All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Today’s Gang of Old Shanghai in my series with That’s Shanghai is perhaps the city’s most powerful and long-lived organisations – The Canidrome Tower Gang in Frenchtown…
Today’s gang in my That’s Shanghai series on the Gangs of Old Shanghai is the Shumchun Triads – from a little village on the Hong Kong border once called Shumchun and now buried somewhere under the city called Shenzhen – their haunt was Fah Wah Village – mostly forgotten now but remembered by Fahuazhen Lu which runs rights through the old Fah Wah rookery….
Here’s the full programme and ticket booking details for the 2018 Beijing Bookworm International Literary Festival….I’m talking on City of Devils on 22nd, doing some Midnight in Peking walks and various other events….do come along….
Today’s gang of old Shanghai in my series for That’s Shanghai – the Pai-Loh Gang – if ever there was a casino that looked like Madame Gin Sling’s in Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 The Shanghai Gesture then it was, reputedly, the Pai-Loh – below is Madame Gin Slings….
The old Argentina Club stood on the corner of Avenue Haig & Edinburgh Road (Huashan Lu & Jiangsu Lu) – what a nasty bunch of White Russian fascists they were too – their story today on my That’s Shanghai series on the old 1940s gangs of Shanghai…
The full line for the Shanghai International Literary Festival 2018 at M on the Bund is now up…click here
I’m there first weekend by the way with City of Devils….
In the run-up to the Asian launch of City of Devils That’s Shanghai are running a daily who’s who of old time organized crime in Shanghai, my list of the Foreign Gangs of 1940s Shanghai…a gang a day for three weeks!! Today, we start with The Swiss….
It’s time to go back and explore Shanghai’s Badlands…
Immerse yourself in 1940’s Shanghai with this astonishing story of two men whose lives intertwine in crime and twisted friendship. In a city under siege Viennese Joe Farren rose to fame by cashing in on Shanghai’s desperate pleasure seeking. King of the chorus lines, his name was splashed in neon across the infamous Badlands nightclub ‘Farren’s’. American fugitive Jack Riley, his fingertips acid-burnt, found a future in Shanghai as ‘The Slots King’. ‘Dapper Joe’ and ‘Lucky Jack’ collided, clashed and came together again in a frantic struggle to survive the city’s last days. Paul French resurrects the denizens of old Shanghai’s ganglands, the drug-running, the gambling, and the graft, vividly restoring this long overlooked side of the city’s history.
