Empire Made Me
"Shanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities, rivalled only by New York and Berlin. Its waterfront crammed with ocean freighters, gunboats, junks and myriad coastal craft, it was the focus for trade between China and the world, creating, for Chinese and foreigner alike, immense if precarious opportunities. Shanghai's great panorama of nightclubs, opium dens, brothels, racetracks and casinos was intertwined with this industrial powerhouse to create a uniquely seductive but also terrifying metropolis." "Keeping order in such a place was never easy, but for the British-run administration in the 1920s and 1930s life became increasingly desperate. Threatened both from within by gangsters and from without by Chinese warlords and the Japanese military, the Shanghai miracle was in reality a very fragile thing." "Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the Shanghai police. It is his story, told in part through his rediscovered photo-albums and letters, that Robert Bickers tells here. Aggressive, bullying, racist, self-aggrandizing, Maurice Tinkler was in many ways a typical Briton-on-the-make in an empire world that gave authority to its citizens purely through their skin colour. But Tinkler was also very much more than this - for all his bravado, he could not know that the history that packed him off to Shanghai could just as readily crush him."--BOOK JACKET.