At the heart of Field's history of the worlds of Shanghai's dancehalls, cabaret and nightlife from the first stirrings of liberal awakening after the May 4th movement in 1919 to the dawn of the Communist revolutionary period in the 1950s is a paradox, which he admits almost all the way through this study. Such worlds were subliminal, hidden and shadowy. They were highly ephemeral. How can they possible be reconstructed and known decades after they were effectively snuffed first by the era of war, then of Communist reconstruction (the latter their real death knell)?

The sources Field uses for this study hints at the complexity of recapturing this shadowy world and its colourful cast of characters. There are some material vestiges of the era, in Shanghai's architecture. Some of the ball rooms, like that at the Astor House (now Pujiang) hotel still exist. There are photos of the era, and indeed, some of the key figures were also film stars, so there are even moving images of them. Field's book contains several dozen black and white images of the ballrooms, and dancers and musicians, at their peak. There are literary testimonies (the book opens with novelist Mu Shiying's surreal imagining of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, with the graphic image of a builder wounded on a site whose blood stains the foundations of some vast new construction). There are police records, particularly complete during the Japanese occupation when close tabs were kept on clubs because of the agents of insurgency they were suspected of concealing. And there are news reports, covering the events which spilled over into the daylight world when things got out of hand.

There are many reasons why we would want to know more about this hidden world. It uniquely captured engagement with new forms of western influence and cultural modernity. Whitey Smith and his orchestra, as Field shows, one of the earliest US bands to work in Shanghai, were adept at adapting jazz to the Chinese palate. Some clubs were the few areas where expatriates and Chinese elites met. And a name that recurs throughout Field's book, that of the most powerful mafia boss Du Yuesheng, who for years was perhaps the greatest force in Shanghai, only shows that politics was never far from the doors of nightclubs like the Black Cat and the Peach Blossom Palace.

Field's main argument is that club culture in this period offers a unique insight into the greater society around, and the ways in which politics and modernity were developing. In the 1920s and 1930s, while the Communists eschewed these archetypal symbols of city culture (and in particular Shanghai culture) which they turned their back on as they retreated to the countryside, the Nationalists entered into a kind of strange pact with them. Despite his fierce nationalism, Chiang Kai-shek was to have jazz at his wedding. In the era of the isolation of the legation quarters during the early part of the Sino-Japanese war, clubs became odd islands of fantasy and escape, but increasingly, they were to be invaded by the violence and disruption infecting society all around. In the latter part of the war, they were dragged into the same world of conflict as the rest of China, with some of their key actors engaging in, or accused, of espionage. After the end of the war, in the depths of the civil war, the Nationalist government tried to close Shanghai's nightlife as effectively as it had done in the rest of the country. A dancers' uprising in 1948 gives Field some of his richest archival material to piece together who were the key players in this submerged world, and what their conditions, political sympathies and backgrounds were. But by the early 1950s, the clubland world was facing a far more formidable foe. By the mid 1950s, through a variety of campaigns, purges and an all-out attack on the small and large entrepreneurs that had kept this whole world afloat for four decades, the last of the major halls closed. Only with the Deng economic reforms in the 1970s did anything like them reappear, and then purely as innocent dance clubs.

Shanghai's golden age is now semi-mythologized. It has been portrayed in films and in literature, and the city, despite its brash modernity, still lives in part off the memories of those days. Shanghai's Dancing World attempts to give real life to this history. Through detailed descriptions of figures like the glamorous Liang sisters, Li Lina, and Yeang Peiying, it sketches in the outlines of real people, saying how they came to be dancers, hostesses, club owners and patrons of these vibrant, but unsteady, cultural worlds. Nightlife, as he says, is telling both because of the evasions it shows to the real world, and because of the insight it gives to people's fantasies and dreams, something that is notoriously difficult for historians to recreate. There is, almost of necessity, a lingering elusiveness even despite Field's forensic historic investigation. Just as the photos show oddly frozen, sterile moments (ideas of beauty were evidently different in the 1920s and 30s than they are today!), so do the first-hand accounts and reconstructions, however painstaking and precise, leave a hollow at the centre. This is an excellent study, the result of many years research, much of it living in Shanghai, and born of a real engagement and affection for the world described. But, and it is no criticism, merely a statement of the inevitable, for all Field's fine work, one ends the book with a feeling that you are glimpsing a world long after the party has moved on.