Shanghai Crucible of Modern China

8vo, br. ed. 299 pp. 16 pp. of historical photos and illustrations, glossary, bibliography. Glossy stiff wraps showing a color cartoon of Chinese and British negotiating at Tientsin in 1858. Light wear, Previous owner's name on endpaper. Light creasing of spine. A few notes and marks in red ink in margins of a few pages toward the rear, text mostly clean. A short political and economic history of a key Chinese trading center, as it dealt with western nations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Maps of Shanghai and China on the endpapers. ".[A] good story told with wit, verve and a sharp eye for the details of compelling local history, such as a British geological survey that found that the subsoil of Shanghai could only stand buildings of six floors, whereas London could take sixty, and New York and Hong Kong any number, a fetching snapshot of Daisy Wang, Miss Shanghai 1947, the price of rice, or the pseudo-urbanization that happened when a lumpen proletariat descended on Shanghai.She gives a sanitized version [of Chiang Kai-shek's 12 April 1927 massacre of communists and leftists] in which a total of 16 5 people were executed. There is no sense here that Chiang's men butchered for an eight-hour day and bled trade unionism dry."--Herman Mast III (University of Connecticut) ; "A Chinese city which owes a great debt to Western influence, Shanghai is the largest city in Asia, and one of its most fascinating. Complete with anecdotes and vignettes of everyday life, this vivid biography traces the city's transformation from treaty port to the commercial, industrial, and financial centre that played a vital role in the development of China's political and social consciousness."