“History Has Many Cunning Passages”: On Jonathan Kaufman’s “The Last Kings of Shanghai”
- Nov 20, 2020
- 1 min read
From LA Review of Books
AS A SHANGHAI-BORN WRITER, when I was invited to review journalist Jonathan Kaufman’s new biographically driven history of the city’s pre-1949 era, I readily agreed. One reason was its title, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China, which led me to assume, correctly, that it would deal in part with the Sassoon family. I knew the Sassoon name from a book series I read in my childhood titled Shanghai Stories. The series included intriguing bits and pieces of information about the family and the stamp it made on the city in which I grew up. On the cover of Shanghai Stories was a silhouette of the iconic structures of Shanghai’s waterfront Bund: the Peace Hotel buildings. One was the Sassoon House, which is now dwarfed by taller buildings across the Huangpu River in hypermodern Pudong.
Victor Sassoon (1881–1961) was mentioned only briefly in the series, portrayed as an evil “imperialist” who built his fortune from the opium trade in China. Likewise, the Peace Hotel was presented as having once been full of the decadent debaucheries of Western colonialists and capitalists like Victor. According to that text, it was not until Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule after 1949 that the building was granted “a new lease on life” as a place to be used by the Chinese people.
