Shanghai: Gateway To The Celestial Empire

Shanghai from 1860 to 1949 was an amazing spectacle, a twentieth-century Babylon reverberating in the Western imagination as a place of style, excitement and intrigue. The place where East met West in China, Shanghai was Asia's only modern metropolis and an international crossroads attracting the citizens of over fifty nations. Home to gangsters and revolutionaries, tycoons and political and economic refugees, Shanghai was both the stage upon which every important event in modern China's history was enacted and a place so wicked it inspired Marlene Dietrich to reasp,"It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily."