Old Shanghai was a city that seemed to have been designed by contradiction. It was Chinese yet international, ancient yet startlingly modern, immensely wealthy yet surrounded by desperate poverty, glamorous enough to attract adventurers from half the world and dangerous enough to convince many of them that ordinary rules did not quite apply there. During the great age of the International Settlement, particularly from the closing years of the nineteenth century through the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai became one of the most extraordinary cities on earth. Along the Bund stood monumental banks, trading houses, hotels and clubs, their stone facades presenting an image of permanence beside the muddy Huangpu River. Ships arrived from Britain, America, Japan, India and continental Europe, while Chinese junks and river craft moved among them. Nanking Road blazed with electric lights, advertisements, restaurants, theatres and department stores. Beyond the grand avenues were enormous districts of lanes, workshops, crowded housing, warehouses, markets and factories. Rickshaw pullers threaded their way between motorcars, policemen directed traffic beneath electric signs, businessmen drank in hotel bars, refugees sought shelter wherever they could find it, and fortunes were won and lost with extraordinary speed. Shanghai acquired the reputation of a place where almost anything could happen because, for several generations, almost everything did. Yet the famous image of Old Shanghai cannot be understood simply as a romantic vision of jazz bands, cocktails and mysterious alleys. The International Settlement was created within the unequal political order imposed on China after the treaty port system opened Shanghai to foreign residence and commerce. The Shanghai Municipal Council developed into an unusually powerful municipal government, dominated for much of its history by British interests but involving residents of several nationalities, and it exercised authority over an overwhelmingly Chinese population that possessed limited influence over the government ruling it. That political contradiction lay beneath much of the splendour and much of the bitterness of Old Shanghai. Shanghai was a city of refuge as well as a city of empire, however, and this became one of the most remarkable dimensions of its history. Chinese migrants fleeing warfare and poverty came to the city in enormous numbers, White Russians arrived after revolution and civil war, and during the darkest years of European antisemitism Shanghai became a sanctuary for thousands of Jews who found the doors of much of the rest of the world closed to them.
The International Settlement itself emerged from the foreign communities established in Shanghai during the nineteenth century. British and American settlement areas eventually came together in 1863, while the French Concession remained administratively separate. The Shanghai Municipal Council, founded in 1854, became the institution responsible for roads, sanitation, public works, fire protection and many other aspects of municipal government. It gradually acquired powers that made it resemble the administration of a small city state inside China, although its legal and political position was far more complicated than that description suggests. Its existence was connected to extraterritoriality, treaty rights and a system under which foreign nationals were often subject to their own consular jurisdictions rather than ordinary Chinese courts. The Council collected revenue, constructed infrastructure and maintained public order, but its authority also represented a visible limitation on Chinese sovereignty. Shanghai consequently developed a strange geography of overlapping jurisdictions. Crossing a road or bridge could mean passing from territory policed by one authority into territory controlled by another. A criminal, political activist or detective might therefore find that a few streets could make an enormous difference. The International Settlement, the French Concession and the Chinese administered districts were parts of the same metropolitan organism, yet they were governed by different institutions with competing laws, police forces and political interests. This fragmentation helped create the peculiar character of Old Shanghai. It encouraged commerce because merchants could operate inside an internationally connected port with sophisticated municipal services, but it also created opportunities for smugglers, organised crime, political undergrounds and anyone capable of exploiting jurisdictional boundaries. The Shanghai Municipal Police therefore operated in an environment where ordinary police work could rapidly become an international incident. A constable pursuing a suspect could not always behave as though the entire city belonged to one legal system, because it did not. The geography of Shanghai itself became part of policing, and the same unusual political geography that made the city difficult to police would later help make Shanghai an unexpected place of escape for people who had nowhere else to go.
