Shanghai traces the story of the most modern of China’s cities, through evocative, beautiful and sometimes painful images. In 1842, the signing of the ignominious Treaty of Nanking turned a small riverside stop-off into a bustling treaty port. Over the near-170 years that followed, Shanghai was shaped and defined by outside forces, from the foreign concessions and Japanese occupiers through to the arrival of the Communists and the cult of Mao. Through civil war, invasion, revolution and famine, Shanghai beat the odds to become a thriving metropolis that commands a place in the contemporary imagination unlike any other. Shanghai has unceasingly been a byword for style, culture, business, and opportunity, and has led the way in China’s ongoing economic boom. The story told through the pages of Shanghai is both grand in scale, and domestic in tone. Photographs depict families living under the cloud of war, enjoying the fine life accorded by a booming international trade (as much in pictures of the 19th century as today), and suffering the inequalities of poverty. Time moves on and fashions change, but above all else, it is the humanity of the city of Shanghai shines through in this spectacular and sweeping history.

Liu Heung Shing was born in Hong Kong in 1952, and is a photojournalist with a career spanning more than twenty years. In 1992, Liu became the first ethnic Chinese person to win a Pulitzer Prize, sharing it for his coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union. With international assignments for the Associated Press and Time magazine to his name, Liu is the author of China After Mao (Penguin, 1983) and China: Portrait of a Country (Taschen, 2008).

Karen Smith is a Beijing-based British art historian, specializing in contemporary Chinese art of the post-Mao era. She is the author of Ai Weiwei (Phaodon, 2009) and is currently finishing her forthcoming book, Bang to Boom: Chinese Art in the 1990s.