Shanghai Modern: the dance halls, records, films and neon of the 1920s–40s

Between the 1920s and the 1940s Shanghai invented a good part of modern Chinese popular culture. The first Chinese-run tea dances were held in 1922. By 1946 the city had 29 dance halls and about 3,000 women working in them as dancing partners. By 1932 its record factories, the largest of them the company everyone called Pathé, were pressing an estimated 5.4 million records a year. Film studios packed their pictures with songs, and the songs went out on the radio and back into the dance halls.

This topic follows that world part by part, through the sources: the gazetteers compiled in the 1990s, the Shanghai Municipal Council’s own licence books and gazettes, a guidebook of 1934, and the scholars who have worked on the period.

Night Shanghai, the first part, starts from the song “Ye Shanghai” and goes back to what it described: the dance halls from the Great Eastern of 1927 to the Paramount and Ciro’s, how a taxi dancer was paid, the Filipino, American and Chinese bands, Li Jinhui and the first Chinese pop songs, the record industry, the dancers’ riot of 1948 and the closing of the halls in 1954.

The four companies, the second part, follows Sincere, Wing On, Sun Sun and Da Sun, the Chinese department stores that rebuilt Nanjing Road between 1917 and 1936, from their leases and roof gardens to the neon that lit the street and the 1950s, when the stores and the lights were taken over or switched off.

The related stories read the same years through their buildings: the Art Deco towers, cinemas and flats, and the shikumen lanes most of the city lived in.