Whore of the East

Abstract

It was already over when the first communist troops marched into Shanghai on a quiet Wednesday morning, 25 May 1949. Chiang Kai-shek and other top leaders of the nationalist Guomindang—who boasted of turning Shanghai into a new Stalingrad and would ‘fight to the end’—had fled on a gunboat to Taiwan weeks before the city finally fell after a long siege by Mao Zedong’s army of peasant revolutionaries. According to Sam Tata, an Indian Parsi and a native of the city who witnessed its fall: ‘At the same time, the vaults of the Bank of China were secretly emptied of their stocks of bullion and the entire gold reserves of the country were spirited after him. The President had pulled off the biggest bank robbery of all time’.²

Good-bye to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the kidnappers; the exclusive foreign clubs … Good-bye to all the nightlife: the gilded singing girl in her enamelled hair-do, her stage makeup, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk-clad hip … The hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls … the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Sichuan Road; the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways … gone the wickedest and most colourful city of the Orient: good-bye to all that.

—Edgar Snow, 1961.¹