Majicman Notes

How author Vicki Baum described Shanghai:

“Optimists, pessimists, Westerners, Easterners, men, women. Europeans, Americans, orients. Courage and cowardice. Idealism and greed. Enmity and love. People of every sort and colour and tendency. Voice, noise, laughter, tea, whisky.”

Full Orchestra of every human being.

From Last Kings of Shanghai

Jonathan Kaufman

Shanghai, after all, was never a colony of a single foreign power (à la Macau and Hong Kong) but instead was divided, from the early 1840s to the early 1940s, into a Chinese-controlled district and two separate foreign-run enclaves. Some accounts portray Shanghai’s foreign community as one made up primarily of people with ties to England, France and America. Yet by the mid-1930s, in addition to large numbers of Japanese residents, there were more White Russian refugees than Britons and Americans combined. Shanghai was also one of the last places to accept Jews escaping from Nazi Germany. It was a remarkable place—and, then, it was some place else.

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom