Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai

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‘This is a biography of a nobody that offers a window into an otherwise closed world. It is a life which manages to touch us all…’ Empire Made MeShanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world’s most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities – an incredible panorama of nightclubs, opium-dens, gambling and murder. Threatened from within by communist workers and from without by Chinese warlords and Japanese troops, and governed by an ever more desperate British-dominated administration, Shanghai was both mesmerising and terrible.Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the police. It is his story, told in part through his rediscovered photo-albums and letters, that Robert Bickers has uncovered in this remarkable, moving book.

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