In 1971, I committed a crime, the repercussions of which still affect me today. I was a bored eighteen-year-old whose overdeveloped but under-used automotive memory banks craved stimulus. In those pre-web dark ages, the information gap between monthly car magazines was excruciating. Desperate, I plied the 629.22 rack of the Iowa City Public Library, and found the font of automotive history. I slipped the heavy Rosetta stone under my baggy Army surplus jacket and walked out. I’ve been guiltily absorbing its contents ever since.
Ironically, out of the thousands of cars listed in it, the one that really grabbed me in 1971 was this one. And I (and my kids) have been searching in vain for it ever since. Turns out I never will find a genuine The East Glows, but I am eager to have some old Chinese Curbside Classics featured here. Are there any?
“The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars – 1885 to the present” covers over four thousand makes, from the A.A.A. to the Zwickau. And for some inexplicable (but prescient) reason, the make and photo that first captured my imagination was the 1965 “The East Glows.”
Sure, the Chinese sedan has an evocative name. But the encyclopedia is a cornucopia of catchy (or not) names from the pre-Lexus alphanumeric naming era. Some didn’t even try, as in the No Name, or the CAR. Others plagiarized, resulting in nine different “Standards.” High-school Latin was common, such as the Quo Vadis (“where are you going?”), Stimula, Audi and the German EGO (a “Super” model was available).
Hyperbole is sprinkled liberally throughout. The Faultless is just “one of many ephemeral cyclecars.” The Famous’ only claim to fame was “rear wheels were larger than the front ones.” Unsurprisingly, American makes dominate the category of superlatives: Primo, Superior, Speedy (4 hp!), Pridemore, and the humble Super-Kar.
Speaking of humility, some makers were disarmingly honest: Rough, Riddle, Static, Troll, Lugly (pre-cursor to “fugly”?) and the predictive Lost Cause.
Idealism might have seemed a better approach, but none found traction in the Darwinian marketplace. The Utopian, appropriately enough, was “built for a local clergyman, possibly only one made”. The Joymobile “never went into production.” And the Peace “never came.”
Rounding out the ranks are random oddballs: Flying Feather, Ben Hur, Tic-Tac, O-We-Go, Lu-Lu, Egg, Wizard, U2, Ponder, Rip, LSD and the prophetic Lutz “formed to make electric steam cars; no evidence that they were ever made.”
My father was more than a bit surprised when I mentioned the Phänomen/Phänomobil to him, as he remembered well that a neighbor of theirs in Silesia had one when he was a young child. We had found a (somewhat rare) point of common interest.
So why exactly did the 1965 The East Glows make such a lasting impression? It’s just a mish-mash of mid-fifties American design themes: a 1958 Studebaker crossed with a 1956 Buick. Built by “Car Factory No. 1, Peking,” it’s described as “one of the more recent designs to appear in China… a hand-built saloon with a six cylinder 150hp engine.”. I can’t exactly say, other than its catch name and derivative styling.
Nevertheless The East Glows became (and remains) a Niedermeyer family legend. On a car trip years ago, when the boys needed something to focus on, I spontaneously made the following offer: a $500 reward for spotting any car with a Chinese license plate; and $20,000 for a The East Glows with valid Chinese plates. My younger son occasionally kept his eyes peeled “just in case,”for some time after the offer was made, but I wasn’t exactly too worried; the offer was limited to U.S. roads.
Are there any The East Glows left in China? Given that they were “hand-built,” and China’s passenger car industry then was mostly limited to a few Hong Qi (“Red Flag”) limousines for party big-wigs, it’s highly unlikely. This Red Flag is from 1985, found on a street and posted at the only site that has a good selection of China automobile history, carnewschina.com. But there’s nothing there that looks like a The East Glows.
On a trip to China a couple of years ago, my son Edward confirmed that restored, hot-rodded, or low-rider The East Glows are NOT seen cruising Beijing’s Chang’An Boulevard on hot summer nights. Is there any old-car culture in China connected to its indigenous cars?
We’ve been steeped in all things automotive for over a hundred years. Family lore, childhood memories, museums, racing, collecting, cruising, modifying, buying and selling, off-roading, car show dreaming, memorizing the Complete Encyclopedia of Motor Cars, writing about car-experiences on web-sites like this one; they’re all about the breadth and depth of our auto-biographies.
