Shanghai Sojourners

"This is the best academic collection yet published on early twentieth-century Shanghai....[The contributors] provide plenty of evidence for the power of concrete changes which are not obviously rooted in anybody's identity. This makes for history writing that sometimes seems shaped by an academic fad. But it also makes for a rare work: an edited collection that really holds together as a book."—Lynn T. White III, Princeton University, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs

"Shanghai Sojourners is an extraordinary anthology of articles on Shanghai society. The term 'sojourners' has been used to capture the nature of the metropolis’ residents from the granting of the foreign concessions to the early 1950s: transient, constantly changing, lacking roots, and wanting to start a new life....This outstanding volume deserves to be considered, not only as a historian’s, but anyone’s travel-guide to Shanghai, as it provides an excellent insight into the soul of the city."—Flemming Christiansen, University of Manchester, China Information

"This book is about the culture and society of a city of strangers, the Shanghai of the Republican era....It is primarily that of Chinese bankers, industrialists, workers, students, journalists, gangsters and prostitutes who only gradually came to think of themselves as 'Shanghai people.' Theirs was a Shanghai that, as the editors describe it, had an 'exotic, disturbing, polymorphous quality' that ended when a cosmopolitan Shanghai became 'securely Chinese' in 1949 (p. 14)."—William C. Kirby, The China Quarterly

"This symposium volume of nine articles, the product of a 1988 conference in Shanghai, has both an evocative and provocative title. Not only does the phrase 'Shanghai sojourners' help conjure up the exotic and complex image of the city from its opening to foreign trade in 1843 through the Communist takeover just over 100 years later, but it also raises a number of intriguing questions about what it meant to live in Shanghai and how that differed from living in other parts of China....Using a rich variety of research methods and many newly-opened archival sources in Shanghai, the authors focus on the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s, but with special emphasis on the 1920s and 30s."—Pamela Atwell, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society