The Shanghai Municipal Police grew directly out of this peculiar urban world. Established in 1854 under the Municipal Council, it began as a small foreign force but eventually became a large and highly diverse organisation. Chinese officers came to form the great majority of its personnel during the twentieth century, while British and other European officers occupied many senior posts. Sikh policemen became one of the most recognisable features of the Settlement, and Japanese, Russian and other personnel also served at various times. Robert Bickers notes that the force eventually contained British, Indian, Russian, Japanese and Chinese personnel, with Chinese policemen forming the bulk of the force during the twentieth century. The image of the Shanghai policeman therefore depended very much upon where one stood. To a British resident he might appear as the representative of efficient municipal government. To a Chinese nationalist he could represent foreign privilege and imperial control. To an ordinary shopkeeper he might simply be the man who dealt with thieves, traffic accidents and disturbances. To a criminal gang he was an obstacle to be bribed, avoided, intimidated or attacked. The Sikh constable in particular became a powerful symbol of the Settlement. Sikh policemen were recruited within the wider structures of British imperial power and were highly visible on Shanghai streets. Their turbans and uniforms made them instantly recognisable, especially when directing traffic or controlling crowds. Their presence illustrated the international character of the Settlement, but also the imperial networks that sustained it, with Indian subjects of the British Empire policing Chinese residents within a foreign administered district of a Chinese city. Old Shanghai was international in ways far more complicated than the familiar picture of Europeans standing on the Bund might suggest.
Daily police work was less glamorous than later legend sometimes suggests. Shanghai required the ordinary machinery of metropolitan policing on an enormous scale. There were burglaries, assaults, disputes, missing persons, drunken fights, traffic offences, fires, frauds and countless complaints requiring investigation. Constables walked beats, detectives interviewed witnesses, stations processed prisoners, traffic officers struggled with the increasing number of automobiles, and police administrators attempted to impose order on neighbourhoods that could be extraordinarily crowded. Yet Shanghai also produced forms of crime and disorder that gave the force its unusual reputation. Armed robbery and kidnapping were serious concerns. Political movements operated across the city. Labour unrest could rapidly become political confrontation. Organised criminal networks participated in gambling, narcotics, protection and prostitution. Weapons circulated widely. The enormous transient population provided anonymity, while the division of Shanghai between several jurisdictions offered opportunities for escape. Detectives consequently required extensive local knowledge and contacts. Language complicated matters further. British recruits might arrive with police or military experience but little understanding of Chinese languages, customs or the intricate social relationships of Shanghai. Chinese officers, interpreters and detectives therefore possessed knowledge that foreign officers could not easily replace. Bickers has pointed to the limitations confronting British policemen who lacked familiarity with Chinese society, languages and local patterns of obligation. The police force may have carried British institutional habits, but practical policing depended heavily upon Chinese personnel. This is one reason that romantic descriptions of the Shanghai Municipal Police as simply a band of tough British officers chasing gangsters through dark alleys are misleading. There certainly were dangerous raids, shootings and confrontations, but the force was an enormous municipal institution operating inside one of the most complicated cities in Asia.
Violence was never merely a criminal question in Shanghai because politics constantly intruded into policing. The Shanghai Municipal Police defended not only public order but the continued existence of a foreign administered settlement. By the 1920s and 1930s Chinese nationalism increasingly challenged that arrangement, and the Municipal Council faced mounting pressure from the Nationalist government and from political movements demanding the recovery of Chinese sovereignty. Police operations against Communist organisations and other political groups therefore occurred within a much larger struggle over who possessed legitimate authority in Shanghai. Historical research has documented cooperation between the Municipal Police and the Nationalist authorities in the arrest and transfer of Communist suspects during the period after 1927. This political role had already been made painfully clear on 30 May 1925, when Shanghai Municipal Police opened fire during a confrontation with Chinese demonstrators outside Louza Police Station, killing several protesters and provoking enormous outrage. The shootings helped ignite the May Thirtieth Movement and became a powerful symbol of resentment against foreign domination. Any account of the Shanghai Municipal Police that remembers only gunfighters, martial arts and daring detectives while forgetting such incidents turns history into adventure fiction. The force protected residents, investigated serious crimes and developed sophisticated police methods, but it also defended a political system whose legitimacy was increasingly rejected by Chinese nationalists. This double character is essential to understanding the force and the city that created it.
