What’s New Podcast Transcript Season 4, Episode 3: The Last Kings of Shanghai October 27, 2020 Host: Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Information Collaboration at Northeastern University. Guest: Jonathan Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, and Director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism. Host: Dan Cohen (00:08): We have long been told that this will be the Chinese century as the most populous nation in the world achieves economic dominance and as it extends its political influence across the globe. But that still emerging future will also be an extension of China's complex past when other nations arrived on its shores with colonialism, capitalism, and once distant cultures. Today on What's New, how the remarkable story of two Jewish families in Shanghai can tell us a lot about China past, present, and future. Host: Dan Cohen (00:42): Welcome back to What's New, I'm Dan Cohen. With me in the virtual studio is Jonathan Kaufman, the author of a fascinating new book, The Last Kings of Shanghai; The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China. Professor Kaufman is a Pulitzer prize, winning reporter and author, and director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism. He has reported on China for three decades for the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. Thanks so much for joining me today, Jonathan, over Zoom in our virtual studio. Jonathan Kaufman (01:14): Thanks, Dan. It's great to be here. Host: Dan Cohen (01:15): Delighted to have you here. And I just really enjoyed reading your book for many reasons. And I have to say, I just immediately recognize it as a kind of passion project where an author sometimes bumps into an incredible story while working on other things and that it just simply demands to be told and now you've had a chance to tell it. But what's the origin of this story as we go back through your own history? Jonathan Kaufman (01:38): Well, bump into is exactly the right word to use. I'm a reporter, I'm a journalist. I've been covering China from back in the late 1970s, early 1980s when China first opened up. And on my very first trip out of Shanghai, back in 1979, this was just three years after Chairman Mao had died. China was still very much locked into the old communist imagery that we have, everybody in kind of those blue Mao suits, lots of bicycles, very few cars. And I was walking along in Shanghai, along the Bund, the famous waterfront with all those art deco buildings and I had to 1 use the bathroom. I went into a hotel and it was like stepping into a 1930s movie. I walked in there and the floors were marble. There were these elite crystal chandeliers. This bellhop was standing there in a little white uniform with a white hat on top. Jonathan Kaufman (02:28): And I went up to him, and in English I said, is there a bathroom I can use? And he responded to me in French. And so I felt like I had stepped into a 1930s musical. And I think all good, at least as a reporter, all good stories start with a question and maybe all good books do as well. And I just found myself thinking, what is this place? And as I found out, it was built by a Jewish billionaire, a playboy, who had actually come from Baghdad and was one of the richest men in the world, Victor Sassoon. And then as I traveled around Shanghai and back and forth to China over the next years, I kept on stumbling across evidence of Jews who had been in Shanghai who had helped shape it. At one point, I was taken by the official Chinese government agency to visit the Children's Palace, which is a place where the Chinese kids were practicing piano and doing their ballet exercises. The kind of thing that the Chinese communists wanted to show to journalists to show how wonderful things were in China. Jonathan Kaufman (03:28): And it was very nice, but it was this huge, huge mansion with like a huge ballroom and grand rooms everywhere. And as we left, there was a little plaque I noticed saying that this had once been the home of the Kadoorie family back in the 1920s and 1930s. And I knew the Kadoorie family because I was based in Hong Kong at the time and they were one of the wealthiest families in Hong Kong. They owned the Peninsula Hotel and all sorts of investments. And again, they were Jewish. So I think in both cases, I kept asking myself, what were these people doing here and what was their connection to China and China's history and China's story. Host: Dan Cohen (04:07): Your book does such a great job tracing back where these two families come from and their immense impact. And I want to get, especially to Victor in a moment, but maybe if we could start with his ancestors who came from Baghdad of all places. How does the Jewish family from Baghdad get to Shanghai? Jonathan Kaufman (04:24): Well, I think when we look at Jewish history, one of the things we're all familiar with is Fiddler on the Roof. That, I think, for most people, Jews and non-Jews is their image of Jews who came, they were in ghettos or they were being oppressed in Europe or in Russia or elsewhere. And they kind of rise up, come to America and succeed. That's a familiar story. And it's one that we know about in many different ways. But the story that Sassoons and the Kadoories is very different. Back thousands of years ago, after the destruction of the second temple, Jews were taken into captivity, into Babylon. We read about the Babylon captivity in the Bible. By the waters of Babylon, we wept as we remembered Zion. These were Jews that were taken to Babylon as captives. 2 Jonathan Kaufman (05:11): But in fact, what happened was, once the Jews got to Babylon, which is now Baghdad, they did very well. It turned out that the rulers of Baghdad, the Turks, the Persians, all the various rulers that passed through there relied on the Jews economically. They relied on them to run businesses. They even relied on them to act as almost the defacto secretary of the treasury, helping run the tax system and so forth. So at the same time that Jews are kind of being dispersed in other parts of the world, Baghdad is really a center of Jewish life and Jews there become very prosperous. So prosperous, in fact, that the rulers in Baghdad named one family as the Nasi, who were kind of the leaders of the Jewish community, almost the King of the Jews, that they would deal with on an almost equal basis when they were ruling Baghdad. And the Sassoons where that family. Jonathan Kaufman (06:04): And in fact, they were so prominent that whenever the leader of the Sassoons was taken to meet with a Pasha of Baghdad, he was carried on a sedan chair and people throughout Baghdad, Jews and non- Jews, would bow their heads respectfully, as he passed through the street, carried aloft on his sedan chair. So this gives you a sense of this very powerful, influential Jewish community in Baghdad. Now as often happens, by the 1820s, 1830s, politics had changed and the rulers of Baghdad turned against the Jews and began to kidnap them and imprison them, demanding ransom. And so in the 1830s, David Sassoon, who's the patriarch of the family was about to take over this great business empire, but he was imprisoned and his father feared that he was going to be killed or some bad things would happen to him. Jonathan Kaufman (06:57): And so he ransomed him out of prison, hustled him down to the waterfront, put him on a boat, gave him a cloak that had pearls sewn inside and sent him off on this boat to safety. Now David Sassoon was in his thirties at this point, he was leaving behind his family and he didn't know where he was going or what would happen. And in fact, he washes up on the shores eventually of India and spends his first night in a warehouse where he's sitting with a gun shooting rats that are skittering across the floor. So you can imagine, I mean, this is almost Shakespearian. This is sort of a prince who was about to take over this dynasty, who has his birthright ripped away from him. And what David Sassoon then does is, he's actually arriving in India at the very time, the British are expanding. Jonathan Kaufman (07:49): The British have moved into India. They're about to make India part of the British empire. And from their part, the British are looking for people to help expand their business influence throughout Asia. So David Sassoon looks around. He has enormous expertise in business. He has all these connections throughout the Middle East. He's hoping to still get some of his money out of Baghdad. And he looks at the British and says, "I'm going to follow the Union Jack." Again, often we think of Jews as being liberal and socialist and fighting against authoritarian regimes and so forth.