The Paris of the East

The Paris of the East is a Western name for Shanghai whose force in the novel comes from the city’s visible European styles and its layered, contested history. It appears both as a shorthand for Shanghai’s prewar cosmopolitan reputation and as an image tested against the city’s modern skyline and the unequal foreign presence that helped shape its past.

A Name for Prewar Shanghai

As Li and Nien Mei-Ling travel through the modern city, the Pearl TV Tower prompts a comparison with Paris: Mei-Ling explains that Shanghai was known in the West before the Second World War as the Paris of the East, and that residents now see the tower as their own Eiffel Tower. The exchange links the nickname to a city that has repeatedly borrowed, adapted, or reimagined architectural symbols. Li’s blunt judgment that the tower is ugly prevents the comparison from becoming simple admiration; the new landmark is at once a local emblem and an imitation measured against a Western original.

Jack Geller offers a more caustic alternative while driving Margaret Campbell through Shanghai. He acknowledges that some people called it the Paris of the East, but prefers The Whore of the Orient, which he says better characterizes the city between the wars. His phrase shifts attention from architectural resemblance and cosmopolitan glamour to the city’s reputation and history. Rather than presenting either label as a neutral description, the exchange makes naming itself a matter of perspective: the same past can be made picturesque or rendered morally charged.

Architecture and Historical Memory

The setting gives the Paris comparison a concrete visual basis. As Margaret approaches the Bund, she sees the Lujiazui financial district, the Pearl TV Tower, and the river; then the road carries her across Nanpu Bridge and north along the waterfront. The Bund emerges through the rain, and its grand European buildings briefly make her feel transported to the late 1930s. French-built banks, British and Russian consulates, and the commercial presence of Jardine, Matheson and Company compose the historical image behind the nickname. The resemblance is not merely a distant label: the passing streets make the city’s architectural past momentarily present to her.

Geller’s account places that elegance beside the unequal arrangements that produced Shanghai’s international character. After the Opium Wars, foreign powers obtained trading concessions in coastal cities. In Shanghai, he explains, the British and Americans formed the International Settlement while the French established their own concession; foreign authorities controlled matters such as policing, sanitation, and building regulations. Chinese residents, by contrast, were pushed into the old town’s slums and excluded from power. In this context, the European appearance recalled by the nickname is inseparable from foreign rule and the divisions it imposed.

A Reputation in Contrast

The novel sets the old nickname against Shanghai’s modern transformations rather than treating it as a complete portrait. The Pearl TV Tower and the rising Lujiazui skyline signal a new city, while the Bund’s older façades preserve the visible traces of foreign commercial power. Nearby, the former Cathay Hotel is identified as a grand Art Deco building, and statues once covered by the Communists are described as having been revealed again for the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. These changes show how the city’s built forms acquire new meanings as political eras change.

The Paris comparison therefore carries both visual appeal and historical tension. Margaret’s fleeting impression of the Bund supplies the scene of European grandeur; Geller’s competing epithet and account of concessions expose the power relations behind that grandeur. Together, the descriptions make the nickname useful but incomplete: it conveys a particular image of Shanghai while leaving the city’s Chinese inhabitants and the costs of foreign dominance at risk of being pushed out of view.