ARCHITECTURE
Building Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway Edward Denison & Guangyu Ren
This book examines the evolution of the city’s architecture and urban form, telling the story of Shanghai through its architecture and urban development, using contemporary photographs and archival materials to show just how extraordinary Shanghai’s architecture is in terms of its variety and the interweaving of international styles and design movements.
Modernism in China: Architectural Visions and Revolutions. Edward Denison & Guang Yu Ren.
An invaluable resource for fans of Art Deco and Modernism in China. Denison and Ren document and analyze the Art Deco age in China–of which Shanghai played a major role–the pivotal link between the ancient traditions of the imperial past and the high-rises that threaten to blanket the country. Modernism in China investigates China’s unique experience of Modernism, its variety, contradictions, and paradoxes, and the role of Modernism in the development of China’s architectural and urban landscapes throughout the 20th century. Beautiful photographs by Denison.
Luke Him Sau, Architect: China’s Missing Modern. Edward Denison & Guang Yu Ren
This is a highly engaging and visual account of China’s 20th-century architecture through the lens of one of the country’s most distinguished designers. Luke Him Sau/Lu Qianshou (1904–1991) is best known as the architect of the iconic Bank of China Headquarters in Shanghai. The book charts Luke’s life and work, commencing with his childhood in colonial Hong Kong, his apprenticeship with a British architectural firm and his education at the Architectural Association (1927–30). In London, Luke was offered the post of Head of the Architecture Department at the newly established Bank of China, where IM Pei’s father was a senior figure. Luke spent the next seven years in Shanghai designing buildings all over China for the Bank before the Japanese invasion in 1937 forced him, and countless others, to flee to the proxy wartime capital of Chongqing. In 1945 he returned to Shanghai where he formed a partnership with four other Chinese graduates of UK universities; but civil war (between the Communists and Nationalists) once again caused him to uproot in 1949, when he moved to Hong Kong and once again re-established his career.
A biography of one of the leading Art Deco architects in Shanghai’s former French Concession and his buildings, illustrated with contemporary photographs and archival materials – with a list of all of his Shanghai buildings (over 100 still stand). Out of print, available in second hand bookshops.
Shanghai Art Deco Deke Erh & Tess Johnston
The Shanghai Art Deco classic by the author-photographer team of Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, who brought Shanghai’s remarkable historic architecture to the attention of the world. The book covers architecture, graphic design, objects, people and places. That’s the good news. The bad news: it’s out of print, so beg, borrow, or steal a copy!
Peace at the Cathay Peter Hibbard
Shanghai was a frenzy of development in the early 20th century as businessmen, thrill-seekers and refugees poured in from all corners of the globe. The Far East’s most cosmopolitan city exuded luxury, style and excitement. One building on Shanghai’s waterfront Bund captured it all: the Cathay Hotel (known today as the Fairmont Peace Hotel). The fortunes of this Art Deco masterpiece have mirrored those of the city, weathering war, revolution and radical social upheaval. Peace at the Cathay chronicles the fascinating stories and personalities behind the city’s most iconic landmark.
Laszlo Hudec and the Park Hotel in Shanghai by Leonore Hietkamp
Using material from the Hudec family and Hudec’s archive, this book tells the story of Hudec and the landmark building said to be Chairman Mao’s favourite, one that remained the tallest in China until the 1980s.
DESIGN
Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars by Lynn Pan
The definitive work on Shanghai’s Art Deco visual culture. From the 1920s to the 1940s, no place was more modern than Shanghai: a veritable playground amid a sea of Asian and European influences; an urban population clamoring for all that was new and Western, but whose aesthetic sensibilities remained profoundly Chinese. In this rich social and cultural history of Shanghai’s art and culture, Lynn Pan guides the reader through the myriad world inhabited by commercial and underground artists and designers, performers, architects, decorators, patrons, as well as politicians, generals, and crime bosses. What emerges is a singular portrait of a city and its art—its life blood, in an era that continues to capture the imagination of art lovers and cultural critics today.
Chinese Women and Modernity: Calendar Posters of the 19102-1930s
This catalog is a compilation of some of the best calendar posters produced during 1910s to 1930s, with the main theme focuses on Chinese women during those periods. It features artworks by such famous painters in Shanghai as Zheng Mantuo, Zhou Muqiao, Hang Zhiying, Li Mubai, Jin Xuechen and Xie Zhiguang. Also included are essays on the history and aesthetic of calendar posters. Thus, this volume is a good reference on the social as well as aesthetic development in China during the early twentieth century.
