welcome. We can expect more interest and someday to be reading English translations of Chinese monographs of the origins of this exciting bilateral relationship.
Editor’s Note: In a further celebration of trade, representatives from PEM are currently in the port city of Shanghai to present the new Guanfu Museum with a reproduction of a treasure from PEM’s collection. This month, the Shanghai Tower, the second tallest in the world, opens with a branch of the Guanfu Museum. PEM is giving a reproduction of an 11-foot panorama of the Shanghai Bund from 1882. The panorama is the largest of its kind and comes with 81 handwritten notes that describe commercial, maritime, diplomatic and recreational activities that took place along the waterfront at that time.
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