I suspect it’s different for the typical Chinese. Mass-produced cars, and the incomes to buy them, are a recent phenomena. And their relationship to them is… different, undoubtedly.There are some early Chinese cars exhibited in museums, like this Dong Feng Golden Dragon, touted to be the first Chinese-designed automobile, and presented to Chairman Mao in 1958. Needless to say, it’s design wasn’t exactly very original, as was the case for all all Chinese cars for quite some time; or should I say “forever”?
Recently, rich Chinese have been snapping up classics from the US and Europe, as well as a an increasing share of new luxury cars. And there is a site devoted to classics.
The Chinese lead designer for Buick’s Shanghai studio (Riviera and Invicta concepts) does not drive. He gets his inspiration from night clubs. Contrast that to GM’s legendary Bill Mitchell, who drove his various Corvette concepts home; a man inspired by racing cars, fighter jets and sharks. China builds more cars than the US. And Buicks are being designed for us in China. So, ironically, in 640 pages of obscure automotive history, The East Glows turned out to be the one car in the Almanac that points to the future.
Somewhere in China, there must be memories of The East Glows. Someone hand-made them; others drove or rode in them. Maybe, just maybe, there’s one stashed away in a museum, or in someone’s barn.
Are there any CC readers in China? We have readers all over the globe, but have never heard of one from China. Or one posted at the Cohort from China. I’d like to eventually have a Portal dedicated to vintage Chinese cars, but at this rate that might be a while.
And here’s the last bit of irony: it turns out there never really was an “The East Glows”. I found recently that subsequent editions of the encyclopedia say it was simply called the “Beijing Limousine”, built (by hand) by the Beijing Auto Works for some years in very small quantities. BAW, which was founded in 1958 and has become one of the biggest automobile builders in China. I guess my $20k is truly safe. Whew!
I am a car lover that has been living in China for the past 6 years.
I can recall seeing only one notable older car while I have been here, and it
was a 1990’s Lincoln Town Car.
I have seen a few Red Flags that are a little newer than the one pictured above. They are cheap looking cars that I noticed only due to that big ugly red hood ornament.
My understanding is that either due to pollution laws, or more likely
due to removing older cars to stimulate sales of new cars, that there
are few older cars to be typically seen on the roads of China.
Your gonna hate the size of that late fee!
I’d be surprised if there was ever more than that one made. It looks a little bit too nice to have been produced in more than a handful, if even that. I’d reckon it was some sort of publicity stunt, “look what we have here, in the glorious revolution!” kind of style. It’s not so much a car, but a taste of another kind of lifestyle.
Apparently the “Beijing Limousine” was made in small quantities for some years, essentially by hand. It was obviously a way to show the world that China could build what looked like modern cars, and gave top party officials something to ride in, other than the two or three other large sedans in (limited) production at the time.
According to the book Russian Motor Vehicles: Soviet Limousines 1930-2003, by Maurice A. Kelly, which is online at Google Books, this series of Chinese cars was produced 1958-1961 and the very first car actually had an “The East Glows” front wing logo, before the name was changed to “Being”.
Here are two photos from the book (if I manage to attach them correctly).
Thanks for those pictures and additional info. I did come to understand that it was called the Beijing sedan, and was built (by hand) in small numbers for some years. I was not aware of the convertible version, and the logo on the front of the first one, which obviously tripped up the editors of the Encyclopedia.
The rear fenders of “The East Glows” or “Beijing” seems to resemble the 1957 Ford Fairlane while the front end seems to have been inspired by the 1958 Chevrolet Impala with a different grill inset. Regardless, they were probably not built in an volume for use by Politburo members!
You and your good-time buddies can expect a visit from Mr. Bookman, the Library Cop. Joy Boy.
absolutely one of THE funniest Seinfeld’s!
Looks good to me ! .
I wonder how well they were made .
-Nate
Its the new 1959 ish Checkebakerbuick!
It wouldn’t look out of place as a generic 50’s car for a circa 1959 advertisement. It’s like the grandfather of the generic badgeless “what kinda car is that” from modern insurance ads.
Mr. Neidermeyer, this is Detective Johnson from the Iowa Public Library Special Investigative Division-Cold Case Bureau, could you please call us back….
Nice in an Oldsmobile sort of way. Most likely a total production run of exactly one.
Seems to me they reverse-engineered incomplete Ford, GM and Chrysler vehicles from 1957 and that’s what they came up with.
