"If God lets Shanghai endure," wrote a disgusted missionary, "he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah." Shanghai seems very much in vogue at the moment -- this new book is only one of several featuring the city currently on display in Taipei bookstores. But any modern eminence it may claim is nothing to the extraordinary life the place hosted in the period prior to World War II.
It had risen to prominence following the British success, in 1842, of wresting Hong Kong from China for the purpose of the more profitably pursuing its opium trade. Demands to establish "treaty ports" at a variety of other locations on the Chinese coast followed.
Very extensive powers were quickly acquired, including the control all customs operations, and the right of foreign residents to be tried only by courts established by their compatriots. Virtual colonies were thus established in the heart of Chinese ports, and Shanghai, only 22.5km from the mouth of the Yangtze River, leading deep into the Chinese interior, was the most important of them.
The city soon established itself as one of the most extraordinary places on earth, and the world's largest city in the middle of the twentieth century. Some of the worst living and working conditions on the planet jostled side by side with fabulous wealth and social display, both expatriate and Chinese. Everybody was welcome, from starving peasants to international adventurers, and nearly everybody came.
By 1932, some 48,000 foreigners from 50 different countries lived in the city's International Settlement, and that was without counting the 25,000 to 50,000 White Russians. This was an expatriate group particularly resented by the others who considered them, the men and the women, to be sexual predators. The appearance of Russian prostitutes, serving all races indiscriminately, was, says Dong, a shattering blow to white prestige in China in the 1930s.
Shanghai's night life was as lavish and bizarre as anything on screen in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. Extravagant and ostentatious parties, dance halls specializing in jazz with locally recruited dancing partners known as "taxi-girls," and (most reminiscent of the Paris of the 1890s evoked so inventively by Luhrmann) the fantastic Great World, an emporium of theaters, distorting mirrors, shooting galleries, magicians and more, patronized by "the Chinese masses and thrill-seeking Europeans alike." Many newcomers to Shanghai were appalled. The English aesthete Harold Acton, normally a lover of all things Chinese, considered the Bund a "ponderous parody", its ostentatious buildings "poisonous toadstools ... imposing from the river, but essentially soulless" and having "little connection with the people of China."
Another writer who visited was Arthur Ransome, the British journalist who witnessed the Russian Revolution, and was later to write the children's classic Swallows and Amazons and its many successors. His article in the UK's Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1926 became notorious in the International Settlement.
"They seem to live in a comfortable but hermetically sealed glass case," he wrote of its inhabitants. "They look round on their magnificent buildings and are surprised that China is not grateful to them for these gifts, forgetting that the money to build them came out of China ... Europe is very far away from them, and China, at their doors, seems almost as far."
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