“Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai” by James Carter

November 12, 1941 was in Shanghai a day like another. Except that this was the day of the Champions Day horse races at the Shanghai Race Club. And that within a month the Japanese would put an end to the Shanghai that everyone knew.  In Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, James Carter uses this one day to paint a “kaleidoscopic portrait” of a dynamic city on the brink of war. On that day thousands of people across Shanghai gathered at one of three places around the city: a celebration of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday; the funeral of Liza Hardoon, Asia’s wealthiest woman; and the Champions Day horse races at the Shanghai Race Club.

The city’s long history of segregation and racism is much on Carter’s mind. Although the city housed three race tracks, he centers his story on the Shanghai Race Club. The SRC started as a whites-only club which denied women and Chinese residents membership. Over time, these restrictions loosened somewhat, but the Shanghailanders, or white expats, still controlled all that mattered: the races and club affairs.

The other events that day play a lesser role in the account, yet act as a foil to show how Shanghai had become one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world at the time. The half-Chinese, half-French Liza was married to the Baghdadi Jewish real estate tycoon Silas Hardoon. Silas had died a decade before, but the philanthropic family promoted an integrated Shanghai. Sun Yat-sen’s birthday was notable for being the first time in four years the Japanese allowed this celebration to take place.

 

Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, James Carter (WW Norton, June 2020)
Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, James Carter (WW Norton, June 2020)

The character sketches in Carter’s book trace a time plagued by racism and sexism. Not all women were household names like Emily Hahn or the Soong sisters, and Carter gives them voice.

Ing Tang appears throughout Champions Day. She was a clothing designer, businesswoman, and actress, starring in the main role of Lady Precious Stream, a London West End hit by the Chinese playwright SI Hsiung. The Shanghai production—the first time the play was performed with an all-Chinese cast—was so successful, enjoyed by Chinese and expat audiences alike that Tang was courted by Broadway to star in the same role in New York. (An untimely divorce would prevent her from traveling to Broadway.)

Another female duo is Vera McBain and Billie Liddell, owners of a horse stable together they called We Two. This was quite a feat in the 1930s and 40s, having to overcome attitudes that Carter quotes from a 1935 Fortune magazine issue devoted to Shanghai:

 

… Shanghailanders themselves act as one classless social group… He is generally loose in his sexual morals. He is apt to be a sportsman—golf, tennis, cricket, bowling, paper chasing, horse racing, and dog racing. And he will gamble on anything under the sun, from the New York Stock Exchange to Manchu ponies.

 

Yet by the height of Old Shanghai, McBain and Liddell were among the top racehorse personalities in the city.

Carter also draws attention to the planned community of Jiangwan, built for the Chinese population that had been marginalized in the colonial concessions.

 

“The Shanghai that exists now,” wrote architect Du Yangeng, “is a foreign Shanghai, and it is an embarrassment.” Du described not only his own thoughts about the city where he worked, but the feelings of many Chinese in Shanghai.

 

The Chiang Kai-shek government envisioned a different Shanghai for new China in the late 1920s, which would give the city its own jurisdiction, separate from the province. The Jiangwan area would be the center of this new Shanghai and at the center of the new construction was architect Dayu Doon. Doon was typical of many educated Shanghainese, born in China but educated abroad. As an architect, he had some say in the location of the new Chinese city in Shanghai.

 

Northeast of the Bund and the rest of the International Settlement, Jiangwan was, according to Doon, the ideal location because it was geographically at the center of the Shanghai municipality (though it was miles from the center of current development), with easy river access, flat topography, and little existing construction; no buildings would need to be demolished to create the New Shanghai.

 

Carter doesn’t romanticize Shanghai as a haven for expatriates, but rather shows the hope of Shanghai becoming a Chinese city run by Chinese, with some western characteristics. The opportunity passed in a flash, maybe not in the single day of this book, but Carter’s focus on  one day in 1941—four years after Japan took Shanghai apart from the foreign concessions and just before they fell as well—emphasizes  how the hopes for many in the city were shattered once and for all.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.