Customer Reviews

Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Contrary to other reader's reviews, I found Shanghai to a disappointing book. The writing style is very florid, indeed verging on overblown. On page one Shanghai is described as "the most pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, squalid and decadent city in the world." Each fresh page relentlessly strives to better this excitable list of adjectives.

Although Stella Dong works hard to convey the atmosphere of old Shanghai, what her book does not do is provide a clear history of the city. Dates are very confused and the narrative thread lost in favour of colourful stories. This is not a book to read if you are looking for a coherent explanation of the Taiping rebellion the Opium wars or the rise of communism around Shanghai.

Several reviewers have commented on the book's exhaustive research. That may be correct but I note that Dong cites only secondary sources in English.

Overall, readers wanting a more nuanced appreciation of Shanghai would do well to look elsewhere. Those who want a racy read might be happier but it is difficult to escape the feeling that this book only adds to the myths about Shanghai rather than improving our understanding.

A good read. Exciting, with colorful atmosphere and anecdotes.

The city of Shanghai, as described in this book, was an extraordinary mixture of extremes of conspicuous consumption and poverty, of etiquette and immorality, and of leisure and harsh working conditions. The book can be appreciated on different levels: as an adventure story, as a description of social conditions, or as a narrative of an amazing history. Although this is not a history monograph, it would be a good accompaniment to one as it gives the reader the feeling of witnessing events as they happen. And they happen! Many current international questions have to do with China: the developments described offer background on such matters as the status of Taiwan and trade ties with the mainland.

A note of warning: the reader should be well-armed with dictionaries because of the frequency of foreign (to Americans) words and phrases, many undefined in the text. Two examples are: nankeen (a kind of yellow cotton cloth) and ronin (here, outlaws). Also, the constant use of a British term (such as godown) when an equivalent term familiar to both British and American readers (warehouse) is available makes one suspect that the author enjoys offering what H. W. Fowler refers to as "puzzles for the common man".

Being neither the right age nor nationality to have experienced the Pearl of the Orient at the height of its hedonistic lustre, this book delivers exactly what literary thrill-seekers like me are after: a good hour or two on the couch in quite another world, minus any brain-taxing flourishes of the scholarly. It reads like a gorgeously-filmed epic, complete with opium junkies, silk and whiskey, rickshaws (wonderfully quaint!), White Russians, massive wealth and dire indigence, cabarets and cheongsams and courtesans, guns and Occupation and Revolution, traids, Art Deco buildings, armies of servants, the Chinese literati and Jewish glitterati, fallen Manchu aristocrats, dinner-party orgies ... as well as the pre-requsite colonials in all their multi-faceted brilliance: corrupt, idealistic, capitalist, romantic. And over this teeming ferment, soon to prove itself sadly ephemeral, presided the grandiose skyline of the Bund, the most enduring image of Shanghai in popular memory, and here in Ms. Dong's 300-page cinematic capsule.

For all armchair adventurers who've been disappointed by modern Shanghai's impersonation of Manhattan by day and Las Vegas by night, this is the perfect trip, in every sense of the word.

Stella Dong's "Shanghai 1842-1949: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City" is a thorough overview of China's most notorious city during its most notorious era.

As Dong's text explains, Shanghai rose to prominence in the late 19th century as a treaty port. Several nations-Britain, US, and France- had gained special status through a series of treaties and thus were allowed to conduct business as if the city were their own. And there were plenty of businesses to conduct--from the importing of opium to the exporting of tea and other goods. Each colonial group lived in its own area complete with its own customs and social hierarchies.

Likewise, with the increased affluence of the city, a wealthy Chinese class also emerged, though once again it tended to live and socialize only within its own boundaries.

With so many people making so much money and so few (legal) rules to follow, Shanghai eventually became a swinging city of sin. By the 1920's, the city became synonmous with sex, opium, jazz, brothels, and pleasure in just about any form. As Dong notes, while the sinners broke all legal rules, they still followed the social stratification of the city: the british patronized British brothels, the Chinese went to Chinese brothels and so on.

Of course, with the invasion by Japan and then the fall to the Communists, the good times ended in Shanghai and most of the colonials left. I felt that Dong could have kept the reader more abreast of Chinese history in the earlier parts of the book to make the latter events (e.g., why the country was so open to communism when a city like Shanghai was not) more understandable. In addition, she introduces certain colorful Shanghai characaters-the writer Emily Hahn for instance-and then loses them.
However, this book is a good, workmanlike introduction to a very interesting city in a very interesting time. I would recommend it to those readers looking for a general overview of the history of the city. If you want more depth, you may want to read this book in conjunction with more rigorous studies or simply look elsewhere.

