‘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.