Night Shanghai: dance halls, jazz bands and the songs of the times, 1922–1954

“Ye Shanghai” (夜上海, Night Shanghai) is a song before it is a slogan. Zhou Xuan (周璇) sang it in An All-Consuming Love (长相思), a film of 1947. The tune is usually credited to Chen Gexin (陈歌辛). Its words picture a city of lights that never sleeps, and the tired, empty feeling that comes with the morning. This story is about the world it described: the dance halls, the women who were paid to dance in them, the bands that played there, and the record industry that turned dance-floor songs into China’s first pop music.

Two things about the song set the tone. The film was shot in Hong Kong, not Shanghai: the Hong Kong Film Archive calls it Zhou Xuan’s first post-war film there. Its first director, Zhang Shichuan, was sent back to Shanghai halfway through and his son-in-law He Zhaozhang finished it. So the song that fixed the image of Shanghai nights was already, in 1947, a song about a city its makers had left. And it is not a celebration. It is half in love with the lights and half sick of them.

How did Shanghai start dancing?

Ballroom dancing came with the foreign hotels. The Shanghai Women’s Gazetteer (上海妇女志) names the first dance floors as those at Richard’s Hotel, the Astor House at the north end of the Garden Bridge, and at the Carlton theatre near Nanjing Road. Both were for foreigners only. The guidebook All About Shanghai still listed the Astor House’s winter tea dances in 1934.

Chinese Shanghai began in 1922, when the Yipinxiang (一品香), a Chinese-run hotel, put on social tea dances. The gazetteer credits it with starting the fashion. The next step came from the department stores. In 1927, it says, the Wing On (永安) company opened the first dance hall proper, the Great Eastern (大东舞厅). Its band was hired from the Philippines. The women who danced with customers were recruited by advertisement and trained, and from then on, the gazetteer says, partnering men on the dance floor became a trade.

The stores were natural hosts. Since 1917 the four big Nanjing Road companies had run amusement floors above their shops. The Shanghai Culture and Arts Gazetteer (上海文化艺术志) lists them: Sincere’s roof garden of 1917, Wing On’s Tianyun Lou (天韵楼) of 1918, Sun Sun’s of 1926 and Da Sun’s of 1936. Theatres and a dance floor were among the attractions of each. At Sun Sun the skating rink became a dance hall at night. When Wing On built its tower in 1932, the seventh floor became the Seventh Heaven (七重天), a dance hall that closed after 1949. Shanghai Television began broadcasting from the same rooms. A few blocks south, at Xizang Road and Avenue Edward VII, the Great World (大世界), opened in 1917, offered a dozen stages for one ticket.

The palaces of the 1930s

The 1930s brought purpose-built halls. The gazetteer gives four of the best known.

The Paramount (百乐门) stood at the corner of Jessfield Road and Yuyuan Road, in the Paramount building. It had two dance floors. One was laid with 10-centimetre panels of coloured frosted glass and was known simply as “the glass floor”. The other was sprung. Both were heated in winter and cooled in summer. A large Filipino band played the dance music of every country, and singers were hired between sets. The dancers were advertised by nationality: White Russian, French, Portuguese, and the most popular Chinese.

The Metropole (大都会) began as the dance hall of the Sun Sun store’s hotel. It took the name Metropole in 1934, at a reopening performed by the film star Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉). The next year its owners opened the Metropole Gardens on Gordon Road, now Jiangning Road, and the original became the International.

Ciro’s (仙乐斯舞宫), at 444 Bubbling Well Road, was Sassoon money. Work began in 1935 and finished in November 1936, and it opened with a private dance on Christmas Day as a Sassoon club. According to the gazetteer it followed the plans of a New York club of the same name. It had no windows, its air was heated or cooled, and its floor was sprung. In 1937 it was leased to Chinese operators and opened to the public.

The St Anna (圣爱娜) opened in the early 1930s in the old Country Club building on Bubbling Well Road, the address the guidebook gives as 80 Love Lane. In summer it opened an open-air garden ballroom on Yuyuan Road, opposite Jessfield Park, with a Black American jazz band. It ran into debt and closed in 1937.

