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

Stella Dong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2000

Shanghai was the one place on the globe where no restrictions were placed on immigration. As a result, political refugees and outlaws sought its sanctuary. This lively biography describes the thrill and excitement of those years.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First edition (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068815798X
• ISBN-13: 978-0688157982
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,308,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Myth as history, February 27, 2001

By 

Peter Jennings (Canberra, A.C.T. Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (Hardcover)

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.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842-1949, May 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (Hardcover)

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".

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgia for the Unremembered, November 18, 2002

By 

"lingam_de_amour" (equatorial Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanghai : The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 (Paperback)

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.