The wicked old Paris of the Orient

Here’s the Mandarin for ooh-la-la! As Taras Grescoe, a respected Canadian writer of nonfiction, shows in this marvellous, microscopically descriptive history of what is now one of the most populous and smoggiest megalopolises on earth, Shanghai in the 1930s was internationally notorious as ‘the wicked old Paris of the Orient’, with ‘as vivid a cast of chancers, schemers, exhibitionists, double-dealers and self-made villains as had ever been assembled in one place’. Grescoe lavishly keeps the promise of his book’s subtitle. In its heyday, the city was both glamorous and squalid, extremely rich and poor, unscrupulous and tough: to shanghai in the lower case means to force people to do what they don’t want to do.

Shanghai’s most dynamic period of evolution was brought about by the wholesale importation of opium. Early in the 19th century, when merchants profited by up to £100 from a chest of the drug, 24,000 chests of it were imported annually from India — ‘enough,’ Grescoe writes, ‘to sustain the habits of two million addicts.’ When Chinese authorities resisted the trade, William Jardine, the Scotsman who later co-founded Jardine, Matheson & Co., sailed from China to England to lobby for military support. Parliament sent 4,000 troops to China to wage what has been called the Opium War. In 1840, three years after Victoria became Queen, British forces attacked China and, within a year, established Shanghai and four other coastal cities, Canton, Amoy, Foochow and Ningpo, as the Treaty Ports, granting extraterritoriality — immunity to Chinese law — to British citizens and some other westerners. The whole operation to impose unlimited opium on China was a brilliant commercial success and surely one of the most shameful enterprises in imperial history.