By Website Editor, 13 January 2012

Shiona Airlie's biography of the colonial administrator James Stewart Lockhart, Thistle and Bamboo, has recently been republished. Longstanding SCA members may remember the original edition produced by Oxford University Press in 1989, which sold out very quickly and became highly sought-after on the second hand market. So the recent re-issue by Hong Kong University Press is a very welcome development - see end of this article for publication details.

Shiona has had a distinguished museum career and in 1985 curated the Terracotta Warriors exhibition at the Edinburgh City Art Centre. She is also the author of Reginald Johnston: Chinese Mandarin, a biography of the tutor of the last Qing emperor - soon to be superseded by a more detailed book. This article is based on Shiona's talk to the SCA Edinburgh branch on 10 January 2012, as well as an earlier interview with her in 2011.

James Stewart-Lockhart (1858-1937) was born in Ardsheal, Argyll and educated at George Watson's College. He served as a Hong Kong colonial official - Lockhart Road is named after him – and rose to become Registrar General and Colonial Secretary. He was instrumental in the acquisition and early administration of the New Territories in 1898.

In 1902 he become the first British Civil Commissioner in Wei-hai-wei (now Weihai), Shandong Province. He was later joined, and indeed succeeded, by Reginald Johnston, another native of Edinburgh, whose biography Shiona has also written. Outside working hours, Stewart-Lockhart was also a serious Confucian scholar and a collector of Chinese art, and after returning to Scotland, continued his Chinese scholarship.

These photos show a view of Wei-hai-wei in the early 20th century, with Government House in the centre (The Clark Family Collection) ; Stewart-Lockhart with his daughter Mary (private collection) ; and Shiona Airlie with her husband Mike Gill and Zhang Jianguo (second right) and Ma Xianghong (far left) of Weihai Archives.



In her talk, and the book, Shiona presents a portrait of a man who strove to preserve the Chinese way of life, treated his Chinese colleagues and subjects with respect, and was treated by Chinese mandarins as one of their own. Another recent history of Weihai by Chinese scholars says that, “compared to most contemporary colonialists, Lockhart was more far-sighted and effective both in his understanding of China and also of its traditional forms of administration”. Soundly based on his papers and other primary sources, Thistle and Bamboo is still a superb insight into Hong Kong and China at the turn of the 20th century.

But for Shiona, it has been much more than simply a piece of research and writing. As she said, “it never occurred to me that the published book would fill the next twenty years of my life in such an extraordinary way”. Central to this has been a deep friendship with Zhang Jianguo, Director of the Weihai Archives Bureau, although Shiona admitted this was tricky when they first met on the early 1990s. “It was difficult at first for a Scottish historian and a Chinese archivist to agree over what we were reading, but Zhang Jianguo and I got to know each other over the years, and I am proud to call him an elder brother”. Shiona visited Weihai in 2005 and 2008, and – remarkably – found on one trip that her driver's father had been Johnston's gardener when he was Commissioner. She later managed to find an old photo of Johnston with the gardener, to send back to the driver – excellent personal feedback arising from her knowledge of the Scottish officials' archives.

Indeed, one long-term outcome of the book's original publication was that it brought the Stewart-Lockhart collections to wider notice. Bequeathed to George Watson's College by his daughter Mary in 1985, they are now in three national institutions, although ownership remains with GWC.

His papers, which Shiona laboriously catalogued in the 1980s, occupy 40 feet of shelving at the National Library of Scotland, and are regularly consulted by academics (her detailed inventories can be found online here and here). His photographs, several thousand in all, are in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and are now accessible again with the recent re-opening of the refurbished building – they were the subject of exhibitions at the City Art Centre in 1982 and Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2008, as well as being shown in Weihai. And his paintings, ceramics and other artistic items are in the National Museums of Scotland, and the collection was the subject of an exhibition at the City Art Centre in 1982.

The recent Dulwich photo exhibition brought one further extraordinary re-connection, providing the opportunity for James Hung, the direct modern descendent of Confucius, to meet Clive Stewart-Lockhart, Antiques Roadshow expert and great-grandson of Sir James. This mirrored the 1904 meeting between the British official and Duke Kong, the then direct descendent of the Chinese sage, in Shandong. “I know Sir James would have been so proud to see them together”, says Shiona.

These photos show Reginald Johnston with Duke Kong in 1904 (Stewart-Lockhart Collection ; Clive Stewart-Lockhart with James Hung and his family at Dulwich in 2008 (Dulwich Picture Gallery) ; and the cover of Thistle and Bamboo.



Shiona loves China with the same passion as Stewart-Lockhart and Johnston. “But I do not think I could have visited the country with my eyes so open had I not studied their lives so closely”, she admits, adding “they have filled my life with friendships and experiences I never dreamed I would have”. In her talk, she told of sitting on the verandah of the former Government House in Weihai, “surrounded by ghosts”.

But Shiona has not stopped pursuing the spirit of Stewart-Lockhart and Johnston. She is now working with the Hong Kong Museum of History on a 2013 exhibition on Weihai, and her full biography of Reginald Johnston will finally see the light of day in English later this year, too (see our later review here). The journey of historical friendship between Scotland and China will surely continue for some time yet.

Publication details – Shiona Airlie, Thistle and Bamboo – the life and times of Sir James Stewart Lockhart, Hong Kong University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-988-8028-92-4 paperback, 262 pages, 19 black and white illustrations, extensive notes and bibliography. It is available from Amazon or at the 'Scotland/China collection' in the Library of the Confucius Institute in Edinburgh.