The End of a Reign
In all eras, in all civilizations there have been cities that mark their time and place in history. For 100 years, Shanghai was such a city.
In the 1930s, this port on the mouth of the Yangtze River boasted some of the most lavishly appointed hotels on Earth. (The lighting fixtures at Victor Sassoon's Cathay Hotel were all Lalique, including those in the bathrooms.) The super-exclusive Shanghai Club boasted the longest bar in the world–"the Long Bar." As a playground of the rich and famous, Shanghai was the port of call for everybody who was anybody.
Silent film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were frequent visitors. In February 1931, Fairbanks told a gathering of Shanghailanders at the Cathay Hotel: "To me there are only five prominent cities in the world and Shanghai in my opinion occupies the limelight as the most colorful, interesting and progressive."
With its occupation by the Japanese in November 1937, the city's luster faded. In Ang Lee's Lust, Caution–set in 1942–we see Shanghai in its twilight. Ruled by collaborators, Shanghai was a tragic city that, like its inhabitants, lost its bearing amidst a world at war.
City of the East
For over a century, from the 1840s through the 1940s, Shanghai was the place where the ideological, cultural and geopolitical struggles of the modern era played out.
In 1842, the British won the First Opium War, which erupted after Britain insisted on importing opium to southern China. By creating a nation of addicts, the crafty Brits insured themselves a market for their opium and thus the ability to redress their large trade deficit with China.
Following its defeat, China became semi-colonial state. The Qing Dynasty ruled, but in China's most important cities the prime real estate was parceled into areas known as "concessions" controlled by colonial powers.
With the Revolution of 1911, which is associated with Sun Yat-sen, the Qing Court was ousted and the country was then ruled by a collection of feuding Chinese nationalists, regional warlords, foreign powers and concession holders. With the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921, a fourth player entered the fray.
Throughout this period, no city in China was more important than Shanghai, which by the end of the 19th century was the world's third most important banking capital after New York and London, and, as such, the undisputed financial center of East Asia. In essence, Shanghai was two cities, one a Chinese city under the authority of the weak Chinese government, the other an international zone consisting of concessions controlled primarily by the British, Americans, French and, following the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, Japanese.
The French concession in Shanghai was a formal part of the French Empire. The Americans and British joined forces in 1854 and jointly ran a concession that became known as the Shanghai International Settlement. The Shanghailanders, as the generations of English and Americans who were born in the city referred to them selves, operated the settlement as an independent state, though one in which Chinese could live.
The state of relations between Shanghailanders and natives is exemplified in a "Memorandum on Naming of the Shanghae Streets." This hilarious memo, written in 1962, by British Consul Walter Henry Medhurst, reads in part:
The foreigners being the dominant portion of the community and charged with the order and security of the Settlement, while the Chinese are but recent immigrants, who have swarmed in for their own conveniences and safety, it follows, that, if either has the right to enforce on the other a system of nomenclature as near as possible adapted to the necessities of both, the foreigners possess that right; and it is one which must be exercised, or the Chinese part of the population, with their usual sagacity for mutual combination, will ever long make the entire settlement a Chinese city, and we shall find such names as, if translated would read, "Virtue and Benevolence Street," Painted Silk Lane," "Justice and Harmony Road" intruding themselves in flaming characters alongside the less modest appellations the Municipal Council has already posted up.
While Chinese were permitted to own land in the Settlement, they were not made to feel at home. In 1889, the Shanghai Municipal Council, the International Settlement's governing body, issued an order allowing "respectable and decently dressed natives" to use the public parks. It then rescinded that permission when too many Chinese took to sleeping on park benches. (It is popularly believed that the gates of the parks bore signs, "Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted," but that's an urban myth.)
It wasn't until 1928 that Chinese were again allowed into the Settlement's public parks. The same year three Chinese men were invited to join the Shanghai Municipal Council, which prior to then had been composed of five Brits, two Americans and two Japanese.
