All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Today’s old gang of Shanghai, in association with That’s Shanghai, is the Portuguese crew of Jose Bothelo (one of two big Portuguese gangs in Shanghai) that operated out of the Silver Palace Casino on the Avenue Foch (Yanan Zhong Lu)….click here…
Today’s gang of old Shanghai is the Giraldi gang – that’s the gang of White Russians around Shura Giraldi who some might remember as the hermaphrodite nightclub owner in Midnight in Peking. Shura allegedly robbed, burgled, fenced and procured his way to great wealth in the Peking Badlands but invested the money in Shanghai’s Frenchtown. Ultimately, in the 1950s, he was reduced to being shipped back to an uncertain fate in the USSR – here he is, with a last remaining young friend, in the Talati Hotel on Tianjin’s old Victoria Road (now Jiefang Road and the First Business Hotel) before being deported to Russia in the mid-1950s….
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….