The guidebook’s list of cabarets that “may safely be recommended” shows the scale. It names the Ambassador, the Palais Cafe and Ladow’s Casanova on Avenue Edward VII, the Canidrome on the Rue Lafayette, the Majestic Cafe and the Vienna Ballroom on Bubbling Well Road, the St Anna on Love Lane and the Venus Cafe on North Szechuen Road. The Majestic’s advertisement calls it the largest cabaret in Shanghai, with “100 charming dance hostesses”. The Cathay Hotel held tea and dinner dances with floor shows. The Paramount is not on the list.

Dates for the Paramount differ. The Culture and Arts Gazetteer says it was completed and opened in 1932. Shanghai’s government information office, writing for the reopening in 2017, says 1933.

How was a taxi dancer paid?

The guidebook sorts the cabarets into “high class, low class, and no class”. At the first kind you brought your own partner. The second supplied “dancing hostesses” at a moderate fee. It gives the rate as “a dime to a dollar a dance” and lists the hostesses as Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Eurasians.

The Women’s Gazetteer explains how the money moved. A man paid his partner in dance tickets, a set number for each dance. A popular dancer might be asked to “sit at the table”, talking rather than dancing, which paid more. A dancer who sat all night without a partner was said to be “eating tangyuan” (吃汤团), and on those nights there was nothing to cook at home. The tickets were not hers to keep. She usually handed about seven in ten to the dancers’ head (舞女大班), and the head passed a share of the pool to the hall’s owner. The dancer kept about three in ten.

The gazetteer also records who the dancers were. In December 1949 the Public Security Bureau counted 1,422 working dancers. Of these:

• 1,157 were aged 18 to 25, and only one was over 35.
• 589 came from Jiangsu, 496 from Zhejiang and 174 from Shanghai itself.
• 1,417 gave hardship as their reason for taking the work.
• 575 had been dancing for less than a year.
• 825 had primary schooling, 444 could not read, 152 had been to secondary school and one to university.

Some, the gazetteer says, danced at night and studied book-keeping or typing by day; they dressed plainly and were known as the “student type”.

The numbers over time are rough. The gazetteer counts 29 dance halls and about 3,000 dancers in 1946. The census of the International Settlement in 1935 lists 1,092 Chinese “singers and dancers”, 825 of them women, but that heading also covered sing-song performers, so it cannot be read as a count of taxi dancers.

What did the Council make of it?

The Shanghai Municipal Council, which governed the International Settlement, treated dancing as one more licensed trade. Its licence tables do not use the words “dance hall” or “cabaret”. The venue was a “Dancing Saloon”, in the same class as a music hall, circus or fair. The licence was charged for every day or night the place was open, and a bar inside a dancing saloon needed a licence of its own: $175 to $300 a quarter by 1936. The Council’s Gazette printed each new application so that objections could be lodged. In February 1939, for example, Karl Heyer applied for a dancing saloon licence for 1154–6 Broadway East in Hongkou.

Enforcement fell partly to the fire brigade. In 1936 it prosecuted the licensees of two dancing saloons, along with three sing-song houses and one cinema, for breaking licence conditions; all were convicted.

The Council also saw the halls as a source of revenue. In 1932 it considered a tax on amusements. A memorandum printed in the Gazette counted 23 cinemas and three large Chinese theatres in the Settlement. It noted “a number of dance halls” but left them out of its sums, then added that extending the tax to dance halls and cabarets with a cover charge should raise a quarter more.

By 1939 the Council’s new Child Protection Section was looking at the halls from another angle. Its report for April listed “girls in dancing halls, ‘taxi dancers’” among the young people being “transferred” from one keeper to another.

Who played the music?

For most of the period, the bands were foreign. The Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, which the Council paid for, had recruited Filipino musicians since 1878. Phillip Guingona counts 22 Filipinos and 17 Europeans in it in 1920. By 1927 the figures were 14 Filipinos to 30 Europeans, and in 1940 three Filipinos, 43 Europeans and four Chinese players. Many orchestra players, Guingona told Sixth Tone, ended their careers in the dance bands. The Philippine consul general said in 1947 that more than half the Filipinos in Shanghai played music in the evenings.