Photo: Courtesy of the USHMM Photo Archives
The famed Shanghai Bund
On The Bund
The Westernized downtown area of Shanghai's International Settlement overlooked the western bank of the river, known as The Bund, from the Urdu "band," meaning "embankment." The Bund was the Wall Street of Asia. As the center of trade and finance, it was where West met East. By 1930, Shanghai's census put the population at 2.7 million, making it the world's sixth largest city.
Upon their arrival in Shanghai, Western visitors, who numbered 40,000 per year in the early 1930s, regularly expressed surprise–and disappointment–at not finding themselves in the exotic East. As The American Express Oriental Travelogue observed in 1931, "The average tourist arriving in Shanghai is astonished beyond words that, instead of a Chinese city with perhaps a wall around it . . . he or she finds a great metropolis built entirely on European and American lines."
Shanghai's Cathay Hotel
Some compared Shanghai to the waterfront cities of Nice and Chicago, the latter of which was architecturally very similar. Noel Coward, a frequent denizen of Shanghai in its heyday, quipped in 1929 that the city was a "cross between Huddersfield [Yorkshire] and Brussels." He is said to have written Private Lives while staying at the Cathay in 1931. He later starred in the first production with his infatuation Laurence Olivier, for whom he wrote the play.
Coward was but one of a stream of entertainment personalities who paid regular visits to the Astor House Hotel or the Cathay Hotel. The New Yorker's Emily Hahn, who often visited the Astor House with her pet gibbon, Mr. Mills, became addicted to opium while in Shanghai. "Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict," she later wrote. "I can't claim that as the reason I went to China." She also noted how her good friend Victor Sassoon liked to photograph her naked.
Photo: Universal Pictures
A Countess from Hong Kong
Shanghai entered the popular imagination as a destination of the rich and famous. In Josef von Sternberg's 1932 movie, Shanghai Express, Shanghai Lily (Marlene Dietrich) was on her way to that fair city when a warlord commandeered the train she was riding in. (The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.)
Charlie Chaplin's first visit to Shanghai in 1931 supposedly inspired his 1967 film, A Countess from Hong Kong, staring Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren and his son, Sydney Chaplin. He returned in March 1936, with Paulette Goddard, his live-in girlfriend and co-star in the just-released Modern Times. The two, the Brad and Angelina of their day, were greeted at the Cathay Hotel by a throng of 30 journalists pursuing rumors of a secret marriage.
Golden Period of film
As a cultural capital of Asia, Shanghai in the 1920s and the 1930s was known as the Paris of the Orient. The city's film industry was particularly influential. In the 1920s, Shanghai produced melodramas and swashbucklers for the Chinese diaspora. In the 1930s, the city's film industry came under the sway of progressive studios, and began making path breaking, socially conscious films with storylines that focused on class struggle, the lives of everyday people and the threat posed by foreign (i.e. Japanese) invaders.
During this time, what is known as the Golden Period of Chinese cinema, Shanghai had silent film stars who rivaled Fairbanks, Pickford and Chaplin in popularity. One of the most wildly popular was, Ruan Lingyu, who has been called "China's Greta Garbo." She starred in Wu Yonggang's The Goddess (1934), about a prostitute who raises a child by herself, and Cai Shushen's New Women (1935), the story of an educated woman who escapes society's disapproval–and China's tabloid press–by committing suicide. Following the release debut of New Women, the Journalist Union protested vigorously at the unflattering portrayal of the press and the studio was forced to re-edit the film.
Ruan, like the heroine in New Women, was mercilessly dissected in the pages of the tabloids, which avidly chronicled her messy divorce. On the eve of International Women's Day, March 8, 1935, the 24-year-old beauty killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. She left a note that reportedly read in part, "Gossip is a fearful thing." During her funeral procession, which was reported to be as long as three miles long, three women used the occasion to join her in death. Fifty-seven years later, Ruan's tragic life was the subject of Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage (1992), starring Maggie Cheung.
In the 1930s, women's changing social roles challenged a Shanghai that was already riven by battles between Communists, Nationalists and Fascists, and that was facing the rising sun of Imperial Japan.
> Post a Comment