Shanghai is a magical city – it was in the 1930s and it is again today, although it’s now a very different city with its own distinctive magic.

Due to its convoluted history as a ‘treaty port’, handed over to the British by the weak Qing Court, a result of the settlement in 1842 following the First Opium War, it developed from a muddy plot of land at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek, near the mouth of the great Yangtze.