Title Details

Paul French was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. His most recent book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir has received much praise, with The Economist writing: “…in Mr French the city has its champion storyteller.”

Introduction
1 How America’s Most Famous Playwright Went to Shanghai, Fooled Everyone and had a High Old Time
of It – Eugene O’Neill (1928)
2 Nearly Snubbed by Shanghai – Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford (1929)
3 Shanghai Gestures – Louis L’Amour (1933)
4 A Warm Welcome for Charlie Chan – Warner Oland (1936)
5 Two Poets Meet in Frenchtown – Langston Hughes & Irene West (1933)
6 From Shanghai to Hollywood – Lyda Roberti (1927)
7 The Beast Comes to Shanghai – Aleister Crowley (1906)
8 Interpreting the ‘Shanghai Mind’ – Arthur Ransome (1926/1927)
9 Red Sojourners at the Zeitgeist Bookstore – Irene Weitemeyer, Agnes Smedley and Roger Hollis (1929)
10 Weimar on the Whangpoo – Lily Flohr (1941)
11 Murder in the Shanghai Trenches – Eliza Shapera & Ameer Buchs (1907)
12 Bobby Broadhurst Teaches Shanghai to Dance – Florence Broadhurst (1926)
13 Man’s Fate and the Shanghai of the Absurd – Andre Malraux (1933)
14 Shanghai’s Most Charming Gangster – Elly “The Swiss” Widler (1940)
15 A Showgirl, Bloody Saturday and the Shrapnel Swing – Terese Rudolph (1937)
16 Manouche on the Route Vallon – The Gypsies of Shanghai (1930s/1940s)
17 Bored in the Broadway Mansions – Penelope Fitzgerald (1977)
18 The Last Refuge: How America’s Biggest Ever Swindler Ended Up in Shanghai – C.C. Julian & Leonora Levy (1934)
Appendices

“The breadth of French’s research into the world of Shanghai in the first half of the 20th century is conspicuously evident in Destination Shanghai, a collection of eighteen biographical essays which catalogue the visits of a range of foreigners to the city. These range from stars of the screen, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, to writers like André Malraux, Arthur Ransome and Langston Hughes, and oddballs such as the English occultist (and amateur mountaineer) Aleister Crowley. Perhaps most compelling are those who French drags back from relative obscurity, such as the actor Warner Oland—a Swedish American who ended up playing a Hawaiian Chinese detective: Charlie Chan. Oland was a big star in the 1930s, both in America and China: Lu Xun apparently never missed a screening of a new Chan movie. When Oland arrived in Shanghai aboard a steamship, he told the waiting press how happy he was to be visiting the land of his ancestors. The motivations of those who traveled in search of Destination Shanghai were diverse, and their experiences distinct; the pieces coalesce however to form an esoteric, scholarly and enjoyable portrait of the city and a miscellaneous cast of its storied visitors.” – Jonathan Chatwin, Asian Review of Books

“Paul French’s entertaining Destination Shanghai relates 18 stories of Westerners in Shanghai during the 20th century, some of them famous, others unknown. … French is fastidious in his research and provides much illuminating detail – both historical context and narrative minutiae – where it is available, so we learn, for instance, precisely which bars American playwright Eugene O’Neill visited on an epic pub crawl. … It is the individuals usually omitted from the city’s grand narra­tive, though, that often make for the most interesting reading, help­ing to compensate for the preponderance of Western voices in a book about a Chinese city. French shows sensitivity for the less privileged: members of the hitherto obscure 30s-40s Roma community, for example, who mostly made a living in entertain­ment, and who we know of only because Romany entertainers were considered fashionable and so tended to advertise their ethnicity, rather than obscuring it to avoid prejudice. … Similarly, a section on poets Langston Hughes and Irene West casts light on the forgotten contribution of African-Americans to the culture of Shanghai in the 30s. Hughes’ 1938 poem “Roar, China!”, with its fierce condemnation of both Japanese militarism and Western colonialism, neatly pricks the bubble of golden-era Shanghai. French never neglects this side of the story, in particular the monstrous poverty and exploitation that underpinned the freewheel­ing international glamour of the city’s Western enclaves.” – Richard Lord, South China Morning Post