Sapajou



The decadent life of the Shanghailanders in the 1930s was illustrated by two great European cartoonists, Schiff and Sapajou. Sapajou, in our opinion, was the best of the two.

Sapajou was a White Russian who came to Shanghai in the early 1920s to escape the Bolshevik Revolution back home. He and thousands of other Russians made their homes in Shanghai which as an open city accepted just about anybody.



An excerpt from Sin City, by Ralph Shaw:

"Star of the (North-China Daily News) office was 'Sapajou', the cartoonist. He was a White Russian ex-officer named Sapoinikoff, a brilliant artist with a wonderful sense of humour. Tall, thin, bespectacled he limped badly as the result of a wound received in an engagement with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. In Shanghai he had quickly earned fame through his brilliant political cartoons and, for a stateless exile, his membership of the Shanghai Club classified him as a rare specimen....

(In 1942), Sapajou became the cartoonist of the German newspaper. It was either that or starvation as a stateless Russian. More than a thousand White Russians had lost jobs in British,
American and Netherlands firms closed down by the Japanese and their plight was pitiful - worse than that of the Jewish refugees, most of whom were still in the Wayside camps supported by donations from international Jewish charities.

After the war there was no job on the North-China Daily News for the Russian cartoonist and, after a poverty-stricken existence in a Hongkew hovel, kept alive on the hand-outs of friends, he ended up in a transit camp for stateless refugees in the Philippines. A sick man, he died shortly afterwards.



All content is copyright unless otherwise indicated