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Shanghai, circa 1915
 

From The World of Flowers Through the Door of Hope
by Lynn Murray

Dolls produced by the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai have recently gained increased recognition from collectors and have been commanding record prices at auctions. The dolls are interwoven with romanticized stories of Edwardian western women wading into dens of iniquity and saving Chinese girls from their lives of depravity.
Much of what we read about the dolls is information recycled from the same sources: Kimport’s Doll Talk, Elsie Clark Krug’s newsletter, the articles written by Mary Eveline Sicard and a dissertation by Dr. Sue Ellen Gronewald. While these documents are valuable, they are purely from Western sources. Using both Western and Chinese sources, the goal of this article is to review what we know of the dolls while seeking greater insight into the lives of girls and women who eventually became inmates at the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai.

Old Shanghai was a unique and special city. It was not a colony and yet it was completely run by foreigners. In 1900 Shanghai was more cosmopolitan than Hong Kong or Tokyo, a city of rapid growth, filled with speculators, adventurers, scoundrels, the best of life and the worst abject poverty and anonymous death. Adventurers and entrepreneurs in search of decadence and wealth flocked to this Paris of the East. Russian aristocrats fled to Shanghai lending the International community an extra touch of mystery and exotic flavor. Nightclubs and cabarets, jazz clubs and dance clubs were thriving. Shanghai became the hot spot for performers and players. The reputation of the city was so bad that the term to be Shanghai-ed became common, as it was practise of ship’s captains to drug and drag sailors from their festivities back to the ship in order to set sail once again.

While some Chinese residents took up the fashions of the west, the separate communities were clearly delineated. A Westerner living in the International Settlement lived in a western city modeled along British colonial guidelines with trading houses and banks, a church, a racecourse and a club. Many foreign residents never bothered to learn to speak Chinese, preferring to preserve their arrogant superiority over their Chinese hosts. Conversely, the Chinese community was thriving in the environment created by the foreign enclave. Within the International Settlement married men and women led quite different lifestyles. Women moved about with great independence within the settlement, but rarely did they leave their own environment. Men dutifully attended functions at the club and church, but left the settlement to enjoy the nightlife of Shanghai under the guise of business.

An integral part of life in Shanghai was the sex trade. Prostitution was never seen as a grave social problem in Shanghai or other Chinese cities. As in European cities, authorities sought to regulate and contain the practise, rather than abolish it. How did women and girls arrive in these circumstances? They were sometimes sold into slavery or as bond servants to proprietors of brothels. Often it was a girl’s desperate family who sold her because they had no marriage prospect for her. Frequently the girls were victims of kidnapping, taken from the rural areas and sold into the trade in the city. Sadly, the methods used are those still employed today in countries around the world where women and girls are prepared to leave home in the hopes of finding a better future. They are convinced by the promise of legitimate work in another city. In China, girls were most often lured away from home by other women, often family friends or associates. Because of the separation of the sexes in Chinese culture, men were seldom the individuals who made the initial contact, unless they were a trusted relative. Once arriving in the city, they were sold by one middleman to the next until arriving in a brothel. For these young girls It was virtually impossible to extricate themselves. They were completely anonymous in the city, normally illiterate, shamed and lost.

In the 19^th and early 20^th Century, there were many strata of sex trade workers called by different names and located in different parts of the city. They ranged from the truly abject women and girls who worked on boats anchored in the river, to the women of the brothels in the French Concession and the Old City and finally to the more respectable women called courtesans who lived in often luxurious surroundings, albeit as prisoners. The average span of time that a girl lasted in a brothel was ten years, by which time she was too old to be appealing. Young girls were trained in the brothel and initiated into the trade at approximately age 14. It was this initiation rite that offered the Madame the opportunity to recover the initial investment she had made. The appeal of very young girls had no social stigma attached by the Chinese. The average age was 17 years old and for a woman to still be in the trade at age 30 was very unusual.

Boys were also kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, but there are few statistics on this and the code of silence on homosexual prostitution remains intact even today. Suffice to say that the Door of Hope had both female and male inmates, though the numbers for boys were low and the rehabilitation rates were poor.

In theory prostitutes could purchase their freedom from a brothel, but this was seldom a reality, for what skills did they have to assimilate into the outside world? Without protectors there was no one to negotiate marriage and their prospects were poor. All they had been taught were the rudiments of personal hygiene and perhaps a little singing. Most often their relative freedom was attained by marriage to a customer, suicide or death from disease. There was no rescue organization or government official to whom the women could turn. Local authorities largely turned a blind eye except when the girls or women were actively soliciting in the streets and local brothel owners or merchants registered a complaint. The street prostitutes were the most pitiful, often mere children working in groups for protection and under the watchful eye of an adult "manager."

