Shanghai Vice

Underneath the glitz and glamour of 1930s Shanghai lay a pool of sweat, blood and crushing poverty. In the words of a British resident, Shanghai was violent, disreputable, snobbish, mercenary and corrupt – ‘a discredit to all concerned’. ‘If God allows Shanghai to endure,’ said the missionaries, ‘He will owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.’ Others agreed: ‘Shanghai is a city of 48-storey skyscrapers built upon 24 layers of hell,’ wrote Chinese author Xia Yan.

The city was often a place of horrific cruelty and brutal violence. After the Small Swords Rebellion, 66 heads, even those of elderly women and children, were stuck up on the city walls. In 1927 striking workers were beheaded and their heads displayed in cages. Up to 80,000 rickshaw pullers worked the littered streets until they dropped, while overcrowded factory workers routinely died of lead and mercury poisoning. In 1934 the life expectancy of the Chinese in Shanghai stood at 27 years. In 1937 municipal sanitation workers picked up 20,000 corpses off the streets.

Shanghai offered the purely synthetic pleasures of civilisation. Prostitution ran the gamut from the high-class escorts in the clubs of the International Settlement and ‘flowers’ of the Fuzhou Rd teahouses to the yeji, or ‘wild chickens’, of Hongkou, who prowled the streets and back alleys. The ‘saltwater sisters’ from Guangdong specialised in foreigners fresh off the boats. Lowest of the low were the ‘nail sheds’ of Zhapei, so called because their services were meant to be as fast as driving nails. Lists of the city’s 100 top-ranking prostitutes were drawn up annually and listed next to the names of 668 brothels, which went by such names as the ‘Alley of Concentrated Happiness’.

Prostitution was not the exclusive domain of the Chinese. The traditional roles were reversed when White Russians turned to prostitution and Chinese men could be seen flaunting Western women. An American madam ran Gracie’s, the most famous foreign brothel in town, at 52 Jiangsu Rd, in a strip of brothels called ‘The Line’.

Linked to prostitution was opium. At the turn of the century Shanghai boasted 1500 opium dens (known locally as ‘swallows’ nests’) and 80 shops openly selling opium. Even some hotels, it is said, supplied heroin on room service. Opium financed the early British trading houses and most of the buildings on the Bund. Later it funded Chinese gangsters, warlord armies and Kuomintang military expeditions. It was true that the police in the French Concession kept a close eye on the drug trade, but only to ensure that they got a reasonable slice of the profits. Not that there was much they could do even if they had wanted to; it was said that a wanted man in 1930s Shanghai need only pop into the neighbouring concession to avoid a warrant for his arrest.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14