“SKY’S THE LIMIT"

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 41, 11 May 1927, Page 6

“SKY’S THE LIMIT"

LIFE IN SHANGHAI CITY OF HECTIC NIGHT There is jnuch in Shanghai to entW a young man enjoying his first ev M .‘ ence of the East, writes G. C. Diim'.'; the London “Daily Mail.” The ChiiL*! is essentially a night bird-how he drinks, and plays fantan all night works 16 hours next day is one of libi minor mysteries—and the Eutom.' soon catches the infection. “In Shanghai,” an American frir ; once told me, with an eloquent w»v' of the hand, as he called for anotfc* cocktail, “in Shanghai the sky’s thi limit. Hours? You drink as lone si you are thirsty, and dance as lone you can stand. Montmartre is and Broadway’s all right for the with a one-way pocket: but in Shat:' Jiai the night life’s fierce.” It was, and is. It became so fletc*. in fact, that even the Chinese author! ties, no Puritans in these mattm were moved to action by the scandal «f “The Trenches,” a disreputable am outside the Settlement and Europeas control. In its gambling dens ani houses of ill-fame opium-smoking cocaine-sniffing and miscellaneous or! gies were nightly features, until at last the place acquired such a repute tion that its only rivals in the Far Bat were the dens of Singapore’s Sago Street and that sinister corner of Harbin, the last refuge of the cut-throat pickpocket and degenerate, known u “the Green Bazaar.”

“The Trenches” were at last 'brought under some sort of control and sherr of their more startling obscenities, but Shanghai, in parts, is still no Sunday school. Lying on one of the mail trade and passenger routes of the world, on the way from Europe to America and Japan, it is a port of call for thousands of sightseers. All are

anxious to investigate the hectic night life of the East, and there are any number of people engaged, like the Fat Boy, in an earnest endeavour to mak* their flesh creep. Nowhere in the world, I should think are there so many cabarets in proportion to the total white population. Thq range from the cheap and respectablf palais de danse to more select resort* with exotic names like “Paradise." where beautifully dressed profession?' dancers, mostly Russian, obliging!? dance with all comers on the sole condition that they order champagne. What they drank back home in Verb hneudinsk and Tobolsk and Khabarovsk I do not know. But in Shanghai no Russian girl dreams of drinking ar.jthing but champagne, and as they are paid nothing by their employers except commission on drinks I know of no se: in which the rigid teetotaller is les? popular. Shanghai is a fantastic blend of Earand West, of mediaevalism thinly ®wrlaid with modernity. You step out o'. a luxurious club and in five minutes* rickshaw has dragged you into a fouru dimensions where anythin* may b*P" pen but the expected. Turning out of the Bubbling Road one warm and starlit night I ®* a £2,000 limousine standing outside * hovel whose broken windows verr stuffed with sacking. What was tee lure? Opium? An ordinary intrigue Hardly. China does not require suCu secrecy as this. A hundred yards beyond I chec \/, the rickshaw with a jerk. From «• filthy tenement on the right “Marche Funebre” of Chopin, with the touch of a master an --~. tragic intensity of a lost soul. was the pianist? Some RussianJutive from the Reds, driven down W _ level of the coolie? A Russian wotwforced by hunger, as many another been, to live with a Chinese or ' the last sad descent to the streets-