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hongkongartman-mlee · 11 months

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The Story Of The 1st Impresario In Hong Kong Mr Harry Odell, His Empire Theatre (璇宮戲院) & To Be Continued尚未完場, The Touching Film About This Jewish Man

An ‘impresario’ is a person who organizes and finances concerts, plays and operas. Art intermediaries are important. They make the availability of art performances much more accessible for the public. A good impresario knows well the audience and their needs.

Mr Harry Odell, a Jewish man, was born in 1896. He came to live in Hong Kong in 1921 and died in 1975 at the age of 79.

It was said that his real name was ‘Harry Obadofsky’. He was the son of Russian Jewish parents. He was educated at St. Francis Xavier’s College, in Shanghai. He ran away from home at 16 and supported himself as a tap dancer in Japan, before emigrating to the USA. In 1921, Obadofsky arrived in Hong Kong and changed his surname to Odell for the reason of marrying a girl Sophie Weill whose family owned the prestigious jewellery business Sennet Freres in Hong Kong. He fought in the defence of Hong Kong in 1941 and was made a prisoner of war by the Japanese.

Mr Odell loved art and culture. By persuading international acclaimed artists such as Xavier Cugat and Issace Stern to perform here in the colony in those years, he was the first impresario in the history of Hong Kong. He tirelessly lobbied the colonial government to build a permanent place for art performances. As a result, the first such venue, Hong Kong City Hall, was completed in 1962(information provided by Judy Green from 'The Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography’).

Mr Odell built his own concert theatre and film cinema known as the ‘Empire Theatre璇宮戲院’ in 1952. It was located in the North Point area along King’s Road and in those years, North Point was regarded as a remote place. Business was bad and it closed in 1957, and re-opened in 1959 as the ‘State Theatre皇都戲院’ following the purchase by a rich Chinese businessman and extensive renovations. The State Theatre sadly closed in 1997.

Concerns were raised in 2015 that the heritage building might be demolished. In 2020, a big property developer in Hong Kong New World Development acquired the ownership right of the Theatre and put forward good proposals related to the conservation of State Theatre. The Theatre is being repaired and will be opened soon for the third time.

The above is not just a story of history. It is a love story of how Harry Odell loved Hong Kong and how we loved this art hero. His life is one big touching story with hundreds of little touching stories within it.

2 film directors, Dora Choi & Haider Kikabhoy, made an evocative documentary movie about the noble story of Harry Odell and it is called To Be Continued 尚未完場. This piece of impressive work looks back on the history of the State Theatre (formerly the Empire Theatre) and the great life of Harry Odell. A film critic wrote this: “Kikabhoy and Choi created a film that is not just educational; it is also upbeat, amusing and heart felt at the same time.”

Apart from visiting Odell’s grave in Happy Valley and gazing at Odell’s former residence Old Alberose in Pokfulam, you must watch this heart-warming good film To Be Continued! Maurice Lee To Be Continued Trailer https://youtu.be/U6GICy7Nmpc Acknowledgement – 尚未完場 Hong Kong City Hall https://youtu.be/fg97X8gfsrA Acknowledgement – Online Museum

State Theatre https://youtu.be/S7D0U8DgEyo Acknowledgement – Bloomberg Television

#Sophie Weill #Sennet Freres #Xavier Cugat #Issace Stern #Judy Green #Dora Choi #Haider Kikabhoy #Old Alberose #St. Francis Xavier's College #New World Development #Hong Kong City Hall #State Theatre皇都戲院 #The Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography

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mydaylight · 1 year

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Consort Duan 端妃 (duān fēi)，of the Cao Clan, was a Ming Dynasty concubine of the Jiajing emperor. Lady Cao was born in Wuxi, modern Jiangsu Province. She was one of JIajing Emperor’s favourite consorts. In 1536, Lady Cao gave birth to the emperor's first daughter Zhu Shouying, Princess Chang'an. The same year, she was promoted to Imperial Concubine Duan. In 1537, Imperial Concubine Duan was promoted to Consort Duan. She gave birth to the emperor's third daughter in 1539, Zhu Luzheng, Princess Ning’an. The Jiajing emperor was a notoriously short-tempered, harsh man with many enemies, and in late 1542 several maids, despairing of his cruelty, attempted to assassinate him. This event has come to be known as the palace incident of the renyin year [1542] (renyin gong bian) or the incident of the palace maids. That night, the emperor had fallen asleep in the chambers of Consort Duan, who withdrew with her attendants, leaving him alone. The palace maids entered the room, tied a knot in a silk curtain cord, and slipped it around his neck; they also began to stab him in the groin with their hairpins. Someone among them panicked, Empress Fang was alerted, and a physician was summoned. The emperor remained unconscious until the following afternoon and, acting on his behalf, Empress Fang ordered that all of the women involved be executed immediately. As the attack had taken place in Consort Duan's palace, the empress determined that she had conspired with the palace women and sentenced her to death by slow slicing in the marketplace. The Jiajing held Empress Fang responsible for the death of his favorite, Consort Duan, thinking that she couldn’t have been involved, and when the empress was trapped in a palace fire in 1547 he refused to agree to her being rescued, leading to her death.

Source: Lee, Lily Xiao Hong; Wiles, Sue. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume II (University of Hong Kong Libraries Publications), Zhang Tingyu, (1739). History of Ming, Volume 114, Historical Biography 2, Empresses and Concubines 2.

Happy belated birthday @misssylvertongue!

#women in history #historyedit #cao duanfei #曹端妃 #consort duan of the cao clan #ming dynasty #16th century #misssylvertongue #sorry this took so long!#hope you like it <3 #her life was so sad #the fact that so many women died while jiajing lived to abuse even more women is so tragic #*mine

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jackson38toh · 6 years

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Stewardess and other -ess words

Q: How did English, a fundamentally nongendered language, get the word “stewardess,” a gendered term that’s now being replaced in our gender-sensitive era by the unisex “flight attendant”? What’s wrong with using “steward” for both sexes?

A: We’ll have more to say later about the old practice of adding “-ess” to nouns to feminize them. As we’ve written before on the blog, the current trend is in the other direction.

Modern English tends to favor the original, gender-free nouns for occupations—words like “mayor,” “author,” “sculptor,” and “poet” in place of “mayoress,” “authoress,” “sculptress,” “poetess,” and so on.

But first let’s look at “stewardess,” which is probably a much older word than you think.

It first appeared in writing in 1631 to mean a female steward (that is, a caretaker of some kind), and it was used for hundreds of years in caretaking, managerial, or administrative senses.

Only in later use did “stewardess” come to mean a female attendant on a ship (a sense first recorded in 1834), a train (1855), or a plane (1930).

“Stewardess” was of course derived from the gender-free noun “steward,” which is very old.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates written evidence of “steward” (stigweard in Old English) back to 955 or earlier, and notes that it was created within English, not derived from other sources.

“The first element is most probably Old English stig,” which means “a house or some part of a house,” Oxford says, noting that the Old English stigwita meant “house-dweller.”

In its earliest uses, the word meant someone who manages the domestic affairs of a household, and it later took on more official and administrative meanings in business, government, and the church.

The femininized “stewardess,” defined in the OED as “a female who performs the duties of a steward,” was first recorded in The Spanish Bawd, James Mabbe’s 1631 translation of a “tragicke-comedy” by Fernando de Rojas:

“O variable fortune … thou Ministresse and high Stewardesse of all temporal happinesse.”

We might be tempted to attribute that example to rhyme alone. But we found two more appearances of “stewardesse” in a religious work that was probably written in 1631 or earlier and was published in 1632.

These come from Henry Hawkins’s biography of a saint, The History of S. Elizabeth Daughter of the King of Hungary. Because Elizabeth gave her fortune to the poor, the author refers to her as God’s “trusty Stewardesse &; faithfull Dispensatress of his goods” and “this incomparable Stewardesse of Christ.”

Until the early 19th century, “stewardess” continued to be used in the various ways “steward” was used for a man. For example, the OED cites an 1827 usage by Thomas Carlyle in German Romance: “She was his … Castle-Stewardess.” (The book is an anthology of German romances, and the example is from an explanatory footnote by Carlyle.)

But as the old uses of “stewardess” died away, a new one developed. People began using “stewardess” in the 1830s to mean (like “steward” before it) a woman working aboard a ship.