It was within this environment that William Ewart Fairbairn developed the methods that would eventually make his name famous far beyond Shanghai. Fairbairn served for decades in the Shanghai Municipal Police and eventually became Assistant Commissioner, with responsibility for the Armed and Training Reserve. Later accounts surrounding him accumulated a considerable amount of mythology, as often happens when a policeman becomes a celebrated combat instructor, and colourful claims about exactly how many street fights he experienced should be treated cautiously. What is beyond doubt is that Shanghai profoundly shaped his thinking. Fairbairn became interested in how policemen could survive sudden violence at extremely close range. He studied various fighting systems and attempted to extract practical principles from them rather than treating any particular tradition as sacred. His interests included Japanese martial arts, Chinese boxing and other methods of fighting. The result was not intended primarily as a sport. Shanghai policemen might encounter an assailant in a lane, inside a building, during an arrest or amid a disturbance where there was neither a referee nor time for an elaborate contest. Fairbairn therefore sought a system that policemen could learn and remember under pressure. In 1926 he published Defendu, Scientific Self Defence, in Shanghai. The work was described as an official text book associated with the Shanghai Municipal Police and was also linked with police use in Hong Kong and Singapore. Its significance lies not merely in individual techniques but in the philosophy behind it. Fairbairn was attempting to construct a modern practical method from experience, selecting straightforward responses suitable for violent encounters rather than preserving a traditional martial art intact.
Eric Anthony Sykes belongs beside Fairbairn in this story. Sykes was an experienced marksman who became closely associated with Fairbairn during their Shanghai years, and their partnership became particularly important in the development of practical pistol shooting and later close combat instruction. Shanghai provided exactly the kind of environment in which conventional assumptions about target shooting could be questioned. A paper target on an orderly range did not behave like an armed criminal encountered suddenly at short distance. Police confrontations could occur quickly, in poor visibility and at very close range. Fairbairn and Sykes became interested in preparing men for those conditions rather than merely producing impressive scores on a formal range. Their later book Shooting to Live reflected this practical orientation. They subsequently became associated with the famous Fairbairn Sykes fighting knife and with British wartime training, while Fairbairn later instructed personnel of the American Office of Strategic Services. The United States National Park Service records both their work on combat pistol techniques and their collaboration on the knife. Yet the roots of their reputation lay in Shanghai. When the Second World War created a demand for instructors capable of preparing commandos and clandestine personnel for close combat, experience accumulated in the Shanghai Municipal Police suddenly acquired a new military significance. The wartime Fairbairn who taught soldiers and intelligence personnel was the product of the Shanghai Fairbairn who had spent years thinking about disorder, policing, firearms and sudden violence in one of the most unpredictable urban environments in the world.
Defendu is sometimes described today as though it appeared fully formed as a secret martial art, but it makes more historical sense to see it as Fairbairn’s answer to practical problems he encountered in police work. Shanghai supplied the laboratory. Fairbairn had access to policemen who needed training, experience of violent incidents, instructors from different fighting traditions and a city where theories could be judged against practical realities. His approach was deliberately eclectic. Instead of asking whether a movement belonged to judo, boxing, wrestling or another recognised system, the more important question was whether it could be learned and applied under pressure. The original police context should also be distinguished from the later military image attached to Fairbairn. A policeman was not simply being trained to kill an opponent. Police work involved control, arrest, restraint and survival, and the force had to operate within an urban environment filled with civilians. Wartime instruction for commandos and secret agents naturally moved toward harsher objectives. The famous wartime Fairbairn image can therefore obscure the earlier Shanghai development of his thinking. Defendu belongs first to the history of Old Shanghai policing and only afterwards to the history of special operations. Its publication in Shanghai in 1926 demonstrates how seriously the Municipal Police treated organised physical training. Shanghai encouraged innovation because Shanghai was difficult. The same city that experimented with municipal administration, electric lighting, traffic systems, telecommunications and international finance also encouraged experimentation in policing. Fairbairn’s methods were another expression of that atmosphere, practical, cosmopolitan and shaped by a city where people and ideas from different worlds were continually meeting.
