I: THE TWO-FRONT WAR | Leningrad, 1934–1985

Not far from the nationalized Putilov Works, amid Leningrad’s greatest showcase of early Soviet avant-garde architecture, the modernist wonders culminate on a square presided over by a statue of Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, on whose watch many of the structures were built. In the quote inscribed on the pedestal, Kirov riffs on Archimedes’s aphorism on the power of the lever: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” Here in Leningrad, Kirov suggests, lies the fulcrum point.

On December 1, 1934, Kirov was shot in his office in the Smolny Institute, the tsarist girls’ school turned revolutionary headquarters that in the Soviet era had become Leningrad’s city hall. When news of the Kirov assassination reached the Kremlin, where Stalin now ruled, the dictator and his entourage of loyal henchmen rushed to Leningrad on the overnight train. To conduct their investigation, the team commandeered the third floor of Smolny. Most historians believe it was a case of the murderer returning to the scene of the crime; the assassination is now widely believed to have been an inside job ordered by Stalin himself. From the cradle of the revolution, Stalin would crush his rivals, the generation of Petrograd radicals who had led the Bolshevik coup.

The triggerman, a disgruntled Party member, was promptly arrested, personally interrogated by Stalin, and executed. But the larger blame for the crime was assigned to Stalin’s intra-Party rivals whom he had outflanked for leadership in the 1920s. Initially, fourteen conspirators, the most prominent leaders of the Communist revolution, were accused of plotting to kill Kirov as a prelude to the murders of other Soviet leaders, up to and including Stalin. But soon thousands, and ultimately millions, ended up accused of membership in a vast conspiracy to bring down the Soviet state led by turncoat Bolsheviks in league with the Western capitalist powers.

Using Kirov’s murder as a pretext, Stalin issued an order expediting political investigations. The civil liberties guaranteed by the Soviet constitution would not apply on account of the new state of emergency. In political cases, the new rules decreed that the accused would only see the indictment a day before the proceedings; that the accused could not participate in the trial; and that pardon hearings would no longer be held for those sentenced to death. For the secret police in Leningrad, the new procedures were a relief. With so many “enemies of the people” to arrest, jail space was at a premium. Victims of what became known as the Great Purge routinely disappeared into the night in black vans emblazoned with signs reading “Meat” or “Milk.” Leningraders came to call them “Black Ravens.” Soon the “Big House,” the newly opened, imposing Leningrad secret police headquarters, just blocks from its old tsarist-era equivalent, was the site of two hundred executions a night. One by one, prisoners were led to the elevator, taken to the basement, and shot. With factory-like precision, the staff got their turnaround time down to two and a half minutes per victim.

The thoroughness of the purge was astounding. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 were subsequently shot as “enemies of the people.” But what is most striking about the Great Purge was the toll it took on any Leningrader who was politically or intellectually active—or merely knew someone who was. Through its web of connections, the entire Leningrad intellectual and political elite was targeted for elimination and either deported to labor camps in Siberia or executed outright. The sophisticated, internationally connected Hermitage museum staff was swept up—the curators of the Oriental Department were accused of being Japanese spies—but so were people affiliated with lower-profile institutions. The librarian of the Leningrad Young Communist Club, where Kirov’s assassin had been a member in the 1920s, was arrested. So were her sister, her brother-in-law, and everyone who had ever given her a job recommendation. Within months of the Kirov murder, more than thirty thousand Leningraders had been sent to Siberia.

If the Kirov murder was indeed Stalin’s plan, it was a darkly brilliant one. Stalin likely admired Hitler’s June 1934 Night of the Long Knives, in which the German fascist had orchestrated the murders of his fellow Nazi Party founders, paving the way for his unrivaled rule as führer. To take out the founders of the Bolshevik party, the witch hunt would have to be centered on Leningrad—hence the Kirov assassination pretext—for it was from Leningrad that the revolution had been launched. Indeed it was only in Leningrad, with its worldly intellectuals open to Western ideas, its armies of educated bureaucrats stifled under the tsarist hereditary class system, and its masses of exploited industrial workers, that the Communist revolution could have been launched. A war on the generation who led the revolution would have to be a war on Leningrad.

The Great Purge was both a literal war on Leningrad and a metaphorical one. The purge of Leningrad’s revolutionaries was also a purging of the revolutionary values of Russia’s gateway—the love of the new and the foreign in architecture, the arts, literature, and politics. The power grab by the Georgian tough in the Kremlin drew on resentments that had simmered in Russia for centuries—the revenge of the illiterate empire on its worldly former capital.

Having launched his investigation and purge from Smolny, Stalin left Leningrad for Moscow. He would rule the Soviet Union as undisputed dictator for two more decades, but he would never return to its second city. Leningrad was dead to him; he had done his best to execute it.

Through his policies, Stalin worked to downgrade Leningrad into just another city. Stalin’s forced industrialization of the Russian hinterlands, which begun in earnest with the First Five-Year Plan unveiled in 1928, served twin purposes. It helped Russia catch up technologically and economically with the industrialized West, as Stalin claimed it would, albeit at tremendous human cost, but it also served an ulterior goal: diminishing Leningrad’s economic primacy. In the nineteenth century, one would have had to travel to St. Petersburg to find a massive industrial structure like the Putilov Works in Russia, but by the 1930s such factories dotted the Soviet Union.

Stalin was similarly obsessed with reducing the city’s position in the Russian mind as the symbol of popular opposition to unaccountable authority. Trying to erase the memories of the revolutionary metropolis, Stalin overturned the Bolshevik edict that had renamed the streets around the Cathedral of Our Savior on Spilt Blood, where Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, for his assassins. Those who rise up against their leaders ought not be glorified, the dictator felt. And Stalin ordered his officials in Leningrad to build a new downtown district for the city, leaving the historic center where the revolution had been sparked to decay from neglect.

