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

on the rise and fall of Shanghai from 1842 to 1949. Starting out with warlords, three separate entities (International Settlement, French Concession, Chinese Territory), gambling, arms, guns, opium, prostitution, rags to riches, white Russian women, David Sassoon family (Iragi Jews), Hardoon garden, Hsu Chi-mo, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Soong three sisters, T.V. Soong, H. H. Kung, mob-figure Tu Yueh-sen (Al Capone of the orient), Mao Tse-dong, Chou En-lai, 40,000 Jews in Shanghai ghetto (Hongkow), Wang Ching-wei, rape of Nanking, Japanese took over in 1943, 8,000 foreigners (British, Americans, etc) in Bridge House (concentration camp), Germans could not kill the Jews in Shanghai, 500,000 ounces of gold moved to Taiwan.... to Communist taking over in 1949. Many of these events were clearly researched and documented. It is a worthwhile read. If anyone will make a movie, it will be fascinating.I was born in Hongkow, Shanghai. I learned about these events in bits and pieces when I was growing up in Taiwan. Of course, I only got one side of the story from Chiang Kai-shek, that everyone is bad except him. Now I look at the whole picture, Wang Ching-wei is not a bad guy after all. He was able to accomplish one government (no more three separate entities) while none of the others could.

This book does well for what it attempts to do - cover the connection between organized crime in Shanghai and show its affects on government, economic and social life of the city in that era. I would have liked to have read more about the personal lives of the three big names that headed the Green Gang in its day, especially that of Chang Hsiao-lin.

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

I appreciated the backstory this book provided on Shanghai and it was a fantastic pre-trip read. The writing gets bogged down in the details of the various revolutions, but the overall writing is well done and paints a bewitching picture of a fast-moving and ever-evolving city from the mid 1800's onward.

Loved this book. My mother grew up in shanghai and Stela Dong's book is a wonderful accounting of the city's fabulously rich roots.

Seems like a good book, but I hate that it has no research of primary sources and no footnotes/endnotes at all. If you are reading this for fun and general knowledge, it is a good book. If you are a historian and want to quote this... it's not a very reputable book to do so (in the sense that it does not follow the typical academic format where every claim is justified with quotations). Still, I think the author does a good job in portraying Shanghai and the book is full of insights and colorful stories. Fun read.

Too much detail. I have no idea who some of the characters are. If I was Chinese and had known the history of China I would have a better understanding of the complete story.

My main issue with this book is that it was very poorly written. It was unable to connect a series of anecdotes into any kind of loose narrative, and in the end just felt like a collection of trivia. The author also just dives into amateurish rants, complaining about the injustices of past events, or comparing the beauty of Chinese women and western women.Additionally, this book walks some fine line of plagiarism with Harriet Sergeant's "Shanghai." The sections on the 20s-40s feel like a re-write of that earlier book! Of course some overlapping is to be expected, when they're both covering the same city and the same time period. But really the structure feels very, very similar, and more damning, Stella Dong numerous times re-uses that book's 1st person accounts, putting them in the 3rd person.In moderation, that sort of thing is perfectly acceptable. However, here it's very heavily done, more than I think is appropriate. Additionally, in the bibliography, Harriet Sergeant is only given credit as a source for a single chapter. That's nonsense, when her unique, 1st person interviews are referenced throughout the book. And to top it off, Harriet Sergeant's name gets misspelled!I won't claim Harriet Sergeant's (now-out-of-print, although easily available used) work was perfect - it's 3 or 4 star material. However it's clearly the better book.

Very disappointing. Utterly superficial, cobbled together from existing sources and obsessed with the seedy side (but in a squeamish and occasionally sarcastic way). You'd never believe that Shanghai during this time was a center for great music, literature, architecture and political debate. So badly written with a series of cliches strung together and badly in need of an editor. To take a sentence almost at random; 'Awash in easy money, Shanghai's Westerners celebrated their newly minted wealth giddily and with gusto'. Also adopts a lazy approach to use of Chinese terms, using neither Wade-Giles nor Pinyin.

An excellent well balanced history of Shanghai. Many histories tend to concentrate on the foreign community in shanghai but the author, perhaps because of her background, gives equal weigh to Chinese involvement in this strange but fascinating city and in so doing gives a more rounded and balanced history of the city. If there is one sector that she has ignored it is the average foreigner who was not a taipan or worked for one of the large business houses. Anyone interested in this section of the foreign community should read "Shanghai made me." It would also have been useful if the author had written a small postscript of shanghai's history post 1949 (decline then revival). But these are small criticisms of what is an excellent general history of Shanghai.

Interesting perspective

Great history of Shanghai when it was a foreign-owned trading port.Really excellently researched as well as telling a great story.

Well written and documented. Exciting read