Most of the Shanghai that Denton would have known has been swept away. His family lived among fellow wealthy Europeans, in European-style houses, few of which remain. Greg Girard’s eerily evocative photographs in Phantom Shanghai show how they were gradually pushed out to make way for a modern, Chinese city.
The fascinating Virtual Shanghai website hosts maps showing how Shanghai has evolved over the last two centuries. This map from 1921 shows the Victoria Nursing Home, where Denton was born in 1915.
This colourised picture of the bund in Shanghai around 1930 probably looks as it would have done when Denton and his family boarded their house-boat in The Coffin on the Hill.
The great mass of shipping on the river before Shanghai alarmed me. I felt that a small steamer boat could never thread its way between all the steamers, junks and sampans; but as soon as we were on board I was so enchanted that I forgot everything but the little world of the boat.
Grateful thanks to Steven Kelly (expert author of Denton’s Wikipedia pages) for pointing me to the Phantom Shanghai and Virtual Shanghai websites.
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