Six miles south of the old imperial center, a new broad avenue named International Prospect was laid out. Plans were made to line it with imposing neoclassical façades in the Stalinist style that was fast replacing the modernist avant-garde as the official face of the Soviet state. Why replace the original neoclassical center with a second neoclassical downtown? For all the formal similarities of the columns and pediments, the style dominating Stalin’s new International Prospect would be quite different from that of the imperial center. While the historic city was built on an intimate, human scale—even the Winter Palace for all its one thousand rooms is just three stories tall and decorated with delicate ornamentation—the Stalinist buildings would be massive and imposing. Stalinist architecture symbolized a return to order and authoritarianism reminiscent of the Romanovs but also the arrival of a dehumanizing and unmistakably modern bureaucratic totalitarianism. While Stalin personally interrogated Kirov’s assassin, just like Nicholas I had after the Decembrist revolt, most of his repression was carried out by interchangeable bureaucrats in blank-walled interrogation cells and servile judges in Kafkaesque courtrooms. Secret police units were literally given quotas of “enemies of the people” to arrest in each region and ruthlessly held accountable for hitting their numbers. One Stalin biographer has dubbed him the “red tsar,” for his rule—and the buildings that symbolized it—embodied both the autocratic nature of tsarism and the bureaucratic nature of Bolshevism’s dictatorship by Party flowchart.

The centerpiece of the International Prospect development was the House of the Soviets, a vast, plodding stone neoclassical edifice fronting an enormous square on which a giant statue of Lenin dwarfs the people at his feet. The building, begun in 1936, embodies all the qualities that the modernist architect Mikhail Okhitovich lambasted in a speech the month after the Kirov murder, in which he had called out the nascent Stalinist style for abandoning the egalitarian features of Constructivism and embracing a “cult of hierarchy.” With its giant government hall and supersized statue of Lenin looming over the Soviet citizens below, the complex augured the ultimate end of Stalinism, in which adulation of the ruler became a civic religion. Okhitovich was arrested shortly after his speech and died in a labor camp in 1937.

In his fateful speech, Okhitovich had bravely noted that the Nazi rulers of Germany shared Stalin’s hostility to modernism. At the time, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were sworn enemies, but Okhitovich’s sense of their similar appetites for dictatorial domination was prescient. In August 1939, the two regimes stunned the world by signing a nonaggression pact. In a secret addendum, they divided Eastern Europe between them. Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Stalin’s Red Army launched a two-front assault on Poland the following month, beginning World War II.

From the first, Hitler had schemed to break the peace treaty and invade Russia. Most of all, he dreamed of an attack on Leningrad so vicious that it would make Stalin’s basement murders and deportations to Siberia look mild by comparison. For the Nazi führer, as for the Soviet Great Leader, the city on the Neva was an idea as much as it was a place. While Peter the Great had founded St. Petersburg to be a gateway through which European technology and culture could flow into his Asian empire, Hitler viewed the city conversely: as a beachhead of Asia’s inferior civilization on the European continent. Hitler called the city “the poisonous nest from which, for so long, Asiatic venom has spewed forth into [Europe].” To culturally purify Europe in advance of the Thousand-Year Reich, Leningrad would have to be eliminated. As a Nazi command memo, later entered into evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, stated, “Hitler has decided to wipe St. Petersburg [sic] off the map. . . . If conditions in the city should reach a point that would bring offers of surrender, such offers should be rejected. . . . We are not interested in the survival of even a fraction of the population of so large a city.”

When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the Nazi Wehrmacht made a beeline for the Venice of the North. While the upper echelons of the Red Army remained paralyzed by shock at Hitler’s surprise attack, the cultural guardians of Leningrad got to work. Not waiting for an order from Moscow, the wizened, bald-headed, and white-bearded Hermitage director, Iosif Orbeli, who had survived the Great Purge (he would later be fired in a postwar purge), gathered his staff and ordered them to begin packing up the treasures of the museum for evacuation to the east, away from the front.

Half a million objects were sent on trains mounted with antiaircraft guns to Sverdlovsk, on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains, just before the Germans severed the railway line. The last Hermitage treasure to be packed up was Jean-Antoine Houdon’s sculpture of Voltaire, commissioned by Catherine the Great and then banished to the attic during the French Revolution—the ultimate symbol of the city’s possibilities and contradictions.

The Hermitage staff worked day and night as the city collapsed around them. German troops completed their noose around Leningrad in September 1941, requisitioning the suburban palaces of the tsars as their command posts. Food supplies were cut off, and a German napalm and phosphorous attack incinerated the city’s flour and sugar warehouses. At first, bakers pulled up bakery floorboards searching for whatever had fallen through the cracks in less-trying times. Once those crumbs were consumed, tens of thousands starved to death each month. The city’s few cultivated intellectuals who had survived the Great Purge resorted to eating the binding glue from their book collections. Common laborers boiled their belts into a thin soup. Desperate Leningraders went to the Haymarket to trade wedding rings for black-market bread and mysterious meat patties, which, rumor had it, were made of human flesh. It is likely that over a million people died during Leningrad’s nine hundred–day ordeal—the largest city ever under siege in the history of the world.

As the Nazi blockade cut Leningrad off from Moscow and the rest of the Soviet Union, Leningraders began referring to the rest of Russia as “the mainland.” Leningrad had always been an island off the coast of Russia metaphorically, an untamable city with independent habits of mind; now the war had made it a literal island, a noncontiguous part of the Soviet Union. In 1941, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, something seemingly unthinkable in Stalin’s Russia took place: a protest broke out on Strike Avenue near the nationalized Putilov Works, which had been renamed the Kirov Works for the assassinated Party chief. The assembled workers and young people of the island city boldly demanded the end of the Bolshevik regime. When Soviet troops were ordered to fire on the protestors, they refused. The situation was defused only when Nazi shells happened to fall in the vicinity and the crowd dispersed of its own volition.

While Stalin’s secret police never fully lost control of the besieged metropolis, the second city of Stalin’s empire edged shockingly close to becoming the free republic of Leningrad. Its Communist leadership was despised by the people. While a day’s bread rations were reduced to the size of a dinner roll, the cafeteria at the Party’s Smolny headquarters instituted just one wartime rule: no seconds on meat. And Smolny itself was immediately camouflaged from Nazi air raids while the beloved monuments of the imperial city, including St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Admiralty building, went naked for months. It was as if the leadership wanted the old downtown to be destroyed.