Yet to concentrate entirely on policemen, criminals and fighting systems would miss what made Old Shanghai so extraordinary. The city was a succession of sounds, smells and visual contrasts. There were tram bells and automobile horns, street vendors calling, construction work, ships sounding on the river, music escaping from dance halls, conversations in several Chinese dialects and numerous foreign languages. Wealthy residents could dine in grand hotels, attend race meetings, shop in modern department stores and dance to jazz orchestras. A short distance away families might live in crowded lane housing or makeshift huts. Shanghai’s industries employed enormous numbers of Chinese workers, while the port attracted migrants seeking employment from surrounding provinces. The Settlement’s prosperity itself drew people toward it. The wealthy foreign Shanghai of banks, clubs and race courses was therefore only one layer of a much larger Chinese metropolis. The city’s remarkable population also included Britons, Americans, French, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Indians, Armenians and many others. Among the communities woven deeply into this international Shanghai were the Jews, whose presence in the city began long before the refugee crisis of the Nazi period. Jewish Shanghai was not a single community. It was a succession of communities whose experiences reflected the changing history of the city itself.
The earliest important modern Jewish community in Shanghai consisted primarily of Sephardic Jews with roots in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East who arrived through the trading networks of the British Empire during the nineteenth century. By the years before the Second World War there were about seven hundred members of this older Sephardic community, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Families such as the Sassoons and Kadoories became deeply associated with the commercial and architectural life of Shanghai. Sir Victor Sassoon in particular became one of the figures associated with the spectacular development of the Bund and modern Shanghai. The building that later became famous as the Peace Hotel was originally Sassoon House, one of the great landmarks of the city. This established Jewish elite inhabited a world very different from the one that later refugees would encounter. There were businesses, clubs, charitable organisations and synagogues, and Jewish families participated in the extraordinary commercial expansion that made Shanghai one of Asia’s great ports. Another Jewish population arrived after the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Several thousand Ashkenazi Jews from Russia settled in Shanghai, many earning their living through smaller businesses and professions rather than possessing the wealth associated with some of the great Baghdadi families. Russian Jews raised funds for the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, completed in 1927, a building that would later acquire profound importance for Jewish refugees. By the 1930s Shanghai therefore already possessed established Jewish institutions and communities before the greatest refugee movement began.
Then came Nazi persecution in Europe. Following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, conditions for German Jews became steadily more dangerous. The annexation of Austria in 1938 and the violence of Kristallnacht in November of that year produced a desperate search for escape. The tragedy was that escape required somewhere willing to receive the refugee. Immigration barriers throughout much of the world made that increasingly difficult. Shanghai became exceptional because, until August 1939, a visa was not required for entry into the city. For families who had been stripped of rights, property and security, this legal peculiarity could mean the difference between entrapment and survival. Shanghai was thousands of miles from Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg and Breslau. Many refugees knew almost nothing about China. Some had never imagined travelling to Asia. Yet a ticket to Shanghai could represent something infinitely more valuable than familiarity. It represented an open door. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that about seventeen thousand German and Austrian Jews reached Shanghai during the great refugee movement, while the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum describes the broader number of European Jews who found refuge there as about twenty thousand. At a time when borders across the world were closing, Shanghai became one of the very few places where large numbers of desperate European Jews could still find sanctuary.
Their arrival added another remarkable layer to the human landscape of Old Shanghai. Refugees stepped from ships into a city already scarred by the fighting between China and Japan. Many had arrived with little money because Nazi regulations had prevented them from taking much property out of Europe. The wealthy Shanghai of the Cathay Hotel, the Bund and fashionable nightclubs was visible, but it was not the Shanghai most refugees could afford. Thousands settled in Hongkew, a crowded district where rents were comparatively low and where life was difficult for Chinese residents and newcomers alike. Jewish relief organisations, established Jewish residents and overseas organisations attempted to provide shelter, food and assistance. The scale of the need was enormous. By late 1939, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than half of the refugee population required financial assistance for food or housing, and about two thousand five hundred people were living in communal shelters known as Heime. Yet the refugees did more than survive. They opened businesses, cafés, bakeries, shops and restaurants. They organised schools, religious institutions, newspapers, theatrical performances and musical events. By 1940 an area around Chusan Road had become known as Little Vienna because of its European cafés, delicatessens, nightclubs, shops and bakeries. For a brief and extraordinary period, fragments of Central European urban culture were recreated in the lanes of a Chinese district on the other side of the world.
