Key Locations
join us and our guide mark logan as we visit some of the city's most iconic locations
Astor House Hotel, 15 Huangpu Road, Hongkou (now the China Securities Museum)
A vast neo-Baroque hotel by the Garden Bridge, opened in its present form in 1911 and preserved since 2018 as a free-to-visit museum. Zhou Enlai hid here during the 1927 White Terror. The foreign press corps lodged here, and it was the social engine of the Comintern-and-correspondents world through which Richard Sorge, Agnes Smedley, Ursula “Sonya” Kuczynski and Kitty Harris all moved.
Shanghai Club, No. 2 The Bund (now the Waldorf Astoria on the Bund)
This was the stately 1910 clubhouse of the British establishment, now restored as the Waldorf’s heritage wing. Its Long Bar, an L-shaped mahogany counter, was a favoured meeting spot of the taipans (the leading foreign businessmen) who drank in strict order of rank. It was also a key part of the social world of the Municipal Police Special Branch and of SIS’s man in Shanghai, Harry Steptoe, who most probably confected the smear file on Wallis Simpson.
The Custom House, No. 13 The Bund
The granite tower of 1927 whose clock and bells were built as a deliberate copy of Big Ben and shipped from England. For decades it chimed the Westminster Quarters over the river. During the Cultural Revolution the tune became “The East Is Red,” which, after a brief restoration for the Queen’s 1986 visit, is what it plays today. The single machine has rung out the changing of an empire.
The Cathay Hotel, No. 20 The Bund (now Fairmont Peace Hotel)
Victor Sassoon’s 1929 Art Deco masterpiece is topped off by a magnificent green copper pyramid. In the Jazz Bar, Sassoon’s old English pub, the Peace Hotel Old Jazz Band holds a Guinness World Record as the oldest jazz band on earth, average age around 82. Take an early-evening cocktail and ask them for “Ye Shanghai.”
SOME SUGGESTED SPOTS TO DUCK INTO TO CHECK PLANS OR LOSE A TAIL
Pre-Mission Briefing
A SELECTION OF RECOMMENDED READING TO PREPARE FOR YOUR MISSION
An Impeccable Spy - Owen Matthews
Essential reading for the Soviet strand. The definitive modern biography of Richard Sorge, drawing on Russian archives, it covers the formative Shanghai years of 1930–33 where Sorge built the contacts and tradecraft he would later deploy in Tokyo. Matthews is clear-eyed about both his brilliance and the recklessness and gives the fullest account of the press-and-Comintern demimonde at the heart of the tour.
Agent Sonya - Ben McIntyre
Another for the Soviet strand, and the ideal companion to the Astor House stop. This is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, the German communist recruited into Soviet military intelligence in Shanghai in the early 1930s, where she fell into the orbit of Richard Sorge. Macintyre, the best-known popular historian of 20th century espionage, follows her from the villas and safe flats of the International Settlement to a Cotswolds cottage, from which, as “Sonya,” she ran the atom spy Klaus Fuchs. A gripping account of a woman who was a wife, mother and colonel in the Red Army all at once.
The Shanghai Badlands - Frederic Wakeman Jr.
The scholarly backbone for the wartime terror. Wakeman, the leading Western historian of Shanghai’s police and secret services, reconstructs the assassination-and-counter-assassination war of 1937-41 between the Nationalist agents of Dai Li and the collaborationist secret police of the 'No. 76' organisation. Rigorous and grounded in the Municipal Police archive; the best single account of how the city’s underworld and its intelligence services became one.
Her Lotus Year - Paul French
Essential context for those interested in the future Duchess of Windsor's time in Shanghai. A narrative non-fiction account of the year she spent in China in 1924–25, and a forensic dismantling of the rumoured 'China Dossier'. French, the pre-eminent chronicler of old Shanghai’s foreign demimonde, shows how each lurid claim was true of someone else and transposed onto her, and names the likely fabricator, the SIS officer Harry Steptoe.
Once safely away from prying eyes, we suggest you keep yourself entertained with these tales of bygone days in shanghai.
Safe House Suggestions
Man’s Fate (La Condition Humaine) - André Malraux
The great novel of revolutionary Shanghai and winner of the Prix Goncourt. It opens in the tense days of 1927, as Communist insurgents rise in the city only to be crushed in Chiang Kai-shek’s White Terror, the same purge that sent Zhou Enlai into hiding at the Astor House. Malraux describes the conspirators, terrorists and Comintern agents of the underground from the inside; indispensable atmosphere for the Red Shanghai of the tour.
Lust, Caution - Eileen Chang
A spare, unsettling novella by one of the giants of modern Chinese literature, echoing a wartime plot in which a young Nationalist agent was sent to seduce and set up a senior figure in the collaborationist secret police. It is the fictional key to the 'No. 76' terror, and vividly conjures up the dark heart of occupied Shanghai. Later filmed by Ang Lee, whose reconstruction of occupied Shanghai, from the collaborators’ villas to a tense set-piece on Nanjing Road, is eye-opening. The film won a Golden Lion at Venice.
Shanghai - Joseph Kanon
This thriller sees refugees fleeing the Nazis swap the threat from the Gestapo for that of the Japanese Kempeitai, and local gangsters. At the centre of the story is Daniel Lohr, who joins his uncle in the city and soon finds himself caught up in a deadly struggle to control its lucrative clubs and casinos. Kanon captures the seedy glamour of the period, and the realities of life in a city where wealthy enclaves are surrounded by areas of grinding poverty.
Empire of the Sun - Steven Spielberg
Adapted from J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, this is the definitive screen account of Shanghai at the moment the foreign city fell. Seen through the eyes of a British boy separated from his parents when the Japanese seize the International Settlement in December 1941, it captures the Bund, the racecourse and the internment camps with startling scale. The best film for feeling the cataclysmic change our tour walks through.
For those seeking further inspiration, we recommend checking out Spybrary