Grescoe Taras - Shanghai grand: forbidden love and international intrigue in a doomed world

TARAS GRESCOE

SHANGHAI GRAND

Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World

St. Martins Press New York

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillan.com/piracy.

To admirable Erin, intrepid Desmond,
and the noble, newborn Victor:
our future together is grand.

1. Grave of Zau Sinmay (Shao Xunmei) and his wife Sheng Peiyu, First Row, Subdivision A1, Eastern Division, Gui Yuan cemetery, Zhujiajiao, Shanghai Municipality.

2. Opium smoker with pipe and lamp, Shanghai, 1898.

3. The hong of E.D. Sassoon & Co. (right), traders in cotton and opium, corner of Nanking Road and the Bund, 1887. This was the original Sassoon House, and the future site of the Cathay Hotel. The Central Hotel (left) would be replaced by the Palace Hotel, which opened in 1907.

4. A teenaged Emily Mickey Hahn, probably taken shortly after her family moved to Chicago, 1920.

5. Mickey Hahn, Manhattan flapper, with her capuchin monkey Punk, 1929.

6. The second Sassoon House (and lower floors of the Cathay Hotel) under construction on the Bund, 1928.

7. Birds-eye view of Shanghai and its foreign concessions at the time of the January 28 Incident, 1932, from the Illustrated London News.

8. Sir Victor Sassoon with professional ballroom dancer Dorothy Wardell (left) and two unidentified women, at Ciros Night Club, 1936.

9. View of sampans and barges on Soochow Creek, seen from Broadway Mansions. Sir Victor Sassoons S-shaped Embankment House, center, was the largest building in Asia when it was completed in 1932.

10. Reception desk of the Cathay Hotel, 1929.

11. Lobby of the Cathay Hotel, grand staircase facing the Bund entrance, 1929.

12. The Cathay Hotels lobby lounge, 1929.

13. Guest room of the Cathay Hotel, 1929.

14. Portrait of Mickey Hahn by Sir Victor Sassoon, Shanghai, 1935.

15. Page from one of Sir Victor Sassoons journals recording a weekend spent on his houseboat Vera with Bernardine Szold-Fritz, her sister Aline Sholes, and Mickey Hahn, then newly arrived in Shanghai.

16. Zau Sinmay at home in Shanghai, 1927.

17. Zau Sinmay in 1935, around the time he met Mickey Hahn.

18. Zau Sinmay as seen by Mexican cartoonist, and Mickey Hahns friend, Miguel Covarrubias.

19. Portrait of the extravagant socialite Bernardine Szold-Fritz, who found Mickey Hahn a reporting job at the North-China Daily News, by Carl Van Vechten, 1934.

20. View of the Bund, with First World War cenotaph in the foreground and peaked roof of the Cathay Hotel (center), ca. 1930.

21. Three of the estimated 23,000 rickshaws registered in Shanghais International Settlement in 1925; the pullers, who made a living plowing the pavement, were frequently addicted to opium.

22. Buck Clayton and His Harlem Gentlemen, at Shanghais Canidrome (ca. 1934) playing for a cosmopolitan crowd of Chinese, American, and European couples.

23. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists, and his wife Soong Mei-ling, the youngest of the American-educated Soong sisters.