Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City [平装]

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On the eve of the twentieth century, few places were as exciting as Shanghai.  Once a wildness of swamps, Asia's "Sin City" evolved into a dazzling modern-day Babylon: redolent with the sickly sweet smell of opium; teeming with illicit sex, crime, and poverty; rife with corruption and glamorous wealth.  In this vibrant history, Stella Dong follows the rise and fall of the city's booming international port, gateway to China's heartland.  In intricate, colorful detail, she examines the misdeeds of its criminal underworld, the passions of its citizens decadent appetites, and the revolutionary spirit of its many political refugees.  Best of all, she captures the essence of the city as if it were a person who had lived a fascinating and tumultuous life.

Amazon.com Review
For a good, spicy read about colonial Asia's most decadent city, this is the book. Stella Dong, a second-generation Chinese-American living in New York, tells the story of Old Shanghai in racy style: readers expecting tales of drugs, prostitution, and gang warfare will not be disappointed. Her scholarship is sound, however, and at the end of each chapter she provides bibliographies of drier, more academic studies for those wishing to delve deeper.

The Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War between Britain and China in 1842 granted trading concessions in Shanghai to the European powers. The international currents shaping the city over the next hundred years were complex: British merchants, Chinese warlords, Russian emigrés, Sephardic Jews, and German spies exploited its extraterritorial status to make Shanghai a hotbed of greed, vice, and intrigue. Opium was crucial to the city's extraordinary wealth and lawlessness, though Dong also relates the rise of its criminal gangs to the development of coastal steamships and consequent loss of inland-transportation jobs. Foreign participation in the opium trade was not confined to the British: the role of the French Concession in Shanghai is described in well-researched detail. The flamboyant personalities that prospered in the city's unfettered environment come alive, characters like Pockmarked Huang, who combined the post of police chief in the French Concession with leadership of the Green Gang. Dong explores Shanghai's political significance both as the source of Chiang Kai-shek's fortunes and as a center of Communist revolutionary activity. As the city again becomes the leading commercial metropolis of a dynamic national economy, Shanghai 1842-1949 successfully documents its unique role in the development of modern China. --John Stevenson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
"provocative and exciting...producing a series of engaging vignettes of 19th and early 20th century Shanghai..." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"A brilliant tableau of creative energy and decadent humanity." -- -- Seattle Times

"A rich tapestry....An entertaining relation of more than a century in one of China's most tumultuous times and cities." -- -- New York Times Book Review

"A rich tapestry....An entertaining relation of more than a century in one of China's most tumultuous times and cities." -- -- New York Times Book Review

"A rich tapestry....An entertaining relation of more than a century in one of China's most tumultuous times and cities."-- "New York Times Book Review"Provocative and exciting."-- "Washington Post"A brilliant tableau of creative energy and decadent humanity."-- "Seattle Times

"Provocative and exciting." -- -- Washington Post