The Last Kings of Shanghai. Jewish Rival Dynasties That Helped Build Modern China

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Kaufman was one of the first Western journalists allowed into China in the 1970s. Kaufman uncovers a history that official communist China has tried to erase: how two of the wealthiest Jewish families — Sassoon and Kadoorie — for over 175 years, from the Opium Wars to the rise of Mao and the Communist Party, ran the economy and politics of Shanghai.

The Sassoon and Kadoorie dynasties sparked an economic boom and opened China to the world, their money transformed Shanghai into a cosmopolitan metropolis, built the most luxurious hotels in the world (where, for example, Charlie Chaplin, the scandalous wife of the abdicated King Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson, and the famous English playwright Noël Coward stayed), and they also helped Jewish refugees find shelter in Shanghai during the Holocaust, yet they remained deaf and blind to the deep inequality in the country and to the political unrest at the doorstep of their palaces — and lost everything.