Old Shanghai

Author: Ke Zhaoyin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-03-01
Features: This book embodies the author and other contributors' attention and interest in the topic of foreign residents in modern Shanghai. It features diplomats like Balfour, Alcock, and Montigny, who boldly aspired to colonial expansion and ultimately contributed significantly to the establishment of the foreign concessions. There are also Jewish tycoons like Hacon, overnight millionaires who secretly controlled the scene as "big bosses" of trading companies, missionaries like who transformed metropolitan schools into "China's West Point Military Academy," Russian émigrés wandering on the midnight Champs-élysées, handing out hands to passersby, Jewish refugees in Japanese quarantine areas finding solace in hardship, and White Russian women groaning in "massage parlors." Regardless of whether these foreign residents were considered "noble" or "lowly" in this immigrant city, they ultimately contributed to the international cultural landscape of the "paradise for adventurers."