It opens with a gong, a dragon, and a blonde in a red-sequined dress singing Cole Porter in Mandarin. The first ten minutes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released in 1984 and set in 1935, are the most concentrated dose of Hollywood Shanghai ever committed to film: a nightclub called Club Obi Wan, all chrome and gold and art-deco curves; a chorus line that blooms out of a silk fan dance into a full Busby Berkeley spectacular; gangsters in white dinner jackets; a poisoned martini, a flung diamond, a machine gun on the drum kit; and a getaway car driven by a twelve-year-old through streets of neon and rickshaws. It is glorious. It is also, as a depiction of Shanghai, almost entirely imaginary, and the story of what it is instead is more interesting than realism would have been. Because Spielberg’s Shanghai is not a place. It is a quotation: of old movies, of a treaty-port legend, and of an imaginary China that Hollywood had been building, film by film, for fifty years.
The deal at Club Obi Wan
The plot machinery of the sequence is worth pausing on, because it is tuned with a watchmaker’s joy. Indiana Jones has come to Shanghai to trade. What he is selling is the ashes of Nurhaci, the founder of the Manchu imperial line, the dynasty this site’s long series followed from the kowtow crisis to the abdication of 1912, an exquisite MacGuffin, since it makes the whole film hinge, literally, on the relics of the Qing. The buyer is Lao Che, a suave Shanghai crime boss with two murderous sons, and the price is the Peacock’s Eye, a diamond the size of a plum. The double-cross is immediate: the champagne is poisoned, the antidote is in Lao Che’s vest, the diamond is lost in a bucket of spilled ice, the singer Willie Scott shrieks, Indy’s inside man Wu Han dies in his arms, and the whole thing erupts into a chase that ends, via an escape plane belonging, of course, to Lao Che Air Freight, with the heroes dumped over the Himalayas and into the film’s actual story. As an overture it is perfect: ten minutes that contain a screwball comedy, a gangster picture and a musical, before the adventure film even begins.
The details are quotations of genre. The club is named for Obi-Wan Kenobi, a wink from George Lucas. The musical number is a homage to the Berkeley extravaganzas of the 1930s, shot with the long deco staircases and overhead symmetries that made Berkeley’s name, and its song, “Anything Goes”, comes from the 1934 Cole Porter musical, performed by Kate Capshaw phonetically in Mandarin, the joke and the thesis of the scene in one gesture: an American standard, wearing Chinese dress, inside a Hollywood dream of the East.
The Shanghai of the movies
By 1984 there was a long tradition to quote. Hollywood had been in love with an imaginary Shanghai since the silent era, and the keystone of the genre is Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express of 1932, in which Marlene Dietrich rides the Peking train through a China of fog, intrigue and exquisitely lit corruption, declaring that it took more than one man to change her name to Shanghai Lily. Around that core accumulated the whole furniture of the Hollywood East: neon signs and rickshaw pullers, White Russian hostesses and Sikh policemen, sing-song girls and warlords, the mysterious waterfront where anything could be bought. The real Shanghai had been the treaty port par excellence since 1842, a city of foreign concessions, and the fantasy was not baseless: Shanghai really was, in the 1930s, the most cosmopolitan city in Asia. But Hollywood’s version flattened it into a mood, glamour plus menace plus oriental inscrutability, the same flattening that put the Swedish-American Warner Oland in eyeliner to play Charlie Chan, in an era when the Chinese Exclusion Act still shaped what America could imagine about Chinese people. Spielberg and Lucas, children of Saturday serials and revival houses, absorbed the whole inheritance and rebuilt it lovingly, with better lighting. Their Shanghai is a museum of other movies.
The geography gives the game away. Not one frame of the sequence was shot in Shanghai. Club Obi Wan was built on a soundstage at Elstree Studios outside London. The street chase was filmed in Macau, the old Portuguese enclave whose narrow streets and Iberian-colonial fronts stood in, as they often have, for a China that in 1983 was still effectively closed to a Hollywood crew. The mountains were American, the village and the bridge were Sri Lankan. Shanghai 1935, as the title card announces, exists nowhere except at the intersection of a British studio, a Portuguese colony and the American unconscious.
The real Shanghai was stranger
Here is the delightful part: the actual Shanghai of 1935 was more extraordinary than the film. The real city, the one this series watched being created by the Treaty of Nanjing, had by the 1930s become the fourth or fifth largest city on earth, a place of genuine collision. On the Bund the banks were temples of neoclassical stone; down Nanking Road the neon was denser than anywhere outside Broadway. The Paramount Ballroom, opened in 1933, billed itself as the greatest dance hall in the Far East and backed the claim with sprung floors and deco towers. The real Lao Che existed, in everything but name: Du Yuesheng, the Green Gang boss who controlled the French Concession’s opium and much of its politics, a fruit-stall apprentice who rose to chair banks and mediate between Chiang Kai-shek and the underworld. The music in the air was not only imported: Shanghai was inventing its own pop, the shidaiqu fusion of Chinese melody and jazz orchestration, and at the Canidrome Ballroom in 1934 the house band was Buck Clayton’s, a genuine Harlem jazz orchestra, whose trumpeter would go home to join Count Basie. American jazz did not depict Shanghai; it played there.
And above all, the city that Hollywood fantasized about was busy fantasizing on its own account. Shanghai in the 1930s was the Hollywood of the East, the centre of a Chinese film industry at its golden age. While von Sternberg was lighting Dietrich, the Lianhua studio was making The Goddess with the tragic, luminous Ruan Lingyu; two years after Indy’s imaginary visit, Street Angels would bring the city’s back alleys, teahouse singers and everything that made its modernity modern onto Chinese screens. The real Shanghai did not need to be imagined by anyone. It was imagining itself, in Mandarin, at twenty-four frames a second, a fact the American fantasy never noticed.
What the fantasy was for
None of this is an accusation, exactly, though the film’s Shanghai sits squarely inside what later critics would name Orientalism, the West’s habit of staging the East as scenery for its own adventures, and Temple of Doom drew criticism on those grounds, for its Indian chapters even more than its Chinese ones. It is fairer and more interesting to see the sequence for what it is: a love letter, written in 1984, to a Hollywood that no longer existed, addressed to a Shanghai that never had. The opening of Temple of Doom preserves, in amber and neon, the moment when the world’s image of China ran through a nightclub that existed only at Elstree. The film was not shown in China; China in 1984 was just reopening to the world, and the real Shanghai was beginning the rebuilding that would make it, within a generation, a skyline beyond even Hollywood’s old imagination. Today the Paramount Ballroom has been restored and dances again, and Chinese filmgoers watch their own blockbusters in multiplexes on streets the 1984 film could only fake in Macau.
There is one more loop worth closing, because it is pure Hollywood. The getaway car in the chase was driven by a child actor named Ke Huy Quan, a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee boy cast more or less off the street, who gave the film its heart as Short Round and then vanished from acting for decades when Hollywood found no roles for him. In 2023 he returned, and won the Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once. The imaginary Shanghai of 1935 had been, for a twelve-year-old, a way into an industry that then closed its door; the real story took forty years to come right. Spielberg’s Shanghai was never a city. It was a dream the movies had about a city, and dreams, like sequined dresses and diamonds in the ice, have a way of outlasting the places that inspired them. Anything goes, sang Willie Scott, in Mandarin, on a stage in England, about a nightclub in China that never existed. She was right. In the Hollywood East, it always did.
