Review by Jamie Kwong

Hallowed Halls
By Martha Smalley, Deke Erh and Tess Johnston

　　The Tess Johnston / Deke Erh architecture Publishing Juggernaut, which aims eventually to document and catalog every brick created in pre-1949 China, continues to steam on.

　　The latest book in the series is called Hollowed Halls, and is a textually rich and voluptuously colourful record of the Protestant colleges of old China. An expert from Yale University, Martha Smalley, has this time joined the Johnston-Erh partnership, which has produced such unforgettable records of the western architectural heritage in China as "A Last Look".

　　The book features some of the great educational institutions of China including what he is now called Beijing University (once Yenching University) and Shanghai's University of Politics and Law (once St John's University), and a dozen other colleges around China that have played a crucial role in the development and continuation of learning in China over the past hundred years and more.

　　The protestant missionaries were particularly active in education, partly out of a desire to increase learning and enlightenment in a western sense amongst the Chinese people and partly, of course, in an effort to increase the number of adherents.

　　These colleges, also including the Lingnan College in Guangzhou and the universities of Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou, were pioneers of modern education in China and did much to lay the groundwork in science, medicine and agriculture research.

　　Most of the colleges were built or at least established around the turn or the century, 100 years ago, and they were built in a solid style that indicates a clear commitment on the part of the builders to the future.

　　Some of the buildings are in a very ornate western University style with hints of Gothic cathedrals and castle parapets. But others make a determined effort to integrate Chinese architectural styles into the solid western brickwork.

　　The graduates of these colleges went on to become leaders in many different fields and their English standard has ensured that English as spoken in Shanghai, for instance, is way ahead of English pronunciation in Hong Kong.

　　As with the other books in the Johnston/Erh collection, Hallowed Halls is a wonderful collage of loving photographs of the old architecture accompanied by yellowed snaps of the same structures from the past that usually show how well the buildings have survived over the decades.

　　This book, like its predecessors, both makes for a wonderful flip-through or a more studied read.

　　Hallowed Halls is available at the Old China Hand Reading Room, 27 Shaoxing Lu, tel: 6473-2526.

Travel China Shanghai Holiday Special
December 30,1998