Book Club

“Shanghai is too complicated to be understood with the naked eye. It needs to be read.”  

And that’s what we do at the Historic Shanghai Book Club: read the multi-layered story of this city and her people, from different perspectives, genres, and periods of history. After all, the history of this cosmopolitan metropolis, where east and west, communism and capitalism, tradition and revolution coexisted could never be told with a single story, a single book.  

The Rules [in brief]:  Buy the book. (NO pirated copies!) Read the book. Contribute to the discussion. 

What we’ll read:   Our focus is Shanghai, and history. We’ll read as much original and contemporaneous material as we can, from many different perspectives. We’ll also read well-researched current books, historical fiction, and nonfiction in a variety of genres.

Who should come: Anyone interested in finding out more about the incredible history of this city. No prior knowledge of Shanghai history (or literature, for that matter) is required!

Book & Author Walks: Whenever possible, we’ll pair the book with a walk, so we can walk in the footsteps of our authors – and with the authors, when we can.

How It Works:  We’ll generally meet on the third weekend of each month, but that will vary depending on guest speaker schedules, etc. We’ll discuss the book first, and, whenever possible,  have the author or an expert on their work join us after that.  Do you have to have read the book to come? YES! YES! YES! And contribute to the discussion, too. A book club’s only as good as the quality of the discussion.

Getting Books: The books selected are all available on Amazon and Kindle/ibook. Hard copies are increasingly difficult to come by, but when books are available in Shanghai, we’ll note that, and their whereabouts under the relevant selection. ALSO – and this is very important – do not ever, ever share pirated copies of books in the group. Writers need to make a living. Buy the books and support the writers who create them. **We Support Writers! Please buy the book!**  

Cost: RMB 100 members, 200 nonmembers per session

Interested?  Email info@historic-shanghai.com to be added to the mailing list and WeChat group. 

THE 2024-2025 READING LIST 

For the list of books previously read, visit our Book Club Archive, here.)

here.

NOVEMBER 2024

SHANGHAI ACROBAT: A True Story of Courage and Perseverance from Revolutionary China by Jingjing Xue

Author JingJing Xue will join us (virtually) for the discussion

BOOK CLUB MEETING: Sunday Nov 24, 10.30am / To book, scan the QR code below or this link

An artfully-wrought memoir of an orphan boy who became a world-famous acrobat. Dropped off at a Shanghai orphanage in 1949 at the age of two, Jingjing is selected for the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe at the age of nine. This extraordinary autobiography tells the moving story of Jingjing’s rise from poverty to becoming one of China’s star acrobats, performing for top leaders, and touring overseas to perform as part of a cultural diplomacy initiative. Xue weaves together history, cultural relics, music, Chinese proverbs, and images in this portrait of the latter half of the twentieth century in China.

DECEMBER 2024

-WINTER BREAK-

JANUARY 2025

THE SUITCASE: The Life and Times of Captain X by Deborah Taussig-Boehner & Lauren Housman (2024)

Authors Deborah Taussig-Boehner and Lauren Houseman will join us (virtually) for the discussion

Debbie Taussig-Boehner inherited her father’s suitcase and its contents, and then spent years piecing together his story from his letters and memorabilia within. The Suitcase is the story of Vladimir Taussig, an opportunistic Czech playboy who deftly ducked legal troubles – and the Holocaust – by moving to Shanghai. There, he fell in with high society—familiar Old Shanghai characters like Victor Sassoon and his cousin Lucien Ovada, Emily Hahn, Chester Fritz, and Edmund Toeg–until the Japanese invasion encroached on the Shanghailanders’ rollicking lifestyle.

In Shanghai, he joined the fight against the fascism, while on the other side of the world, his family’s lives began to disintegrate as Czechoslovakia was occupied and the horrors of the war reached their doorstep. It’s a tale of passion and tenacity, weakness and courage, impropriety and decency, lies and truths, exclusion and tolerance, of life and death.

Available on Kindle and in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing.

FEBRUARY-MARCH 2025

HER LOTUS YEAR: China, The Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson by Paul French (2024)

Author Paul French will join us in person for a book walk & discussion in mid-March.

Before Wallis Simpson became famous as the woman who so dazzled a king that he gave up the throne for her, almost bringing down the British monarchy in the process, she spent a year in China. Then, she was Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife. China left its influence on her in terms of style, and provided her with friendships that would last a lifetime.

But that China year also gave the British government a rich trove with which to damn her. There were her rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East, from techniques learned in a Shanghai high-end bordello to scandalous doings with high society Shanghai, like Victor Sassoon and Count Ciano. The British government’s supposed ‘China Dossier’ on Wallis portrays her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king.

In Her Lotus Year, author Paul French (Midnight in Peking, City of Devils) debunks the dossier, tracing many of the accusations to the misdeeds of other China characters, revealing a very different Wallis, a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the U.S. government, undertaking dangerous diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war.

Available on Kindle. Hard copies not available in China at this time.

APRIL 2025

MURDER IN THE MALOO, translated and with an introduction by Paul Bevan (2024)

Paul Bevan, who translated the book, will join us (virtually) for the discussion

Sensational adventure stories were all the rage in early 20^th century Shanghai, and Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai represents an excellent example of this most popular of popular fiction categories.

Translated into English and published here for the first time, this historical novel tells of the exploits of Ma Yongzhen, a martial artist and gangster who was ruthlessly murdered by rival gangs in 1879. The story takes the reader into the world of the Shanghai gangster and the dens, courtesan houses, and teashops they frequented.

It is very loosely based on a true story, as Ma Yongzhen was in fact an historical figure, who rode the horses of his native Shandong province and walked the streets of Shanghai in late Qing dynasty China. The book follows Ma’s rivalry with local gangland bosses, the unscrupulous Scrofulous Bai and the murderous mastermind, Cheng Zimin. For much of the story, Ma Yongzhen appears to be unstoppable in his quest to dominate the Shanghai underworld, until a dastardly plan is laid to attack him unawares.

In addition to translating the novel, Paul Bevan has written an illuminating introduction and an essay that vividly describes the city of Shanghai as Ma Yongzhen would have known it.

Available on Kindle and in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing.

MAY 2025

RED MANDARIN DRESS: An Inspector Chen Novel by Qiu Xiaolong (2009)

A serial killer is stalking the young women of Shanghai. His calling card: leaving the bodies in well trafficked locations, clad in a red mandarin dress. With the newspapers screaming about Shanghai’s first serial killer, officials anxious for a quick resolution, and the police under pressure from all sides, something has to give.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department, a rising cadre, is often put in charge of politically sensitive cases. But this time, there’s a catch―Chen is on leave. But when the murderer strikes directly at the investigative team itself, Chen must take over the investigation himself, discovering that this, his most dangerous and sensitive case to date, has roots that reach back to the country’s tumultuous recent past. Historic Shanghai readers will enjoy the easily recognized local settings in this novel.

JUNE 2025

Maiden Voyage is a fictionalized autobiography, an account of writer and artist Denton Welch’s sixteenth year, in 1931, when he ran away from his English public school and went to Shanghai to live with his father. Welch narrates his adventures in Shanghai, exploring his ambitions, aspirations, and secret desires–the love that does not speak its name. Written with an artist’s powers of keen observation and precisely realized details of his physical and social surroundings, makes the book a remarkable coming of age tale.

Available on Kindle. Hard copies are out of print.

JULY 2025

-SUMMER BREAK-

AUGUST 2025

SECRET WAR IN SHANGHAI: Treachery, Subversion, and Collaboration in the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (1999)

In this classic account, Bernard Wasserstein draws on the files of the Shanghai Police as well as the intelligence archives of the many countries involved to provide the definitive story of Shanghai’s secret war. Bernard Wasserstein introduces the British, American and Australian individuals who collaborated with the Axis powers as well as subversive warfare operatives battling the Japanese – and one another. At times both shocking and amusing, this book lifts the lid on the bizarre underworld of the ‘sin city of the Orient’ during its most enthralling period in history.

Available on Kindle. Hard copies are not available in China at this time.

SEPTEMBER 2025

SHALAMA: My 96 Seasons in China by Jean Hoffman Lewanda (2024)

Author Jean Hoffman Lewanda will join us (virtually) for the discussion

Shalama is a Russian Jewish girl, born in 1928 in the Chinese city of Harbin, whose life tracks one of the great rescues and rebirths of the 20th century — the move of Jewish people from Europe to Harbin, then on to Shanghai and eventually the United States. Harbin was a remote town close to the Russian border which in a few years had changed from a fishing village into a sophisticated European city thanks to an influx of Jews escaping pogroms and White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks. Many thousands, including Shalama’s parents, crowded into the city and many of them prospered. But the Japanese occupied Harbin in the 1930s, and at twelve years old, Shalama and her family moved southwards to the international port city of Shanghai. There, Shalama went to the Shanghai Jewish School, became a typist, changed her name to Shirley, met and married an Austrian Jew named Paul Hoffmann and remade her life.

Told in story form by Shirley’s daughter, Shalama is a moving epic that captures the feel of those dangerous times when the world had lost its moorings. After the family’s departure from Shanghai following the Communist victory, Paul and Shirley moved to the United States. Towards the end of her life, an unexpected turn of events brought both enlightenment and closure to questions that had remained a mystery throughout her lifetime.

Available on Kindle and from Earnshaw Books in Shanghai.

OCTOBER 2025

MR PAN: A Memoir by Emily Hahn

A collection of stories written for the New Yorker, about the eponymous “Pan Heh-ven”, who was actually Hahn’s lover, Zau Sinmay (Shao Xunmei).

Mr. Pan is no highly-placed official. Mr. Pan is the Mr. Smith of China—an ordinary man with extraordinary reach—and China, like America, depends as much on its Mr. Pans as on its powerful and world famous officials. Here, in a series of linked vignettes, you’ll get a glimpse into a new way of life—Mr. Pan at work, Mr. Pan with his father, Mr. Pan with his creditors, with his docile wife, Pei-yu, as Hahn tries to make sense of his reasoning. It is a rare glimpse into a time and place that few Westerners at the time had the opportunity – or interest – to see, written as only Emily Hahn’s perceptive pen could produce.

Available on Kindle.

NOVEMBER 2025

FALLING LEAVES: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah (1997)

Born in 1937, Adeline Yen Mah grew up in a privileged family in Shanghai, but hers was an unhappy lot: she blamed by her siblings for her mother’s death, soon after her birth, ignored by her millionaire father and unwanted by her stepmother. A story of greed, hatred and jealousy, of plots, lies and conspiracies, a domestic drama is played out against the extraordinary political events of the period in China and Hong Kong. Written with emotional force and vividness, Falling Leaves has been an enduring bestseller.

Available on Kindle. Hard copies are not available in Shanghai at this time.

DECEMBER 2025

-WINTER BREAK-