HISTORY For more fiction/nonfiction books on Shanghai, check the Historic Shanghai Book Club list, here.
Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity Marie-Claire Bergere (translated by Janet Lloyd)
Shanghai today is a thriving, bustling metropolis. But does its avid pursuit of the modern trappings of success truly indicate that it will once again become the shining example of China’s commercial and cosmopolitan culture? While history continues to unfold, eminent China scholar Marie-Claire Bergère takes readers back to when Shanghai first opened to the world in 1842 to narrate the city’s tumultuous and unique course to the present.
Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity is the first comprehensive history of Shanghai in any Western language. Divided into four parts, Bergère details Shanghai’s beginnings as a treaty port in the mid-nineteenth century; its capitalist boom following the 1911 Revolution; the fifteen years of economic and social decline initiated by the Japanese invasion in 1937, and attempts at resistance; and the city’s disgraced years under Communism. Weaving together a range of archival documents and existing histories to create a global picture of Shanghai’s past and present, Bergère shows that Shanghai’s success was not fated, as some contend, by an evolutionary pattern set into motion long before the arrival of westerners. Rather, her account identifies the relationship between the Chinese and foreigners in Shanghai—their interaction, cooperation, and rivalry—as the driving force behind the creation of an original culture, a specific modernity, founded upon western contributions but adapted to the national Chinese culture.
Eclipsed for three decades by socialism, the wheels of the Shanghai spirit began to turn in the 1990s, when the reform movement took off anew. The city is again being referred to as a model for China’s current modernization drive. Although it makes no claims to what will happen next, Bergère’s Shanghai stands as a compelling and definitive profile of a city whose urban history continues to be redefined, retold, and resold.
Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels, by Isabel Sun Chao and Claire Chao
This is Isabel Sun’s story, the story of a girl growing up in a wealthy Chinese family during Shanghai’s first golden age, and filled with wonderful detail you won’t find elsewhere that brings old Shanghai to life. She attends McTyeire School for Girls, St. Mary’s Hall, and St. John’s University, gets her hairclips from Wing On, dates a dashing young man who rides a Harley, and has her own song at her favorite nightclub. Written with and researched by her daughter Claire Chao, it is equally a classic old Shanghai tale, a story of the rise and fall of a great family and the role of fate across five generations, all set against the dramatic, turbulent backdrop of 19th and 20th century China. (Special touch: The book is lavishly illustrated, with both vintage photographs and charming illustrations). A bestseller, the book has won over 25 literary & design awards.
For Historic Shanghai’s review of the book, click here.
Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng
Nien Cheng was one of old Shanghai’s elite. Her first-hand account of life for someone of her class during the cultural revolution is beautifully written, despite the painful topics – her house arrest, time in jail, and unexpected tragedy. The book offers a rare glimpse of Shanghai during the cultural revolution, with the added benefit of Cheng’s descriptions, detailed and immediate, that really bring it to life.
Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 Andrew David Field
Drawing upon a unique and previously untapped reservoir of sources, this study traces the origin, pinnacle, and ultimate demise of a commercial dance industry in Shanghai between the end of the First World War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Delving deep into the world of cabarets, nightclubs, and elite ballrooms that arose in the 1920s, the book assesses how and why Chinese society incorporated and transformed this westernized world of leisure and entertainment. Focusing on the jazz-age nightlife of the city in its “golden age,” the work examines issues of colonialism and modernity, jazz and African-American culture, urban space, sociability and sexuality, and latter-day Chinese national identity formation in a tumultuous era of war and revolution.
Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
This book explores the play of international forces and international ideas about Shanghai, looking backward as far as its transformation into a subdivided treaty port in the 1840s, and looking forward to its upcoming hosting of China’s first World’s Fair, the 2010 Expo. As such, Global Shanghai is a lively and informative read for students and scholars of Chinese studies and urban studies and anyone interested in the history of Shanghai.
Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Lives by Jie Li
In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account–part microhistory, part memoir–Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life–territories, artifacts, and gossip–Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century.
First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former “International Settlement.” Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai’s labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city’s population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.
