From The Diaries of Stanley Livingstone-Stanley, CBE
(Spatchcock & Knarles, Troon, 1954)
August 23rd,
Shanghai
Our ship, like a blessed ark, awaits us out in the Whangpu. Tomorrow morning we sail and not a moment too soon. Not for nothing did the evangelist say of this city: "If God lets Shanghai endure, He owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah".
Poor Carstairs will never be the same.
I shall not forget the rickshaw ride through the streets at 6 this morning. Frobisher, white as a ghost and liable to vomit at every lurch, tried to explain why he had roused me at such an hour. The man was the worse for drink and Lord knows what else, but it was clear that he had had to leave Carstairs in a position of danger, at the Palaise Crystal, on Rue Chu Pao-San - Blood Alley.......
.......We were soon outside the soaring edifice of that Temple of Pandemonium, its appalling pink and yellow facade and infernal crimson lighting gleaming in the murky dawn. Frobisher vomited long and hard before we went in.......
.......Frobisher, however, managed to summon up enough mettle to get us behind the main bar and into the "corridor of dreams" via the lavatories, by some negotiating (I heard the words "baksheesh" and "whisker-San" and "he wish stay with Tiger Lily" and knew we would find Carstairs here) with a stick-thin Korean lady in a yellow kimono who seemed to be the eponymous "Shanghai Lil". Here the air was almost solid with the foul opiate. All was decked out in blue plush and silk. The senses reeled at it. I had to send Frobisher back to his yellow "Lil", for he could not have stood it for long. I went on alone, through this tunnel to Hell.
The blue corridor had small openings about 4 feet high, with bamboo curtains across, on both sides. Oriental style name plates were fixed above each curtain. In the miasma and the blue glare it was hard to keep one's brains in order, but, after a sharp bend to the left, I saw the plaque:
TYGER LILY, SPECAL LADIE
and with pounding heart, dripping brow, and befogged eye, I broke through the bamboo curtain.
I was in the lowest of opium dens. Like a cave it was, the smog lit by hanging red paper lanterns. Two rows of 4 cots lay on the filthy floor. The walls dripped with condensation. The cots were unoccupied, but at the far end, a kind of double bed had been fashioned, and it was the obscene loading of that couch which has seared itself so upon my susceptible mind.......
.......There was a hookah by the bed, and pipes on a table also. The lantern above them gave the girl's body a strange, ghostly hue and sheen. Her face was very young, and hauntingly beautiful with its soft eyes beneath the glossy black hair. She was on her hands and knees above Carstairs.......
***Postcards and photographs reproduced from Originals of the Author's private collections by kind permission of his Estate***
