"What's up with these foreigners who write about Shanghai?" asked a Shanghainese friend as I cracked opened a newly-purchased copy of Stella Dong's Shanghai 1842-1949: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. "They're always so obsessed with sex, drugs, and money."

Rise and Fall is the latest in a long series of books on the antics of those wild and wooly foreigners who inhabited the city in the supposed glory days of "Old Shanghai." According to the press plugs, Dong spent a total of ten years researching the book. Considering that span of time and the slew of excellently researched and well-written books on various aspects of Shanghai's history published in recent years, one would expect this study to be, at the very least, an informed digest of the extant literature.

On this and other fronts, Rise and Fall disappoints. It offers neither penetrating new insights nor useful synthesis of existing studies. Dong paints far too broad a portrait to attempt the depth of certain earlier monographs. Rise and Fall merely summarizes, and readers with any prior knowledge of Shanghai's history will find themselves scanning ahead in a futile search for new information.

That Rise and Fall makes for a passably good read can be attributed to the intrinsic appeal of Shanghai's story. Rarely before or since has so much compellingly chaotic history been compacted into so short a span of time. Shanghai was the great melting pot, a motley array of quirky characters and outlandish stories. The "Paris of the East" was Eden, Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled into one. It would be difficult to write a history of Shanghai that wasn't interesting.

Dong introduces us to some of the many colorful characters who comprise the intriguing tapestry that was Shanghai. We hear briefly of the families of Sephardic Jews who were the Robber Barons of Shanghai's business world, amassing fabulous wealth through shrewd speculation in opium and real estate. They were rivaled only by that giant of the British Empire, Jardine and Matheson. We are teased by tales of lavish parties and indecent opulence. But tease is all that the writer does: She brings up a subject, discusses it for a page or two, and then, just as the reader's interest is aroused, drops it and moves on to the next. The seasoned Shanghai aficionado, if he hasn't quit the book yet, will be wincing at all that gets left out, while the newcomer will be left with an itch to know what happened next -- an itch that goes sadly unscratched. Although Dong had the privilege of meeting with such luminaries of Shanghai's history as Emily Hahn, Irene Kuhn, and Helen Foster Snow, as well as descendents of other notables, she failed to translate these interviews into any fresh perspectives.

Rise and Fall presents itself as a "popular history" rather than a serious academic work, and makes for a light, unstrenuous read. As such, it omits the introduction explaining what methods were used and what choices were made, and why. Likewise suggestive of a lack of substance are the large print font and the total absence of citations.

With its focus on the foreign factor in old Shanghai, Rise and Fall at times treats the Chinese as bit players on their own stage. As in many similar books on Old Shanghai, the foreigner characters are treated with loving romanticism, while the Shanghainese are reduced to stereotypes: the gangster, the prostitute, the comprador, the coolie, the intellectual, the movie star.

Dong makes little effort to portray, let alone investigate, the richly complex "native" society that emerged in Old Shanghai, as the city's residence tried to reconcile a number of conflicting influences and demands. Harriet Sergeant's excellent and in-depth Shanghai, although also focusing on the foreign factor and at times patronizing towards the "locals," at least features a long, sympathetic, and well-constructed chapter on "the Chinese". Rise and Fall includes a handful of the more famous urbanites -- as Lu Xun, Green Gang head Du Yuesheng, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Soong family -- in her catalogue of characters, but overall the treatment is cursory.

At one point, the writer attempts a discussion of Shanghai the film industry, which at that time was second in the world only to Hollywood. The films of Old Shanghai made an imprint in the common culture of China that remains indelible even today. Among the better known pictures, which the writer cites, is "Street Angel," starring the "Golden Voiced" Zhou Xuan. It tells the tale of two sisters from the countryside who fled to Shanghai, and end up in the control of a sketchy teahouse owner. The older sister is regularly beaten by the teahouse owner and forced to become a prostitute, prowling the streets and dodging the cops. The naïve and somewhat bratty teenage younger sister, played by Zhou Xuan, sings to entertain the customers. A portly, leering old customer sparks an interest in the songstress, and ultimately the streetwalking sister is killed protecting the younger from suffering her fate. Rise and Fall mistakenly identifies Zhou Xuan as having played the persecuted prostitute, which seems like a small mistake but, considering the prominence of the film, is akin to declaring Darth Vader Han Solo's father in a presentation of American pop culture.

Rise and Fall is generally aimed to entertain an audience that has never before read anything about Shanghai. Judging by the opening chapter on the Opium Wars, covering pretty much the basics of "it happened, the foreigners came, and Shanghai began," Dong seems to target newcomers to the study of Chinese history. The Western reading public certainly stands to benefit from greater exposure to China's history, and such simple, easily-accessible books can accomplish a lot more in that direction than the obliquely analytical tomes that comprise the bulk of China histories.

But Shanghai's complex and multifaceted history is commonly reduced to a distorted and sensationalized stereotype of lurid decadence. The Communist Party propounds this version of things to demonstrate how much better things have gotten since. Ironically, what the authorities issue for the sake of propaganda, foreign writers -- and Dong is no exception -- reiterate for the sake of titillation, with the identical effect of creating a simplified and misleading vision of Old Shanghai.