The Old Shanghai A-Z

The Old Shanghai A-Z
Author: Paul French
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9888028898

This richly anecdotal guide to every street in Shanghai details many landmarks and stories associated with its best-known avenues. A definitive index to the street names of Shanghai, some of which have disappeared or been removed, allows historians, researchers, tourists, and the just plain curious to navigate the city in its pre-1949 incarnations, through the former International Settlement, French Concession, and External Roads area with a detailed map and alphabetical entry for every road. The book is lavishly illustrated with old advertising, images, and postcards of the streets and businesses, the bars and nightclubs, the people and characters of old Shanghai bringing alive the city in its previous heyday as the Pearl of the Orient.The Old Shanghai A-Zshould become the standard reference work as well as being an easy-to-use guide for researchers and visitors looking to recapture the glamour and uniqueness of old Shanghai. Paul Frenchis an analyst and writer who has worked in Shanghai for many years as a founder of Access Asia. His books includeCarl Crow: A Tough Old China HandandThrough the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium War to Mao.

City of Devils

City of Devils
Author: Paul French
Publisher: Picador USA
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2018-07-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250170583

"In the 1930s, Shanghai was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made--and lost. 'Lucky' Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison in the States, spotted a craze for gambling and rose to become the Slot King of Shanghai. 'Dapper' Joe Farren--a Jewish boy who fled Vienna's ghetto with a dream of dance halls--ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld's. In 1940 they bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation and genocide. They thought they ruled Shanghai; but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction they left in their wake."--Jacket

Networking the Russian Diaspora

Networking the Russian Diaspora
Author: Hon-Lun Helan Yang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0824882695

Networking the Russian Diaspora is a fascinating and timely study of interwar Shanghai. Aside from the vacated Orthodox Church in the former French Concession where most Russian émigrés resided, Shanghai today displays few signs of the bustling settlement of those years. Russian musicians established the first opera company in China, as well as choirs, bands, and ensembles, to play for their own and other communities. Russian musicians were the core of Shanghai’s lauded Municipal Orchestra and taught at China’s first conservatory. Two Russian émigré composers in particular—Alexander Tcherepnin and Aaron Avshalomov—experimented with incorporating Chinese elements into their compositions as harbingers of intercultural music that has become a well-recognized trend in composition since the late twentieth century. The Russian musical scene in Shanghai was the embodiment of musical cosmopolitanism, anticipating the hybrid nature of twenty-first-century music arising from cultural contacts through migration, globalization, and technological advancement. As a pioneering study of the Russian community, Networking the Russian Diaspora examines its musical activities and influence in Shanghai. While the focus of the book is on music, it also gives insight into the social dynamics between Russians and other Europeans on the one hand, and with the Chinese on the other. The volume, coauthored by Chinese music specialists, makes a significant contribution to studies of diaspora, cultural identity, and migration by casting light on a little-studied area of Sino-Russian cultural relations and Russian influence in modern China. The discoveries stretch the boundaries of music studies by addressing the relational aspects of Western music: how it has articulated national and cultural identities but also served to connect people of different origins and cultural backgrounds.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Last Boat Out of Shanghai
Author: Helen Zia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 034552232X

"The dramatic, real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist Revolution--a precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. Shanghai has historically been China's jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao's proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have opened the story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. Young Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father's dark wartime legacy, must choose between escaping Hong Kong or navigating the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome young exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation in order to continue his studies in the U.S. while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America"--

Shanghai

Shanghai
Author: Michael Knight
Publisher: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

The growth of Shanghai viewed through its dynamic visual culture

Remaking Chinese Cinema

Remaking Chinese Cinema
Author: Yiman Wang
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Film remakes
ISBN: 9888139169

From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multilocal process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through transregional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema. Among the book’s highlights are a rereading of The Goddess—one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West—from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood’s fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood’s remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of “Chinese elements” in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach, a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai
Author: Ruiyan Xu
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2011-07-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408809958

When an explosion reverberates through the Swan Hotel in Shanghai, it is not just shards of glass and rubble that come crashing down. Li Jing and Zhou Meiling find their once-happy marriage rocked to its foundations. For Li Jing, his head pierced by a shard of falling glass, awakens from brain surgery only able to utter the faltering phrases of the English he learnt as a child - a language that Meiling and their young song Pang Pang cannot speak. When an American neurologist arrives, tasked with teaching Li Jing to speak fluently again, she is as disorientated as her patient in this bewitching, bewildering city. As doctor and patient grow closer, feelings neither of them anticipated begin to take hold. Feelings that Meiling, who must fight to keep both her husband's business and her family afloat, does not need a translator to understand.

Tales of Old Shanghai

Tales of Old Shanghai
Author: Graham Earnshaw
Publisher: Tales
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789881762115

The old Shanghai was a rich and cosmopolitan mixture of East and West and this engaging book offers a glimpse into that world through an assortment of photographs, newspaper clippings, cartoons, stamps, and other collectibles. Evoking different eras, this record also contains vintage advertisements, excerpts from travel guides, flyers handed out to ex-pats highlighting Shanghai’s international atmosphere, and often hilarious firsthand accounts from those who had the opportunity to live in or pass through this bustling trade port. The scrapbook format allows readers to either read from the start or flip through to any page to learn of the extraordinary layers and depth of the old-world city.

Carl Crow - A Tough Old China Hand

Carl Crow - A Tough Old China Hand
Author: Paul French
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2006-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789622098022

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and made the city his home for the next quarter of a century, working there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and groundbreaking adman. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a dull colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the thriving and ruthless cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book – 400 Million Customers – that encouraged a flood of businesses into the China market in an intriguing foreshadowing of today's boom. Among Crow's exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of Western hostages from a mountain bandit lair, and being one of the first Westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao's second-in-command Zhou En-lai. During the Second World War, he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, coordinating US policies to support China against Japan. The story of this one exceptional man gives us a rich view of Shanghai and China during those tempestuous years. This is a book for all with an interest in Shanghai and China of this period, and those with an interest in the development of journalism and business there.