The bandleaders became local names. Sixth Tone, drawing on the Chinese press of the time, notes a China Press ranking that put Don José’s Filipino band ahead of Whitey Smith’s American band. In the 1940s Lobing Samson’s band played at Ciro’s with the singer Yao Lee (姚莉).

American players came too, and the best documented is the trumpeter Buck Clayton. In 1933 the pianist Teddy Weatherford, a Shanghai favourite, was back in Los Angeles hiring musicians for the Canidrome ballroom. He signed Clayton’s band. Clayton later wrote: “My life seemed to begin in Shanghai.” He had never been treated with such respect as a Black musician at home. The respect had limits. After a white American marine picked a fight with him, the Canidrome received bomb threats and let the band go. Clayton moved to the Casa Nova, a ballroom with a Chinese public, where the band had to learn the Chinese hits of the day. He went home in 1935 and joined Count Basie.

Chinese bands were the cheaper option, and in the end the patriotic one. The first all-Chinese dance band is usually credited to Li Jinhui (黎锦晖). Szu-Wei Chen’s history of the Shanghai music industry tells the story. In 1934 the Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng (杜月笙) asked Li to form a jazz band for the dance hall in his new Yangtze Hotel. Du wanted every member Chinese, preferably tall northerners so that nobody would take them for Filipinos. Li arranged his own songs as dance tunes alongside the foreign repertoire, and the hall was full every night. Other halls followed, partly because Chinese melodies drew customers and partly because Chinese musicians cost less than the Filipinos and White Russians.

The top cabarets held out. Chen notes that in 1939 it was reported as unprecedented when the Paramount added five Chinese film songs to its programme. The change came with the war. After Japan occupied the settlements in December 1941, Hollywood songs and American big-band numbers were pushed off the dance floor as enemy culture. In 1942 the Paramount advertised in the Shun Pao (申报) for Chinese women singers. The occupation government also taxed entertainment at 30 per cent of the ticket price.

Zhou Wanrong (周万荣), a trumpeter who played the Paramount, told the Taipei Times in 2000 that before the war most bands had been foreign. Filipinos had the big hotels and dance halls, and Chinese players got only the small bars. When the foreign bands left, managers had no choice but to hire Chinese. After 1945 the same players found an audience among American troops, who paid in US dollars. By then the Paramount had an all-Chinese band, led by Jimmy King, a pupil of Lobing Samson; the bassist Zheng Deren (郑德仁) joined it in 1947.

Where did the songs come from?

Chinese pop began as children’s music. Li Jinhui (1891–1967), from Hunan, edited the children’s weekly Xiao pengyou in Shanghai from 1920 to 1927 and wrote a dozen children’s musicals. In 1928 he took his Zhonghua song-and-dance troupe on tour to Southeast Asia, and on his return he reorganised it as the Bright Moon troupe (明月歌舞团). The Culture and Arts Gazetteer credits it with training a generation of stars: Li’s daughter Li Minghui (黎明晖), Wang Renmei, Li Lili and Zhou Xuan.

To keep the troupe afloat, and to suit the publishers, Li wrote love songs. The gazetteer’s table of principal songs calls “Drizzle” (毛毛雨), “Express Train”, “Little Sister I Love You” and “Peach Blossom River” “the earliest commercial popular songs”, and says they began Chinese popular song. Chen describes “Drizzle” as a folk-style tune with words of love too familiar for public use, accompanied by Western instruments in a rough New Orleans jazz. It was sung by a girl with a high, untrained voice. Lu Xun likened it to “a cat being strangled”. When Li re-recorded it in 1934, the arrangement had become plainly jazz.

The criticism came from all sides. Nie Er (聂耳), who played violin in Li’s troupe, attacked Li’s work in print in July 1932 under the pen name “Black Angel” and left. Critics called the music “yellow”, meaning obscene, and the Nationalist government banned some of Li’s songs and children’s musicals. The songs stayed popular all the same.

The records

The songs reached the city through gramophone records, and the records mostly came from one company. Chen traces it to Pathé Phono Cinema Chine, founded in Shanghai in 1908 by a Frenchman, E. Labansat. It became Pathé Orient in 1921, when it built a new studio. In 1930 the British Columbia company took over its Shanghai property, and on 25 June 1934 it was formally registered as Electric & Musical Industries (China). Chinese buyers went on calling it Pathé, Baidai (百代).