Researching on the “FAW Hongqi” and “FAW Hongqi I5” press issues could lead you for further infos… You may be interested in the actual chinese presidential limousine…and dozens of related stuff…with extraordinary cars exposed…
Amazing entry. The name of this car wouldn’t surprise me, as the Chinese often use names like this. Dongfeng, for instance, means “East wind” and I think early Chinese tractors had their name scripts done in the way Mao wrote. Is also interesting to recall the dark pre internet days. I’m young, but old enough as to have no internet as a kid, and I remember how amazing it was to me to look at my father’s 1961 Encyclopaedia Britannia, an the section of cars, that has a picture of a Soviet ZIL limousine!
Memories much like my own! We didn’t have internet in my home until high school (1997 in my case), but my mother had a set of Britannica Junior encyclopedias from 1955. In the automobiles section that one featured not a ZiL but its predecessor the ZIM. The picture was captioned ZIM (Soviet) and for years I thought that Soviet was the model name!
Lots of interesting cars in there that I would never see in the USA and didn’t know much about until later…Jowett Jupiter, Jaguar Mark VII, Fiat 8V of some sort…I think those are still packed away somewhere at home. A very interesting historical snapshot! Nothing Chinese though. (If that first Chinese-built car up there is from ’58 that would be why.)
I remember the time when the Chinese rode bicycles & we rode in Buicks. Now it’s the Chinese who ride in Buicks & we now ride bicycles.
Also, how can a car designer find inspiration in nightclubs? Can you imagine a car inspired by the Rat in Boston or CBGB’s 😉
Finally, Paul, speaking as a part-time reference librarian, maybe you should make a small donation to the Iowa City Public Library to atone for your action.
CBGB is now occupied by John Varvatos, a designer who just did a special edition Chrysler 300, what a crime that they closed that down!
“The East Glows” aka “Beijing Limousine” also raids 1957-58 Ford styling cues as well. And I think I see a nod to the 1957 Chevy as well in the notch in the rear doors. It’s the StudeChevroFord! (Not really picking up other GM cues.)
Yes, 1958 Ford was the first thing that popped into my mind.
I was actually thinking a little bit ’57 Pontiac in side view. The greenhouse is kinda Fordish. But the overall proportions are definitely 1956-58 Studebaker.
A very curious car indeed! The headlights look very ’57 DeSoto-ish to me.
It looks like something from a 50s chop shop.
Chop Suey shop? Sorry, could not resist that one!
I can’t speak for any of the other makes but they made at least one O-We-Go cyclecar, it’s at the Northeast Classic Car Museum in Norwich, NY. They were made in Owego, NY of course.
Information card…
Sort of reminds me of what this Kiwi purchased from N2A (No 2 Alike):
http://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/customs-classics/10507781/Three-old-Chevys-become-one-stunner
that o-we-go is sweet! it looks like i could make one myself in the backyard out of sheet metal, a couple of bicycles, a riding lawnmower and some welding work. good lord that looks like fun.
You can still get a Ferbedo. They’re the biggest carmaker in Germany – for kids!
http://www.ferbedo.de/fahrzeuge.html
Fascinating post, Paul. An hour later I wanted to read it again…
Is that “Dongfeng Golden Dragon” a British (Consul, Zephyr, Zodiac) or a French (Vedette) Ford?
It does have a lot of MK2 UK Ford about it, I have DongFeng front brake rotors and pads in my Citroen the have a joint venture with PSA.
I was struck by the Dongfeng´s similarity to the french Ford(or later Simca)Vedette.
The side profile looks almost the same.
Your picture of The East Glows/Bejing actually puts the 1957 Studebaker to shame, I am sad to say. Its basic shape and proportions are actually not bad. A little cleanup on the detail work, and you would have had one of those no-name cars that used to appear in ads for spark plugs and tires.
The tooling for the Morris Ital was sold to Chinese interests but perhaps they saw what a POS the Marina was and shelved the idea, the Fintail Mercedes was built in China though with local bodywork I have seen a photo of the results but never an actual car.
They also built the C3 Audi 100 for quite a long time (well into the late 90’s, maybe even past 2000) as a Hongqi. They must have bought the body tooling as it was completely identical save for badging.
I can’t even imagine how few cars there must have been in China in 1958, given its size and population. I first went to China in 1987, when the first few ‘joint-venture’ hotels had just opened (serving Danish Butter!) in Beijing. Cars then were limited to foreign-made taxis and new German limos for party apparatchiks. Everything else was buses, trucks and bicycles.
I think Jeep was making inroads on the non-roads at the time with a joint-venture factory. By then the most of the ‘Red Flags’ were being parked in garages and left to rot (I wanted to bring one back to the US!). They didn’t run well apparently.
