Best Shanghai History Books 2019

Our annual roundup of the year’s best books on Shanghai’s history. We’re honored to have hosted many of these authors, and will read several of these books in the 2020 Historic Shanghai Book Club.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution by Helen Zia

In the spring of 1949 in Shanghai, the question on everyone’s lips was “stay or go”?

In Last Boat Out of Shanghai, Helen Zia tells the dramatic, real-life stories of four Chinese who left on that legendary last boat out of Shanghai – including her own mother.

Zia is a journalist by trade, and applied those skills to impeccable research and extensive interviews that bring Benny, Annuo, Bing, and Ho and their Shanghai to life, in rich detail.

She’s given us an invaluable treasure in the stories of the last of the generation to remember this forgotten exodus, from their lives in old Shanghai, the difficult decision to abandon their homeland, and their journeys into unknown, uncharted territory.  

Helen Zia spoke to Historic Shanghai in March, followed by a tour of destinations in the book. The Historic Shanghai Book Club will read this book in November 2020.

Available in Shanghai at Garden Books.

Gonda: Shanghai’s Ultramodern Hungarian Architect based on An Ultramodern Hungarian Architect in Shanghai – Károly Gonda’s Art of Building by Eszter, edited by Livia Szentmartoni and Andras Krizsa

“Shanghai’s Hungarian Architect” has long referred to Laszlo Hudec, but Hungary gifted Shanghai more than one talented Hungarian builder.

Gonda, by the Association of Hungarian Architects and Consulate General of Hungary, casts light on a heretofore little known architect and his work. Like Hudec, Gonda was trained as an architect and was a World War I prisoner of war who, in 1920, made his way to the bustling metropolis of Shanghai, and began working as an architect immediately.

The book does more than just offer a biography and building list; it also provides the context of Gonda’s life in Shanghai, drawing from letters and diaries of those who lived in Shanghai at the time, and using archival material to provide detailed descriptions of the buildings at the time of construction.

Ultimately, the book does us a great service in identifying Gonda’s buildings, many of them landmarks, showcasing his innovative style. The book is illustrated by Nicky Almasy’s gorgeous photographs.

Historic Shanghai is proud to have been a consultant and editor for this volume. This book is, unfortunately, not yet available for sale.

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth Century China by Jung Chang

The Soong sisters of Shanghai were nearly mythological: three wealthy, American-educated siblings who married the most powerful men in Republican-era China.

As the country battled a hundred years of wars, revolutions, and seismic transformations, the sisters were at the center of power, and each one left an indelible mark on history.

Perhaps because of their nature, perhaps because of their positions, they were immensely secretive; no diaries survive, and any letters are written with an eye to history. 

Jung Chang, whose previous biographies include Mao and the Dowager Empress Cixi, has dug into archives, personal and academic, and the result is a book that offers new insights into the mysterious trio. It’s not perfect, as Chang’s has strong views that color her portrayals, and although the book is supposed to be about the women, there is a great deal about their husbands and father, as well. But no matter: Chang’s research gives us valuable new information and insights.

The Historic Shanghai Book Club will read this book in September 2020.

Shanghai Old Town: The Walled City by Katya Knyazeva

Shanghai’s Old Town, the original Chinese city, is over 800 years old, and yet its remarkable story has been mostly untold – a fate all the more tragic as it is disappearing rapidly to the gods of redevelopment.

For the past decade, Katya Knyazeva has been researching and documenting the disappearing architecture, mythology, and street life inside the ancient city core, leading readers on a treasure hunt to find undocumented relics and lanes rich with history and memory. Katya is a dogged researcher, and she dives deep, with each chapter a genealogy of a street or important site, with a narrative that branches into the surrounding neighborhoods, the families whose fortunes rose and fell with the fortunes of old Shanghai.

In evocative prose and photographs, she captures the world of the walled city – all that we’ll have, once the developers are done.  

Katya Knyazeva led several walks for Historic Shanghai in the area documented in the book in 2019.

Available in Shanghai at Madame Mao’s Dowry and Garden Books.

Someday We Will Fly by Rachel Dewoskin

It’s 1940, and 15-year-old Lillia has fled from Warsaw to Shanghai, the only place they can find that will accept Jews without visas.

Her mother has disappeared, so with her father and baby sister, they struggle to make a life — school, friends, even budding romance — in this strange new place, as Lillia navigates a path that takes her from the Kadoorie School to nightclubs, from the Garden Bridge to French Concession drawing rooms, all in the midst of war and painful deprivation.  

DeWoskin, the daughter of Sinologist Ken DeWoskin, is not unfamiliar with China. She spent her childhood summers here, and in researching this book, she spent seven summers in Hongkou, absorbing the atmosphere, walking in the steps that refugees walked eight decades ago, reading memoirs and interviewing survivors. Her talent is in the creation of the interior world of a teenager, and she brings to life the emotions of a teenager of this time, one who has had to grow up too fast and cope with grown-up situations in an unknown world. Sometimes that is at the expense of strict historical accuracy – which she freely admits, for it is this compelling story and its characters that take priority. DeWoskin’s language is stunning, and what really makes this book is the marriage of Lilia’s rich interior world with the rich exterior world of 1940s Shanghai.

Rachel DeWoskin led a walk for Historic Shanghai around the destinations featured in the book in June 2019

Available in Shanghai at Garden Books.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2020

Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai by James Carter (June 2020)

A triptych of a single day revealing the history and foreshadowing the future of a complex and cosmopolitan city in a world at war.

November 12, 1941: war and revolution are in the air. At the Shanghai Race Club, the city’s elite prepare to face off their best horses and most nimble jockeys in the annual Champions Day races. Across town and amid tight security, others celebrated the birth of Sun Yat-Sen in a new city center meant to challenge European imperialism. Thousands more Shanghai residents from all walks of life attended the funeral of China’s wealthiest woman, the Chinese- French widow of a Baghdadi Jewish businessman. But the biggest crowd of all gathered at the track; no one knew it, but Champions Day heralded the end of a European Shanghai.

Through this colorful snapshot of the day’s events, the rich and complex history that led to them, and a cast of characters as diverse as the city itself, James Carter provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of a time and a place that still speaks to relations between China and the West today.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman (June 2020)

The epic, multigenerational story of the Sassoons and the Kadoories, two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era.

By the 1930’s, the Sassoons had been doing business in China for a century, rivaled in wealth and influence by only one other dynasty–the Kadoories. These two Jewish families, both originally from Baghdad, stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than 175 years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. In The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country’s deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.