Stella Dong: Shanghai 1842-1949

By MARGIE THOMSON

For sheer good writing and depth of history, it would be hard to go past this terrific "biography" of the city that came to be known as "the whore of Asia". With Shanghai leading the charge of China's rebirth in a more capitalist image, it's timely to look into the turbulent past of the city called in a Chinese proverb "the Emperor's ugly daughter": errant yet alluring for the wealth and opportunity she symbolises.

Through vibrant recreation of historical events, personalities and places Dong captures Shanghai's character, transformed by profiteering British opportunists from an ordinary port town into the home of the world's most lucrative opium trade.

In its prime, writes Dong, Shanghai was the most pleasure-mad city "because nowhere else did the population pursue amusement, from feasting to whoring, dancing to powder-taking, with such abandoned zeal. It was rapacious because greed was its driving force; strife-ridden because calamity was always at the door; licentious because it catered to every depravity known to man; squalid because misery stared one brazenly in the face; and decadent because morality, as every Shanghai resident knew, was irrelevant".

HarperCollins

$39.95