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This conscientious, deftly-written popular history of pre-Revolutionary Shanghai is the best introduction I've seen to a city that once was the world's premier East-West trading port - and may well be again.
Shanghai has always reminded me of two other cities whose founding spirit is entirely and unabashedly commercial - Las Vegas and Hong Kong. Las Vegas, the city in the desert where human vice was calculatedly indulged for the interest of extracting coins from pockets on as grand a scale as possible. Hong Kong, the rocky island in the South China Sea where persecuted, ambitious refugees from mainland China were given similar license to redeem their personal histories by making a fortune, however they could.
Of the two, Shanghai is decidedly more like Hong Kong for one reason: the early histories of both cities were forged in the bosom of England's condescending, corrupt colonialism. Most often, a native Chinese' road to fortune in either Shanghai or Hong Kong was made through the parlors of the taipans, the powerful and usually English businessmen who controlled the real estate, the opium, the cotton, and all other bounty of the land.
"WE POSSESS ALL THINGS"
Stella Dong, a journalist and former resident of Shanghai, excels in her portraiture of the chronically stressed yet chronically interdependent relationship between the Chinese underclass and their colonial masters in Shanghai. She shows how the deformations of the person-to-person relationship of man and mistress, man and coolie, taipan and comprador, were exactly reflected at the level of China-Western relations.
Her narrative skills are good enough, pulling us from the swampy wasteland that was Shanghai of the early 1800's, to the rich and cosmopolitan city under Japanese siege in the early 1940's. But it's her eye and ear for the speech of each era that, for me, provided the real through-line of this book. No matter what year or era, there is always a juicy overhead comment or speech that gives give body and flesh to the characters in question.
Here is the Chinese Emperor Ch'ien Lung's famously terse rejection of George III's envoy to the Imperial Court, an occasion on which the envoy sought extended commercial relations with China: "We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country's manufacturers. Our ways bear no resemblance to yours." Does that quote not contain all the strangely natural claim to omnipotence and unreasonable hauteur that one would expect from an emperor?
CHOW-CHOW CARGO
Here is the wonderful summation of British colonial life in Shanghai provided by a young clerk, Edward Bowra, during the peak years of the British-run opium trade in the middle 1800's: "A man's career here is in his own hands and he makes or mars his fortunes unaided and unrestrained by those petty restrictions of class and caste and the jealous rivalries which are so rife in convention-ridden, sham-loving, Mammon-worshipping England. Here are prizes to be won. All is for the quick eye, the stout heart, the strong will."
And here is my favorite piece of captured speech in the book, caught by the American journalist Carl Crow listening to a taipan talk to his comprador in a makeshift pidgin combining English, Chinese, Indian, and Portuguese words.
Taipan: "How fashion that chow-chow cargo he just now stop godown inside?"
Comprador: "Lat cargo he no can walkee just now. Lat man Kong Tai he no got ploper sclew."
Taipan: "How come you talkee sclew no ploper? My have got sclew paper safe inside."
Comprador: "Aiyah! Lat sclew paper he no can do. Lat sclew man he have go Ningpo more far."
(Quick key: "chow-chow" means mixed cargo, "godown" means warehouse, "sclew" means security, "walkee" means moving cargo.)
BAGHDAD JEWS
For anyone who has struggled through the various badly-written histories of Shanghai, espying obviously colorful characters like Big-Eared Du and Pockmarked Huang behind opaque layers of prose, this is the book that brings them to life. The aforementioned are gangsters who ran Shanghai far more ruthlessly than Al Capone ever ran Chicago. I especially loved the portrait of the Sassoons, a family of Jews who fled persecution in Baghdad to untold riches running opium and cotton from Shanghai.
The Sassoons are best known today as the former proprietors of the famous Peace Hotel on Shanghai's riverside street, the Bund. They were only one of many Baghdad Jewish families who settled in Shanghai and built a fortune there. Again, the author's ear finds just the phrase that brings the tycoon and horse fancier Sir Victor Sassoon to life: "There's only one race greater than the Jews, and that's the Derby."
Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City is available at Amazon.com.
