Shanghai: Books: Shanghai Recommended Reading

Shanghai Recommended Reading

“I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city of Shanghai, but none that so overwhelmingly impressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life.” ~Aldous Huxley, 1927

NONFICTION

Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng, 1968 — A harrowing account of life during the Cultural Revolution.

Shanghai, Harriet Sergeant, 1998 — A portrait of the city in the 1920s and ’30s during its waning days of decadence.

Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842-1949, Stella Dong, 2001 — Story of Old Shanghai with tales of drugs, prostitution, and gang warfare.

FICTION

When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005 — A Cambridge graduate whose parents disappeared in Shanghai, where they lived when he was a boy, travels east from England in the 1930’s as a detective to determine what really happened to his mother and father.

See also Library for Beijing