Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City - Hardcover

Dong, Stella

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068815798X ISBN 13: 9780688157982

Publisher: William Morrow, 2000

Synopsis

Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century was the place to be. Opium was all the rage, parties were wild, and decadence was a way of life. Journalist Stella Dong looks back on a city that in its heyday was a thrilling combination of Las Vegas, the Wild West, Paris in the '20s, and Chicago during Prohibition. She captures the excitement of its most notorious years -- the decades before Mao's revolution -- when the city was populated with bankers, gangsters, revolutionaries, drug traffickers, gamblers, world royalty, industrial magnates, celebrities, and heiresses. Shanghai was the one place on the globe where no restrictions were placed on immigration. As a result, political refugees and outlaws sought its sanctuary. At that time, this truly international city was free of a central government's scrutiny and quickly became a breeding ground for revolutionary activity. This lively biography describes the thrill and excitement of those years.

About this title

About the Author

Journalist Stella Dong has written for the New York Times Book Review, Travel & Leisure, and Harper's Bazaar. A first-generation Chinese American, she grew up in Seattle and now lives in New York City. This is her first book.

Reviews

"provocative and exciting...producing a series of engaging vignettes of 19th and early 20th century Shanghai..."

In its heyday, Shanghai was known by many names--the emperor's ugly daughter, Sodom and Gomorrah of the Far East and whore of Asia. In her first book, Dong, a journalist and second-generation Chinese-American, has filled her often-absorbing history of the city with vivid details that leave little doubt as to how Shanghai earned its reputation. She also offers tidbits on colorful local personalities, such as the Chinese warlord who never left home without his enormous lacquered teak coffin, the radical American feminist who was indirectly responsible for the end of Mao Zedong's second marriage and the wealthy Chinese businessman whose two younger daughters married Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. Although the city was inhabited by 250,000 Chinese when the British invaded in 1842, it wasn't long before the nationals were serving the foreigners, who were making Shanghai one of the world's wealthiest business centers. Banking and manufacturing were the respectable professions, but it was opium--controlled largely by foreigners but used largely by Chinese--that built modern Shanghai. The arrogance and excess of foreigners, who set up their own courts, lived lavishly and excluded the Chinese from governing bodies and private clubs, created the uneven balance of power and economics that helped pave the way for Communism. Dong skillfully packs her narrative with all of the city's "sordid pleasures and exploitation," offering an account that is at once informative and entertaining. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dong, a journalist and second-generation Chinese American, offers a fascinating account of a city legendary for decadence, violence, and greedy imperialism. Dong meticulously details the European commercial interests that deliberately promoted opium trafficking and exploited the land and people of Shanghai with every conceivable vice for nearly 100 years. She chronicles the multinational cast of commercial and industrial titans, criminals, and bureaucrats that promoted Shanghai's development into a city to rival the Chicago of Al Capone's era for violence and blatant criminality. Dong highlights the powerful Soong empire, started by an American-educated Chinese who returned as a missionary and went on to become outlandishly wealthy and powerful. Here, too, are accounts of the powerful Chinese gangs, sanctioned by Europeans and Americans who looked the other way as long as their interests were protected. Although irredeemably corrupt, Shanghai was also the epicenter of technology and advancement from machinery to movies. Dong captures Shanghai's history through changes in geopolitics, economics, and social politics and the "ever combustible tinder of Chinese nationalist feeling." Vanessa Bush

Journalist Dong here colorfully and lucidly recounts the myths and stories of exotic Old Shanghai. Using mostly English sources and scholarship, she gleefully chronicles the overlapping and sometimes merging cosmopolitan worlds of trade, sin, politics, play, and, above all, money that made the city both "the Paris of the East" and "the whore of the Orient." She uses many stories and even gossip to personalize the great events of modern Chinese history that took place there, from the Opium Wars to the bloody battles of the Chinese Revolution dating from the 1920s to 1949. Specialists are not offered new theoretical insight or information, but general readers will find this story lively and informative. Other recent books that cover much of the same material include Betty Wei's more scholarly survey Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China (1987. o.p.) and Harriet Sergeant's Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures (1990. o.p.).
-Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068815798X
• ISBN 13: 9780688157982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336