Old shanghai

A popular history of Shanghai, focusing in particular on its golden age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book traces the complex texture of Chinese and foreign life from Shanghai's days as a market town. Wei tells the story of gangsters, traders, and bankers, as well as the artists, political activists, missionaries, and armies of laborers who made Shanghai one of the world's foremost business cities, and the flashpoint of political and social change in China. Asia's largest city, Shanghai pulsated with wealth sophistication and suffering, through its international heyday to the communist takeover in 1949.