This Jewish refugee Shanghai deserves a place within the familiar imagery of Old Shanghai every bit as much as the Bund, the policemen, the opium dens, the jazz clubs and the grand hotels. Imagine a Viennese refugee opening a café in Hongkew while a Chinese family lived next door, a Russian Jewish shopkeeper speaking with customers a few streets away, a Baghdadi Jewish businessman crossing the International Settlement in a motorcar, Sikh policemen directing traffic, Chinese constables patrolling their beats and British detectives moving between stations. Shanghai was not a melting pot in which differences disappeared. Communities often remained socially distinct and economic differences could be enormous, but they occupied the same city and repeatedly came into contact. The Jewish refugees experienced poverty, overcrowding, disease and uncertainty alongside Chinese neighbours who were themselves enduring war, displacement and hardship. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum emphasises the shared experience of Jewish refugees and Chinese residents in Hongkew, where difficult circumstances brought the communities into everyday contact. The refugee story therefore cannot be reduced to the claim that wealthy foreign Shanghai simply saved European Jews. Most refugees survived in districts filled with ordinary Chinese residents, aided by Jewish relief organisations and individuals while living amid a Chinese population that was itself suffering terribly from war.
Among the refugees were not only Germans and Austrians. A remarkable group of Polish Jews eventually reached Shanghai after escaping through Lithuania, the Soviet Union and East Asia. Around two thousand one hundred Polish Jewish refugees reached safety through an extraordinary chain of circumstances during 1940 and 1941. The story involved humanitarian assistance from diplomats including the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara and the Dutch representative Jan Zwartendijk, while the Chinese diplomat Ho Feng Shan issued visas to Jews attempting to escape Austria. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum records the importance of Ho Feng Shan and other diplomats in helping refugees make their journeys. Among those who reached Shanghai were rabbis and students associated with the Mir Yeshiva. They continued their religious studies in Shanghai during the war, and the Mir Yeshiva became the only major eastern European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust almost intact. Its students gathered at the Beth Aharon Synagogue, which had been built by a wealthy member of Shanghai’s older Sephardic community. In this extraordinary way the different eras of Jewish Shanghai met one another. Wealth created by an earlier Baghdadi Jewish community helped provide an institution in which refugees from destroyed Jewish communities in Eastern Europe could preserve their religious learning.
The war transformed this fragile sanctuary. Large parts of Shanghai had already fallen under Japanese control following the fighting of 1937, but the International Settlement and French Concession retained a precarious separate existence for several more years. After Japan entered the wider Pacific War in December 1941, the old foreign order effectively collapsed. British and American power in Shanghai disappeared, enemy nationals were eventually interned, and Japanese authority became dominant throughout the city. For Jewish refugees who had escaped Nazi Europe, the situation became increasingly uncertain. In February 1943 the Japanese authorities announced the creation of a designated area for stateless refugees. Jews from Germany, Austria and Poland who had arrived in Shanghai after the beginning of the refugee crisis were compelled to live within this restricted area in Hongkew, which residents commonly came to describe as the Shanghai ghetto. It is important to understand exactly what this meant. The measure did not apply in the same way to every Jewish resident of Shanghai. Older Russian and Sephardic Jewish communities were in different legal positions. Nor did Japanese policy in Shanghai become an equivalent of Nazi extermination policy. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Japanese measures were based primarily upon nationality and refugee status rather than a programme of systematic mass murder of Jews. Nevertheless, life inside the designated area could be extremely harsh. Movement was restricted, housing was desperately crowded, food and medicine were difficult to obtain and refugees faced arbitrary authority and constant uncertainty.
