Biased Review

I always try to write unbiased reviews... but this one will be a bit different since I have been involved in creating the book. "Promenades au coeur de l'ancienne concession Francaise" is the new version of an old guide about Shanghai's French concession. As the original one, this book was made by "A pleines mains" an expat charity in Shanghai. Proceeds are used in various help projects in Shanghai and the surrounding cities. The original guide was published in 2002 and has become out of print since then. It has been transformed into a number of guided walks throughout the French Concession. Each walk is about one hour and can be easily fit into a busy afternoon shopping or as a short break in a business trip. Walks are spread the old French Concession and the adjacent Xu Jia Hui area. One of them passes by the entrance of the lane where I live. Fortunately, my house is not included... which will avoid disturbing the quietness of my little private Shanghai.

The book is both in French and English, ensuring that the information collected within the important French community in the city is spread out to every lover of the old Shanghai. The original text was written in 2001 and the original author interviewed a few remaining Chinese survivors of the Concession time. This adds anecdotes and real stories to the book, making it a lively read. Having been interested in the topic for a few years, I still managed to learn quite a few things from it.

I did not design the walks, but I contributed is by landing some of my own collection of old Shanghai postcards and documents to be used as illustration. I am quite proud of having been part of it as the result is really good, but it's for you to judge. If you are looking for a practical book about old Shanghai, it's a good point to start.

Sin city

I am not sure anymore where is the first time I heard about Ralph Shaw. It must have been about 2 years ago when I started to get really interested about Old Shanghai. I heard the story of this ex-journalist from North China Daily News (the most important English Speaking newspaper in Shanghai and the whole of China). I tried then to buy a copy of the book and this is where the difficulties started. It was not available in any English book store in China, then I started to look on the internet. Sin City was displayed on several book sites such as amazon.com but was listed as sold out. I finally got a second hand copy on the internet. The one I got is not the original publication of 1973, but a reprint in paperback from 1986. I had it shipped by the seller in England to my parents place in France and finally collected it in December.
I don't think the book sold very well, certainly not helped by the cover of the paperback was definitely not representative of the content, slizy and in any case plain ugly. However, it is in the bibliography of most books about Shanghai including the biography of Carl Crow I reviewed in a previous article. I was really interested about and really anxious to read it. It did not last for very long, as I went trough within a few days of Chinese New Year 2008.
Sin City is the memoirs of Ralph Shaw, a Huddersfield (where I studied) boy that was sent to Shanghai as part of the UK military force and became journalist then night editor of the North China Daily News. He arrived in Shanghai in 1937 until 1949. Shaw was in his 20s in Shanghai and fully enjoyed all the pleasure that the city could offer in term of nightlife, drinking, partying and enjoying play with women. In Old Shanghai, like many men he found the perfect playground. His life in old Shanghai is depicted through a series of portraits, locations and actions. What is so interesting in this book is that he mentions all those people and all those places from the old Shanghai straight out of his memory. Shaw arrived in Shanghai a few days before the invasion of the Chinese city by the Japanese forces and witnessed the mounting tensions between the British forces and the Japanese, until the invasion of the settlement in December 1941 and his arrest the Japanese secret police and incarceration as a prisoner of war. There are many books about this period, but reading the actual experience of somebody who went through it is quite a unique experience.
Shaw does not stop at places and people, his memoirs also include a lot about the vices of the city, prostitution, gambling and corruption. Once again, Ralph Shaw was definitely well informed and the light he casts on the city is less than flattering. Corruption, prostitution and alcoholism were normal practice for the most men foreign community in Shanghai and it reflects in the book. Once again, Shaw adds many details about places and people including portraits of the people and funny anecdotes. The book is really good to take the reader in the Old Shanghai, into the smoky girly bars and opium dents. With cross referencing with other books, the picture of Old Shanghai really gets together while reading it.
What is more questionable and probably less interesting for most reader is the display of his own sexual performance, with a distinct preference for handy performances and self help. Although it adds to the story, it also takes away from the plot and take off some of the book's credibility. Some pages of Sin City would easily find there place in men-only literature and take the book far away from most readers. This is where most readers probably get lost. The erotic pages clearly dominated the cover and marketing of the book though they are not that many. It's a pity such a narrow approach was taken for a book that is so full of first hand details about the old Shanghai.

