Sapajou was the artistic nom de plume of Georgii Avksent'ievich Sapojnikoff, one-time Lieutenant of the Russian Imperial Army. He was a graduate of the Aleksandrovskoe Military School in Moscow, and saw action in World War I, in which he was gravely wounded. As a result of his wounds, which left him with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life, he was invalided out of the army, and it was at this time that he began to take an interest in the visual arts, enrolling in evening classes at the Academy of Arts.
1920 found him, like so many of his compatriots, a refugee in Shanghai. From 1925 onwards he was on the staff of the North-China Daily News, probably the most important and prestigious English language newspaper in the Far East, and one that was rightly considered the mouthpiece of the largely British establishment of the International Settlement in Shanghai. Through his daily cartoons published over an almost unbroken period of some fifteen years, he became well known not only in Shanghai but also internationally. The publishing house of Kelly & Walsh produced several albums of his sketches of Shanghai life, and his illustrations appeared in a number of contemporary books on Chinese subjects He was also a Director and shareholder of the Shanghai Russian publishing house and newspaper Slovo.
Sapajou had the relatively rare distinction for a White Russian of being a member of the exclusive Shanghai Club (famed for its long bar - allegedly the longest in the world-which features in many of his cartoons of Shanghai life, e.g. Figure 1), and also of the Cercle Sportif Francais (Figure 2, long known post-1949 as the International Club, and in more recent years, having been purchased and enlarged by the Okura hotel group, as the Huayuan or Garden Hotel, once more a gathering place of the fashionable). He was tall, bespectacled, and distinguished in appearance (a Russian lady of my acquaintance who knew him at the height of his popularity recalled that "all the girls loved him"), and walked with a cane as a result of his war wound. He appears in a number of his own cartoons, an example of which is given as Figure 3.
Following the entry of the Japanese into World War II and their occupation of the International Concession, the North-China Daily News was closed down and Sapajou had to seek work elsewhere. For a professional cartoonist and stateless person - hence not subject to the internment that was the lot of most of his colleagues who had been unable to escape the Japanese - the choices were few, and in order not to starve he joined the local German newspaper, which was of course controlled by Nazis. After the war was over and his former colleagues returned from other theatres or were released from internment, while many were sympathetic to his predicament, the times and situation were such that it was not possible for him to be reinstated in his former job. He spent the next few years in conditions of considerable poverty in the north Shanghai suburb of Honkew (Hongkou 虹口), and eventually, shortly before the Communist takeover, was evacuated by UNWRA, with many other White Russians, now refugees twice over, to a displaced persons camp on the island of Tubabao in the Philippines. Already seriously ill, he died not long after arrival.
Such a sad ending to a life lived through turbulent times cannot, alas, been seen in any way as atypical for a man of Sapajou's background and period. What does mark him out from the crowd is the remarkable body of work he left behind, a fascinating, indeed brilliant, record of a vanished world, which taken in toto is a still insufficiently appreciated resource for students and scholars alike, and which can also provide great enjoyment to any with an interest in China in general or Shanghai in particular - especially at a time when in many ways that great city is drawing on its native and exotic genius to recreate itself after half a century of denial.
The cartoons themselves can be approached in a number of ways: taken sequentially, they provide a graphic chronological account of all the major developments in China from the warlord era through the Northern Expedition, the suppression of the Communists in 1927 and their subsequent reemergence in rural guise, the vicissitudes and successes of the Nationalist Government, and the gradual rise of Japan as the major threat to both Chinese, and eventually Western, interests in China. Thematically, one can observe social change, within and between both the Chinese and foreign communities; the problems of extraterritoriality ("extrality" to the true Shanghailanders); the life of the various expatriate communities; anti-crime campaigns; Chiang Kai-shek's 蒋介石 New Life movement; China at war, against foreigners and against itself; and also the way in which the accepted (by the North-China Daily News and its readers) views of certain figures or developments changed.Chiang Kai-shek himself, from red devil pitted against "good old" Marshall Wu Pei-fu 吴佩孚 and other Treaty Port favourites, to "jolly good chap" himself after 12 April 1927; or the Japanese, from plucky little fellows doing a hard and at times nasty job that somebody probably had to do, to cruel aggressors (a change of view that, at least in retrospect, took a surprisingly long time). Over the years Sapajou also amassed a rich portfolio of portraits of historical figures, and perhaps even more interestingly, of ordinary people drawn from life, and typical characters drawn from an imagination fed by rich experience and an observant eye.
The fact that most of Sapajou's work was produced for the North-China Daily News, as already hinted at in the previous paragraph, naturally influenced the way issues were treated, and a few words about the newspaper are necessary before moving to the cartoons themselves. The newspaper commenced publication on 1 July 1864, and finally shut down its presses on 31 March 1951, the longest run enjoyed by any foreign language newspaper in China. Its circulation for most of the period of Sapajou's association with it was around 7,000, largely amongst business and professional circles, amongst whom it had considerable influence. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that it sought for itself amongst the elite of the Shanghai International Concession, and indeed more broadly within the British community in China, an influence analogous to that of The Times at "Home."
