Shanghai Gets a Bad Review, 1934

Posted: April 1st, 2022 | No Comments »

Among all the usual gush about interwar old Shanghai, some visitors hated the place….fakes, stinks, dumb, laowai and a (more common) complaint of people from other big cities – Shanghai is the ‘Big City’ only if you’re a hick…

These are the view of Bruno Lessing (the pen name of the American journalist Rudolph Edgar Block. He was a pretty witty guy – wrote strips for The Yellow Kid, Happy Hooligan and the Katzenjammer Kids as well as a lot of pretty good short stories about life in New York’s Jewish Lower East Side. He was also an inveterate traveller writing a scathing column on most places foreign to Manhattan – “Vagabondia” (from which the below is a typical excerpt). He also collected walking sticks and eventually has 1,400 of the things!

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