To put it mildly, Shanghai has a checkered past. As a notorious bastion of rouges, thieves, soldiers of fortune, drug smugglers, prostitutes, pleasure seekers, speculators and industrial tycoons- it is second to none. From being a sleepy little fishing and trading village on the Huangpu river in the early 1800's to becoming one of the worlds largest ports and a city of over 14 million people- Shanghai has had more than it's fair share of growing pains. Not very many cities on the globe can match it in having gone through so much political and financial turmoil in the last 150 years.

When I first picked up this book I was a little skeptical. The title, `Rise and Fall of a Decadent City' seemed a bit over the top and I was afraid it was going to end up being three hundred pages of vice soaked sensationalism. As a resident of Shanghai I have discovered that the myth of old Shanghai often looms larger than the truth.

I was pleasantly surprised. The book was meticulously researched, well written and most important- interesting. Since this book is a history of Shanghai, China's most populous and prosperous city, you also inadvertently get a short course in modern Chinese history while your reading it. From the Taiping rebellion to the opium war and the Boxer rebellion- many of the great historical events in Chinese history are clearly laid out and explained in the context of how they influenced and helped to form Shanghai.

`Shanghai, The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City' is a very good piece of popular history and I highly recommend it.

There is always something new that you can learn when you read a book, and that's why I purchased this one. I didn't know much at all about Shanghai, except for its lurid reputation, and I decided that buying this book would inform me about something new. It's a good purchase, for the author has a very interesting tale to tell, and she tells it very well. The book gives the city's history from 1842, during the Opium Wars, until 1949, when it fell to the Red Army. Between these dates a lot of amazing things happened in the city, and they are well-recounted in this book, both the highs and the lows. At times the profusion, and confusion, of Chinese names can cause the eyes to glaze over, but that's not the author's fault. If you like to learn something new every time you read a book on history, buy this one and you will not be disappointed.

I knew the Shanghai that Stella Dong describes as a child and adolescent growing up there. She captures the surreal quality of this unique world amazingly well. Reading "Shanghai" brought it all back--the "sweetly-sick" odor of opium in the side streets, the blind beggars and the gangsters who used to knock on the door of our house in the French Concession for "protection money." What I especially like is Dong's even-handedness. She writes about this Chinese city from neither a purely Western nor a Chinese point-of-view. This is the best of the books available about Shanghai. I hope everyone interested in exploring China's recent past will read this book because they'll learn a great deal about the forces that shaped China today from understanding the underpinnings of this astonishing place.

Alas, despite the enticing title and initially engaging, gossipy style, this book bogs down in repetitive trivial details while failing to explore fasciniting topics to which it alludes (such as the international drug trade in the early 20th century and its links to Shanghai and to international arms trading after WWI). Little effort is made to identify individuals as they reappear in subsequent chapters or to present a coherent historical narrative. This is one of the very few books I have ever simply chosen to put down rather than finish.

I was fascinated by Stella Dong's book "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City." I lived in Shanghai for almost ten years prior to, during, and after the Second World War and wrote about that experience ("Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai"). Despite that, I was surprised by how little I knew about the history of this turbulent city and how much I learned from Ms. Dong's volume. The book is encyclopedic about the history of Shanghai from 1842-1949, a tumultuous period including the opium war, the boxer rebellion, the two World Wars, the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist movement, and the ultimate virtual surrender of the city to the communists.

Readers will profit from the voluminous research that went into the preparation of this well written account of what was widely known as an open city where those with the interest and resources could avail themselves of anything they fancied, legal or illegal. Ms. Dong has approached this task with the energy of a historian and apparently read virtually all the available sources on Shanghai. More importantly for the average reader, this voluminous research is not written in the dry scholarly manner of some historians. Instead the book is prepared much the way a journalist would write an exciting expose of the city and its inhabitants. Among these are the gangsters and politicians, and Ms. Dong points out that both terms often apply to the same individuals, the opium dealers, as well as the inhabitants and owners of numerous brothels residing in Shanghai. Readers will get glimpses of a range of fascinating characters inhabiting Shanghai at various times from Ho-Chi Minh, Chou En-Lai, members of the Sassoon family, to different groups of refugees finding safe haven in this turbulent city. The book holds the interest of average readers while providing an overview of the history of both Shanghai and China more generally, its Chinese and foreign inhabitants, as well as the widespread corruption and vices of this fascinating city that has a well deserved reputation for notoriety.

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