And yet the Shanghai refuge fulfilled its most fundamental purpose. Most of the European Jews who reached the city survived the Holocaust. While Jewish communities across Europe were being destroyed, thousands of refugees in Shanghai endured the war in crowded rooms, communal shelters, cafés, workshops, schools and synagogues. They built lives in circumstances that had never been part of their plans. Children went to school. Newspapers were produced. Musicians performed. Religious services continued. People married and families were formed. Refugees argued, worked, worried about relatives in Europe and waited for news that often did not come. Chinese neighbours continued their own lives amid occupation, hunger and war. Shanghai was no paradise, and describing it as one would diminish the hardship experienced by both refugees and Chinese residents. It was something more important than paradise. It was a place where people who had been denied entry elsewhere were able to remain alive. The Wall of Names maintained today by the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum records 18,578 names, a reminder that the refugee story consists not merely of statistics but of individual lives.
The Jewish story also reveals something fundamental about the character of Old Shanghai. The very political irregularity that made the city a symbol of foreign privilege helped create conditions in which people who were unwanted elsewhere could enter it. This does not erase the injustices of the treaty port system or convert foreign control into a humanitarian project. The International Settlement had not been created to save refugees from Nazism. Its unusual immigration arrangements arose from the peculiar structure of authority in Shanghai. Yet history often produces consequences that its institutions were never designed to create. A city divided among Chinese, British, French, Japanese and other jurisdictions became, for a few crucial years, a crack in the international system through which thousands of persecuted people could escape. Shanghai’s openness was chaotic rather than idealistic, but to those standing on a European railway platform with Nazi persecution behind them, the distinction could become secondary. If Shanghai was somewhere they could enter, then Shanghai meant life.
The 1930s therefore gave Old Shanghai both its most famous appearance and its most tragic complexity. The neon signs still shone. Hotels still served drinks. Dance halls still played jazz. Police still patrolled the Settlement. Fairbairn and Sykes were still connected to the hard world of police training and practical shooting. Wealthy families still maintained homes and businesses. Yet around them China was at war. Chinese refugees crowded into districts that seemed safer. European Jews arrived from a continent descending into genocide. Japanese military power expanded. Political assassination, espionage, smuggling and competing intelligence organisations flourished. The International Settlement increasingly resembled an island surrounded by a conflict it could not control. Foreign residents who once imagined the Settlement as permanent were forced to recognise that the political system sustaining their world could not survive indefinitely. Fairbairn left Shanghai in 1940 and carried his experience into wartime training. After December 1941 Japanese forces took control of the International Settlement. In 1943 the foreign treaty system that had sustained it was formally relinquished. The Shanghai Municipal Police disappeared with the political order that had created it. The refugee community remained until the defeat of Japan in 1945, after which most of Shanghai’s European Jewish refugees eventually departed for the United States, Australia, Palestine and later Israel, and other destinations.
This is why the story of Fairbairn, Sykes and Defendu should be placed within the much larger story of Old Shanghai. Their methods did not emerge from an abstract theory of combat. They came from a peculiar international port where policemen confronted criminals, political militants, riots and ordinary disorder amid complicated legal boundaries and enormous social differences. Fairbairn’s willingness to study different fighting traditions reflected Shanghai itself, a city in which ideas, people and institutions constantly crossed cultural boundaries. Sykes brought another kind of practical knowledge, particularly concerning firearms and marksmanship. Together their names became associated with a severe philosophy of close combat that later found a natural audience during wartime. But Shanghai should never be reduced to the background scenery of their legend. The city was the essential ingredient. Without Shanghai’s streets, police stations, ranges, crowded neighbourhoods and unusual security problems, there would probably have been no Defendu in the form history remembers. Yet the same streets also contained Chinese factory workers, Sikh constables, Russian exiles, Baghdadi Jewish merchants, German Jewish doctors, Austrian musicians, Polish rabbis, American businessmen, British policemen and countless others. Fairbairn and Sykes were two figures within an extraordinary human landscape.