A tough old China hand

Although the French translation of "400 million customers" seems to have been a strong success Carl Crown did not gain long term fame in France. I never heard about him before coming to Shanghai. The discovery came while listening to the author of his biography (Paul French), last year at the Shanghai literary festival. Having heard about the famous Carl Crow map of Shanghai before I bought the book after French's speech at Glamour bar.
Carl Crow was a very important figure of the old Shanghai, where he spent two periods of his life. He first started the China Press in Shanghai, a newspaper that was bringing an American voice to a scene dominated by the British North China Daily News. After moving to Japan, he became famous for being the first journalist to publish the "21 demands" from Japan to China in 1915.
Coming back to Shanghai in 1918 he created what became the prime foreign advertising firm in Shanghai, helping foreign companies to sell their products throughout China. Carl Crow Inc also maintained the first and largest advertising network in Eastern China, importing the concept of advertising and creating the famous Shanghai advertising posters with Chinese girls in QiPao. These posters have since become one of icon of old Shanghai. He also founded the Shanghai Evening Post in 1929, the Shanghai newspaper that mostly supported the Nationalist cause and the development of China. He finally left Shanghai on the last American refugee boat after the Japanese invasion of the settlement and finished his life in the US as a writer and adviser on Asian politics.
Carl Crow is the author of many books including "400 Million Customers", "The Chinese are like that" and "Foreign Devils in the Flowery kingdom". He crossed the path of Sun Ya Tsen, Chiang Kai Chek and his wife, Zhu En Lai, various Chinese warlords and many Shanghai known figures. He was part of the Shanghai publishing seen along with fellow Missourians such a Tom Millard and JP Powell.
It took me while to finish it, not by lack of interest but by lack of time. Paul French definitely spent an enormous amount of time to research it. He travelled extensively to the US, HongKong and other locations to pull together information, and the book really feels like a great study. As an Old Shanghai fanatic, I found in it many information that I missed, many cross references to things I had heard of and many points of high interest. Carl Crow's life takes us to the tumultous Chinese's history from the 30's. At the same time, I sometimes felt that without all my prevous knowledge of these events and characters, I would probably have been lost a bit. "A tough Old China Hand" is a highly interesting book, but not one for the freshers in the Old Shanghai.

The Master of rain

Field is a young English officer in the Shanghai Municipal Police, freshly arrived from Yorkshire. Through his uncle high in the Shanghai establishment, he is very quickly introduced to both the high Shanghai society, and the less glamorous parts of the megalopolis. The master of Rain is a crime novel based in Shanghai 1927, centered around the resolution of furious murders of Russian prostitutes. Field tries is best to solve the murder, along with his newly found friend, the American detective Capresi. They are surrounded by a fallen White Russian noble turned into serving men (Natasha Medvedev) and the Taipan of one of the largest trade house (Charles Lewis), all of it under the shadow of the king of Shanghai's mafia.

Although I bought this book without knowing anything about it, I have loved every page. Tom Bradby was the foreign correspondent for a British TV. Based in Hong Kong, he clearly used a lot of time and efforts to research and recreate the old Shanghai in his novel. Characters have the right tone and locations in the city have been thoroughly researched. Only Shanghai experts will notice a few omissions, or inventions but they never deviate too far from documented history. Action flows at a fast pace making this book a real page turner.

Though enjoying the book tremendously, I have to admit that the universe created by Tom Bradby has a lot of sight, but very few sounds, smell or taste. It fails a little to immerse us in the (noisy) streets of Shanghai. There is a also a little too much indulgence in making the characters meet various historical figure (such a Borodin) without any need for the actual story. The actual plot is sometimes bizarre and the book leaves many questions unanswered, which is a bit disappointing for a crime novel. Finally, the sexual serial crime at the center of the novel seems a little odd in the 1930's.

Nevertheless, The Master of Rain is a great introduction to the old Shanghai, recreating the Paris of the East and illustrating the high life of a few as well as the hard life of many. As a quick introduction to the Old Shanghai, it comes highly recommended.

