Shanghai, Paradise of Adventurers Again
While visiting the Shanghai history exhibition underneath the Oriental Pearl Tower this past weekend (worth the 35 yuan admission, although not super informative), TT noticed that one of the exhibition halls boasts the hyperbolic title, “The Metropolis Infested With Foreign Adventurers.”
The museum does include a few of the standard tropes about colonialism and exploitation, but overall it is not very political — and in fact one gets the sense that the real point is to point up Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past and present, glossing over the intervening three decades of Maoism. It lingers lovingly over the prevalence of opium smoking and prostitution in a way that suggests the curators understood how titillation might increase gate receipts. Now foreign adventurers are welcome again, albeit without the protection of extraterritoriality.
Anyway, the idea of an infestation of foreign adventurers is a long-established part of Shanghai’s romantic mythology, and two fin de siecle books expanded on the idea, just as the Japanese invasion was about to bring that little world crashing down. Neither of them is very reliable, either in the main or the particulars, but they are fun to read.
In 1937, the Mexican honorary consul, Mauricio Fresco, published “Shanghai: The Paradise of Adventurers” (Orsay) under the pseudonym G.E. Miller. The book evinces a strong anti-missionary bias: Among its ludicrous claims is the slander that the Catholic Salesian order ran gambling rackets! The book’s supposed purpose was “putting an end or at least curtailing, nefarious activities of exploitation systematically practised by foreign adventurers of all classes and types.” As historian Robert Bickers noted in “Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai” (Allen Lane, 2003): “Coming from the Mexican Honorary Consul this was particularly rich; as we have seen, the position had long been deeply implicated in the large-scale organized gambling in the city of the 1920s. Fresco left hurriedly when his identity was revealed (accusing the SMP [Shanghai Municipal Police] in print, and without evidence, of granting ‘full protection’ to British opium smugglers was a representative indiscretion), but the book remains in print, in Chinese, and the catchy title joined that list of monikers associated with Shanghai’s name.”
Ernest O. Hauser was a slightly more reputable voice, being a journalist rather than diplomat. His “Shanghai: City for Sale” (Chinese-American, 1940) may not have fabricated colorful tales out of whole cloth, but it was still riddled with factual errors, and rode its own hobby-horse of antipathy toward the taipan elite. TT’s copy, printed on cheap paper because of wartime shortages and bought by a Shanghai expat in 1940, is annotated with pencil corrections.
