Tower of Vice: Shanghai’s Great World

There’s no more notorious symbol of Old Shanghai’s underworld than the pleasure palace that was the Great World—after all, this tiered wedding cake of a building was owned by one of the most powerful gangsters in the city: Huang Jinrong, aka Pockmarked Huang. Read on, for the story:

But when the Great World opened in 1917, it wasn’t yet a tower of vice. Fortuitously situated on the corner of Avenue Edward VII (Yan’an Road) and Tibet Road (Xizang Lu), in the former French Concession, it was the brainchild of Huang Chunjiu (no relation to the gangster), and a place for good, clean family fun.

Huang was a pharmacist from Zhejiang province, but his real genius was in marketing. He had made his fortune on a ‘brain tonic,’ carefully designed to appear Western and appeal to a Chinese audience. Today we’d probably call him a snake-oil salesman.

In 1931, he sold the building to Pockmarked Huang, who was simultaneously a leader of the Green Gang triad, the most powerful gang in the city, and head of the old French Concession’s Chinese detective force. Fighting crime and organizing it weren’t mutually exclusive in Old Shanghai.

Pockmarked Huang promptly ditched his predecessor’s formula – the good, clean family fun one – for something much more risqué. Amid the Peking Opera performances and mirror mazes was every kind of gambling imaginable, taxi dancers, sing-song girls, all kinds of entertainment. The tales were legend: the higher you climbed in the building, they said, the higher the slits in the girls’ qipaos. If you lost it all, there was a place all the way at the top, where you could end it all, far below on Avenue Edward VII.

It was so notorious, so very naughty, that very few Old Shanghai residents ever admit to having gone there. As a little girl in 1940s Shanghai, our friend Nora Sun, granddaughter of Sun Yat-sen, begged and begged her amah to take her. “Good family girls don’t go to the Great World,” snapped the amah, but relented enough to take her to be amused by the ha-ha jing—the 12 image-distorting funhouse mirrors.

As a teenager, Ellis Jacob and his Shanghai American School friends went to sample the pleasures on offer at the Great World one evening. “Nothing more would have come of it,” he writes sheepishly in The Shanghai I Knew, “but one of the boys contracted a venereal disease.”

Great World, Gangsters, and Opera

But the Great World wasn’t just about vice. Huang and his Green Gang co-conspirator, Du Yuesheng, were big Chinese opera fans, not least because of the glamorous young opera stars. Huang owned opera theaters, and was briefly married one of its stars, Lu Lancheng (there’s a fascinating side story about Huang’s run-in with an admirer of Lu’s, a warlord’s son, which eventually resulted his slipping to number 2 in the Green Gang, but that’s for another time).

The Great World had its own opera troupe, which included the popular Meng Xiaodong who played the old man character, sheng. She was first linked with Peking opera mega-star Mei Lanfang, becoming his second concubine, but by the 1940s she would be Du Yuesheng’s last love.

The Great World Bombing

In 1937, as thousands of Chinese poured into Shanghai, fleeing the Japanese bombing in the Chinese parts of the city, the Great World was transformed into a refugee center. The refugees lived here, and hundreds lined up each day to be served meals. So in August 1937, when bombs fell on the Great World in a tragic instance of friendly fire, thousands were killed and maimed – a day that became known as Bloody Saturday.

Great World in New Shanghai

The Great World soldiered on, but its days as the Tower of Vice were numbered, and so were the Green Gang’s. In May 1949, Du Yuesheng took his opera star and family and decamped to Hong Kong. Huang Jinrong, nearing 80, chose to live out his days in Shanghai. After all, as so many people reasoned, it was just another change of government. But even at his advanced age, he was too steeped in the old society not to be a target. He had to be made an example. In a move that was almost poetic, he was assigned to sweep the floors of the pleasure palace he once owned. Both were shadows of their former selves. Naturally, the cameras were there to record the peak PR moment for the new government.

In New Shanghai, the Great World went back to being a place of good, clean family fun and entertainment. The Peking Opera remained, as did the ha-ha jing, and the grand atrium was packed with crowds watching the acrobats perform. In 2003, it was shuttered by the SARS outbreak, and somewhat mysteriously remained closed for the next 14 years.

Today, the Great World is trying to reinvent itself for modern Shanghai, where there’s no place for a tower of vice. That Great World was a slice of another era, never to return – but luckily, we have director Joseph von Sterberg’s breathless description of his 1930s visit there:

The establishment had six floors to provide distraction for the milling crowd, six floors that seethed with life and all the commotion and the noise that go with it studded with every variety of entertainment Chinese ingenuity had contrived. On the first floor were gambling tables, sing-song girls, magicians, pick-pockets, slot machines, fireworks, bird cages, fans, stick incense, acrobats and ginger, One flight up were the restaurants, a dozen different groups of actors, crickets in cages, pimps, mid-wives, barbers and earwax extractors. The third floor had jugglers, herb medicines, ice cream parlours, photographers, a new bevy of girls their high-collared gowns slit to reveal their hips, in case one passed up the more modest ones below who merely flashed their thighs, and (as a) novelty, several rows of exposed (Western) toilets.

The fourth floor was crowded with shooting galleries, fantan tables, massage benches, dried fish and intestines, and dance platforms. … The fifth floor featured girls whose dresses were slit up to the armpits, a stuffed whale, story tellers, balloons, peep shows, masks, a mirror maze, two love-letter booths with scribes who guaranteed results, ‘rubber goods’ and a temple filled with ferocious gods and joss sticks. On the top floor and roof of that house of multiple joys a jumble of tight-rope walkers slithered back and forth, and there were seesaws, lottery tickets, Chinese checkers, mahjongg … firecrackers, and marriage brokers.

And as I tried to find my way down again an open space was pointed out to me where hundreds of Chinese, so I was told, after spending their last coppers, had speeded the return to the street below by jumping from the roof…”Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry