Shanghai is a visual history that tells the story of modern China as witnessed by this romantic city. The end of the Opium War in 1842 effected a dramatic transformation, turning a sleepy backwater into a bustling treaty port. Over the intervening 160 years, Shanghai has been shaped by outside forces - foreign concessions, Japanese invasions, the arrival of the Communists and the cult of Mao, they have all played their part in sculpting today’s Shanghai.

China’s turbulent history is traced through Shanghai’s evocative, beautiful, and sometimes painful images. As we reach the present day with its helter-skelter development, lavish wealth is juxtaposed against grinding poverty, and documented through the lenses of Shanghai’s most important contemporary artists. Told through rare official archive photographs, images taken from private collections, new commissions, and co-author Liu Heung Shing’s own work, Shanghai is the definitive history of the most beautiful of China’s cities.