'Interglobe Subway: New York to Peking', from a 1904 cartoonist’s imagination

I was browsing through Facebook and came across an editorial cartoon posted to a New York City vintage history group.

It was published almost 115 years ago, in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper of Dec 20, 1904. The whimsical cartoon by Claudius Maybell is headlined "The Subway Age", and in the picture there is a sign atop the stairwell to the street that reads "The Interglobe Subway: New York to Peking" (Beijing was known in the West as Peking then and for decades later).

The cartoon shows well-dressed New Yorkers ascending the subway onto a busy street. The Western fashion of the day was shifting from the Victoria Era to the Edwardian Era.

The American women are wearing broad-brimmed hats and ruffled dresses from the neck to the ankles. The new styles featured form-fitting gowns with high waists and "straight line" corsets. A man in the photo is wearing a suit with a vest, and a bowler hat. The only thing he was missing was a watch fob.

Many of the Chinese on the street are holding oiled-paper umbrellas. Some of the men are wearing caps, and one woman is wearing a flowing dress presumably popular during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

There also is what at first looks like Chinese writing below the sign, but one of my colleagues at China Daily said the letters were nonsensical.

There is a sign above what appears to be a restaurant advertising "chop suey", which was and still is a popular dish in Chinese-American restaurants. Legends abound about whether the dish was a Chinese or American invention. One story says the dish was called tsap seui and was from Toisan, Guangdong province, an area where many Chinese immigrants to the US originated. But it likely wasn't available in the Beijing of 1904.

Chop suey in fact appears in an 1884 article in that same Brooklyn Eagle by Wong Chin Foo, a prolific writer in San Francisco at the time. He wrote that chop suey "may justly be so-called the national dish of China" and it was a "staple dish for the Chinese gourmand".

(Wong incidentally was one of the first Chinese immigrants to be naturalized in the US and fought fiercely against the Chinese Exclusion Act.)

I went to the digital archives of the Brooklyn Eagle in the hopes of finding a story accompanying the cartoon, but alas it was a standalone image.

A footnote at the bottom of the cartoon reads: "By and by New Yorkers will be taking Christmas shopping trips to China."

What is intriguing is that the cartoon was published a little less than two months after the New York subway began operating. Perhaps in those heady days, confident New Yorkers figured they could expand their underground marvel to the rest of the world.

A proposed transoceanic subway map titled "subway through earth" also is inset in the cartoon. It is basically a straight line from New York to Beijing, which is on the left side of the map, which means the tunnel would go across the continental United States and under the Pacific Ocean. Such a tunnel would be about 8,800 miles long.

The flight distance from New York to Beijing is a little over 6,800 miles. I used air miles to approximate both distances, but they probably would be longer to account for tunneling through mountain ranges, for example.

1904, coincidentally, also was the year that the Wright Brothers tested the world's first fixed-wing aircraft.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published from 1841 to 1955, the year the borough's beloved Dodgers won their only baseball World Series before breaking hearts three years later and moving to Los Angeles. The American poet Walt Whitman once edited the paper, which at one time had the largest afternoon circulation in the US.

Contact the writer at williamhennelly@chinadailyusa.com