The OED defines this use of “stewardess” as “a female attendant on a ship whose duty it is to wait on the women passengers.”

The earliest example we’ve found is from an 1834 news article about a shipwreck that left only six people alive, a passenger named Goulding and five crew members:

“Mr. Goulding and the stewardess floated ashore upon the quarter deck.” (From the Oct. 16, 1834, issue of a New York newspaper, the Mercury.)

The OED’s earliest citation is a bit later: “Mrs. F. and I were the only ladies on board; and there was no stewardess” (from Harriet Martineau’s book Society in America, 1837).

The use of the word in rail travel came along a couple of decades later. We found this example in a news account of a train wreck:

“A train hand, named Miller, had his leg broken above the ankle, and seemed much injured. Margaret, the stewardess of the train, was likewise bruised.” (From the Daily Express of Petersburg, Va., Oct. 30, 1855.)

Soon afterward, on July 29, 1858, a travel article in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer in West Virginia noted that on the Petersburg & Weldon Railway, a “stewardess travels with each train to wait on the lady passengers—serve ice water to them—hold their babies and other baggage occasionally.” (Note the reference to “babies and other baggage”!)

The earliest example we’ve found of “stewardess” meaning an aircraft attendant appeared in the New York Times on July 20, 1930. The reporter describes firsthand his experience aboard a flight from San Francisco to Chicago:

“And then there is Miss Inez Keller, stewardess or rather traveling hostess. The Boeing system has solved the problem of looking after the passengers by putting girls on all the liners.”

Later that year, an Australian newspaper ran this item: “A successful trial flight was made with the finest and largest passenger air liners in the world, each having luxurious accommodation for 38 passengers, with smoking saloon two pilots, steward and stewardess.” (From the Western Herald, Nov. 18, 1930.)

The OED’s first example appeared the following year in a photo caption published in United Airlines News (Aug. 5, 1931): “Uniformed stewardesses employed on the Chicago-San Diego divisions of United. The picture shows the original group of stewardesses employed.”

Oxford defines the newest sense of “stewardess” this way: “A female attendant on a passenger aircraft who attends to the needs and comfort of the passengers.” It adds that the word also means “a similar attendant on other kinds of passenger transport.”

This brings us to the larger subject—the use of the suffix “-ess” to form what the OED calls “nouns denoting female persons or animals.”

The ancestral source of “-ess,” according to etymologists, is the Greek -ισσα (-issa in our alphabet), which passed into Late Latin (-issa), then on into the Romance languages, including French (-esse).

In the Middle Ages, according to OED citations, English adopted many French words with their feminine endings already attached, including “countess” (perhaps before 1160), “hostess” (circa 1290), “abbess” (c. 1300), “lioness” (1300s), “mistress” (c. 1330), “arbitress” (1340), “enchantress” (c. 1374), “devouress” (1382), “sorceress” (c. 1384), “duchess” (c. 1385), “princess” (c. 1385), “conqueress” (before 1400), and “paintress” (c. 1450).

Some other English words, though not borrowed wholly from French, were modeled after the French pattern, like “adulteress” (before 1382) and “authoress” (1478).

And in imitation of such words, “-ess” endings were added to a few native words of Germanic origin, forming “murderess” (c. 1200); “goddess” (some time before 1387), and obsolete formations like “dwelleress” and “sleeresse” (“slayer” + “-ess”), both formed before 1382.

As the OED explains, writers of the 1500s and later centuries “very freely” invented words ending in “-ess,” but “many of these are now obsolete or little used, the tendency of modern usage being to treat the agent-nouns [ending] in –er, and the nouns indicating profession or occupation, as of common gender, unless there be some special reason to the contrary.”

Some of the dusty antiques include “martyress” (possibly 1473), “doctress” (1549), “buildress” (1569), “widowess” (1596), “creditress” (1608), “gardeneress” (before 1645), “tailoress” (1654), “farmeress” (1672), “vinteress” (1681), “auditress” (1667), “philosophess” (1668), “professoress” (1744), “chiefess” (1778), “editress” (1799), and “writeress” (1822).