While popular with its readership, however, it frequently found itself - or rather placed itself - in difficulties with the Chinese authorities, whoever they might happen to be. This was hardly surprising, given its role as mouthpiece of what Arthur Ransome called, in a highly critical but perceptive (and at the time notorious) article, "The Shanghai Mind." The gist of his argument was that "nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine that the Englishmen in Shanghai represent an English outpost or share the English point of view. The Shanghailanders hold that loyalty begins at home, and that their primary allegiance is to Shanghai." They make difficult any good understanding between England and China because just as we at home are apt to think of them as English, so the Chinese, in China, make the same mistake. English policy and thought are
"judged by the Chinese from the newspapers published in English in places like Shanghai and Tientsin. The Chinese naturally turn to these papers and judge England and England's policy by what they find there. It is impossible to persuade them that what they find is an expression not of the British but of the Shanghai mind. [In 1927] No Chinese, reading the Shanghai newspapers, could have had any other impression than that ... England was fundamentally and irrevocably hostile to the only movement in China which had as its object the freeing of the country from the wholly unscrupulous warlords who secure Shanghai's approval by suppressing labour and the resentment of the whole country by the wholesale robbery which is making its normal development impossible."
A number or Sapajou's cartoons critical of the diplomatic corps in Peking (and later Nanking), and of home governments, typify this "Shanghai mind" as described by Ransome (Figures 4 and 5).
The attitude taken by the newspaper to Chinese political developments has been well described by a contemporary as "austere, and on occasion supercilious but at times, particularly in the mid-to late '20s, it took a more openly hostile approach to the nationalist movements of the day. In 1929 the North-China Daily News was subjected to a postal ban by the National Government in Nanking, largely as a result of articles by its Peking correspondent, Rodney Gilbert, and the news editor George E.Sokolsky. In 1930 the editorial stand point changed noticeably with the appointment of Edwin Haward as editor. Knee-jerk criticism of anything done by the National Government ceased, and a generally more objective approach became the norm. While not underrating the importance of Haward's role, though, the change also reflected a broader modification of the position taken by many foreigners resident in China, who were gradually coming to see that they could live and work with the Nationalists, and that the alternatives - the Communists, banditry or, later, the Japanese - were all far more inimical to their interests. This is not to say that the change was universally welcome amongst the North-China Daily News' readership; while subscriptions by well-educated Chinese rose, criticism from the more diehard foreign readers was at times severe (see Figures 6 and 7).
While there is no reason to believe that Sapajou did not share the general views of his peers, there can also be little doubt that he welcomed the later, more accommodating approach adopted by Haward. Honoured as he was by the way in which he had been accepted by the International Settlement elite, he always remained very actively involved in White Russian community affairs, which of itself could not but have given him a more sympathetic understanding of the underdog, as the position of many of his compatriots was dire indeed. More than this, though, is the obvious liking and understanding of the Chinese, indeed admiration for them - albeit not unmingled with exasperation, and on occasion horror - that comes through in his drawings. And for every cartoon that pokes fun at the Chinese (and leaving aside questions of political viewpoint, I have not found one that could be described as malicious) there are at least half a dozen that attack foreign foibles. At the same time, at least for the historian, it is precisely the relatively typical nature of Sapajou's views, and of the world that he portrays, that gives his work its particular value.
While it is inevitably the content of Sapajou's cartoons that provides the greatest interest to historians, he would never have enjoyed the influence and popularity that were his at the height of his career were it not for the high level of his artistic accomplishment. His keen eye and sharp powers of observation, together with the capacity shared with the best cartoonists of drawing together a host of specific characteristics, be they national, individual, of a time or of a place, to produce immediately recognisable and lasting types, was more than matched by the fluidity and subtle power of his lines - which over time became both simpler and stronger - and the accuracy of his profiling and shapes. He was also an accomplished water colourist, and Hua Junwu 华君武, the doyen of PRC cartoonists, recalled in a 1997 article being impressed as a young art student in 1930s Shanghai by an exhibition of these works.
HuaJunwu also acknowledged the influence that Sapajou's cartoons had exercised on him while studying at the Upper Middle School attached to the Shanghai Datong University 上海大同大学. The cartoons appearing regularly in the North-China Daily News fascinated him at a time when he himself had just begun to study drawing, and he frequently tried to imitate their style, even to the extent of adopting a similar signature (while Sapajou signed his pictures in English, he did so in Chinese style, vertically from top to bottom). What struck Hua most about the cartoons was the way in which they managed to completely bring out the inner aspect of their subjects, be they Englishmen, Japanese or Chinese, and he confessed in retrospect to embarrassment at the extent and quality of his imitations of the master. Hua was not alone in this admiration for Sapajou's work, whatever he or his contemporaries may sometimes have felt about the content. Cartooning in the modern sense was a new medium in China, the political potential of which was quickly felt. The artists Huang Miaozi and his wife Yu Feng were also struck by Sapajou's cartoons, and although I have been unable to trace any direct acknowledgment, there are striking similarities between some of Sapajou's characters and those appearing in Zhang Leping's 张乐平 famous San Mao 三毛 series, which first started to appear in Shanghai in 1935. Hence the view - no more than just - of a modern Shanghai scholar, writing in a popular newspaper in 1997, that "while old Shanghai was indeed 'an adventurer's paradise', there were some foreign artists, such as Sapajou, who made contributions to culture."
Now to the actual cartoons. I have arranged them in seven sections, with only such notes as are necessary to explain what may not be immediately apparent from the drawings themselves, to place them in context or to draw out their worth as a scholarly resource.
