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037 Sailortown
Erfgoedstuk
Bladmuziek
Sailortown,
Titel:
Sailortown
Naam uitgever:
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. - E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
Jaar van uitgave:
1997
Omschrijving:
Liedtekst en Liedtekst verklaring
Aantal pagina's:
360
Taal:
Engels
Plaats van uitgave:
London & Newe York
Auteur:
Stan Hugill
THE PACIFIC, AUSTRALIA, ASIA, AND AFRICA When a tea clipper sailed homeward bound from Shanghai she
would get a rousing salute of guns from all the other vessels lying in the stream. The seamen from these ships found their fun ashore in the dives
behind the Bund, and in the European and native drinking dens and brothels. Some bolder ones sorted out the sing-song houses in Foo- chow Road, a street long famous for its sing-song girls and their ac- complishments, both musical and sexual. In the seventies Scotts Road was a notorious brothel area, with over three hundred low-class whore-houses catering to both sailors and Chinese. There were many white girls in these dives, mainly victims of the white slave traffic, most of them having already been broken in in the stews of other Orien- tal ports. The most sumptuous brothel in Shanghai, in the seventies, was that visited by the Australian sociologist, W. N. Willis, called the Harem, which had twenty select white girls, but I doubt if the im- pecunious sailors ever got anywhere near this place. In later years the dives behind the Bund became known to the sea-
faring community as Blood Alley, and it was here that Red Eisen- berg, who later became a crimp in Eureka, California, had his sailor drinking den. After the First World War the Russian (^migrés poured into Shanghai, and it was then one could see White Russian women sitting on the doorstep of a brothel in the Broadway area, with next door, a Chinese itaitai doing the same thing. They would inform the sailor that they were 'Russian princesses', and in time all White Rus- sian whores became known as 'Princesses'. Of course, many of them had been on the game in Russia long before the Revolution. Their men-folk, too, had to demean themselves, and it was a common sight around 1919 to see a White Russian pulling a rickshaw for hire. The Seafarer'^ records the fact that a German sailing ship called the Land- kirchen had to pay off in Shanghai several of the crew suffering from beriberi. They were replaced by five White Russian naval officers from the beach, who signed as A.B.s and were extremely glad to do so.
On the whole, however, Shanghai, being such a cosmopolitan
city, never developed a compact Sailortown. Most of the drinking dens, 'rags', and places of entertainment frequented by seamen had other clientele in the form of German, Russian, French, American, and British shore-dwellers as well as the Chinese themselves. After Commodore Perry opened up Japan in 1854—his second visit—the sailor who touched here in the sixties and seventies was in for a marvellous, if at times somewhat dangerous, slice of 'shore- going'. The Treaty Ports, naturally, had their boundaries and whites were not supposed to leave these areas, but sailors being sailors sometimes did, and this was when the danger arose. After so many years of isolation it took the Japanese quite a while • Vol. I, no. I, June 1963. 302
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Organisatie: Shanty Nederland
laatste wijziging 18-09-2022
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