In the 1930s EMI had 24 record presses in Shanghai, RCA-Victor 18 and the Chinese-owned Great China 8. Chen cites Andrew Jones’s estimate that by 1932 Shanghai pressed 5.4 million records a year, about half of them EMI’s. In 1932 the company created the post of musical director and gave it to the composer Ren Guang (任光). Two years later Nie Er joined the music department and formed a Chinese orchestra to accompany its recordings.

The company’s office stood at 811 Hengshan Road in Xujiahui, a red-brick house now called the Little Red Building. It is better known in China for a political recording than for pop. In 1935 Ren Guang’s music department recorded “March of the Volunteers”, the song from the film Children of Troubled Times that became the national anthem of the People’s Republic, and the house is now a memorial to that recording. Nie Er had written the music but had left for Japan in April. He drowned there in July.

Film songs and the singers

In the late 1930s and the 1940s the songs moved into the cinema. The Culture and Arts Gazetteer says films of the period almost all had songs. Those with four to fourteen were advertised as “singing epics”. The songs were printed in songbooks before a film opened, recorded, broadcast and sung in the halls.

A new group of composers followed Li Jinhui’s commercial road. The gazetteer names Yan Gongshang, Li Jinguang (黎锦光), Chen Gexin, Yan Hua, Liang Leyin, Huang Yijun and Wang Yunjie. Li Jinguang, Li Jinhui’s younger brother, worked for the Victor and Pathé companies for ten years from 1938. He wrote more than 120 film songs for Zhou Xuan, Li Lihua, Gong Qiuxia and Yao Lee. He also wrote “Ye lai xiang” (夜来香), which the gazetteer gives as an example of songs written purely for the dance halls. Chen Gexin wrote “Rose, Rose, I Love You” (玫瑰玫瑰我爱你).

Zhou Xuan was the voice of the period, known as the “Golden Voice”. She came out of Li Jinhui’s troupe, and the gazetteer lists her among his pupils. After the war she made films in Hong Kong, and “Ye Shanghai” came from the first of them.

1948: the dancers’ riot

The halls survived the war; they nearly did not survive the peace. In 1947 the national government in Nanjing banned commercial dancing, on the grounds that dancing in the cities while the army fought the civil war hurt morale. Shanghai decided to close its halls in batches chosen by lot. The first draw was set for 3 p.m. on 31 January 1948.

The Women’s Gazetteer tells the story from the dancers’ side. They formed an association, elected Jin Meihong (金美虹) to lead it, and petitioned the city and the government in Nanjing. They held press conferences. They opened retraining classes in sewing, cooking, typing, book-keeping and embroidery, and more than 500 dancers enrolled, to show that they would take other work if there were any. Their demand was that jobs come before the ban.

At 1 p.m. on 31 January the dancers and dance-hall staff met at the Sun Sun Lin (新仙林) dance hall. During the meeting a reporter brought word that the Social Affairs Bureau had held the draw early, at 11 that morning, and that 14 halls, the Paramount among them, were to close. The meeting broke up and marched to the bureau. The director, Wu Kaixian (吴开先), would not see them. The crowd broke in, wrecked the offices and threw files, chairs and drawers from the windows. Police arrived at 4.30. The Women’s Gazetteer says 797 people were arrested and several leaders were jailed, and that the city then allowed the halls to keep trading.

The English-language press in Shanghai was not unsympathetic. The China Weekly Review’s editorial of 14 February 1948 said the ban would mean unemployment and possible starvation for thousands of cabaret girls, which was why they were so militant. Its digest of the Chinese papers quoted a less forgiving view: storming a government office “certainly should not be encouraged”.

After 1949

The halls lasted a few more years. Christian Henriot, in a study of how Shanghai closed its brothels, records that dance-hall advertisements vanished from the papers in March 1950. Three years later 721 registered taxi dancers and 579 waitresses were still at work. The dance halls were finally banned in November 1954. The buildings found new uses:

• The Metropole closed in 1952, and its Jiangning Road hall became a story-telling house.
• Ciro’s closed in 1953, became a story-telling house and a puppet theatre, and was demolished in 1995.
• The Paramount became the Hongdu (红都) cinema in 1951.
• The Canidrome was awarded by a court to the city’s Culture Bureau in 1951 and rebuilt as the People’s Culture Square.

