Shanghai [Paperback]

Harriet Sergeant (Author), Harriet Sargeant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a spellbinding portrait of Shanghai in the 1920s and '30s, English writer Sergeant (The Old Sow in the Back Room) digs past the familiar image of a vice-ridden Westernized enclave and uncovers a city of many identities. Her Shanghai is an oasis of native artistic experiment; an unregulated refuge for international business where children worked 14-hour days; the center of China's innovative film industry; and a cosmopolitan magnet that became home to White Russian merchants and aristocrats, Japanese jazz musicians, emigre Iraqi Jews and refugees from Nazi Germany. The sprawling narrative is structured around three traumatic historical episodes: the bloodbath of 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek's troops and his former Communist allies slaughtered each other; the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1932, which claimed 14,000 lives; and the 1937 outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Sergeant, who has made frequent trips to the city since the end of the Cultural Revolution, interviewed dozens of current and former residents, both foreign and Chinese, and she integrates their colorful stories into her exceptionally vivid, informal chronicle. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: John Murray Publishers, Ltd. (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0719557135
• ISBN-13: 978-0719557132
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,725,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #63 in Books > Travel > Asia > China > Shanghai

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars potent evocation of the pre-communist city, April 11, 2000

By 

alan balfour (new york) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanghai (Paperback)

This is a work of exceptional richness and observation. Beautifully constructed and written -the author draws from converations across the work, the most sensual yet critically insightful portrait of this strangely synthetic city. Having reviwed much of the literature of prewar Shanghai, Ms. Sergeant's work gives the most complete sense of life and death of the city and of the culture.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Reading about Shanghai's Eerie Past, December 10, 2001

By 

K H Teh (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanghai (Paperback)

Through her skillful narration interspersed with rich vignettes, Sergeant delved into the fate, suffering and individual triumphs of 4 representative strata of the pre-World War II Shanghai society ¨C the English (the snobbish old colonial master), the Japanese (nouveau rich old-colonial-slaves-turned-new-colonial-master), the White Russians (the royalist Russians abandoned by fate and humiliated by self-degradation), and the Chinese (downtrodden colonial slaves seemingly condemned to unending cycles of oppression from within and outside its own community) ¨C in so doing Sergeant succeeded in vividly recreating the eerily exciting pulse and ambience an extraordinary city unique to the social, economic and political climate of its time.

As a modernized China re-engages the world confident of its destiny on one hand and betraying insecurity about its traumatic past on the other, Sargeant's work is an essential background reading for any foreigner with a serious interest in engaging China at a deeper level.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly informative anecdotal history of pre-war Shanghai, November 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Shanghai (Hardcover)

The most memorable part of this fine, absorbing account of pre-war Shanghai is the description of the horrific factory conditions in the Chinese- and Western- owned businesses there. Here are tales right out of Dickens! I realized, unfortunately, that the unsavoury reputation of modern China's horrible factories has a long and sad history. The description of girls from the chrome plating factories with "chromium holes eating into their arms" was particularly awful.

The book is also full of interesting stories and anecdotes of all aspects of old Shanghai - the parties, social gatherings, etc, and carries on right up to the communist takeover (when newer and even more devestating things happened). Many interesting photographs. For anyone who's been to the city recently and seen how much of the pre-war architecture survives, this book will be a treat. The author gets a little lost at the end - perplexed (sarcastic?) at Europe's seeming abandonment of the place to the Japanese without a fight, though it seems obvious that London was more worth saving than a ruthless mercantile city like Shanghai - kind of a pre-war Hong Kong is what it was, and clearly from these pages not so much glamorous as crass. Well-worth the read, this book will give the reader much food for thought as to China's current direction and unhealthy work conditions. Must Peking try so hard to follow in the ways of its more ruthless ancestors?

Another good description of Shanghai's interesting and horrible sides is W. H. Auden's and Christopher Isherwood's 1930's account, "Journey to a War."