Description: 1915 to 1918 was an unsettled time in China; there were warring rebels and bandits all across the land. But James Archibald Mitchell was not deterred and traveled widely. Mitchell was a fine writer and a skilled photographer with a sharp eye for people and places. Two of his sons have now collaborated to publish their father's journal and photos.
Brief description: James A. Mitchell was born in Centreville, Maryland in 1892. After graduation from Trinity College in Hartford, he spent three years in China amidst the chaos of changing regimes. He returned home in 1918 to join the American forces in Europe, but the war ended and he never shipped out. He earned a Master's Degree in English from Yale in 1921, and then, at age forty, decided to enter the ministry. He was the rector of St Paul's Episcopal Church in Englewood, New Jersey for 30 years. In the 1950s, he was caught up in the McCarthy scandals because of his support for civil rights and his work for progressive causes. He died in 1967.
Review Quotes:
"The 'Art Mitchell' of this charming, other-worldly book, was "Reverend Mitchell" to me in my grade school years, the dignified, slightly distant father of a rascally son who was my good pal, and who, like me grew to be an author.
As a Jew from a Left-wing family I knew little of the family and religious customs he supervised, but there was a quiet dignity to Rev. Mitchell I found appealing. Had I known that, like my family, he was a strong proponent of integration and had integrated his church we would have had more to talk about. Had I known that, like my family, he had suffered the persecutions of the McCarthy period, I would have considered him a hero. I mention both these political events because the young "Art" of this story is of a different time and place--a time when Western Imperialism and superiority was taken for granted; a time when our cultural norms were the measure of all others.
Despite these unreflective beginnings, the young man who emerges from these pages is open hearted, fearless, and a fair-minded reporter in a truly strange land. Reading this book is like opening a sealed time capsule revealing the intimate secrets of a previous era, not all of them as democratic and fair-minded as we might like, but having known the man he became, and having had the opportunity to review the young man as whom he began, I am filled with admiration and awe at the immense distances, psychic and geographic that he traversed and I can recommend that any reader follow his footsteps, wholeheartedly."
Rev. Hosho Peter Coyote, Zen Buddhist priest, actor, author.
James Archibald Mitchell's travel notes and rare photographs transport us to the colorful, but desperate, world of China in the throes of warlordism. We enter the thought process of a person curious to learn what Chinese society was really like. His affectionate, although somewhat imperialistic, observations of Chinese people at the grassroots--coolies and villagers--are poignant and frank; his descriptions of traveling to remote places by boat, train, or donkey, quite humorous. Despite the ragged state of affairs at that time, Arch recognizes the immense dignity and beauty of China's ancient civilization. Arch's sons John and Hugh should be congratulated for making this honest narrative available to a wider audience.
Shelly Drake Hawks, PhD
Author: The Art of Resistance. Painting by Candlelight
This book is pure gold for both old China hands and readers who just want a good adventure in a bye-gone world. James Archibald Mitchell's fresh and lively observations of his travels in warlord China, 1915-18, are witness to a China closer to the middle ages than the industrial era.
Mitchell shows us the smoky reds and golds of a Medieval funeral in the "gaudy semi-foreign brazenness of Shanghai," the magnificent distances of monumental Peking, and the spirituality of mountain temples on a donkey journey through northern mountains where crowds gathered to see foreigners. In a vast country in perpetual revolution after the end of the Qing Dynasty, readers will see the environs of Shanghai when its riverbanks were still verdant and the rivers flowed with graceful sampans. Darker truths are told as well: the suspected pirates summarily marched off to be shot, the dead infants found in sacks stuffed with straw, the villagers filthy and tattered if always warmly welcoming. How fortunate we are to be able to take such an earnest journey through the very different, but very familiar, old China that became the new China of today.
GARY MOORE, playwright and author of Burning in China