Shanghai Saga: The Story of a City

No book provides a more authentic view of the colorful and corrupt world of old Shanghai through the eyes of a foreign resident than Shanghai Saga, the memoir by an Australian who worked as a customs official and newspaper reporter before fleeing from Shanghai in the face of Japanese threats to the fragile world of the “Paris of the Orient.” In one of the most wicked cities in the world, trade boomed and vice blossomed along the imposing waterfront, and John Pal had unrivaled opportunities to experience the underbelly of the China’s greatest city during the naughty 1920s and 1930s. He tells his own story and that of Shanghai, including accounts of the corruption, the crime, the opium-smuggling gangsters and brothel barons, and the hordes of refugees from the Russian Revolution whose women had to sell their bodies to keep alive and whose menfolk begged in the streets. This is the book which describes old Shanghai most vividly.