Petersburgers speculate to this day that even when the tide of the war turned in 1943, Stalin took his time pushing the Nazis back from Leningrad—the better to bleed the city he so loathed. Speculation aside, Leningrad, whose population, between deaths and evacuations, had dropped from three million to one million during the war, was indisputably rebuilt last of all the major Soviet cities in the war zone. The memory of the surprise attack, mass starvation, and disloyalty to the regime during the siege did not fit the official Stalinist narrative of the nationalistic “hero city” valiantly defying the fascists. Nor did the inconvenient truth that the Leningraders’ indomitable fight for survival was a fight for their city, not their country. The first director of the Blockade Museum, which had opened just three months after the liberation of the city to memorialize the victims of the siege, was shot by the secret police and the museum was shuttered until the Gorbachev era. Even the official Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad near the House of the Soviets did not open until the 1970s.

The Great Patriotic War, as it came to be called, made Stalin’s rule even more nakedly nationalistic as earlier aspirations of Bolshevism to universal human progress—aspirations rooted in the city on the banks of the Neva—were expunged. In 1943, Stalin scrapped “The Internationale,” with its call to global proletarian solidarity, as the USSR’s national anthem and replaced it with a hypernationalist ballad that personally name-checked Stalin. After the war, the main avenue of Leningrad’s alternate downtown, International Prospect, was renamed for the Great Leader. And in his final, paranoid purge, victims sent to Siberia—or worse—were tarred with a new epithet: “cosmopolitan.” Embracing the global values that had always defined Peter’s city had become grounds for repression.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, though Soviet Communism was never again as brutal, Leningrad had accepted its diminished role. As during the reigns of reactionary tsars, the city’s greatest talents, like composer Dmitri Shostakovich and poet Anna Akhmatova, poured their efforts into the arts instead of politics, pushing boundaries and embracing the new as much as they could get away with. The most brilliant people often pursued the most menial jobs, where there was no pressure to join the Party and one’s mind, at least, was free. A desk job monitoring Leningrad’s citywide steam-heat system became a coveted position. As long as the system was functioning normally, a worker was free to punch in and spend the workday writing music or poetry. But life in the economically stagnating and intellectually stifling Soviet system was bleak—a career of commutes from the gray high-rise slab apartments erected around the city to an ossified, bureaucratic workplace via the lavish subway system, opened in 1955, whose marble stations, dubbed “People’s Palaces,” conjured a bounteous Communist future everyone knew was a lie.

For an alternative future, as always, Leningraders looked westward. The city became a major center for jazz music, recovering from the authorities’ draconian 1949 confiscation of all Soviet saxophones. Rock ’n’ roll, too, survived the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s condemnations—he called it “dog shit”—fueled by European tourists who sailed in on summer cruises from Finland and eagerly bartered their vinyl LPs for vodka on the black market. In the growing Leningrad artistic underground, being a “Petersburger,” a worldly aesthete/intellectual, became a form of non-Soviet identity. Fittingly, the city’s early-1970s pioneering punk band chose as its name the city’s original moniker: St. Petersburg. The clueless Communist authorities accused the punk rockers of being monarchists.

The silver lining to the city’s demotion during Soviet times was that its historic center was never leveled. Though battered by the war and poorly maintained, it remained one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Officially saluted after the Nazi siege as “the heroic defenders of Leningrad,” the people of the city, having survived assaults from Moscow as well as Berlin, became the world’s most committed architectural preservationists, with by far the largest local chapter of the official, state-backed Association for the Protection of Monuments in the late Soviet era. A defensive posture was the only way to endure. But as the city focused on preserving the past rather than building the future, its perennial dreams of remaking Russia in its image lay dormant.

II: THE DARK AGES | Shanghai, 1937–1989

In the summer of 1937, the militarist empire of Japan, intent on subduing a vast swath of Asia, attacked China. That fall, vicious urban warfare swept Shanghai as the Japanese invaded the Chinese districts of the city. The fighting left some one hundred thousand Chinese dead, many felled in hand-to-hand combat.

For the Western residents of the foreign settlements, it was just more of the same. The key to the Shanghai concessions’ success had always been as an island of stability in the midst of chaos. With their nations still at peace with Japan, the Britons, French, and Americans felt themselves to be safely in the eye of the storm. After a night on the town, Shanghailanders in tuxedos and evening gowns would go up to the rooftops of the city’s industrial warehouses and watch the fighting less than half a mile away as if it were a fireworks display.

As usual, the instability sent an influx of Chinese refugees to the foreign concessions, boosting their populations and economies. The city similarly benefited from the storm clouds gathering over Europe. In the late 1930s, twenty-five thousand stateless German and Austrian Jews who had been stripped of their citizenship by the Nazi regime poured into Shanghai, the only city in the world where neither passport nor visa were required for entry. While initially a burden on the city—Sir Victor Sassoon turned vacant offices and apartments in his Embankment Building on the Suzhou Creek into a massive social service agency to aid his desperate coreligionists—the influx of so many Western-educated professionals and entrepreneurs soon proved a boon to the local economy. Ironically, the Jewish refugees who had been told by their government that they were not, and never could be, Germans brought their Germanic culture with them, strengthening the Central European layer of international Shanghai’s multicultural stew. Viennese coffeehouses soon sprang up along the avenues of the concessions, and the cabarets that the Nazis had closed down as too “decadent” and “degenerate” for fascist Berlin found a home in a city where “decadent” and “degenerate” were considered high praise for a nightlife act. To oversee entertainment at the Cathay Hotel’s Tower Club, Sir Victor hired Fredy Kaufman, a veteran cabaret impresario who had been run out of Hitler’s Berlin.

In time, however, the escalating turmoil that became World War II would overwhelm even international Shanghai. As Japanese warplanes launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese naval vessels sailed up the Huangpu to attack the Anglo-American International Settlement. The battle was brief. A single British gunboat, no match for the Japanese armada, protected the river. As royal navy sailors jumped overboard and swam for the shore, pajama-clad British guests from the Bund’s luxury hotels waded into the mud to aid them. The Japanese took the International Settlement that very day. The French Concession, administered by the Nazi’s Vichy France puppet regime since the fall of Paris in 1940, endured until 1943 when the Germans gave it to their Japanese allies outright. To the eternal embarrassment of China, it was the nation’s archrivals, the Japanese, who finally ended extraterritoriality and freed Shanghai from a century of Western domination.