The music went south. Pathé closed its Shanghai operation in April 1949, and the industry moved to Hong Kong. Sixth Tone notes that Lobing Samson and other Shanghai jazz musicians followed, and that Filipino arrangers such as Vic Cristobal arranged many of the songs Hong Kong recorded. Chen Gexin went to Hong Kong and came back. He was labelled a rightist in 1957 and died at a labour farm in 1961. Li Jinguang stayed and worked as a sound director at the China Record factory. In 1985 the factory brought him back to sort the popular songs of the 1930s and 1940s.

The players came back too. In October 1980 six veterans of the old dance bands, led by Zhou Wanrong, began playing at the Jin Jiang Hotel. By the end of the year they had moved to the Peace Hotel, the old Cathay. In 1989 they were the first Chinese band at the Sacramento jazz festival. In 2019 the band’s manager said Guinness World Records counted it the world’s oldest jazz band, with an average age of 82. The Paramount reopened as a dance hall in 1994. After a restoration of 2013–17 it again sells dances, with a jazz band on the stage.

What the sources disagree on

The 1948 riot. The two gazetteers do not agree on its size:

• The Women’s Gazetteer puts the crowd at the Social Affairs Bureau at more than 6,000 and the arrests at 797.
• The Public Security Gazetteer puts the meeting at more than 2,000 and the arrests at more than 500. It says all the arrested dancers were later released. It also dates the national ban to October 1947, where the Women’s Gazetteer says only the second half of 1947.

The Public Security Gazetteer’s 2,000 are the people at the Sun Sun Lin meeting; the Women’s Gazetteer’s 6,000 are those outside the bureau. Neither book says where its figures come from.

How many dancers. The Women’s Gazetteer gives about 3,000 dancers in 29 halls in 1946. The Public Security Gazetteer gives more than 800 licensed dancers in nearly 20 halls in 1947, so its count covers only women with a licence. Neither count covers the 1930s, and the Settlement’s 1935 census mixes dancers with sing-song performers.

When the Paramount opened. It was 1932 in the Culture and Arts Gazetteer and 1933 in the city information office’s account of 2017.

When Chinese pop began. Sixth Tone dates “Drizzle” to 1927. The Culture and Arts Gazetteer’s table puts it with Li Jinhui’s other first commercial songs “in the early 1930s”, the years when he was writing for the Bright Moon troupe’s survival.

Who wrote “Ye Shanghai”. The tune is generally credited to Chen Gexin, and a 2022 China Times profile lists it among his best-known songs. The gazetteer’s short biography of him does not mention it. The Hong Kong Film Archive’s notes on the film name the screenwriter, Fan Yanqiao, but not the songwriters.

The Peace Hotel band’s founding. The gazetteer and the Taipei Times say 1980. The band’s manager in 2019 said December 1979.

What to look for

The Paramount, 218 Yuyuan Road. The corner of Yuyuan Road and Wanhangdu Road, by Jing’an Temple station. Look up at the stepped round tower over the entrance. It was taken down in the cinema years and rebuilt in the restoration of 2013–17. The dance floors upstairs are open to paying visitors again.

The Peace Hotel, on the Bund at Nanjing Road. The old Cathay has a jazz bar with a resident band of older musicians. The band was formed in 1980 by men who had played the Paramount and the other halls in the 1940s.

Nanjing Road East. The Wing On store and its 1932 tower stand on the pedestrian street. The tower’s seventh floor was the Seventh Heaven; the roof gardens and dance floors of the 1920s and 1930s have all gone.

The Little Red Building, 811 Hengshan Road. Pathé’s office stands in Xujiahui Park. It is listed heritage architecture and now a memorial to the 1935 recording of “March of the Volunteers”.

The Canidrome site, Fuxing Middle Road. The greyhound track and its ballroom are gone. The city turned the site into a public square from 1951, and the Shanghai Culture Square stands there now.

What is gone. Ciro’s on Nanjing West Road was demolished in 1995, and the Metropole Gardens on Jiangning Road were cleared in 1992.