A Canadian Clergyman in Shanghai

China specialist Dr Matthew Wills introduces us to a memoir of early 20th century Shanghai through the eyes of a Canadian ex-pat. 

It has been an exciting time for China-related books at Peter Harrington recently, for we have acquired a range of 19^th and 20^th-century publications covering all manner of topics, from missionary work and pharology to philosophy and political propaganda. Some of these are already on our website, with others scheduled to appear in the coming weeks. You can find our current China-related stock here.

Today, I would like to write about one of these acquisitions: a fascinating typescript memoir authored in 1966 by Alexander Trivett, a Canadian-born clergyman who spent almost 3 decades in China between the early 1920s and the early 1950s. Among his several appointments, Trivett was Dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral in the British concession in Shanghai for 28 years.

As an historian of China, I have found that memoirs reveal the kind of granular, everyday detail – the colour of life – that is often omitted by formal bureaucratic documents and other sources. Trivett’s account is no exception. I decided to read the whole 118-page document to gain as full a picture of his experiences as possible, and this decision did not disappoint. Among his many recollections, he writes of sailing to China in the company of an American officer prone to throwing chairs overboard, and of preaching at his first post in the city of Hankou with the full-throated backing of a “hardened male quartet of old China hands” who liked to sneak a few beers in a side room during hot summer sermons. In Shanghai, Trivett’s life was equally rich, with his duties including officiating at the marriage of Butterfly Wu – Shanghai’s wedding of the year for 1935 – and taking an active role in the rich cosmopolitanism of the foreign concessions.

I found Trivett’s memoir most compelling though, because of the personal perspective he brings to the tumultuous and eventful history of China in this period. He writes of the destruction wrought by the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937 and his internment in the infamous Lunghua camp – home to a young J. G. Ballard – by the Japanese Army. Trivett was also in Shanghai in 1949 to witness soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army entering the city and securing it for Mao’s Communist Party. And, permeating through the whole of the memoir in its post-1945 portion is a poignant sense of the end of China as Trivett had known it, with foreigners no longer able to enjoy the colonial privileges secured by the gunboat diplomacy of former times.

As a document of history, Trivett’s is the kind of account where its depth ensures that one reading will not suffice. Indeed, I finished it with an entirely new perspective on events I thought I knew well. As he only privately circulated copies, just one is known to exist institutionally (in the library of Lambeth Palace), and I cannot imagine that many people have had a chance to read his story. It feels exciting to have been one of them.