“Night in Shanghai, night in Shanghai, you are a city that never sleeps. Bright lights, the car sounds, peaceful and prosperous song and dance.”
These are the opening lines to Zhou Xuan’s ‘Shanghai Nights,’ still probably the most famous ballad to the ‘Paris of the East.’ You don’t earn praises like those without a popping nightlife – and if you think Shanghai delivers on that promise today, you should have seen it in the early 20th century.
Of the roughly 200 dance clubs in town, The Paramount was the city’s most famous – and also among its most hedonistic. In keeping with its Chinese name “Gate of a Hundred Pleasures” (pronounced in Shanghainese as “pah-loh-men”), the club was a shimmering monument to glitzy, glamorous debauchery, with enough dances and raging parties to make Jay Gatsby blush.
The club first opened with a fittingly extravagant golden-key ceremony by Madame Wu Tiecheng, wife of the city’s first Chinese mayor, on December 19, 1933. Crowds poured in to the tunes of the club’s in-house Russian orchestra, and the party was officially on.
Located at the corner of Yuyuan Road and Jessfield Road in the former International Settlement, the building's dramatic Art Deco design was the work of local architect S.J. Young. It featured the city’s first VIP room and first bar on a dance floor, which was reliably lined with The Paramount’s famed ‘taxi girls,’ vying to sell their services as dancing partners or escorts.
But the wild, freewheeling escapades of The Paramount would eventually be its undoing. In 1936, Sir Victor Sassoon was snubbed by a rude waiter during his visit to the club, and – this is an age when people took respect and honor extremely seriously – he started plotting its demise.
Sassoon was far from an average customer: he was perhaps the single biggest landowner in Shanghai, whose properties included the Cathay Hotel, many offices on the Bund and, by some estimates, more than 1,800 establishments throughout Shanghai. And he didn’t suffer rude waiters lightly.
Sassoon hired British firm Palmer and Turner, the same group behind the HSBC Building, Customs House and Cathay building, to build him a club to end all clubs. In 1936, he unveiled Ciro’s – the first building in Shanghai entirely devoted to a modern night club.
The 1930s were truly the golden age for Shanghai's night life. The decade – or, at least, most of it - brought a unity and calm that hadn't been seen in the city for many years, and a ban on foot-binding in the new republic meant a generation of dancers was now coming of age.
Competition between Ciro’s and The Paramount was fierce. If Sassoon’s mission was to take business from The Paramount, he succeeded – the year after Ciro’s opened its doors, The Paramount was facing bankruptcy and swapping out its management as it struggled to stay open.
Ciro’s may have been the newest, hippest spot in town, but The Paramount – nearly bankrupt or not - still had a guest list second to none.
The 'Young Marshall' Zhang Xueliang was a regular. The heir apparent to the ‘Tiger of Mukden's’ northeastern fiefdom insisted on making a pilgrimage to The Paramount every time he headed south for R&R with his brother-in-arms Zhang Zongchang, aka the 'Dogmeat General.'
Other regulars included Pockmarked Huang and Big-Eared Du, bosses of the infamous Green Gang that dominated the city’s extensive underworld. Some say the band would even observe a moment of silence when Du walked in, as a sign of respect (and/or fear).
By the late 1930s, the glimmer of Shanghai’s nightlife began to fade. The city fell to the Japanese in November 1937, butthe British and American-run International Settlement area that housed the Paramount continued until December 1941, when Tokyo declared war on the Allies and attacked Hong Kong and Pearl Harbor.
When one of the Japanese occupiers marched into the club and asked taxi-girl Chen Manli for a dance, she "No" - a crime for which she was shot dead in the middle of the dance floor, sending revelers fleeing in horror. The glory days of The Paramount were officially over.
Following the communist victory in 1949, The Paramount was closed and later reopened as The Red Capitol Cinema, showing Maoist propaganda films.
The building spent the latter part of the 20th century in obscurity, until it was extensively renovated and reopened as a night club in 2008, hoping to bring the old Shanghai spirit into the 21st century.
Some has been lost in the transition – the original fittings have been removed, and the rosewood dance floor is covered with modern tables, more suited for drinking and playing dice than doing the foxtrot.
Nevertheless, names like Ciro's, The Paradise, Metropole, Canidrome and many more have been lost to the history books – only The Paramount has survived, in one form or another, to this day.
Even if you aren’t won over by today’s clubbing culture, you can still enjoy the Paramount’s iconic Art Deco airs and let your imagination replace the smartphone-tittering club goers with the glamorous, boozed-out pleasure seekers from Shanghai’s golden age of clubbing.
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