‘Life was good, very good, almost too good’ – Wallis Simpson’s year in China

Few women have had more written about them, mostly of a critical, salacious nature, than Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Edward VIII gave up his crown. Much of the gossip has fed on what became known as the ‘China Dossier’, a supposed compendium of the year Simpson (or Spencer, as she then was) spent in China in the mid-1920s while she was trying to get a divorce from her heavy-drinking, abusive, naval first husband. As Paul French sets out to prove, the story of what she herself called her ‘lotus years’ is more prosaic, but no less fascinating.

Simpson arrived in Shanghai in the summer of 1924, hoping to make a fresh start.  She was 28. She had very little money and, though not beautiful, she was chic, attractive to men and good at enjoying herself. Warlords were fighting for power in the wake of the collapse of the 167-year-old Qing dynasty, and Shanghai was everything that her Baltimore upbringing was not: noisy, brash and endlessly exciting. Drawn into the large foreign colony which ruled over the treaty port, Wallis embarked on a whirl of race meetings, night clubs, thés dansants and shopping expeditions. As she wrote in her auto-biography later, life was ‘good, very good, almost too good’.

Still hoping to find a way of securing her divorce – Shanghai had residency regulations she could not get around – she moved on to Peking, taking the romantic Shanghai Express later immortalised by Marlene Dietrich. Her funds were severely limited and French suggests that she was able to keep afloat by acting as a courier for the American authorities at a time when the war made the posts uncertain. Peking was less flashy than Shanghai but even more fun.