Given that they probably made, at most, one car a week at the Beijing Works in 1958, as well as the size of China, and poor quality they must have really been, it would be really hard to find one now in the sea of cars in modern China. And certainly anyone with the temerity to have the knowledge and experience to build cars would have been shipped out to the countryside for re-education during the cultural revolution… if they were lucky, they’d have been allowed to keep one of the ‘East-is-Red’ Tractors on the collective in running condition.
I’ll never forget two sights I saw in ’87 — a group of men building a fire under a worn-out diesel delivery truck, trying to thaw out its fuel lines (it was early January), and the views of the teams of men hand-building the new concrete highway to the Guilin airport. There was one dump truck for the length of construction, with men lifting material into it with rope-raised buckets. The rest was wheel-barrows, mule-carts, and men digging, smoothing, walking.
Mashup of a ’58 Ford, ’58 Stude, and this…
Gives new meaning to “ChineseJunk”, but don`t be too surprised when the Chicoms begin to sell these in the US, thru Wal Mart. “Chery” anyone?
All the above cars – the Beijing, the Red Flag and the Golden Dragon – have been designed utilizing existing Soviet models, the GAZ-13 Chaika and the GAZ-21 Volga. The Russian cars were inspired by and adapted from the ’55 Packard (Chaika) and the ’54 Ford (Volga). Since the 50s were the era of “The Russian and the Chinese are brothers forever”, the Soviet designs were freely available to Chinese engineers. So of course the resulting cars look like Soviet cars once removed, or American cars twice removed.
I traveled to China a couple of years ago, and only saw exactly ONE car that sort of looked like a vintage vehicle. It was an absolutely hideous custom 4-door convertible that looked like a 1990s car covered with retro-style aftermarket doodads (outside dual horns, fender-mounted headlights, continental kit, etc.) It was parked in a very touristy area and probably was used for weddings. From what I understood after talking to a couple of English-speaking locals, China has extremely prohibitive laws for automobiles, making absolutely NO exceptions for anything vintage. As a result, keeping a vintage automobile registered and on the road is nearly impossible. My personal observation was also that the Chinese prefer to build a modern replica rather than to restore something truly old. It seems to be part of the culture and I have seen it many times in regards to buildings, for example.
I December, 1981 I checked out “Small Wonder-amazing story of the Volkswagen” by Walter Henry Nelson from my high school library, and somehow, it forgot to find its way back 🙂
Paul, buy the iowa City Public Library an new copy of the book you stole and karma may reward you with the sighting of a The East Glows. Right now your theft makes you unworthy, and you have to right the imbalance.
Until then you deprived others of knowledge, so the knowledge you seek will be withheld from you.
You’re right, I do need to make amends with them.
FWIW, I have been making some effort to disseminate automotive knowledge, perhaps as a form of compensation?
Chinese? I am, look at me. But I’m driving this Volare in north michigan though, and a Lincoln Mark VIII traveling between Detroit area and Otsego county every week escaping the big cities during the non-winter time, and a Buick LeSabre with cold out during salty rusty days starring at the plastic rocker panel covering up the rust.
Curbside classic car isn’t practical in china, at least not practical if it’s made in china. Buick has the reputation of being extremely rust resistant in china on the condition when locally made Chinese cars rust only a bit less than cars in Michigan, comparable to New England cars even though road salt is barely used. And people barely knows what’s going wrong with the car, my ex bf’s mom drives a Ford Focus until it stopped on the road, never knowing what’s going wrong. My dad isn’t any better with the Chevrolet Cruze when cylinder head went bad, it leaks engine oil and burning it to smoke worse than an Oldsmobile diesel but he never saw that in rear view mirror ( I saw that the first day I came back home and knowing a Cruze is way slower than a 90hp volare means something is wrong ) My dad insisted in saying its all right because check engine light isn’t on, oil pressure light doesn’t come on neither. ( he majors mechanical engineering though, even with fairly well above average knowledge about cars among Chinese ) many older cars in china getting scrapped for very minor issues not resolved ( I feel doing a transmission rebuilt isn’t a big deal on a town car. Convert the suspension isn’t that hard. ) and for no parts, even though I never feel any part on a caprice or crown Victoria is hard to get, it takes quite a while to get a pair of headlights for aero crown vic in china ( it does take quite a while to get a pair of nice and cheap headlights for mark VIII though )
Curbside classic just doesn’t run when no mechanic around a Chinese city can tell it’s a ’87 Toyota Camry. The best guess I heard is corolla, not bad for them really. And I am really tired of seeing people selling a ’93 Chrysler imperial for 90k RMB ( $15000 ) claiming it’s the ultimate presidential limousine with crystal bonus ( maybe the only thing right here ) on the hood so it must be really worthy and keeping saying it’s a vintage classic collector’s item. ( sometimes people say the same on a Chrysler LeBaron, or New Yorker )
If I want to drive a curbclassic car in china, the best bet is a Trabant or Fiat 126P, with tractor level technology to keep them running without scaring away the mechanics ( it’s luxury old Yankee tanks, so complex we can’t touch them ….. Said in similar Chinese if I imagine. ) If a B Body or panther is beyond their reach, virtually everything else is, and never count on them messing around with a JDM with four independent suspensions correctly
Jeff, Thanks for your insightful comment. It confirms what I have suspected and heard. Since cars are such a relatively recent phenomena in the lives of most Chinese, there isn’t the kind of car culture that has evolved in the US and some other countries.