Hoping to win over the Chinese with their rhetoric of an “Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” rather than a “Japanese Empire,” the Japanese occupiers humiliated the Western residents of the former International Settlement. Colonial Shanghai was turned upside down as the foreigners were reduced to the second-class citizenship they had foisted on the native Chinese for a century. Citizens of the allied powers were forced to wear red armbands denoting their nationality (“A” for American, “B” for British, etc.), and their bank accounts were frozen with monthly withdrawals limited to the wages of a typical lower-class Chinese laborer. “Enemy aliens” were barred from the hotels, nightclubs, cinemas, restaurants, and bars from which they had once barred the Chinese. Finally, foreigners were rounded up in Holy Trinity Cathedral, just behind the Bund, and relocated to less-desirable parts of the city, with single males forced to live in a British American Tobacco company warehouse in Pudong. Eventually, some eight thousand foreigners were imprisoned in internment camps. In keeping with the wishes of their German allies, the Japanese moved Shanghai’s Jewish population to an official ghetto just off Broadway in the former American zone, though they rebuffed Nazi requests for extermination.

While there were Chinese collaborators—and even a Vichy-like Chinese puppet government under Wang Ching-wei—the violence with which the Japanese took the Chinese city of Shanghai, let alone their infamous Rape of Nanjing, made it impossible for the empire to win over the Chinese masses. The Japanese occupiers of Shanghai had more luck with the city’s other Asian communities. As colonial Indians, the Sikhs, who had been brought to Shanghai to serve as policemen in the International Settlement, were officially British subjects. But the Japanese specifically exempted them, as fellow Asians, from their anti-British regulations and won their loyalty in return.

The Empire of the Sun had grand plans for postvictory Shanghai. They envisioned the city as far more than a minor colonial outpost—it would be the jewel of the empire that dare not speak its name. Japanese city planners debated several different proposals for how Asia’s greatest port should be developed in the glorious, imminent future in which Japan would be Asia’s unrivaled superpower. Some called for continuing the Chinese Nationalists’ strategy of building up the civic center at Jiangwan as an alternate downtown away from the Bund. Others called for leveling the foreign settlements entirely, as well as the industrial district in Pudong, and rebuilding the city’s two riverbanks into an ultramodern metropolis linked together by a network of bridges and broad high-speed roadways. By 1950, imperial planners predicted, Shanghai would have a Japanese population of three hundred thousand. Ultimately, these boosterish Japanese projections were no more accurate than the American Shanghailander real estate firm’s 1920s vision of a city at midcentury with “an increasing number of foreign residents from all parts of the world.”

Japan’s dreams of domination over Asia collapsed as American troops pushed the imperial forces back to their home islands and then won unconditional surrender after twin nuclear attacks obliterated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the aftermath of the war, American troops poured into Shanghai, which, with its history as East Asia’s great international hub, became the central processing zone for Americans heading home from the Pacific theater. For the GIs from New York and Chicago, being surrounded by the neon lights of Nanjing Road and the skyscrapers on the Bund was like a homecoming; to the Arkansas and Iowa farm boys who had assumed all of Asia was as undeveloped as the South Pacific atolls where they’d fought, Shanghai was a wonder—the biggest city they had ever seen.

With the Japanese defeat, Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists retook control of China and, for the first time, the entire city of Shanghai. But the war for China was not over. The Nationalists and Communists, who had put aside their differences to make common cause against the Japanese “dwarf bandits,” now again battled each other for dominion over the world’s most populous country. With the Cold War competition between American- and Soviet-aligned blocs getting under way, the Nationalists enjoyed American backing as a bulwark against Mao’s Communists, who had won mass support in the countryside for their valiant resistance to the Japanese.

The Nationalist government’s reign would be brief. Economic mismanagement led to out-of-control inflation and unemployment. In what had been Asia’s leading financial center just a decade before, residents were reduced to bartering for basic goods. The foreign businessmen who had presided over Shanghai’s economy began cashing out and abandoning the city. Many returned “home” to the country that had issued their passports but which they had, in many cases, never seen. Sir Victor Sassoon, bon vivant to the core, forsook his ancestral homelands of Baghdad and Bombay, as well as his youthful British stomping grounds, and moved to the Bahamas in 1948.

The following year, with Mao’s million-man army closing in from the countryside, the Shanghai bankers did what they always did: they cut a deal. The bankers paid off the People’s Liberation Army to enter the city peacefully. While the worldly urbanites of Shanghai and the masses of Mao’s peasant army gawked at each other in mutual befuddlement, the Communist conquering of China’s capitalist heart on May 27, 1949, was remarkably nonviolent. Mao had long promised his peasant troops that when they conquered Shanghai they would sleep in skyscrapers—and the authorities made good on their promise, requisitioning a handful of French Concession high-rises and billeting soldiers there in shifts. An apocryphal story soon spread among Shanghai sophisticates of the high-rise-dwelling peasant soldier who, never having encountered a commode before, took to washing his rice bowl in the toilet.

Though most of the Chinese business elite stuck it out, some fled. Contemporary Shanghai writer Lynn Pan recalled that when Shanghai fell, her father, a building contractor whose firm built several of the French Concession’s Art Deco apartments including the Picardie, where peasant soldiers were housed, was on a business trip in British-run Hong Kong. He simply never returned home. But many wealthy Chinese families blithely continued living their bourgeois lives in the now-Communist city.

Even after Mao’s formal announcement of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949, only American business interests were seized in Shanghai as revenge for American support of the Nationalists. Despite the revolution, many of the several hundred Britons who had remained through the economic chaos of the Nationalist era stayed put. “We will stand by Shanghai if we possibly can,” the British consul general said at the time. “Shanghai is home to us as a community, not merely a trading post.”

As with the French Concession high-rises, the new Communist leadership seized pieces of the city selectively, taking only those with the largest propaganda payoff. The Shanghai Race Club, the long-segregated gambling den in the heart of the city, was converted into People’s Square, making the International Settlement’s largest green space free and open to the general public for the first time. (Betting was banned as a relic of the capitalist past.) The new Communist authorities also requisitioned the British-owned Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation’s (HSBC) beaux-arts pile on the Bund as their new city hall. A red star was added to the building’s pinnacle. Similar cosmetic changes were made to other Bund buildings. It was as if the authorities believed revolution was as simple as slapping a red star on a capitalist building and calling it communist.

