On first visiting Shanghai over 30 years ago, I stayed at the Broadway Mansions hotel, at a time when Communist China was still emerging from political self-isolation.
Like the city itself, the Art Deco building was dilapidated, and the staff uncertain about a foreign visitor. But the hotel retained a touch of its former grandeur, not least in its superb views over the Huangpu river and expensive details such as full-length brass piano-style hinges on the bedroom doors.
The receptionists could not or would not tell me who had financed such luxury in China in the 1930s. The answer, I later learnt, was one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs — Victor Sassoon, a man who deserves to be much better known in history than he is.
Before the second world war, Shanghai was a byword for money, adventure and glamour. It was nominally under Chinese sovereignty but 40,000 foreigners lived in an international settlement where local laws did not apply.
They prospered first from the deadly opium trade and later from dominating China’s commerce, finance and tourism.
Shanghai’s undisputed masters were two wealthy Jewish businessmen — Sassoon and his great rival Elly Kadoorie — who eclipsed even old colonial trading families headed by the Keswicks of Jardine Matheson.
This heady era is brought vividly to life in Jonathan Kaufman’s The Last Kings of Shanghai — a multigenerational epic of the Sassoon and Kadoorie dynasties, which rightly takes business out of the shadows and puts it at the heart of modern China’s history. (The UK edition, titled Kings of Shanghai, will now be published in November.)