The Taiping Revolt of 1860 drove an estimated 350,000 refugees from the lower Yangzi region into Shanghai. Housing needs were critical and the market for commodities of all sorts increased dramatically. Construction moved swiftly ahead both within the walled city of Shanghai and beyond. North of the walled Chinese City was the French Settlement and just north was the growing International Settlement along the Bund and the Suzhou River, where by 1920, no less than 335 brothels were in operation in an area of approximately 65 blocks. The city was divided into eleven prefectures by the Police Department. In 1900 Shanghai’s sex-trade industry or "world of flowers" was highly concentrated in three of the 11 prefectures.

Enter Miss Cornelia Bonnel, teacher of English and missionary. Miss Bonnel lived in a large house courtesy of a Chinese pastor. After watching a bond servant being mistreated by a woman in the street and observing that none in the crowd stepped forward to help, Miss Bonnel made a life-altering decision to convert her home into a refuge. The fact that she was living alone in Shanghai in 1900 speaks volumes for the mettle of Miss Bonnel. She must have been assertive and convincing, for she persuaded a small group of women missionaries, to join her on a committee for management and fund-raising. They opened the original Door of Hope refuge in November 1901. In 1903 Minnie Morris joined Miss Bonnel at Seward Road, where they were assisted by a visiting preacher and a Chinese servant. Not all members of the original committee had hands-on involvement with the mission. Their activities were focused on soliciting donations from both Shanghai and foreign sources.

Few girls came of their own accord in the first years but the missionaries struggled determinedly. For a little over three years, the Door of Hope was associated with the Florence Crittenton Association for Rescue, but this affiliation ended in 1906. One of the greatest stumbling blocks for the Door of Hope was getting information to the girls in the brothels. As the home was located some distance from the brothels, it was difficult for a girl to make her way there unassisted. Progress was seen when the courts agreed to allow the missionaries to receive girls convicted of prostitution or orphans found on the streets. Further progress was made when a group of affluent Chinese businessmen made it possible for Miss Bonnel to rent a room in Fuzhou Road, one of the main streets of the brothel district. There a receiving home was established with a large signboard outside proclaiming Yesu Neng Jiuren (Jesus Saves). While this new location made sanctuary more accessible to the girls, it was hardly conducive to reeducating them or removing them from the unsatisfactory surroundings of the World of Flowers or red light district. Both the receiving home on Fuzhou Road and the original home on Seward Road were overcrowded despite the purchase of a neighbouring house on Seward Road. The women of the mission committee must have felt both overwhelmed and gratified by their success.

By 1908 they leased larger premises in Zhejiang Road where they maintained the so-called first year home and the industrial home. From the receiving home, inmates assured of a place were sent to the first year home. The industrial home was for those inmates who stayed longer than one year. In 1909 there was a disagreement between the Chinese philanthropists and the missionaries’ evangelical activities, culminating in the withdrawal of financial support from the Chinese. (The missionaries expressed determination to marry their inmates off to Christians.) Not deterred, the purposeful committee of women redoubled their efforts to raise funds and in 1913 succeeded in purchasing property in the countryside that finally alleviated the problems of overcrowding.

Funding for the Door of Hope Mission came mainly from donations (50-65%) of which foreign donations were ten times as large as those from China. The district court provided a small amount of funding from fines that were collected. Infrequently there were one-time large donations from churches, the Christian Herald and famine relief organizations. Sales of items made in the industrial home accounted for very little of the income to the Door of Hope, helping to sustain those employed in the industrial home, but not making it self-sufficient.

According to the Annual Report of 1902, the industrial home produced a large variety of items including clothing, embroidered handkerchiefs, socks, fan boxes, custom bridal trousseaux and dolls. The Industrial Home was a large clothing workshop, sometimes employing more than 45 women who stayed at the Door of Hope for prolonged periods of time.

The ideal plan was for a girl to be moved from the receiving home to the first year home, where a strict daily routine was followed. It included the study of Chinese, arithmetic, hygiene and religion in the morning and training in sewing, embroidery and cooking in the afternoon. After evening prayers, all were sent to bed early with lights out by 9:00 PM. The Door of Hope Mission confined the girls who were allowed to leave only under certain circumstances: marriage, return to family or legitimate employment. Marriage to an inmate of the Door of Hope was achieved by advertising the names and photos of those girls who were ready to leave. Men, who because of financial or social circumstance had poor marriage prospects, were often the respondents. They might be Chinese Christian ministers, Chinese doctors, tailors or simply peasant farmers. They were driven by tradition to marry and carry on their family name, so they negotiated marriage to one of the inmates through the missionaries. After promising that they would not mistreat their wife, nor sell her into prostitution, the marriage was performed. A 1920 report in the Chinese women’s magazine Funü zazhi said that men who wished to marry Door of Hope residents paid 105 yuan. Of this, 30 went to the Door of Hope and the remaining 75 were used by the intended wife to buy clothes and other goods. No woman was forced to marry.