The surprising moderation of the new Shanghai authorities resulted from the backgrounds of its first Communist leaders. While Mao’s decades-long sojourn in the hills had resulted in a Party far removed from its sophisticated Shanghai roots, the two men who led the city administration were part of the old cosmopolitan Communist clique. Chen Yi, the first Communist mayor of Shanghai, had lived in Paris as a young man and still sported the beret on his head and the cigarette in his mouth to prove it. His right-hand man, Pan Hannian, had been a habitué of Shanghai’s avant-garde Jazz Age literary circles. A committed coffee connoisseur, after the revolution he often held Party meetings in the city’s elegant cafes. To Chen Yi and Pan Hannian, New China, as the Communists called it, was more about China’s emergence on the world stage as a dignified, independent power than about crushing the capitalist class. By early 1951, under the leadership of the cadres holed up in the red-starred HSBC building on the Bund, business was booming in Shanghai once again. The upscale Nanjing Road department stores still did a steady business, even if their displays and advertisements had been toned down a bit. While rickshaws were quickly banned as backward and degrading, the city’s red-light districts took longer to shutter. For a time, it seemed like Shanghai, though no longer an autonomous city, might remain China’s cosmopolitan trading hub. Then came the first cold wind of Stalinist-style repression from the northern capital.

In April 1951, ten thousand Shanghai “counterrevolutionaries” were arrested and 293 of them executed on orders from Beijing. In fear, many Chinese businessmen fled to British-run Hong Kong, taking their businesses with them. Others lost all hope: men who had once looked down on their industrial holdings in Pudong from their Bund skyscrapers threw themselves from the windows splattering the riverfront pavement with their remains. Lynn Pan, then a little girl, recalled being out for a (supposedly banned) rickshaw ride with her amah in those days and being surprised when the governess pulled down the shade. Why, she asked, did she lower the shade under a brilliant blue sky? “Because there are things you mustn’t see,” came the reply.

The climate for foreigners degenerated rapidly. The bosses of foreign firms, who had already acceded to new requirements by giving Chinese workers job security and massive raises, could no longer feel at home in Shanghai. As in Stalin’s Russia, any contact with Westerners became grounds for suspicion; Chinese journalists and teachers who had trained in the West became targets for repression. In such times, how long could people like Chen Yi, who had cavorted in Paris in his youth, stay in charge? Hoping to satisfy Beijing while preserving his leadership position and Shanghai’s booming economy, Pan Hannian ordered three hundred of his favorite Shanghai capitalists to meet with him in the Cathay Hotel (renamed the Peace Hotel after the revolution) for a softball session of self-criticism.

As the Shanghai economy began to decline from the trauma, cooler heads in Beijing prevailed and the repression campaign was called off. After all, in the early Communist period, on average, 87 percent of the taxes Shanghai collected went to the central government in Beijing. Under the city’s business-friendly leadership, even when Shanghai’s businesses were nationalized in 1955, their former owners were put on retainer at large salaries to continue managing the enterprises.

Though the city with the cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial soul could never quite fit into Mao’s New China, the Beijing authorities were divided over the role Shanghai would play in the People’s Republic. All agreed that Shanghai must play second city to Beijing. (Fortuitously, this policy preserved the historic skyscrapers and lilongs of Old Shanghai while the ancient heart of Beijing was leveled and redesigned by Soviet planners, complete with the world’s largest square, Tiananmen.) Other Party planners went further, arguing that Shanghai must be made into a “normal” city by moving fully half of its population to the interior. Beginning with China’s First Five-Year Plan in the 1950s, a national industrialization program cribbed from Stalin’s Russia, 170,000 skilled workers and 30,000 engineers from Shanghai factories were sent to smaller cities. The ultimate end of this vision would be for Shanghai to revert to the regional market town it had been before the Westerners had set eyes on it and developed it into China’s most modern metropolis.

To mark China’s emulation of Stalin’s Soviet Union, with its five-year plans and leader’s cult of personality, in the mid-1950s the Bubbling Well Road estate where one of the city’s Jewish real estate magnates had built a traditional Chinese garden for his Eurasian wife was turned into the site of the Russian-designed Sino-Soviet Friendship Palace. With the palace unmistakably modeled on Leningrad’s Admiralty building, its surging gold spire atop a neoclassical cupola, it is here that China’s international gateway tips its hat to its spiritual sister city. But in the 1950s, the two cities were unified only by loss—both demoted and forced into hibernation by new Communist authorities who distrusted the very cities where the dreams of revolution had been born.

For all of Chen Yi and Pan Hannian’s efforts at moderation, in 1966 a Chinese purge to rival Stalin’s, the Cultural Revolution, would rise out of Shanghai. Today, the Cultural Revolution is seen as a cynical ploy by Mao and the Gang of Four (also known as “the Shanghai group” for their roots in the city) to hold onto power after their 1950s industrialization program failed to deliver on claims that China would economically “surpass England and catch up with America” in fifteen years. And indeed Mao and the Gang did exploit the dissatisfaction of Shanghai’s youth for their own ends. But the tensions were real. By the mid-1960s, many in Shanghai had begun to wonder whom the revolution had benefited. On account of Mao’s relocations of the city’s industries and the Beijing government’s siphoning off of the city’s remaining bounty, average Shanghai residents had even less housing space per capita than they had had in 1949. The city’s people saw Shanghai’s overall wealth and prominence declining. Meanwhile, over them, they saw the same Westernized Chinese business class who had held sway in the city before the revolution, as well as a haughty new Party elite. Given these conditions, the rising generation of postrevolutionary youth who had come of age steeped in the Chairman’s cult of personality—many of them had been named Chaoying (Surpass England) and Chaomei (Overtake America) in honor of Mao’s delusional economic pronouncements—could not help but identify with Mao’s new slogan: “To rebel is justified.”

Led by the Red Guards, young armed cadres loyal to Mao, the Cultural Revolution was an Oedipal war on a humiliating past. And Shanghai was the foremost symbol of that past, still filled with the churches and skyscrapers the Westerners had built and a Western-dressed, English-speaking business class that still cavorted on Nanjing Road. In the summer of 1966, Red Guards began harassing pedestrians sporting Western fashions and hairdos; soon Mao suits—the gray pants-and-tunic set always buttoned to the very top—were nearly ubiquitous. Red Guards tore down the foreign-language signs that still dotted Shanghai and went to work coining Chinese words for Western manufactured goods. City residents who spoke English—either the rarefied Queen’s English version or the near-ubiquitous pidgin—soon pretended to know only Chinese.

