世界日報
- Important Notice from the Peking–Hankow Railway Administration
- Bound Volumes of the Shijie Ribao Supplement
- Buy Your Autumn Festival Gifts
This page of the Peking Shijie Ribao for Tuesday, October 19, 1926, carried mainly notices and advertisements. In a notice dated September 11, the Peking–Hankow Railway Administration announced that it was withdrawing Special Express Trains Nos. 7 and 8 between Peking and Shijiazhuang. It replaced them with ordinary trains Nos. 21 and 22, which hauled freight cars as well as passengers, and gave the need to redistribute rolling stock as its reason. The paper also advertised monthly bound volumes of its own literary supplement. According to the ad, Peking University professor Liu Bannong edited the supplement, and each volume ran to about 120 pages with more than 150 pieces, aimed at students. A tea shop outside Qianmen offered tins of chloranthus-scented Pearl Tea as Autumn Festival gifts.
This reading covers three legible items on the page: the railway notice, the supplement advertisement and the tea advertisement. The OCR text was heavily garbled, so the readings follow the page image wherever the two disagree. The medicine advertisements printed on dark backgrounds in tiles r0c2, r1c2, r2c2 and r3c2 are largely illegible and are not translated. Small-print book lists and contents tables are partly blurred and are left out, so any publisher's subscription notice among them, such as one for the Sibu Congkan, is not covered. Text cut off at the tile edges is also omitted.
Translation
Important Notice from the Peking–Hankow Railway Administration
Important Notice of the Peking–Hankow Railway Administration, No. 246. Notice is hereby given: In order to redistribute rolling stock and facilitate transport, this railway will, effective today, suspend the running of Special Express Trains Nos. 7 and 8 between Peking and Shijiazhuang, and will instead make up Ordinary Passenger Trains Nos. 21 and 22, with freight cars attached, to run daily between Peking and Shijiazhuang carrying passengers and goods. This is urgently announced so that all may be informed. Hereby announced. September 11, 15th Year of the Republic of China.
Bound Volumes of the Shijie Ribao Supplement
Shijie Ribao. Bound Volumes of the Shijie Ribao Supplement. The Shijie Ribao Supplement is edited by Dr. Liu Bannong, professor at Peking University, and many of those who write for it are likewise accomplished scholars of the day. Each bound volume gathers a month's contents into a single book, finely printed and handsomely bound, entirely unlike the crude volumes made by binding up old newspapers. Each volume runs to about 120 pages and contains more than 150 pieces; rich in content, it gives equal weight to learning and to entertainment. Every young person should have a copy at hand for the hours after class.
Buy Your Autumn Festival Gifts
Tuesday. Please buy gifts for the Autumn Festival. Pearl Tea, 40 cents silver per tin. This tea is gathered from famous mountains in every province of China and brought to the capital, where specially engaged master craftsmen scent it with Fuzhou zhulan (chloranthus) blossoms. Its flavor is fragrant and pleasing to the palate; drinking it promotes saliva and quenches thirst, dispels summer heat, and strengthens the spleen and stomach. It is truly the most healthful beverage for the summer season. General wholesale: Qinglong Tea Shop, Xiangchang Road, outside Qianmen, Peking. Telephone: South Exchange 4651, 5567.
Context
The Peking–Hankow line and who ran it
The Peking–Hankow Railway Administration that issued this notice ran the trunk line joining Peking with Hankou on the Yangtze. The railway was built between 1897 and 1906 by the Société Belge de Chemins de Fer en Chine, a Belgian-backed company. The full 1,214-kilometre line, with 125 stations, opened on 14 November 1905. On 1 January 1909 the railway came under Chinese control, so by 1926 the administration publishing this notice was a Chinese body rather than a foreign concessionaire. The Peking–Shijiazhuang service named in the notice ran on the northern section of the line, the part closest to the capital and to the government that controlled it.
What was happening along the railway in September 1926
The notice is dated 11 September 1926, and it explains the change only as a matter of redistributing rolling stock to ease transport. In that month the railway ran through the heart of the civil war. The Nationalist Northern Expedition had formally begun on 9 July 1926, and that year the forces of Wu Peifu held northern Hunan, Hubei and Henan. During the summer much of Wu's army was tied down near Beijing, fighting the Guominjun at Nankou Pass. In early September, as Nationalist troops closed in on Wuchang, Wu and most of his army fled north to Henan, while the troops left behind held the walled city for more than a month. Wu had already shown how tightly warlords controlled this line in 1923, when he sent military police to break up the founding meeting of the railway workers' federation. The notice itself says nothing of armies taking over cars on this route, so a military cause for cutting the express remains an inference from the timing, not an established fact. Even so, swapping express trains for mixed passenger-and-freight trains suggests that the administration was short of rolling stock.
Who Liu Bannong was
Liu Bannong, whom the advertisement names as editor of the supplement, was one of the best-known writers of the May Fourth generation. His work first appeared in 1916 in New Youth, the most influential journal of the May Fourth New Culture Movement. He went on to study abroad and earned a PhD in 1925 at the Institut de Phonétique of the Sorbonne in Paris, returning to China the same year to begin a university teaching career. The ad's title, "Dr. Liu Bannong, professor at Peking University," draws on this new doctorate and his teaching post. In 1926 he had been back in Beijing only about a year. By putting his name first, the Shijie Ribao presented the bound volumes as serious reading for students rather than as simple newspaper reprints.
The Shijie Ribao and its supplements
The Shijie Ribao was a young paper in 1926. The journalist Cheng Shewo founded it in 1925 together with the evening Shijie Wanbao, and he had Zhang Henshui edit two supplements, Mingzhu and Yeguang. A modern account of Cheng lists Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, Li Jiannong, Liu Bannong and Qian Xuantong among those who wrote for him. That account names Liu as a contributor, not as an editor, so the claim that he edited the supplement sold here rests on the paper's own advertisement. The paper's second year was also a dangerous one. After it reported that the warlord Zhang Zongchang had had the well-known journalist Lin Baishui shot, Cheng found his own life at risk. Against that background, the bound-volume ad can be read as the effort of a paper under warlord pressure to win a loyal student readership through a supplement that mixed scholarship with entertainment.
Original
京漢鐵路管理局緊要廣告
京漢鐵路管理局緊要廣告第二百四十六號啓者本路現因調濟車輛便利運輸起見自即日起將往來北京石家庄之第七八兩次特別快車停止開行另組第二十一及二十二兩次尋常客車附挂貨車逐日往來北京石家庄間載運客貨合亟佈告俾衆週知此佈中華民國十五年九月十一日
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