Shanghai

404 Pages·1990·120.174 MB·English

by  Harriet Sargeant

SHANGHAI
When I first visited Shanghai shortly after the Cultural
Revolution, Communism had fallen on the city like a sand­
storm, burying and preserving. The international commu­
nity who had made Shanghai great between the wars might
have been scattered across the world but their edifices
remained largely untouched. Even the light switches had
not changed since the 1930s. Now Shanghai is one of the
most exciting economic centres in the Far East. The place is
booming, with new investment and new building projects.
There is no place for sprung dance floors or an Art Deco
swimming pool and no sentirnentality at their loss. On the
other hand Shanghai is not the spiritually dead city that I
first explored. The highly charged atmosphere of the
Twenties and Thirties, what the Chinese described as
'jenao', a perpetual 'hot din' of the senses, has returned. It
seems entirely possible that Shanghai will overtake Hong
Kong and Tokyo to become once again the leading city in
the Far East and an Asian international capital. Shanghai's
former inhabitants would have approved.
Harriet Sergeant is the author of Between the Lines:
Conversations in South Africa and The Old Sow in the
Back Room: An Englishivoman in Japan. She lives in
London.
By the same author
BETWEEN THE LINES: CONVERSATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA
THE OLD SOW IN THE BACK ROOM:
AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN JAPAN
SHANGHAI
Harriet Sergeant
JOHN MURRAY
Albemarle Street, London
For my father
who first took me to Shanghai
© Harriet Sergeant 1991
First published in 1991
First published in paperback in 1998
by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd,
50 Albemarle Street, London W 1X 4BD
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or
storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or
not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this
publication) without the written permission of the copyright
owner, except in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the tenns of
a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1P 9HE. Applications for
the copyright owner's written permission to reproduce any part
of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN 0-7195-5713 5
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
. .
Illustrations
Vll
Acknowledgments
IX
Introduction
I
A Simple Equation - The Rise of a Great City
I IO
The White Russians
2 30
Citizens of Nowhere
34
The Sweetest and Cleanest Girls in the
Whole Town
41
The Order of the Brilliant Jade
3
r927- The First Battle
68
The British
4 95
The Spoiling Life
98
The Abattoir of All Human Joys
137
A Wonderful Old Racket
166
The War Across the Bridge
5
r932 - The Second Battle
1 9
7
The Chinese
6 206
The Most Repellent Kind of Slavery
210
The Iron House
225
That House of Multiple Joys
248
Gossip Is a Fearful Thing
268
The War at the End of the Street
7
r937 - The Third Battle
296
A Bit Like the End of Things
8
The Fall of Shanghai
312
Notes
340
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
PLATES
Engraving of the Bund.
I
The tree-lined boulevards of the French Concession.
2
3 The Russian Church.
4 Olga Alexeyevna Skopichenko, the poetess.
A Russian fur shop.
5
6 Two Russian entertainers.
A Chinese student haranguing a crowd during the spring
7
of
1927.
8 A barrier separating the International Settlement and the
Chinese section of Shanghai.
Manuela, the Japanese nightclub dancer.
9
Koichi Okawa, the Japanese bandleader.
10
Japanese residents of Hongkew celebrating Japan's unification
I I
on Memorial Day.
Sir William and Lady Hayter's servants in front of their house.
12
3 Basil Duke.
I
14 George Stewart.
The Shanghai Paper Hunt Club.
15
16 Sir William Keswick.
Sir Christopher Chancellor.
17
18 Lady Chancellor.
Shanghai Race Club, Grand Stand and Enclosures.
19
Chinese punters.
20
A Chinese altar outside the stables on the racecourse.
2 I
A group of Japanese marines on the lookout for Chinese
22
snipers.
23 Japanese marines amid the ruins of Chapei.
The home of a wealthy Chinese converted into a dormitory for
24
Chinese refugees.
25 A Japanese patrol forcing a Chinese civilian to show his hat.
26 Market Place in Shanghai.
Lu Xun, Bernard Shaw and Cai Yuanpei.
27
28 Emily Hahn and pet gibbon.
29 Wang Baolian with Kanzo Uchiyama at Lu Xun's grave.
30 Ruan Lingyu.
31 Li Lili.
32 Nanking Road.
33 A Chinese rickshaw man.
3 A Chinese foodseller with portable kitchen.
4
35 Chinese dance hostesses.
36 A bridal sedan chair.
37 A Chinese brothel and opium den.
38 The border of the French and International Settlements, August,
1937.
39 Chinese and foreign civilians escorted from a combat zone by
Japanese soldiers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce
photographs:
Plate r, Uta Schreck; 2, 26, Culver Pictures Inc., New York; 7, 8, 20, 21, 24, 2 5,
Illustrated London News Picture Library; 9, Taeko Wada; ro, rr, Koichi Okawa; 12,
32, Sir William Hayter; 13, Patricia Maddocks; 14, George Stewart; 15, 17, 18, Lady
Chancellor; 16, Lady Keswick; 19, Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Archives; 22, 23, 36,
37, 38, 39, John Hillelson; 28, Emily Hahn; 29, Wang Baolian; 30, 31, Tony Rayns.
The cartoons which appear on chapter opening pages throughout the book are from
the work of Georgi Sapojnikov (Sapajou), chief cartoonist for the North China Daily
News from 1925-49.