While the rest of the world faded into black and white during the Great Depression, Shanghai in the 1930s was a glittering metropolis of 3 million people studded with cabarets, nightclubs, and legendary bordellos. Known as the "Paris of the Orient," Shanghai developed a high-flying social scene for the city's elites and expatriates, and it became famous for hosting all manner of vices, not limited to gambling on horse and dog races or a thriving opium scene. Legend has it that Christian missionaries in the city would shake their heads and muse, "If God allowed Shanghai to endure, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology."
Here's a look at China's sin city before it became the stainless-steel jungle of the 21st century.
Fuzhou Road, above, was a prime thoroughfare for Shanghai's night life in the 1930s. Carl Crow, an American journalist who moved to Shanghai in 1911 and detailed the city in his guide Handbook for China, wrote of Fuzhou Road:
Each side of the street for many blocks is lined with gorgeous Chinese restaurants, whose proprietors vie with each other in making the gaudiest showing possible with gilt, mirrors, paint and lacquer. At 8 o'clock at night the street is lit up with a brilliancy that has given it the name of "The Great White Way of China," and from that hour until midnight, the restaurants will be thronged with Chinese at dinner parties, which often extend over 60 or 70 courses.
Of course, Fuzhou Road was famous -- or infamous -- for the establishments on Hui Le Li (The Lane of Lingering Happiness), which branched off the road. There, 151 "singsong" houses provided nighttime entertainment for Shanghai's gentlemen.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
The Paramount Hotel, with its legendary ballroom, drew the chic and glamorous of Shanghai's social scene. The Paramount featured a glass dance floor over colored lights, an in-ballroom bar, and several lounges for more intimate social engagements. Above, women sit in one of the Paramount's lounges during an evening gathering.
In 1935, an American traveler in Shanghai, Ruth Day, likened dancing on the Paramount's glass floor to "dancing on eggs." The Russian chorus girls may have been a little bawdy for Day: "Their costumes were scant, hats, slippers and a very minute loin cloth."
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
This photo shows people walking along the water in Jessfield Park, which was originally built as a private garden in 1914. The avenues surrounding Jessfield Park hosted some of Shanghai's most raucous gambling houses and decadent nightclubs, which advertised foreign bands and nude shows.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
By the 1930s, many women in Shanghai had broken with traditional modes of female conduct that for the most part kept women at home. With Western influences sparking the urge to "modernize" China at the beginning of the 1900s, women partook in Shanghai's merrymaking at dance halls, restaurants, and theaters.
A curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco writes on the museum's blog that 1930s advertisements depicted "an ideal of the modern woman in Shanghai: she was fashionable in appearance, she was … adept in the home and in social occasions, she projected confidence and composure."
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
The Majestic Hotel on Bubbling Well Road was one of the glitziest cabarets in Shanghai, perched in the city's most upscale and fashionable district. Andrew Field, author of Shanghai's Dancing World, describes the Majestic Hotel as "the grandest one in Shanghai, the centerpiece a magnificent ballroom built out of marble, with pillars, pergolas, Greco-Roman statuary, and a fountain in the center attended by cherubs. It also featured … [the] Italian Garden … used for outdoor dancing in the heat of summer. A fan-shaped canopy and rose-clad trellis completed the luxurious outdoor setting."
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
The Park Hotel (at far right in this nighttime view of Shanghai), was designed by Laszlo Hudec in the Art-Deco style and was completed in 1934. At 272 feet high, the hotel was the city's highest building in the 1930s, with 22 floors and more than 200 rooms and suites. The Sky Terrace ballroom, a nightclub on the hotel's top floor, featured a retractable roof so that guests could dance under the night sky.
The Chinese magazine Libailiu, or Saturday, described the Park Hotel as one of the few high-class cabarets that did not engage in "selling souls," or prostitution, like most others.
On the left side of the photo is the grandstand of Shanghai's race course. The Shanghai Race Club became one of the wealthiest corporations in the city from gambling revenue. When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, he banned horse-racing as an immoral and capitalist pastime.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Above, inmates stand outside a northern Shanghai opium detoxification clinic. Opium was easily accessible and widely consumed in 1930s Shanghai, though usage was on the decline by the end of the decade, when cigarettes became more popular. According to legend, a gang based in the Mansion Hotel in the French Concession trafficked 40 percent of the world's opium.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Although movies became wildly popular in Shanghai during the 1930s, theater was still a common diversion. In his Handbook for China, Carl Crow writes that Europeans heavily influenced Shanghai's theater, leading to the staging of more and more Western plays, with Chinese actors depicting foreign characters. "Of these," he writes, "Napoleon is the favorite, and no traveler should miss an opportunity to see Napoleon and Josephine portrayed by Chinese actors.… Fifty cents will usually purchase the best seats in the theatres."
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Shanghai had two major European districts, a British-administered section and the French Concession. Many of the European-style villas built in these areas are still standing.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
This is a view from behind the Cathay Cinema, a movie theater built in 1932. The popularity of film skyrocketed during the 1930s, and by the end of the decade, more than 36 movie theaters dotted the city. The cinema, along with the ritzy club Cercle Sportif Français and the upscale apartments Grosvenor House and Cathay Mansions, composed the Cathay Complex.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Pictured above is the Auditorium at Avenue du Roi Albert in the French Concession. It was used as a sporting facility for jai alai, a Spanish sport immensely popular in Shanghai during the 1930s. In jai alai, players in a three-walled court attempt to direct the ricochets of a ball onto lines drawn on the floor. The game was one of many outlets for gambling in Shanghai.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
The Bund, sometimes called the "front door" of Shanghai, lined the city's waterfront with foreign banks and commercial buildings. It was a prime business address in the city and served as a main promenade for Shanghai's shoppers and tourists.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
The Lyceum became the home of the Amateur Dramatic Club, a British drama society founded in 1866. The expatriate community used it for staging operas, concerts, plays, and other social events until 1931, when screening movies became more popular.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Revelers pose for a photo at a costume dress ball in the Cercle Sportif Français, one of two cosmopolitan social clubs in the French Concession. Membership at the Cercle Sportif Français was rumored to be more egalitarian than in other foreign social clubs; it allowed Chinese members and even 40 women to join each year. A writer for the Shanghai Daily describes its ballroom as "one of the loveliest" in the city.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Men stand outside one of Shanghai's bowling alleys.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Swimming pools were special features in Shanghai's social clubs. The exact location of this pool is unknown, but the Cercle Sportif Français was known to have a swimming pool, as well as lawn tennis courts, a billiard room, and a bowling alley.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Nanking Road, pictured above, was the heart of Shanghai's shopping district, housing the city's four modern department stores. The main drag through Shanghai's international settlement was lined with cabarets.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
Shanghai's entertainment centers tended to cluster together in one district; most cinemas, opera houses, and theaters stood together in an area called "Recreation Ground." It was customary to attend a theatrical performance or screening earlier in the evening and then drift toward a dance hall or cabaret.
Above, a mostly European audience watches a play in one of Shanghai's theaters.
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
