Great World

The Great World Entertainment Centre, facing onto the wide intersection of Yanan Lu and Xizang Lu, was the biggest and most famous entertainment complex of old Shanghai, with simultaneous all-day performances of music, films, opera, magic, with a host of ancillary attractions available, including brothels and fortune-tellers. It was a multi-media complex decades before the phrase was coined.

    Here is a description of the Great World from the film director Joseph von Sternberg in his book "Fun In A Chinese Laundry". Von Sternberg directed the 1934 smash hit movie Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich.

"THE ESTABLISHMENT had six floors to provide distraction for the milling crowd, six floors that seethed with life and all the commotion and noise that go with it studded with every variety of entertainment Chinese ingenuity had contrived. On the first floor were gambling tables, sing-song girls, magicians, pick-pockets, slot machines, fireworks, bird cages, fans, stick incense, acrobats and ginger. One flight up were the restaurants, a dozen different groups of actors, crickets in cages, pimps, mid-wives, barbers and earwax extractors. The third floor had jugglers, herb medicines, ice cream parlours, photographers, a new bevy of girls their high-collared gowns slit to reveal their hips, in case one had passed up the more modest ones below who merely flashed their thighs.

"The fourth floor was crowded with shooting galleries, fantan tables, massage benches...the fifth floor featured girls whose dresses were slit to the armpits, a stuffed whale, story tellers, balloons, peep shows, a mirror maze, two love-letter booths with scribes who guaranteed results, 'rubber goods' and a temple filled with ferocious gods and joss sticks. On the top floor and roof of that house of multiple joys a jumble of tight-rope walkers slithered back and forth, and there were seesaws, lottery tickets, and marriage brokers.

"And as I tried to find my way down again an open space was pointed out to me where hundreds of Chinese, so I was told, after spending their last coppers, had speeded the return to the street below by jumping from the roof..."


"When the Japanese aggressors occupied Shanghai, the 'Rong's Great World' became a 'special amusement' centre, where people were brain-washed with ideas of enslavement to benumb their will to fight for the nation. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the U.S. imperialists and Kuomintang reactionaries used it as a propaganda instrument to whip up an anti-communist and anti-popular campaign. American movies made in Hollywood on pornography and violence dominated the screen and obscene and superstitious operas flooded the stage. Pick-pockets, swindlers, prostitutes and rascals mixed with the audience with an ax to grind. Traitors and enemy agents of every hue were found spying for information or plotting against people's lives among the artists, staff and audience of the 'Great World'. The 'Great World' was, in fact, a paradise for monsters and demons and a den for enemy agents and traitors camouflaged by beautiful music and graceful dancing. After liberation, the 'Great World' returned to the embrace of the people. The people's government took it over in 1954."

(From Anecdotes of Old Shanghai, Cultural Publishing House, 1985.)

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