Western architecture itself was a target, but in a city so thoroughly Western influenced, there was little the Red Guards could do to purify the metropolis short of leveling it outright. As such, only the most obvious examples of Western influence were trashed. Religious sites, including Holy Trinity Cathedral, were desecrated. And the British Consulate, which occupied the most desirable parcel of land in the whole city, was attacked and its diplomatic staff marched out, beaten, and covered with glue. (A British Foreign Office official later quipped with a last gasp of imperial hauteur, “122 years without rent isn’t bad going.”)

In the summer of 1966, the Red Guards ransacked the homes of Shanghai businessmen, searching out “the Four Olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. While the most notorious Buddha bonfires took place in historic Chinese cities with millennium-old temples, the antique Chinese book and art collections of wealthy Shanghainese were looted and often destroyed on the spot. The Red Guards also found—and confiscated—millions of US dollars in cash stashed away in Chinese businessmen’s homes.

In January 1967, the Red Guards’ wrath turned on the Shanghai Party itself. One hundred thousand gathered in People’s Square to denounce the municipal party committee and overthrow it. Mao praised the rally and backed the Shanghai Party takeover. For the next decade, China withdrew into itself in a violent rejection of the world and even its own past. The nation recalled all but one of its foreign ambassadors. Chinese universities were shuttered. The economy atrophied. Not only were the symbols of a century of foreign domination eradicated but so, too, were relics of China’s thousands of years of civilization before the unequal treaties, now tarred as a “feudal” pre-Communist culture irrelevant to New China. Rather than come to terms with its past, China erased it.

With Mao’s death in 1976, a nation exhausted and impoverished after a decade adrift sought pragmatic leadership. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping, whose cosmopolitan youth studying in France and working as a Party organizer in Jazz Age Shanghai had led to his tarring as a “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution, took power.

For all his Shanghai values—his gaze fixed on the market and the outside world—Deng was wary of Shanghai itself. The city had been the birthplace of Chinese capitalism but also the cradle of the Cultural Revolution that had destabilized the country. To begin market-oriented reforms, Deng chose to bypass Shanghai. Instead, he would test his policies in an entirely new city of his own creation, called Shenzhen, that he ordered built on the border with Hong Kong, the British colony that had grown rich swiping businesses and businessmen from Shanghai during its Maoist stagnation. Deng designated Shenzhen as China’s first “Special Economic Zone,” a carve-out area where private enterprise and foreign investment would be encouraged in the Communist state.

To sidestep intra-Party ideological debates about communism and capitalism, East and West, Deng packaged his free-market zone in Shenzhen as a mere “experiment.” He was, as he aphoristically put it in a pair of exceedingly famous (if apocryphal) quotes, “crossing the river by feeling the rocks”; he didn’t care “if it’s a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches mice.” But within the wrinkled septuagenarian still lurked the curious teenager who had moved to France with the stated intention “to learn knowledge and truth from the West in order to save China.”

For another decade, while Shenzhen boomed, Shanghai remained a somnambulant metropolis. At night, the city that once had been a riot of flashing lights was nearly pitch black. The streets, once packed with honking American automobiles, were now plied by silent bicycles. Squatters occupied the old banking towers on the Bund. And in the nationalized Peace Hotel (née Cathay), the same aging jazz band played the same numbers every night for an audience of handpicked foreign visitors whom Communist authorities trusted enough to grant a heretofore unnecessary document: a visa to visit Shanghai.

III: LICENSE-PERMIT RAJ | Bombay, 1947–1991

During the British Raj, Bombay had been the hub of the empire—an island off the coast of India linked as much by sea to the mother country as by rail to the subcontinent. Neither fully British nor fully Indian, Bombay was a zone apart. But what would its role be in the new independent India?

Bombay’s uncomfortable fit into the federal republic was immediately evident when a postindependence language fight broke out as the government in Delhi carved the subcontinent into states organized by mother tongue. The federal scheme worked well enough for rural areas and even for major cities like Calcutta, where Bengali was the lingua franca, or Madras, where it was Tamil. But in Bombay, with communities from all over India and beyond, English was the closest thing there was to a common language. And English, the language of colonial domination, was a target in the early national period, slated for a fifteen-year phaseout (that never quite took).

In Bombay, at independence, the largest linguistic segment, accounting for 43 percent of the population, was Marathi speakers, who composed most of the city’s working class; Gujarati, the main language of the traders and industrialists, came in second. To address this predicament, some argued that Bombay should become a federally administered Union Territory akin to America’s District of Columbia, as had been done with the Indian capital, Delhi. Instead, in 1955, the federal government decided to make Bombay the common capital of both Marathi-speaking Maharashtra due east over the creek and Gujarati-speaking Gujarat to the north. The compromise failed to placate the Marathi-speaking plurality who continued to agitate, undeterred by violent crackdowns on their protests, until 1960, when Bombay was made the capital solely of Maharashtra. It was a fateful decision. Henceforth Bombay, lashed to the vast Maharashtrian hinterlands, would be run by politicians who weren’t from Bombay and whose constituencies lay elsewhere. Even during the Raj at its most paternalistic, the men who ran Bombay were loyal to the city and wanted to see it live up to its potential as the urbs prima in Indis, if only because they knew Bombay’s success or failure reflected on the colonial project itself. In the new Indian republic, with the island metropolis run by mainlanders, this was no longer the case.

The challenges of fitting the polyglot trading port of Bombay into an independent India were even starker in economic policy. For Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in 1948, just months after India won independence, Bombay’s economy had been a symbol of everything that was wrong with modern civilization—infernal mills amid luxurious frippery, a rich city in a poor country. The new postcolonial India, he had argued, would have to decommission the nation’s industrial, financial, and commercial hub. Though India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a different vision—he foresaw a fully industrialized India built by a socialist system that combined the Soviet Union’s central planning with Great Britain’s rights-based liberalism—his plans dovetailed with Gandhi’s anti-Bombay sentiments. While Nehru’s methods were incomparably gentler than Stalin’s or Mao’s, his goal was identical: to demote his nation’s most modern city and, through central planning, spread its riches to the rest of the country.

