Interwar period

The Interwar period is evoked as the era that made Shanghai both a commercial gateway and a city sharply divided by colonial power. Jack Geller explains its history to Margaret Campbell during their drive, while the Bund’s surviving architecture later gives her a fleeting visual passage into the late 1930s. Together, his account and her impression frame the period as a past still legible in the modern city, but not reducible to its grand façades.

Colonial Shanghai

Geller says that some people called Shanghai the Paris of the East, but that the harsher name the Whore of the Orient better captured the city between the wars. In his account, the foreign presence followed the trading concessions forced on Chinese cities after the Opium Wars. Shanghai became the commercial gateway to China, and the British and Americans joined in establishing the Shanghai International Settlement, while the French maintained a separate French Concession. Geller also identifies the Japanese among the foreign powers present.

His description emphasizes that foreign authorities governed much of daily urban life: they controlled policing, sanitation, and building regulations, and operated with substantial self-government under powerful commercial interests. Chinese residents, by contrast, were squeezed into the old town’s slums and excluded from that system of power. Geller connects this exclusion to Shanghai’s role in the emergence of the Chinese Communist Party, making the city’s political history inseparable from the inequalities of its colonial order.

The Past in the Modern City

As the car approaches the Bund, Margaret sees the skyscrapers of the Lujiazui financial district, the Pearl TV Tower, and the river through the mist. The route over Nanpu Bridge and north along the waterside expressway brings her suddenly alongside the older waterfront. For a moment, its European buildings seem to carry her back to the late 1930s: French banks, British and Russian consulates, and the commercial empire of Jardine, Matheson and Company appear as monuments to the business power Geller has described.

The vision is brief and unsettled by the present. Geller points out Margaret’s hotel, the former Cathay Hotel, and recalls how statues on a nearby building were covered after the Communists came to power, then unveiled again for the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Their changing interpretation—from a symbol associated with the oppressed worker to one of strength and power—shows how the city’s inherited architecture can be repeatedly assigned new political meanings. The Interwar period thus enters the scene not as a self-contained historical tableau, but as a layer of Shanghai that persists beneath later transformations.