The girls who were not returned home, married or employed after one year were sent to the Industrial Home, where they were employed, or they were taken on as assistants in the receiving homes or first year home. The staff of the Door of Hope was totally female. The hope of the missionary women was that they could teach a new self respect and a sense of control of their life to these women. Unfortunately, the wages for women in legitimate work were seldom enough to keep them from returning to prostitution. The strict adherence to routine, religious observance and self-discipline often led to boredom and rebellion and there were frequently incidents of fighting, spitting, stealing and even tunnel building in attempts to escape. Many such incidents are recorded in the Shenbao Index.

Regardless of the motivation of the Door of Hope missionaries, Miss Bonnel and the others are to be highly esteemed for their dedication to relieve the plight of their fellows in Shanghai. There was a complete lack of state in Shanghai. No social agencies to rely upon or with whom to seek refuge. Assistance to prostitutes, no matter their young age, was not prestigious work, thus the social elite in both the Chinese community and the foreign communities were not helpful or generous. It was only after the revolution of 1911 that the Chinese Anti-Kidnapping Society was formed by a group of affluent merchants who saw the deplorable trade in women as another activity making China appear primitive and backward. The AKS focused its efforts on reporting kidnapping to the police through one of their four inspectors. Their overall success remains questionable. Some readers will argue that prostitution is a part of society that has been with us always. In reality, prostitution exists in societies that place women in a position of subordination. In 19^th and 20^th century Shanghai, women were not only considered subordinate, they had no rights and no dignity. In this kind of culture, prostitution is bound to thrive.

Ironically, the dolls made at the Door of Hope Industrial Home represented the traditional strata of accepted Chinese society. Naturally, none were made to represent the highly desirable concubine, with her white painted face and luxurious costume. To the Western eye the Chinese dolls initially look very similar to one another. It is only when there is a group of dolls assembled that one begins to appreciate their individual differences and characters. Kimport Dolls, of Independence, Missouri, offered 24 characters, leading to the erroneous conclusion that there were only 24 different characters made. Today we know that there were other characters made by special request and that some of the earliest dolls were actually much larger than the dolls produced in quantity. The Buddhist nun is one such doll. At the Strong Museum there can be found a nurse and at the Delaware Historical Society, a Korean gentleman and lady. These characters are so seldom seen that we surmise they were made by special order or made as samples for future production.

When we undertake a study of the dolls made at the Door of Hope Mission we need to keep in mind the historic occurrences in China, the environment in which the dolls were made and the simple fact that they were completely hand made. Dolls were only one of the products produced at the Door of Hope. The Industrial Home was in a state of constant upheaval, moving from one location to the next until 1913. The dolls were produced from 1902 up to the time of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and the subsequent burning of the Industrial Home in 1937. The archives containing order lists, receipts and other ephemera relating to the dolls was likely burned at the same time, leaving us only the Annual Reports and personal correspondence as references. Revolution and war effected the Industrial Home in 1911, 1924 and again in 1927. Doubtless the death of Miss Bonnel in 1916 had a lasting effect on the Door of Hope. Keeping these facts in mind, we realize that we cannot make any strict rules about quality control, types of fabric used, the absence or presence of wooden hands on the dolls, the absence or presence of bound feet or queues. We know that a doll with western hair style was made after 1911, but the converse is not necessarily true, for dolls with both carved queues and queues of hair or silk floss continued to be made after 1911. A more certain way of categorizing the dolls to similar time of manufacture may be by recognizing the differences in the style of carving of the heads and the silk fabrics used for the costumes. Since much of the silk was donated to the Mission, colors did vary from one year to the next. It is only the sewing techniques that remained consistent and help us to identify the high quality Door of Hope dolls with certainty.

Dolls similar to those made at the Door of Hope are found occasionally and incorrectly attributed to the Door of Hope. The author speculates that these dolls may have been produced at the Florence Crittenton Association for Rescue, for they appear to be contemporary with the Door of Hope Dolls, although there are some very clear differences in attributes. There is no reason to consider these dolls of less importance historically, for they are really more rare than the Door of Hope dolls. Each doll has historical significance and should be valued on its quality and originality, no matter their origin.

How rare are the Door of Hope dolls? Recent research offers figures of less than 50,000 dolls produced, the number estimated by earlier researchers. In order to do the math we must consider that according to reports, it took one person nearly a month to complete one doll. If we reckon that there were as many as 45 girls working in the Industrial Home at any one time and theorize that they each produced one doll per month we get the possible total of 540 dolls per year. If we then extend that figure to cover the 35-year production period, the highest possible figure falls well short of 50,000, at 18,900.
 

Kimport Dolls - Doll Talk


Can you identify the characters below?
























Not all Door of Hope Dolls had hands. We speculate that at the beginning, the dolls had no hands.

Whose feet are these? There are bound feet and farmer's feet. Manchu lady feet and child's feet.....




Mission Street, Shanghai

                                                         
The red lanterns marking the brothels gave us the modern day term "red light district"                                                                                                                
 

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Dolls from the collection of Bunny Thornton-Trump and Lynn Murray

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