Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City

by Stella Dong

Book Overview

Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern-day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao′s cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 068815798X
• ISBN13: 9780688157982
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: William Morrow
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.3" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Shanghai; "Sin City"

There is always something new that you can learn when you read a book, and that's why I purchased this one. I didn't know much at all about Shanghai, except for its lurid reputation, and I decided that buying this book would inform me about something new. It's a good purchase, for the author has a very interesting tale to tell, and she tells it very well. The book gives the city's history from 1842, during the Opium Wars, until 1949, when it fell to the Red Army. Between these dates a lot of amazing things happened in the city, and they are well-recounted in this book, both the highs and the lows. At times the profusion, and confusion, of Chinese names can cause the eyes to glaze over, but that's not the author's fault. If you like to learn something new every time you read a book on history, buy this one and you will not be disappointed.

A splendid and highly readable work of history

Stella Dong presents a well-researched and accessible history of a city that exerts a powerful fascination over Westerners. A Chinese-American journalist who appears familiar with both the Chinese and Western worlds, she deftly conveys the moral ambiguities implicit in a city whose founding is based upon greed and depradation. The book covers a tumultuous time in China's history, but Dong does a praiseworthy job of guiding the reader through the period's complexities. "Shanghai" excels in its portraiture of the chronically stressed yet chronically interdependent relationship between the Chinese underclass and their colonial masters in Shanghai. It also shows 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. The authors narrative skills are more than up to the standard that this enigmatic city deserves. Dong pulls 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. A splendid and highly readable work of history.

A Fascinating History of a Notorious City

I was fascinated by Stella Dong's book "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City." I lived in Shanghai for almost ten years prior to, during, and after the Second World War and wrote about that experience ("Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai"). Despite that, I was surprised by how little I knew about the history of this turbulent city and how much I learned from Ms. Dong's volume. The book is encyclopedic about the history of Shanghai from 1842-1949, a tumultuous period including the opium war, the boxer rebellion, the two World Wars, the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist movement, and the ultimate virtual surrender of the city to the communists.Readers will profit from the voluminous research that went into the preparation of this well written account of what was widely known as an open city where those with the interest and resources could avail themselves of anything they fancied, legal or illegal. Ms. Dong has approached this task with the energy of a historian and apparently read virtually all the available sources on Shanghai. More importantly for the average reader, this voluminous research is not written in the dry scholarly manner of some historians. Instead the book is prepared much the way a journalist would write an exciting expose of the city and its inhabitants. Among these are the gangsters and politicians, and Ms. Dong points out that both terms often apply to the same individuals, the opium dealers, as well as the inhabitants and owners of numerous brothels residing in Shanghai. Readers will get glimpses of a range of fascinating characters inhabiting Shanghai at various times from Ho-Chi Minh, Chou En-Lai, members of the Sassoon family, to different groups of refugees finding safe haven in this turbulent city. The book holds the interest of average readers while providing an overview of the history of both Shanghai and China more generally, its Chinese and foreign inhabitants, as well as the widespread corruption and vices of this fascinating city that has a well deserved reputation for notoriety.

A colorful and accurate picture of a great city

I knew the Shanghai that Stella Dong describes as a child and adolescent growing up there. She captures the surreal quality of this unique world amazingly well. Reading "Shanghai" brought it all back--the "sweetly-sick" odor of opium in the side streets, the blind beggars and the gangsters who used to knock on the door of our house in the French Concession for "protection money." What I especially like is Dong's even-handedness. She writes about this Chinese city from neither a purely Western nor a Chinese point-of-view. This is the best of the books available about Shanghai. I hope everyone interested in exploring China's recent past will read this book because they'll learn a great deal about the forces that shaped China today from understanding the underpinnings of this astonishing place.

Lao Hao a (Shanghainese for 'very good')

To put it mildly, Shanghai has a checkered past. As a notorious bastion of rouges, thieves, soldiers of fortune, drug smugglers, prostitutes, pleasure seekers, speculators and industrial tycoons- it is second to none. From being a sleepy little fishing and trading village on the Huangpu river in the early 1800's to becoming one of the worlds largest ports and a city of over 14 million people- Shanghai has had more than it's fair share of growing pains. Not very many cities on the globe can match it in having gone through so much political and financial turmoil in the last 150 years.When I first picked up this book I was a little skeptical. The title, `Rise and Fall of a Decadent City' seemed a bit over the top and I was afraid it was going to end up being three hundred pages of vice soaked sensationalism. As a resident of Shanghai I have discovered that the myth of old Shanghai often looms larger than the truth.I was pleasantly surprised. The book was meticulously researched, well written and most important- interesting. Since this book is a history of Shanghai, China's most populous and prosperous city, you also inadvertently get a short course in modern Chinese history while your reading it. From the Taiping rebellion to the opium war and the Boxer rebellion- many of the great historical events in Chinese history are clearly laid out and explained in the context of how they influenced and helped to form Shanghai.`Shanghai, The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City' is a very good piece of popular history and I highly recommend it.