In the lead-up to independence, the top industrialists of Bombay had met to ponder what a post-Raj economy should look like. J. R. D. Tata, the heir to Bombay’s greatest commercial dynasty, and the other assembled magnates ceded tremendous power over their businesses to the state. In a surrender to central planning that became known as the “Bombay Plan,” the industrialists agreed to limit foreign direct investment in their companies and give the state the power to fix their prices and regulate their production—even seize their companies outright. In 1953, the government used this new authority to nationalize Tata Airways, creating Air India. Similarly, Bombay’s landlords acceded to a 1947 rent-control law, capping rents at 1940s levels and destroying the incentive for maintenance and upgrading of properties even as the population of Bombay tripled in the postindependence decades.

Some economic historians remain puzzled as to why Bombay capitalists would surrender so much power to the state. But given the temper of the times, the outcome was all but inevitable. The Raj, they had to acknowledge, had been good for Bombay but bad for India. Even though India produced enough food to feed itself, periodic famines had long plagued the colony. Linking a poor country to the global market had allowed rich cities, like Bombay, and rich, developed countries, like Britain, to siphon off crucial resources as goods sought their highest price. And even when Bombay boomed under the Raj, many Bombayites had been left behind. The Bombay business elite was shrewd enough to realize that maintaining Bombay as a rich and divided island off the coast of an impoverished nation would be untenable in the world’s largest democracy.

With the Industries Act of 1951, the government began to put its vision of a less Bombay-centric Indian economy into practice. The stated goal of the new law was to maintain a regional balance when deciding where to locate industries. The meaning, to all who could read between the lines, was to move industry from the island of Bombay to the rest of the nation. To make companies comply, the new law mandated that government agencies sign off on routine corporate decisions. The state meddling soon grew into a stifling bureaucratic system dubbed alternately “red-tapism,” as if it were a religion, and the “License-Permit Raj,” suggesting that the independent Indian government was as restrictive of Indian businesses as the old British imperialists.

The Gandhian goal of preserving industries whose value was spiritual rather than economic, like handloom weaving, coupled with Nehru’s insistence on spreading industry equally throughout the subcontinent developed into a system that quashed Bombay and hamstrung the Indian economy. While Japan and other rapidly developing Asian countries were using protective tariffs to shelter their indigenous industries until they grew strong enough to vanquish their competition in the West, India sheltered its indigenous companies but then regulated them into oblivion—when it didn’t nationalize and mismanage them outright. The foibles of the License-Permit Raj were legion but among the most egregious was slapping inexpensive synthetic fabrics with a luxury tax under the misguided presumption that handloom-woven artisanally produced natural fabrics, like silk, were for the poor while high-tech synthetics, like polyester, were for the rich.

To spread the wealth and development of Bombay inland, grand plans were laid during the License-Permit Raj to physically transform the surrounding region. Right at independence in 1947, a master plan proposal for greater Bombay, prepared by a Bombay city planner and a New York–based consultant, endorsed moving industry out of the city. Relocating factories, the thinking went, would eliminate the industrial slums that scarred Bombay Island. Plans were made to build a new bridge across the creek to connect the city to the subcontinent and facilitate the moving of industry from city to countryside. But the inefficiencies of the Indian public sector slowed its grand plans. The bridge, slated to be opened in 1964, was completed in 1972.

As in Nationalist-era Shanghai and Stalinist-era Leningrad, the new Indian authorities hoped to create an alternate downtown away from the impressive but psychologically humiliating edifices of the British colonial center. In 1964, a team headed by the leading Indian architect of his generation, Charles Correa (his Latino surname comes from family roots in the Portuguese colony of Goa), published a vision for New Bombay, a “twin city” to be built across the creek from the original urbs prima. With New Bombay, the nation’s greatest metropolis would cease to be an island off the coast of India but would be a twin city with a coequal half on the mainland. In Correa’s explanation of the need for New Bombay, it was clear that the practical considerations—“The development across the water is essential to the orderly growth of Bombay”—were as important as the ideological ones. New Bombay, he and his team wrote, “would give a new image and new vitality to the citizens of the City and the State. . . . Where new capitals have been created,” the authors concluded, “it has been found that they not only fulfill the functional requirements of creating efficient administrative centres, but they also become a source of pride for their citizens.” Surely the historic “new capital” foremost in the minds of the planners—more prominent even than Brasília or Washington DC—was “Old Bombay” itself. While never the political capital of the Raj, it was its ideological capital, built as much to be an administrative center as a source of pride. Fully exorcising the ghosts of the Raj required building an entirely new Bombay.

According to the plan, overseen by the State Industries and Investment Corporation of Maharashtra, the government bureau charged with encouraging a rational distribution of industry over the entire state, the state government offices were to be moved from the island city to New Bombay where they would serve as the anchor tenants of the new development. Using the government as a tenant seemed a wise move at the time; the new Indian state kept growing and growing as it nationalized more and more industries and employed a larger and larger proportion of the population. The architects and planners duly drew the roads, railway stations, and office blocks, all in the slabby modernism-on-the-cheap that revealed centrally planned Nehruvian India’s affinity for the utilitarian socialist ideals of the Cold War–era Soviet Union. The development that sprung up around the central rail station, a white concrete structure adrift in a vast parking lot that looks as if it were constructed out of an enormous Lego set plagued by a shortage of window pieces, was given the grandiose name Belapur Central Business District (belapur means “city of vines” in Sanskrit, a homage to the lush tropical environment the development paved over). But the state government never moved in, dooming New Bombay to a second-rate status it has never shaken.

Instead, state officials placed themselves in Nariman Point, a new land-reclamation project adjacent to the heart of historic Bombay, a short walk from the Oval Maidan where Sir Bartle Frere’s Victorian Gothic government buildings face the Art Deco apartments. The state officials, who constantly harped on the need to redistribute investment from central Bombay to the mainland, had refused to do their part. At Nariman Point, government officials spared no expense to give themselves top-of-the-line design. The headquarters of the nationalized Air India, which was completed in 1974 and looks like a giant white domino or punch card, was designed by the New York firm Johnson/Burgee Architects, where modernist-superstar-cum-Museum-of-Modern-Art-curator Philip Johnson was a partner. The nearby National Centre for the Performing Arts was designed solely by Johnson.