City of the flat world

"The World is flat" is a book from Thomas Friedman about globalization and the changes it is bringing to the world, companies and individuals. The main point is that the World has become a level playing field on a worldwide basis.
The collapse of Marxist Leninist style of regimes has allowed 3 billions of people (Russia, China, India and others) to join the capitalist system. The Internet and other technologies have made communicating with the whole word something easy. Work flow software allows to cut service work into pieces that can be separated and done anywhere in the world, before being put together. This was previously only possible with production of goods. Manufacturing is now "off-shored" to places like China. Services can be "outsourced offshore". Most people connected to the Internet can "upload" their creations or point of view in such things as this blog, or wikipedia (that is very difficult to access in China because it's banned). All data and information created by humans can be accessed and searched via search engines and the Internet.
I read this book within a few days mostly in the plane as I was traveling between Asia and Europe. For most people involved in international business, it's very clear that the world has actually gone flat. Although, the book did not bring much news to me, it's still enjoyable to read an analysis of this phenomenon that is influencing our lives so greatly. The version I read was the one from 2006, that was already revised, though I think one point was missing. Friedman explain clearly that the information is becoming much more diverse, with a very large share of the Internet being in other languages than English... but the reasoning does not go to the logical conclusion, i.e. that native English speakers should also learn foreign languages instead of waiting for others to learn there, being able to master it along with their own.
During the whole reading, I could not stop thinking about Shanghai today. This city is the center of the business battlefield for the largest market in the world. Any company of a respectable size has to be in China and most multinational companies make it the center of their growth for the next decades. As a consequence, the city is full with foreigners from any nationality you can think of. Shanghai today is one of the metropolis of the flat world... and will maybe become it's capital though there is still a long way to go. Thanks to Friedman's "flattening factors" Shanghai is everyday becoming more of a world city.

Building Shanghai

I had this book stored on my shelf since I bought it a few months ago. Winter coming, bad weather and renewed interest kind of melted together pushing me to open it again. "Building Shanghai" looks at first like of those coffee table books, that you look at every now and then and you leave around just to look nice when people come and visit you. This book is really nice to look at, but it's also much more than that. It's a history of Shanghai from an architectural point of view. With several maps of the old Shanghai compared with the new one, I was able to locate quite a number of buildings I had noticed in the street and know about their history and architectural style. What is more fascinating is to look at some of those photograph, and to realize that I passed some great buildings every day without notice them... as they have been covered or altered with terrible expansions or additions that make impossible to recognize anymore.
As much as I am appalled by the current destruction of Shanghai architectural heritage, I also have to admit that destroying grand building a few years old to replace them by something even grander has always been part of the Shanghai history, and that some buildings that we revere today as antics were horrible creations mixing very diverse kind of styles in Frankenstein-like creation. Similarly in the old and new Shanghai, architects are pushed over the limits by landlord willing to deliver a message with their buildings... but only end up showing how bad tastes they have.
Finally I enjoyed in this book the great love of the authors for the old Shanghai and it's preservation... as well as the love of Shanghai as a modern city and how to continue it's expansion while avoiding expending it's monstrous aspect to much. I'm not sure this has been the priority of Shanghai's planners until now... but hopefully this attitude is already changing in some districts.

Les Francais de Shanghai

The French concession of Shanghai was run by French and under French law, an enclave in the middle of China. Although French people settled it, many more nationalities were added on the way. Portuguese, Russians fleeing the revolutions, Jews fleeing persecutions in Europe and of course Chinese. I recently read a book about the French people that lived in the French concession, “Les Francais de Shanghai” (i.e. "The French people of Shanghai").

This book is not a novel, it’s not a thesis or a real biography of Shanghai either… it’s a little bit of all. The book is built in many small chapters, each of them telling stories and anecdotes about a particular French person or family of the old Shanghai. The author used a lot of research, old documents and interviews of people who actually lived in the old Shanghai, or their descendants. It gives little snaps of the daily life in old Shanghai, details that have not much importance taken one by one but together create an atmosphere, a moving picture of the old Shanghai.

I read the book within a weekend, losing a lot of sleep on it as I was fascinated by the characters and stories. It is full of information I had never seen before, including the history of famous institutions such as the university, hospitals and churches that one still can see today. It also give great information about the influence of the Jesuites priests in the development of the city, as well as more information about some famous people (de Montigny, Dubai, Moller). I particularly enjoyed the part about police and gangsters in the old Shanghai, discovering that a house very near from mine used to be the "Poste de police Petain", complement of the "Poste de Police Joffre" that I already knew of a little further on the road. I was sitting on my sofa while reading, in my 1920’s apartment in the heart of the French concession and I felt like being transported through time.

Readings occupied my mind fully, and when I had to go out for survival shopping it was a shock to re-discover XXIst century cars …when I was expecting 1930’s Renaults or Peugeots. This book was a great travel in itself, making old Shanghai even more vivid. After "Les Francais de Shanghai", I will continue looking for great books like this one, completing my knowledge of the past of this great city.