In a 1949 photograph of 's Huangpu River taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, an American warship can be seen floating amid the junks that crowd the harbor. The late French photojournalist, whose ability to capture history's definitive moments earned him the moniker "the eye of the century," knew that the days of a Western presence in Shanghai--and of China's Nationalist government--were coming to an end. Mao Zedong's Communist revolution would soon purge all foreign influences from the city that had been known as both the Paris of the East and the Whore of the Orient in the 1920s and 1930s. "In retrospect, the prewar period has an air of unreality about it," writes English author Harriet Sergeant in Shanghai
(John Murray Publishers), her compelling portrait of the city during that era. "One almost wonders if it ever happened at all, so good was Shanghai at creating illusion." Today a different kind of illusion has been created, as the city is again a vibrant mix of the East and the West.
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