Perhaps the enduring fascination of Old Shanghai comes from the fact that no single image can contain it. There was the Shanghai of the Bund, with stone buildings facing the river and flags of great commercial powers moving in the wind. There was the Shanghai of Nanking Road, illuminated by advertisements and filled with shoppers. There were ballrooms, cinemas, restaurants, racing, newspapers and fashionable hotels. There were Chinese entrepreneurs creating modern businesses, writers and artists building new cultural movements, refugees arriving from distant provinces and foreign communities carrying fragments of Russia, Britain, Japan, India, America, Europe and the Middle East into the same city. There was the Shanghai of factories, sweat, disease, overcrowding and exploitation. There were gangsters and policemen, revolutionaries and informers, bankers and beggars, missionaries and smugglers. There was also Jewish Shanghai, from the Sassoons and Kadoories to Russian shopkeepers, from Ohel Moshe to the cafés of Little Vienna, from the Mir Yeshiva to the overcrowded rooms of Hongkew. A Sikh constable might stand directing traffic while a British detective crossed the road, Chinese officers worked a nearby station, a rickshaw puller hurried past a gleaming motorcar and a recently arrived Jewish refugee tried to sell bread or coffee from a tiny shop. Somewhere within this world William Fairbairn was considering how a policeman should react when an arrest suddenly became a fight, while Eric Sykes considered the realities of firearms at close distance. Somewhere else a family newly arrived from Vienna was trying to make sense of a Chinese city that had become their unlikely sanctuary.
When the International Settlement finally vanished, it took with it an entire political and social world. The Shanghai Municipal Council ceased to rule, the Shanghai Municipal Police ceased to exist, street names changed and the assumptions upon which foreign Shanghai had operated became part of history. Yet Old Shanghai has remained strangely alive in the imagination. Photographs preserve policemen standing outside stations, crowds filling Nanking Road, ships along the Bund, fashionable hotel interiors and the dense streets of Hongkew. Fairbairn and Sykes survived in another kind of memory. Their names travelled through wartime training schools into the history of commandos, intelligence services, practical shooting and close combat. Defendu, conceived in the demanding world of Shanghai policing, became part of a much broader international history of self defence. Jewish memory preserved a very different Shanghai, remembered not primarily for cocktails or gangsters but as the distant city that opened when so many other doors had closed. For many former refugees, Shanghai remained a place associated simultaneously with hardship and salvation. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum notes that many survivors and their descendants continued to regard the city with profound affection because it had become their second home.
To understand Old Shanghai, then, one must picture all these worlds existing at once. Picture the Bund beneath a grey morning sky, ships moving along the Huangpu, Nanking Road beginning another crowded day, policemen reporting for duty at stations scattered across the Settlement, rickshaws passing trams, detectives exchanging information with informants, restaurants opening and factories sounding their whistles. Picture a Jewish family who had escaped Vienna stepping ashore carrying what remained of their possessions, knowing almost nothing about China but understanding that they were alive. Picture Chinese residents of Hongkew making room in an already overcrowded district for strangers from a distant continent while enduring their own struggle against war and occupation. Picture the grand Sassoon buildings rising above the Bund while impoverished Jewish refugees slept in communal shelters only a few miles away. Picture Fairbairn teaching policemen Defendu, Sykes thinking about the pistol at close range, Sikh constables controlling crowds and Chinese policemen performing most of the daily work of policing the Settlement. That was Old Shanghai. It was glamorous and dangerous, sophisticated and unequal, generous and ruthless, cosmopolitan and deeply divided. It was a city shaped by empire, commerce, crime, migration, modernity and revolution. It was a place where fortunes were made, sovereignty was contested, policemen developed methods that would influence wartime special forces, and thousands of Jews found refuge from a Europe that was preparing to destroy them. Few cities have ever contained so many contradictions. Fewer still have played such dramatically different roles in the memories of the people who passed through them.
