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| The Bund, Shanghai, 1930's |
"Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, the fishing village on a mudflat which almost literally overnight became a great metropolis.
Inevitable meeting place of world travelers, the habitat of people of forty-eight different nationalities, of the Orient yet Occidental, the city of glamorous night life and throbbing with activity, Shanghai offers the full composite allurement of the Far East."
'All About Shanghai; A Standard Guidebook.' Shanghai University Press, 1934
The Shanghai of the 1920's and 1930's occupies an almost mythic space in the popular imagination, full of half glimpsed stories, extravagant gestures and not a little passion mingled with violence. This image of Shanghai often appears as though seen 'through a glass, darkly'.
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| screen grab from Shanghai Express, 1932 |
But what of the real Shanghai of the era?
The real, 'tween the wars Shanghai shrugs off lazy aphorism while enticing us deeper into a world of great complexity and dramatic contrast, populated by characters both improbable and also all too ordinary.
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| set of Shanghai Express, 1932 |
"The tired or lustful businessman will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy, or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race-meetings, baseball games, and football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult in this climate, but there is whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleships. The jeweller and the antique dealer await your orders, and their charges will make you imagine yourself back on Fifth Avenue or in Bond Street. Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations."
"Journey to a War", Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, 1939.
This irregular periodical of the virtual kind attempts to mine this rich vein of narrative, casting up rare gems of time, manner, and place for the reader's consideration - intermingled with illustrative photographs.
Each post presents an adventure of itself - a journey into a past that seems increasingly distant from the relative safety of your own media portal.
As has often been thought, but ne'er so well expressed: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
Come learn their ways with Tales of Old Shanghai.
