The Whore of the Orient

“The Whore of the Orient” is Jack Geller’s preferred epithet for Shanghai between the world wars, a deliberately provocative alternative to “the Paris of the East.” In the conversation, the name gathers together his account of foreign power, cosmopolitan spectacle, and gangster glamour. It also makes the city’s identity a point of tension: Geller celebrates a Shanghai formed by many cultures, while Margaret Campbell wonders whether that portrait leaves too little that is Chinese.

The Expression and Its Historical Frame

Geller introduces the phrase while explaining Shanghai’s past to Margaret, who has never visited the city and admits she knows little about it. He contrasts the familiar-sounding “the Paris of the East” with the harsher epithet, saying that he thinks it better characterizes the city between the wars. His explanation places the expression within a history of foreign concessions imposed after the Opium Wars. Shanghai, he says, became the commercial gateway to China, with the British and Americans joined in the International Settlement and the French governing separately in the French Concession.

Geller’s account emphasizes the unequal powers behind the city’s cosmopolitan reputation. Foreign authorities, he says, controlled policing, sanitation, and building regulations, while Chinese residents were pushed into the old town’s slums and excluded from influence. He connects that exclusion to Shanghai’s role as the place where the Chinese Communist Party began. In this telling, the epithet does not simply describe a colorful urban atmosphere: it belongs to a history in which foreign privilege and Chinese dispossession occupied the same city.

A Cosmopolitan City as Spectacle

The phrase is part of Geller’s larger, openly admiring performance of Shanghai’s past. He calls it the most cosmopolitan city in the world and evokes an improbable range of residents, from Nazi spies and Filipino band leaders to Arab gendarmes and Indian princesses. Gangsters and adventurers complete the picture; Geller imagines a city teeming with them and likens it to “A twentieth-century Sodom and Gomorrah.” He even supplies an English-accented flourish about Lea and Perrin’s sauce and Gilbert and Sullivan, turning the city into a theatrical mixture of international influences.

That exuberance helps explain the force of “The Whore of the Orient.” The expression casts Shanghai as alluring and excessive, a place whose appeal lies partly in its distance from conventional national identity. Yet the glamour is inseparable from the structures Geller has just described: the foreign-run institutions and exclusion of Chinese residents are the history behind the cosmopolitan spectacle. His fascination is therefore revealing as well as celebratory. The city is admired through the same colonial-era world that made its international character possible.

Margaret’s Response and the Limits of the Portrait

Margaret initially asks how Shanghai came to be governed by foreign powers, and Geller’s account makes her curious about a city she had not known. But her later observation, “Not very Chinese,” tests the portrait he has constructed. Geller concedes the point, adding that large parts of Shanghai are not Chinese and that even Margaret’s hotel is very British and colonial. Their exchange leaves the epithet suspended between attraction and estrangement: it names a distinctive history, but also a city whose cosmopolitan image can obscure the Chinese lives and unequal conditions beneath it.

Narrative Significance

The expression introduces Shanghai through a visitor’s encounter with someone eager to interpret it. Geller’s vivid, personal account gives Margaret—and the reader—a historical frame before she experiences the city for herself; his admission that she will see it in time makes the portrait provisional rather than final. The phrase thus establishes both the seduction of Shanghai’s past and the need to question whose perspective defines it. Margaret’s brief challenge keeps Geller’s romantic language from standing as an uncontested description of the city.