HISTORIC SHANGHAI VIRTUAL EVENTS & RECORDINGS

• Please select the event or recording you'd like from the list below.
• Recording link(s) will be sent by email.
• Contact us at info@historic-shanghai.com with questions

VIRTUAL EVENT

Monday October 31, 8pm (Shanghai time) Halloween Special - Paul French on Murders in Old Shanghai On Zoom

There’s nothing spookier than a gruesome Old Shanghai murder, and no one who knows them better than Paul French, the New York Times bestselling author of City of Devils and Midnight in Peking. 

On this Halloween night, come hear this inimitable Old Shanghai storyteller regale us with tales of poison, stabbing, love triangles, assassination, and unravel the tantalizing, often surprising tales of whodunit, and why. 

Tales like that of the French aristocrat who was unceremoniously assassinated as he mounted the stairs to his office (but by which of his many enemies?); the young American, found shot dead, whose best friend committed suicide before he could be questioned; the Frenchtown power brokers who dropped dead, one by one, after a sumptuous banquet at Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng’s house; a Chinese gold dealer, murdered in postwar Shanghai, as accusations flew between the accused, and the gold remained missing … and more!

RECORDINGS

Living History: Liliane Willens, author of “Stateless in Shanghai”

On Zoom

What was it like to grow up, from birth into young adulthood, in Old Shanghai?

Liliane Willens, our guest on ‘Living History’ was born in Shanghai in 1925 to stateless Russian Jewish parents and lived here – through the glamorous 1930s, the Japanese occupation, civil war, and the early years of the Communist China, until 1951.

Our Living History series offers the rare opportunity to hear from eyewitnesses to the dramatic history of the city, Shanghai history, and ask them questions about what life was really like Old Shanghai. Liliane is wonderful raconteur—join us for this very special experience!

Dr. Liliane Willens is the author of “Stateless in Shanghai”, a memoir of growing up in Shanghai, and was a professor of French Language and Literature at Boston College and MIT before retirement. 

Tippling Shanghai: A brief history of drinking in Old Shanghai

Old Shanghai earned a reputation as a drinking town, and deservedly so! In this illustrated talk, we’ll explore that sometimes grim, sometimes glamorous story, from the early and very seedy sailors bars, to the taipans preferred tipples, what they drank, and where they drank it. We’ll take a look at the stories of Old Shanghai’s most celebrated nightclubs and bars, the characters who ran them, from the shady to the sophisticated; the post 1949 scene; the ‘talking girl’ bars of the 1980s, and more. 

Virtual Walk: Revolutionary Shanghai 

Shanghai may be best known as the engine of the nation’s economy, but our city is also famous for its central role in the Chinese revolution: for it was in Old Shanghai, where tycoons amassed millions and nightclubs hopped, that the seed of revolution was sown, a revolution that would change the fate of a nation.

Join us on International Labor Day to take a virtual walk through the epic drama of Shanghai’s role in China’s path to revolution. We’ll trace the arc of that history through fascinating and often unlikely characters, from the end of the imperial Qing age to the military victory in 1949, and beyond. 

On our journey, we'll explore the intellectual and social energy of early 20th century movements, (virtually) visit the places where they lived, worked, and made revolution: the homes of heroes, rebels, and legends, the sites of uprisings and protests, and more!

Missionaries, Madams, Spies & Scribes: The Women of Old Shanghai 

Meet the trailblazing women of old Shanghai, the feisty, independent iconoclasts who forged new paths in what was still very much a man’s world.

Women like  Yan Shuhe, founder of the Women’s Bank; Agnes Smedley, revolutionary and spy; left-wing writer Ding Ling; Gracie Gale, owner of Shanghai’s most famous bordello; Dr. Anne Fearn, the physician who treated patients for over 40 years; heiress Daisy Kwok, founder of a fusion fashion salon; explorer Ruth Harkness, who scooped the men and brought back the first panda to the U.S.; Emily Hahn--writer, opium addict, lover of a Chinese poet—and more. 

Hear about their extraordinary lives and achievements, see where they lived, worked, and played, the institutions they created, and explore the unique environment of old Shanghai that allowed them to blossom. 

Lost Portraits: Shanghai Studio Portraits, 1900s-1950s

What can a collection of old Shanghai photographs tell us about people, society, and the city? Found in the junk markets of Shanghai, these images, frozen in time, offer a window into a forgotten world, telling a compelling story about a place and time that’s long since disappeared.

In these captivating images, we see how people tried out new identities in the portrait studio; how changes in fashion revealed changes in society; the dynamics of family portraits; social transformation in wedding photos; the evolution of the status of women, and more. And we’ll share the stories of the Shanghai photo studios as well, how they evolved as a space for creative collaboration and the creation of new roles and communities.

Book Club: Witness to History From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience by Paul Hoffman and Jean Hoffman Lewanda

Book Club discussion with Jean Lewanda Hoffman, Paul's daughter and the book's editor

On the rainy afternoon of November 28,1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949, and emerged from the challenges all the wiser. In Shanghai, he taught mathematics, lived the high life, and worked for an American lawyer, Norwood Allman [his memoir is our next book!] who was also secretly the US spy chief in China before and after the Communist takeover.

Book Club: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (discussion) 

Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s historical novel tells the story of Christopher Banks, born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai and orphaned at nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, Banks is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents’ alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.

Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, the possibility of avenging one’s past, and the Shanghai of the imagination.