Free That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba

Jews and Chinese revolutionaries. She might as well seize the chance to sample what was often described as ‘a narrow layer of heaven on a thick slice of hell’ without being watched by any Warfields, Washington hostesses or other tutting Baltimore matrons. Win saw her off on a steamer to Shanghai, and they were to meet only once again.
    There were several navy wives on the boat and Wallis was pleased to find Mary Sadler, already a Washington acquaintance and wife of the now Admiral F. H. Sadler, commanding officer of the USS Saratoga . As the pair sailed up the Huangpu River into the Soochow Creek to the accompaniment of foghorns booming on the river and the rattle of a tram on the nearby Nanking Road she would have been struck by signs illuminated by gas lamps, electric lights not yet having been installed in the city, adding to its air of mystery and half-lit gloom or decadence. Passing the often dilapidated junks anchored four deep, she would have smelled the unique mixture of sewage, seaweed and sulphurous steam that permeated the city, a reminder of its origins as a muddy swamp.
    All China in 1924 was in a febrile state after the collapse of the ruling dynasties in 1911 while various warlords fought for control. Many of these power struggles were centred on Shanghai, where in 1921 the Communist Party of China was founded. Shanghai was one of the major treaty ports awarded to the British in 1842 following the Opium War, with leases which were now causing increasing resentment among the restive Chinese. The British and the American settlements had joined to form the International Settlement, run by the Shanghai Municipal Council but ruled by a British police force and judiciary. The French opted out and instead maintained their own French Concession, located to the south of the International Settlement and largely governed by French laws. It was here, in the Rue Molière, that Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary and political leader largely responsible for the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty, chose to live. Many of the White Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks made their homes close by. There was also a Chinese-administered part of the city where the largely impoverished native populations were subject to Chinese law overseen by the so-called Mixed Courts in the Settlement and this left many of them at the mercy of the warlords.
    From the end of the nineteenth century, the treaties forced the opening up of all of China but especialhe but esply Shanghai and other ports to Western culture and influence through trade. By the early twentieth century, the city was poised to reap the rewards of having avoided any involvement in the First World War and swiftly became a booming economic centre, the commercial hub of East Asia attracting banks from all over the world as well as economic migrants and many shady types. It was a fashionable centre of prosperity with British emporia where staples such as marmalade could be found and French boutiques with high-fashion clothes and accessories. The city was also the centre of national and international opium smuggling during the 1920s. The notorious Green Gang became a major influence in the International Settlement with the Commissioner of the Shanghai Municipal Police reporting that corruption associated with the trade had affected a large proportion of his force. An extensive crackdown in 1925 simply displaced the focus of the trade to the neighbouring French Concession.
    Prostitution flourished in Shanghai as nowhere else. In 1920 the Municipal Council calculated that there were more than 70,000 prostitutes in the foreign concession, among them 8,000 White Russians. By 1930, Shanghai had more prostitutes – or ‘flowers’ – per capita than any other city in the world, and they had a defined hierarchy listed in guidebooks. At the top, able to command most money, were male opera singers, then first-class courtesans followed by ordinary courtesans, prostitutes in tea