Still seen, though rapidly going out of fashion, are “hostess” (c. 1290), “authoress” (1478), “poetess” (1531), “heiress” (1656), and “sculptress” (1662).

Of the few such occupational words that are still widely used, perhaps the most common are “actress” (1586) and “waitress” (c. 1595). These “-tress” endings, the OED says, “have in most cases been suggested by, and may be regarded as virtual adaptations of, the corresponding French words [ending] in -trice.”

In conclusion, “stewardess” was created at a time—in the 1600s—when English writers created all sorts of what the OED calls “feminine derivatives expressing sex.” It was also a time when educated English speakers regarded their native tongue as inferior to French and Latin, the gendered languages that were the lingua franca of nobles, clergy, and scholars.

Now “stewardess,” like so many of those feminized nouns, is rapidly becoming obsolete. But unlike the others, it hasn’t been replaced by a unisex “steward.”

Why? We don’t know the answer. But for whatever reason, as “stewardess” has fallen out of favor it’s taken “steward” down with it—at least in reference to air travel.

The usual replacement, “flight attendant,” showed up in the late 1940s, and passed “stewardess” in popularity in the late 1990s, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer.

The earliest example we’ve found for “flight attendant” is from the Jan. 26, 1947, issue of the Santa Cruz, Calif., Sentinel about a Hong Kong plane crash in which all four people were killed:

“The company listed those aboard as Capt. O. T. Weymouth, an American pilot, and a crew of three Filipinos, including Miss Lourdes Chuidian, flight attendant.”

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from Blog – Grammarphobia https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/10/ess-words.html

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nycreligion · 6 years

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Down goes Jesus, up goes Xi. Twitter from lvv.com

Eight is perfect harmony in Chinese tradition. If you ascend to live on the 8th Floor, you are especially blessed. So, learn these eight truths to rise above the ordinary crowd of news-followers.

1 The age of managerial imperialism in China.

We listened to President Xi Jinping’s entire speech to the Communist Party annual gathering. It was like listening to a managerial report. His game plan is managerial competence in aggressive suppression of domestic opponents and the attainment of international supremacy. He picked his internal circle for their managerial abilities and loyalty, not for their charisma. Don’t mistake this group as a bunch of ideologues. They use ideology to manage their people. But they could come to believe their own rhetoric resulting in an era of increasingly harsh treatment of religion..

Chinese Communist managers must adapt–“Sinicize”–religion to support the Chinese socialist society. At a recent meeting, the heads of the officially approved religious associations all vowed to fight “desinicization” in their religions. This means to fight the infiltration of any foreign ideas into Chinese religion.

2 The Xi personality cult is growing. He is being hailed as the “core leader,” which means that he can over-rule other leaders in the inner circle. Xi Jinping thought was recently enshrined along with Mao Zedong’s Thought in the Communist Party constitution. Mao was the founding leader of the People’s Republic of China.

Mao took on a god-like appearance in Chinese propaganda. The “Great Helmsman,” as he was called, thought that Chinese people were like sacks of potatoes who needed someone godlike to inspire them to action. In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, the Red Guards made Mao and Mao Thought the absolute touchstone of hope and judgment. Although that terrible episode soured Xi’s generation on such outlandish absolutist leaders, there is a constant temptation of dictatorial Chinese leaders to fall into the arms of popular adulation as a means of securing power. Mao is still counted as a “mystical presence” by many ordinary people. Taxi cab drivers sport Mao portraits hanging from their mirrors and tales of how his presence saved them in car wrecks. There are even Mao Temples and gargantuan icons scattered around the countryside areas of special significance in Mao’s biography.

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Although in the past Xi has denounced “personality cults” around Mao, the wave of tens of thousands of public portraits shouting his hosannas and other activities like teaching every school child about The Leader’s thought seems like a massive revival of a state-promoted religious cult. His and associates’ speeches have shown an inclination to the miraculous, at least in this-worldly terms: in Hong Kong he predicted “new miracles” were possible and in Pakistan, his vice premier also called for the creation of “new miracles.” Worldly rhetoric, surely; verging on the divine, maybe some local officials will start to promote this trend.

Bob Fu, president of China Aid, which documents religious policy in China, is alarmed, He says that the Communist Party is seeking to “exert total control over all areas of life” of Chinese citizens. The official ideology of this total control will include an eradication of alternatives to atheism.

3 Big drive in some areas to replace Jesus with Xi as savior of the Chinese people. (see #4)

4 Blame for poverty is being put on religion, particularly Christianity, as an “opium of the people.”

Communists claim religion perpetuates poverty while Xi’s Thought will end it.

A Chinese social media account acclaimed Yugan’s Huangjinbu township Party cadres for their house-to-house visits with Christians to melt “the hard ice in their hearts” so that they were “transformed them from believing in religion to believing in the party.” The township is located in an area of the poor southeastern province of Jiangxi that is about ten percent or more Christian. After some warnings that their share of the poverty relief fund would be cut, they “voluntarily” got rid of their Bible verses and portraits of Jesus or of the Cross and put up Leader Xi’s portraits in their living rooms.

Qi Yan, the local Communist leader, told the South China Morning Post, “Many poor households have plunged into poverty because of illness in the family. Some resorted to believing in Jesus to cure their illnesses. But we tried to tell them that getting ill is a physical thing and that the people who can really help them are the Communist Party and General Secretary [of the Communist Party] Xi.” Qi added, “Many rural people are ignorant. They think God is their savior —After our cadres’ work, they’ll realize their mistakes and think: we should no longer rely on Jesus, but on the party for help.”

At the next Chinese New Year’s celebrations, party leaders hope that no more gospel couplets will be hung on the front doors. They plan on putting Leader Xi everywhere.

5 Christianity is the religious movement most feared by the Chinese government.

“Appeal to a Higher Power” means Communism is an ersatz religion.

Dictionary definition of ersatz: being a usually artificial and inferior substitute or imitation, i.e. ersatz turf or ersatz intellectuals. First used in 1871. Mirriam-Webster Dictionary

6 Communist apologetic for government corruption: religion did it!

Beijing Daily warns that “feudalistic superstitious activities” lead to corruption. “Superstition is thought pollution and spiritual anesthesia that cannot be underestimated and must be thoroughly purged…As an official, if you spend all your time on crooked ways, sooner or later you’ll come to grief.”

Li Chuncheng, former deputy party honcho in Sichuan, used feng shui (pronounced feng swey) to find the crooked path. Feng shui is a traditional method of divining the good and bad influences of one’s environment. Li used it to guide him in his corrupt career of bribery and abuse of power for which he was jailed for 13 years in 2015.

Security chief Zhou Yongkang, who made all other officials quake in their boots, used occult sources for his power. He was jailed for life for leaking state secrets to qi-gong expert, fortune-teller and healer Cao Yongzheng, known as the “Xinjiang Sage” of far western China. In the 1990s, a People’s Daily article claimed that with a single look at the face he could tell a person’s future and with a single touch could heal incurable illnesses.

Chinese courts say that Cao was also able to pocket several billion dollars in “illegal profits.” He very well might be the highest paid fortune teller in world history. Supposedly, he is in custody of the Chinese government after testifying against the security chief Zhou.

7 In sheer numbers and ferocity, the Chinese government has become the leader of an international atheist movement. Renewed effort to teach and demand atheism.

“Communism begins from the outset with atheism,” said an article this Fall in People’s Daily.

Beijing Daily, the official voice of the government, warned Communist Party officials this Fall not to “pry to god or worship Buddha” because good Communists are atheists.

8 Religion is “soaking into China” from outside influences, claims the government.

In an editorial in the People’s Daily, Wang Zuoan, the head of China’s religious affairs bureau, approved the new rules approved last winter to restrict religion because of “The foreign use of religion to infiltrate [China] intensifies by the day and religious extremist thought is spreading in some areas.”

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8 things you need to know about current oppression of religion by the Chinese government

Eight is perfect harmony in Chinese tradition. If you ascend to live on the 8th Floor, you are especially blessed.

8 things you need to know about current oppression of religion by the Chinese government Eight is perfect harmony in Chinese tradition. If you ascend to live on the 8th Floor, you are especially blessed.

#Bejing Daily #China #People&039;s Daily #personality cult #religious freedom #Tony Carnes #Wang Zuoan #Xi Jinping #Yugan