Shanghai Lit Fest 2010 – Down and Dirty in Shanghai and Peking
Posted: March 5th, 2010 | 1 Comment »I wasn’t down to speak at the Shanghai International Literary Festival this year – nothing to sell! But a speaker dropped out for some reason and a gap needed filling so I’m the plug and this was the best I could come up with to amuse the punters.
The Down and Dirty Secrets of Seedy Shanghai and Perverted Peking
Sunday – 7th March
Glamour Bar, M on the Bund – 3 PM
We’ve had the glamour, we’ve had the politics – now it’s time for the secret and sordid history of the foreign criminal underworld of Shanghai and Peking in the first half of the twentieth century. Pimps and pros; gangsters and gamblers – from Shanghai’s ‘Line’ and its notorious luxury bordellos full of ‘American Girls’ to the illegal casinos of the Badlands; the sexual-sadist cults of Peking’s Legation Quarter to the secret cabarets of the Tartar City – foreigners were mad, bad and depraved on a scale few can imagine. They murdered and robbed, procured and pimped in a haze of drugs, sex and debauchery.
Paul French tells the largely hidden tales of the underworld that include murder, gun fights and easy money based on his forthcoming trilogy of books that aim to reveal the largely previously ignored lower depths of low life foreign China. Not for the easily shocked or the legally upstanding.
Paul French is the author of various books including Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists From Opium to Mao. He is currently completing the first in his low life trilogy – A Peking Murder – a dramatic investigation into the previously unsolved and horrific murder of a young English woman in 1937 Peking to be published by Penguin Books in 2011.
Hello Paul,
long time since we spoke, a happy belated Thanksgiving to you, even if you are English.
Glad to see your book on the sordid lives of foreigners in China is now published. Looking forward to reading it and seeing how you used the Tao Tai’s letter of inquiry from the “Kiukiang Incident” I provided you fits in with these unscrupulous individuals.
I have done the walking tour through Beijing’s old embassy district that is described in the article, unaware of the Pamula Werner murder, described in the CNN article (http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/play/haunted-beijing-walking-tour-338180?hpt=hp_bn7). I need to acquire and read your collection of books as they look like they would be of interest.
My project is still having the Chinese translations modified as I learned from my editor Xiao Ping Dirks, who is a Chinese history professor at UCLA, they were poorly done.
I’m currently babysitting Chinese medical student’s at Wannan Medical College in Wuhu, Anhui. Trying to pinpoint where some of the photos my Hart relatives took, but the city has been changed so radically over the years and I have yet to meet anyone old enough who has a recollection of where these places once stood.
Anyway, just wanted to say hello and if you see Justin or Michelle, you can give them my regards too.
Stan