Shanghai, pullulating with vice, luxury and crime and combining extremes of wealth and poverty, exercised an insidious and irresistible lure on travellers in the inter-war years. The seething polyglot city, inhabited by a host of European and American emigres, where heroin was available on hotel room service, and gangsterism was rife, is recreated in this book, using the reminiscences of the scattered remnants of those who populated it at the height of its notoriety.