Description
In 1978, a young banker slipped away from his official minders in Shanghai and wandered alone through Shanghai’s old French Concession. The city he saw had barely changed since the 1930s, and it sparked a lifelong fascination: what was it like to live in Old Shanghai at its height?
Shanghai Days is his answer. Focusing on the Nanking Decade, from the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 to the Japanese assault of 1937, Nicholas Whitlam brings to life one of the most glamorous and wicked cities the world has known. This was a city run in three parts, by the British-dominated Municipal Council, the French Consul-General and the Chinese, and presided over in practice by the Green Gang boss “Big Ears” Du Yuesheng in his uneasy alliance with Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek. Readers meet the Sassoons, Kadoories and Hardoons, the jazz musicians and taipans, and a stream of famous visitors including Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Albert Einstein, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Whitlam also never forgets that 97 percent of the city’s residents were Chinese.
From the Bund’s granite façades to the Del Monte nightclub, from assassinations to full-scale war, this is a vivid, concise portrait of a world that glittered but was far from gold.
