‘Shanghai is the ultimate noir.’ British author Paul French talks about his obsession at Hong Kong festival

Paul French used his time at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival to speak about his favourite obsession: Shanghai. The British author has released two books on the city this year, City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir and Destination Shanghai.

“If you think about noir as being everybody alienated from everybody else, alone in the community, alone in the city, everybody is guilty, there’s never a good ending – Shanghai is the ultimate noir city,” French told a sold-out event on Sunday afternoon at the festival’s new home, the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in the city’s redeveloped colonial Central Police Station compound.

The collective guilt that he refers to – and that runs through City of Devils – came down to the fact that everyone who succeeded in old Shanghai was doing it off the back of imperialism and the theft of China’s resources. Shanghai is all about money – French says it’s in the city’s DNA.

If you had the money in 1930s Shanghai, there was no shortage of ways to spend it. You could hang out in nightclubs, dance to jazz played by African-American musicians, and cavort with dancers from Russia and Austria. There was no prohibition, there were opium dens and people were free to sleep with whoever they wanted.

“There were very few laws about what you could do with your money because people who made money didn’t want to be told how to spend it,” French told the event (moderated by the author of this article).

The problem came if you didn’t have any money. French admits to being guilty of romanticising old Shanghai, but says he tried to balance that against the fact that it was one of the worst cities to be in if you were poor and fell through the cracks. By the time of the Japanese invasion in 1938, the Municipal Council was picking up about 70,000 dead bodies off the streets every year, particularly in winter.