That takes time, for hands-on knowledge to be accumulated and passed on as folk wisdom as well as practical experience. Americans have been intimately involved with their cars for generations.
My father, an immigrant, only became exposed to driving and owning a car after the age of 40, never developed a natural feel for cars. Of course, part of that may be for other reasons, but growing up with cars really does make a big difference.
Love your Volare!
Jeff, your post brought back quite a few memories for me, and thank you for that. When I was in High School (roughly 15 years ago), I dated a boy with an old green Volaré. At the time I thought the car obnoxious; with age comes wisdom. I wonder what happened to him, and that Volaré…
+1, thanks for commenting, Jeff. It’s fascinating to see how different generations from different backgrounds interact with technology. I scratch my head over automotive issues that my dad gets intuitively, whereas he struggles with computer tasks that I manage just fine…though I ask my son for help when I really get confused. 🙂
I used to pass the old Beijing Automobile Works factory everyday, in the early 2000s. It was a separate facility from the Beijing Jeep joint venture plant. It was more or less abandoned then, and is now the site of Rem Koolhaus’s Beijing TV tower.
Not many old cars on the road back then, although there was a dusty old Honqi limousine parked under the highway near the factory. The weirdest car I ever saw was a black ’73 Chrysler Newport, in a repair shop on the way to the Great Wall. No doubt shipped over to open the first US diplomatic outpost in Communist China, headed by George H.W. Bush.
My favorite early Chinese car is the 1964 Shanghai SH760 – 56 Plymouth up front, East-bloc sedan behind:
A 73 Chrysler? Interesting. Was there Canadian diplomatic representation in China back then? Because I read that was the reason behind some old Chryslers found in the Ukraine (there are pictures on Flickr), and then I speculated the same could explain the Chrysler I saw in Cuba (http://flic.kr/p/ebgcPt)
I see more 1958 Ford than Buick in that exquisite car. If it runs as nice as it looks that would be really something.
Chinese cars? Ugh!… Having been in a few recent ones, I can’t imagine what their first efforts must have been like.
This “Studebuick” is not too bad-looking, but what’s under the rice-paper skin? A tractor engine and a Soviet van chassis, no doubt. The East Blows.
Beware, world, Chery, Dong Feng, FAW, Wulin… they’re coming! Slowly but surely, they’re gaining ground. Here in SE Asia, you see them everywhere now, those cheap, flimsy and ugly copies of other cars. You can put the Chery QQ’s doors on the Daewoo Matiz, they are completely identical.
That old red Dong Feng is an exact copy of the Simca Vedette/Ariane (see pic below) with a different grille and a silly dragon hood ornament. They’ve been cribbing cars for 50 years, and they’re getting better at it. Beware the rise of the Chinese car!
And what means the stampled date JAN. 1973?
It means my memory is not perfect. Off by two years…
I think I saw the same book as a grade schooler. I discovered that my elementary and public library had car books and was in heaven.
The Chinese did 1958 better than many of the Americans. This really isn’t bad. On the other hand, if you are building a limited edition in a planned economy, picking 1958 had to be the worst year possible. Did any other year go completely out of date faster than 1958?
Extremely interesting! Very 1958 Studebaker. How ironic that both Russia and China built Packard and Studebaker copies long after the originals were out of production. Seems this Company, once America’s 75th largest was selling to unappreciating buyers.
I just got the 1973 version of this book in the mail today. $5.49 on ebay and it’s in terrific condition. It’s an old library book from the Mt. San Antonio College Library in Walnut, California. It has that wonderful old book smell. Sadly, it doesn’t have a picture of the Beijing CB4 but it has some (incorrect) information (it says the CB4 was a six cylinder when it was actually a V8.)