Shanghai

by HarrietSergeant (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1991

  $3.28

  Shanghai, pullulating with vice, luxury and crime and combining extremes of wealth and poverty, exercised an insidious and irresistible lure on travellers in the inter-war years. The seething polyglot city, inhabited by a host of European and American emigres, where heroin was available on hotel room service, and gangsterism was rife, is recreated in this book, using the reminiscences of the scattered remnants of those who populated it at the height of its notoriety.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $5.58

  In the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai was called the whore of the Orient, home to gangsters and warlords, where nightclubs never closed and hotels supplied heroin on room service. It became the epitome of glamour, immortalized in books and films. With its bustling population of British, Chinese, Americans, French, Germans, Japanese and White Russians, its extremes of poverty and wealth, it appeared to straddle East and West. By the time the Chinese Communist takeover of 1949 had destroyed the illusion, Shanghai had passed into legend. This portrait of the city in its heyday combines first-hand accounts with extensive research and lively reconstruction.