We’ve had the glamour, we’ve had the politics – now it’s time for the secret and sordid history of the foreign criminal underworld of Shanghai and Peking in the first half of the twentieth century. Pimps and pros; gangsters and gamblers – from Shanghai’s ‘Line’ and its notorious luxury bordellos full of ‘American Girls’ to the illegal casinos of the Badlands; the sexual-sadist cults of Peking’s Legation Quarter to the secret cabarets of the Tartar City – foreigners were mad, bad and depraved on a scale few can imagine. They murdered and robbed, procured and pimped in a haze of drugs, sex and debauchery.
Paul French tells the largely hidden tales of the underworld that include murder, gun fights and easy money based on his forthcoming trilogy of books that aim to reveal the largely previously ignored lower depths of low life foreign China. Not for the easily shocked or the legally upstanding.
