Recommended Books & Films

Recommended Books

At the top of the list on Shanghai history is Pan Ling's nostalgic, romantic, easy-to-read history of the city and its characters, In Search of Old Shanghai (Joint Publishing [H.K.] Co., Ltd., 1982). Many accounts of Shanghai's history tend to focus on the lurid, the sensational, and the exotic, including Stella Dong's spicy, reasonably well researched history of colonial Shanghai, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842-1949 (William Morrow, 2000). It suffers, as any general book on Shanghai must, from a lack of depth, but it at least summarizes the main events and personalities that came to define the time. Harriet Sergeant's equally entertaining Shanghai (Jonathan Cape, 1991) focuses on a shorter period (1920s and 1930s) and uses stories and anecdotes to bring to life Shanghai in its heyday. Considerably more academic but still fascinating, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1999) by Hanchao Lu gets past the myth and the hype to examine the daily lives of ordinary Shanghainese in their shiku men (stone frame) lane housing.

For a mostly fascinating and detailed narrative of contemporary Shanghai, warts and all, Pamela Yatsko's New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2001) provides a wider perspective on Shanghai now and in the future.

As biographies and memoirs go, only the first section of colorful American journalist Emily Hahn's China to Me (Blakiston Co., 1946) is set in Shanghai, but it offers a vivid and entertaining account of life among the Shanghai elite in the 1930s, including her encounters with members of the Soong family, who are themselves profiled in great, highly readable detail in Sterling Seagrave's The Soong Dynasty (Harper & Row, 1985).

Old Shanghai comes alive in Vickie Baum's novel Shanghai '37, in which different characters' lives collide at the Cathay (Peace) Hotel just before the Sino-Japanese War. No literary masterpiece, it nevertheless succeeds in bringing a tumultuous bygone era to life.

Far darker visions of Shanghai are powerfully evoked in J. G. Ballard's personal novel, Empire of the Sun (V. Gollancz, 1984), based on his imprisonment as a child during the Japanese occupation; and in Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai (Grove Press, 1986), a memoir of her imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. Anchee Min's Red Azalea (Pantheon Books, 1994) recounts her extraordinary journey from revolutionary Red Guard to film star in Shanghai under the watchful eye of Madame Mao.

A welcome antidote to the dark and heavy survival stories is the light and fun detective novel Death of a Red Heroine (Soho Press, 2000), by Chinese author Qiu Xiaolong, featuring a poetry-writing Shanghai police inspector Chen who investigates the death of a model former Red Guard. This is the first of four Inspector Chen novels. Those partial to thrillers can also pick up Tom Bradby's The Master of Rain (Doubleday, 2002), a murder mystery set in 1920s Shanghai involving British lads, Russian prostitutes, and Chinese gangsters.

Finally, for pictorial memoirs on Shanghai's colonial architecture, there's no topping Tess Johnston and Deke Erh's A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai Revisited (2004), and Frenchtown Shanghai: Western Architecture in Shanghai's Old French Concession (2000), both published by Old China Hand Press, and both more widely available in Shanghai than in the West. The two have also released a series of books on Western colonial architecture in other parts of China.

Recommended Films

Films about Shanghai, at least those familiar to Western audiences, trade heavily on the nostalgia of the mysterious and romantic 1930s. For Western audiences, the classic is Josef von Sternberg's 1932 film Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich, though none of it was filmed in Shanghai, of course. The Shanghai underworld of 1930s gangsters and their molls is also stylishly evoked in Zhang Yimou's 1995 film Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao yao dao waipo qiao), starring Gong Li. Steven Spielberg's 1987 film Empire of the Sun, based on English author J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, takes a look inside the concentration camps of Shanghai during the Japanese occupation; some of the most gripping scenes were filmed in the streets of Shanghai (using 15,000 local extras) and at the Peace Hotel on the Bund.

Although Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's 2000 award-winning film In the Mood For Love (Hua Yang Nian Hua) is set in Hong Kong, it evokes the lives of displaced Shanghainese in the former British colony during the 1960s. Everything in this wonderfully moody movie oozes nostalgia, and the lead actress Maggie Cheung's slim, figure-hugging qipao outfits even sparked a fashion craze in Shanghai in 2001 when old-time tailors were forced out of retirement to churn out once again this quintessentially traditional Chinese dress which had fallen so out of fashion until then.

For those who like a little more challenging fare, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's beautiful chamber piece, Flowers of Shanghai (Hai Shang Hua, 1998), takes place entirely inside four turn-of-the-twentieth-century opium-filled Shanghai brothels, as madams, servants, and courtesans (called hua or flowers) despair and connive for the attentions of their patrons. There's nothing lurid or sensational here, only a slow-moving existential meditation that grows increasingly claustrophobic as the evening wears on. Not for those with short attention spans.

The darker side of modern Shanghai as seen through the failed dreams and bleak hopes of a lonely Shanghai youth is depicted in the stylized low-budget Suzhou River (Suzhou He, 2000) directed by Ye Lou.

Recent Hollywood films shot with a Shanghai backdrop include Mission Impossible III (2006), The Great Raid (2005), Code 46 (2003), and the not very successful The White Countess (2005), the last about a blind American diplomat, his fantasy nightclub, and a family of Russian aristocrats in 1930s Shanghai.

Finally, a 1998 Austrian documentary by Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy, The Port of Last Resort, tells the story of the Jews who fled Nazi Europe for Shanghai from 1937 to 1941.