Book description
Book by Ling, Pan
Why read it?
1 author picked Old Shanghai as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
What a cast of characters Pan Ling introduced me to! There are Big Ears Du and Pockmarked Huang, notorious gangsters and leaders of the Green Gang; Wang Jingwei, the “Chinese Petain;” Dai Li, who headed the Chinese Nationalist secret police; and many others.
I love to read about faraway places in different times, and Pan Ling brought to life for me the incredibly complex and fascinating milieu of 1930s Shanghai through interlocking portraits of many key Chinese figures of the period. She made me want to meet these people—but preferably not in a dark alley.
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