Shanghai Splendor Weh Hsin Yeh
Rich with details of everyday life, this multifaceted social and cultural history of China’s leading metropolis in the twentieth century offers a kaleidoscopic view of Shanghai as the major site of Chinese modernization. Engaging the entire span of Shanghai’s modern history from the Opium War to the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, Wen-hsin Yeh traces the evolution of a dazzling urban culture that became alternately isolated from and intertwined with China’s tumultuous history. Looking in particular at Shanghai’s leading banks, publishing enterprises, and department stores, she sketches the rise of a new maritime and capitalist economic culture among the city’s middle class. Making extensive use of urban tales and visual representations, the book captures urbanite voices as it uncovers the sociocultural dynamics that shaped the people and their politics.
In the 1980s, Lynn Pan returned to the Shanghai she had left as child. Tracing It Home is her elegant, beautifully rendered account of that journey, of her heritage, intertwined with the city (literally – her grandfather was a prolific builder who constructed many of Shanghai’s landmark historic Art Deco buildings) and insights into the people of Shanghai.
Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise by Lynn Pan
Gangsters ran old Shanghai, and in this delightful, well-researched book, Lynn Pan dishes the details. How they held respectable positions in banks, government, and on boards, held immense wealth, power, and the means they used to control the city.
FICTION
Acclaimed Shanghainese writer Xiao Bai makes his English language debut with this heart-stopping literary noir, a richly atmospheric tale of espionage and international intrigue, set in Shanghai in 1931—an electrifying, decadent world of love, violence, and betrayal filled with femme fatales, criminals, revolutionaries, and spies.
Night Shanghai by Nicole Mones
In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats. From being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, he becomes the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war.
Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and has been bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai’s most powerful crime boss in payment for her father’s gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.
Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation toNight in Shanghai‘s final, impossible choice.
In this stunningly researched novel, Nicole Mones not only tells the forgotten story of black musicians in the Chinese jazz age, but also weaves in a startling true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in the West.
Red Mandarin Dress & other Inspector Chen novels by Qiu Xiaolong
Native son Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen Cao is a poet, assigned to the Shanghai police after college. He solves crimes in Shanghai, tackling contemporary issues from corruption to pollution to the struggles of the average person navigating work, the Party, family…Fun for history buffs: Qiu often uses history to solve his crimes. Qiu honestly and directly about contemporary issues, giving readers a genuinely unique insight into Shanghai.
In her most powerful novel yet, acclaimed author Lisa See returns to the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl’s strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy. Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father—the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the Communist regime. Devastated by Joy’s flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy’s and Pearl’s separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China’s history threatens their very lives.
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang
Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ai-ling) is considered one of China’s great 20th century writers. From one of the great families of old Shanghai, her short stories in Love in a Fallen City are set in 1930s Shanghai and Hong Kong, with themes drawn from those changing times: women, juxtaposed between the traditional and the modern, trying to find a balance.
GUIDEBOOKS
All About Shanghai and Environs
A classic guidebook from Shanghai s roaring 1930s. Written with firsthand authority and an enthusiasm that is truly infectious, the authors captured and bottled the madness, excitement, depravity and fast bucks of the greatest boomtown the world had ever seen. Written as a guide for newcomers and visitors, this book today is a fascinating portrait of the old Shanghai in its heyday, enjoying every minute of the ride.
GRAPHIC NOVELS
Constable Khang’s Mysteries of Old Shanghai
Constable MeeMee Khang of the late 1920s & 1930s Shanghai Flower and Bird Market Constabulary has three days to find out where this strange kitten tattooed with the Chinese characters for murder came from. Three days to find the fortune teller who sold him and three days to determine why the richest man in Shanghai must have these answers!
The Adventures of Tintin: The Blue Lotus
Tintin travels to Shanghai in The Blue Lotus, diving into the Sino-Japanese conflicts of the early 1930s. The political tensions combined with the chilling threats of drugs give the story an especially high and realistic sense of danger. Herge’s interest in China was spurred by a friendship with a young Shanghai art student named Chang Chong-chen (Zhang Chong Ren) a relationship that Tintin mirrors with a Chinese boy also named Chang Chong-chen. Herge paints a vivid picture of China and takes the opportunity to denounce ethnic prejudices (though ironically his artistic depiction of the Japanese businessman Mitsuhirato is quite grotesque). Years later, Tintin’s relationship with Chang would become the basis of Tintin in Tibet. –David Horiuchi
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