In the Shanghai of the 1930s, a visitor may have seen a film of blue opium smoke drifting down Nanking Rd. to the area around Blood Alley where Chinese people working as rickshaw drivers and beggars needed puffs of the potent drug to forget their impoverished lives. Up in the swanky part of town, in hotels and apartments, expatriates from the United States and Britain played through the night, gulping gin slings, having sex, sometimes smoking opium. Shanghai accommodated writers, con men, women who thrived on adventure and those who wanted to reinvent themselves. The remarkable, if brief, story of this fantastic city is told by Canadian writer Taras Grescoe in Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War.

Jennifer: What led you to investigate the Shanghai of the mid-1930s?

Taras: I’d been to China five times and when I was researching another book I lingered for a few days in Shanghai and as I wandered on the Bund (the old waterfront) I felt I’d entered a time capsule. There was a band of septuagenarian and octogenarian Chinese musicians playing old jazz standards in a mock Tudor bar. The walls were stained with nicotine. There were dropped ceilings and I could see there was beautiful marble carving on them. The hotel was called the Peace Hotel.

When I went back home to Canada I began doing research and realized that many of the places I’d been were remnants of old Shanghai. The Peace Hotel had once been the famous art deco Cathay Hotel.

Shanghai is a palimpsest. You can see the old Chinese city, which stands as a maze work of residences and shops, then there is this European city and a modern city. I realized Shanghai would be a fantastic subject for a book. It sat there marinating in my head for a while and then I began to do research.

Jennifer: You tell the story of Shanghai through the lives of Sir Victor Sassoon, a wealthy Brit, Emily (Mickey) Hahn, an unconventional woman from the American Midwest, and Zau Sinmay, a privileged Chinese poet. What was it about their lives that drew you in as a writer?

Taras: I had a crush on Mickey Hahn from the first time I saw her picture and read some of her books.

Her first book was published just as the Depression hit. She had to make her way in the world through her wit, her talent and charms. She did it by chronicling her adventures. I went to her archives at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. She wrote up to three letters a week to her family in St. Louis, Mo. She talked about her adventures and in her archives I discovered this vast cache of letters. It was a gold mine.

I also discovered Victor Sassoon’s journals were available and they had notes about everyone he met and there were snapshots and little scribbles that gave insight into his emotions. The three, Hahn, Sassoon and Sinmay, were exhibitionists and narcissists who disobeyed the rules about foreigners mixing with the Chinese population.

When Emily went to Shanghai in 1935, she immediately gravitated towards the Chinese side. At a lecture on D.H. Lawrence, her eyes locked with this Chinese man who — unlike the other Chinese wearing westernized clothing — was dressed like an ancient Chinese scholar.

He had long whiskers, an aquiline nose and a striking face. He brought her into the Chinese side of Shanghai. At the time she met Zau she also met Sir Victor Sassoon. They hit it off as well. They were both nonconformists. Sir Victor was a British multimillionaire. It was in Bombay where he got into the opium trade and the cotton trade. (When) he went to the Far East, he also saw the potential of making a fortune in real estate.

So you get a Chinese decadent poet who was educated at Oxford, who spent summers in Paris, and knew the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, yet dressed like an old Manchu scholar. Then you get the multimillionaire Sir Victor and the notorious Emily Hahn.

Her books were international bestsellers and she made a massive amount of money. She made Zau Sinmay well known through her New Yorker stories about Mr. Pan. She turned him into a caricature, which really annoyed him.

Jennifer: Most of the fascinating people who populate your book were Jewish, including Sir Victor and a Canadian named Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen. They did a lot to help Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

Taras: Shanghai became a port of last resort because Canada and the United States were turning away ships filled with Jewish refugees. When they arrived in Shanghai they were welcomed.

Sir Victor worked in the canteen of the embankment house, he set up a refugee thrift store and he gave money to the cause. He had pride in his heritage. He saw himself as more culturally rich than members of the British upper class with whom he had associated all his life. This is why he helped his Jewish co-religionists.

You didn’t ask the big question. What was really important about Shanghai? If you want to understand what is happening in China today, you need to understand the Shanghai of yesterday. When the British and Americans introduced opium to China, it caused a reaction that has been there ever since. The Chinese considered it a vast insult. China had once been a glorious empire and had been reduced to a poor, backward country.

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China is the crucible that will shape globalization. It started in Shanghai where people from all over the world set up factories. The Chinese Communist Party, which would lead to Maoism, was born there. In fact, Mao, who worked as a laundry boy at that time, was a tenant of one of the leading Jewish citizens of Shanghai.

The story of Shanghai is about a clash of cultures and when you understand that, you understand China.

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