Stella Dong's Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City is an impressionistic history of "The Pearl of the East." She throws enough colorful characters and astounding events at us that it is a quick and interesting read, but it would have benefitted from a tighter structure. Dong doesn't seem to want to say anything particular about Shanghai except that this sensational event happened and then that intriguing character passed through. An overarching vision, a guiding thesis, would have made this a better book. Her predilection for the sensational is evident in her subtitle: Surely a decadent city is one engaged in a long and lurid fall? Can a city on the rise really be decadent?

In her first book, Dong has filled her absorbing history of Shanghai with vivid details that leave little doubt as to how Shanghai earned its reputation as Pearl of Asia. She offers tidbits on colorful local personalities, such as the Chinese warlord who never left home without his enormous lacquered teak coffin, the radical American feminist who was indirectly responsible for the end of Mao Zedong's second marriage and the wealthy Chinese businessman whose two younger daughters married Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. Although the city was inhabited by 250,000 Chinese when the British invaded in 1842, it wasn't long before the nationals were serving the foreigners, who were making Shanghai one of the world's wealthiest business centers. Banking and manufacturing were the respectable professions, but it was opium--controlled largely by foreigners but used largely by Chinese--that built modern Shanghai. The arrogance and excess of foreigners, who set up their own courts, lived lavishly and excluded the Chinese from governing bodies and private clubs, created the uneven balance of power and economics that helped pave the way for Communism. Dong skillfully packs her narrative with all of the city's "sordid pleasures and exploitation," offering an account that is at once informative and entertaining. ( )

The cover page brackets "Shanghai" with the dates 1842 and 1949.

Shanghai (China) > History/Shanghai (China) > Social conditions/China > History > 19th century/China > History > 20th century