Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City

Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century was the place to be. Opium was all the rage, parties were wild, and decadence was a way of life. Journalist Stella Dong looks back on a city that in its heyday was a thrilling combination of Las Vegas, the Wild West, Paris in the '20s, and Chicago during Prohibition. She captures the excitement of its most notorious years — the decades before Mao's revolution — when the city was populated with bankers, gangsters, revolutionaries, drug traffickers, …