Entertaining History of Shanghai

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	• Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 Stella Dong Harper Perennial, 2001 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good historical assessment

on the rise and fall of Shanghai from 1842 to 1949. Starting out with warlords, three separate entities (International Settlement, French Concession, Chinese Territory), gambling, arms, guns, opium, prostitution, rags to riches, white Russian women, David Sassoon family (Iragi Jews), Hardoon garden, Hsu Chi-mo, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Soong three sisters, T.V. Soong, H. H. Kung, mob-figure Tu Yueh-sen (Al Capone of the orient), Mao Tse-dong, Chou En-lai, 40,000 Jews in Shanghai ghetto (Hongkow), Wang Ching-wei, rape of Nanking, Japanese took over in 1943, 8,000 foreigners (British, Americans, etc) in Bridge House (concentration camp), Germans could not kill the Jews in Shanghai, 500,000 ounces of gold moved to Taiwan.... to Communist taking over in 1949. Many of these events were clearly researched and documented. It is a worthwhile read. If anyone will make a movie, it will be fascinating.

I was born in Hongkow, Shanghai. I learned about these events in bits and pieces when I was growing up in Taiwan. Of course, I only got one side of the story from Chiang Kai-shek, that everyone is bad except him. Now I look at the whole picture, Wang Ching-wei is not a bad guy after all. He was able to accomplish one government (no more three separate entities) while none of the others could.

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Decadent pleasures

Stella Dong's bid to enter the ever-burgeoning world of "lite" cultural histories of important world cities (such as the city studies of Jan Morris) is nothing if not entertaining, and her account of life in the "Old Shanghai" from between the Opium War and the Communist Revolution moves along with a wealth of all sorts of interesting social tidbits about a city that was notorious site of decadence and pleasure-seeking for decades in the West and East alike. Because the work is somewhat gossipy and lightweight in nature it might have benefitted from a sharper sense of humor and irony, or from a more personal point of view (all of which we see in Jan Morris's work). At the very least, it needs at least some photographs of its primary locales and figures, and also clearer chapter subdivisions--at times, the book just seems to grind along somewhat from topic to topic with little direction. But it still is a fun overview of a very fascinating site for the colonialist imagination

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Easy Reading

Very informative, easy ready, learned a lot in just the first 10 pages. Great author.

Entertaining History of Shanghai

I read this shortly after my return from a trip to Shanghai and found it to be an engrossing, fast read. I prefer travel literature to straight history, so I'm not overly concerned with whether something is perfectly accurate (which no history is, anyhow). If you want to get a flavor for Shanghai as it was and pick up a number of entertaining facts (or factoids) along the way, read this.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern?day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao's cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor.

Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger?than?life character in a fantastic novel.

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