The new “International Style” buildings—a term coined by Johnson to describe the unadorned, blocky, placeless, modernist structures that came to dot the world in the mid-twentieth century—answered Nehru’s call for a fresh start for independent India. Rather than draw on indigenous architectural traditions—traditions many felt had been tarnished by the British rulers’ appropriation of Indo-Saracenic styles—Nehru called for an Indian modernity “unfettered by the traditions of the past . . . an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.” But many came to resent the arrogance of public officials who housed themselves in the choicest locations in buildings designed by the highest-profile international architects while relegating others to inhabit the inland redevelopment scheme they touted. Ultimately, the bleakness of places like Belapur CBD, coupled with the sluggish growth of the Indian economy, led more and more Indians to wonder if Nehru’s path to a modern India was a road to nowhere.

Though there was no political opposition in the early independence period powerful enough to stop the License-Permit Raj, there were always naysayers against India’s state-directed, micromanaged economic development strategy. In the 1950s, a pair of Bombay economists suggested that India put its people to work making low-skill, low-cost consumer goods for the global market rather than building Nehru’s heavy-industrial dreams. In 1961, a young Manmohan Singh, the man who would ultimately lead India on a new economic path, wrote his Oxford doctoral dissertation on the need for India to embrace export-led growth.

But beyond the scholastic debates of academics and policy wonks, the real ideological naysayers against Nehruism were the Bollywood studios. To grow in spite of national economic policies that directed the state banks’ capital into serious, important industries like steel production rather than showbiz, the movie studios came to rely on Bombay black-market merchants and underworld figures for financing, effectively inoculating their businesses against red-tapism. While some studios dutifully turned out politically correct fare, saluting Nehruvian socialism with tedious documentaries on the openings of rural cement plants and the like, others presented a vision of a vibrant Bombay as an alternative to a staid, self-abnegating, official socialist ideology that ignored the metropolis at best and condemned it at worst. Lacking the vast resources of the Hollywood studios, Bollywood films were often shot on the streets of Bombay rather than on backlots.

The metropolis the studios presented was not the License-Permit Raj–restricted city of office clerks and public employees, but a mythic throwback to the glamorous Bombay of the Jazz Age. It was not difficult to conjure such a city, for Bombay had been physically frozen in its preindependence, cosmopolitan state. The same rent-control laws that preserved the city’s housing stock, albeit in increasing levels of decay as well-to-do homes were converted into de facto chawls, provided the city’s multinational corporate tenants with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Paramount Pictures, the Hollywood studio, maintained the same downtown office it first rented in 1933 right through the socialist period until today, all for a token rent. Similarly, Thomas Cook stayed put on Hornby Road, which was renamed for Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji. And whatever the government’s economic program, the citizenry’s right to dissent against its policies was always protected; with independence, the full free speech rights that the British had preserved for themselves back home had, at long last, been attained by the Indian people. In Bollywood movies, at least, Bombay remained maya-nagri, the city of illusion, a place where peasant farmers migrate to reinvent themselves as business magnates and mafia dons. While in traditional Indian philosophy, it is the goal of the wise and philosophical soul to see beyond the illusion (maya) of this world to the ultimate spiritual reality, Bombay’s film directors reveled in illusion and glitz. For Bollywood, the city’s moniker, maya-nagri, was a badge of honor to be worn proudly despite the sneers of stoical Gandhian India.

But when the lights came up and the comforts of the air-conditioned movie palace gave way to the sweltering streets of the metropolis, the denizens of the actual Bombay still had to deal with the realities of a city economy regarded with hostility by its inland rulers and bound with red tape. For many of the ambitious but idle young men who sat along Marine Drive looking out across the Arabian Sea, their backs turned to the once-gracious, now-crumbling Art Deco apartments behind them, the future lay just a short trip across the waters in the booming oil sheikhdoms of Arabia. While Cold War–era Bombay, like Leningrad and Shanghai, seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of its founding, in new regions unbound by the burdens of history the slate was still as blank as that of Bombay Island freshly reclaimed from the sea, the Neva river delta just conquered from the Swedes, or the new treaty port on the Huangpu after the Opium War.

IV: THE CITY AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD | Dubai, to 1981

There are many stories of how Dubai got its name. Unlike the fantastical tale of St. Petersburg being built whole in heaven and dropped to earth, the most fitting of Dubai’s origin myths may even be true. According to one theory, the name Dubai comes from a physical description of the town. A city along a tidal creek running inland from the Gulf, Dubai may mean “two houses,” one on each side of the creek. But the two words come from two different languages. The word two (doh) is Hindi while the word house (bayt) is Arabic; they come together to form doh-bayt—Dubai. Whatever its literal veracity, this origin story conveys a deeper truth: Dubai has always been a polyglot city.

The reason for Dubai’s eternal crossroads status is its location. It is the city at the center of the world. Shards of porcelain unearthed by contemporary archeologists suggest that Dubai merchants were trading with China two thousand years ago. But the geography of Dubai cuts both ways. The centrality of its location, at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, is undermined by its climate. The intensity of the summer heat, often reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, meant Dubai could never achieve liftoff before the advent of air-conditioning. From the coming of Islam in 630 AD to the dawn of the twentieth century, Dubai and its surrounding region experienced no population growth.

Befitting its status as a trading port, but hardly a boomtown, Dubai was of minor interest to Great Britain in its age of empire. Seeing the centrality of the Gulf for its lucrative trade routes to India, the British East India Company sought to safeguard the region from anti-Western, Islamic fundamentalist pirates in the early nineteenth century. With the help of their intimidating royal navy, the British struck a series of agreements with the local sheikhs beginning in 1820 to keep the region peaceful and the trade routes open. When the Maktoum, a branch of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, a small trading port seventy-five miles down the coast, took over Dubai in 1833, they duly kept the peace on behalf of the British. The Makhtoums have ruled Dubai as autocrats ever since. The only organized movement for democratic reform was crushed in 1939 with a massacre of conspirators at a royal wedding.

For all the British touting of their “civilizing mission”—the 1930s British representative for the region waxed eloquent about, as he put it, modernizing a people stuck in the seventh century—the colonial power did little to develop Dubai. While Bombay was being rebuilt as a showcase of modernity, Dubai languished with little public investment in infrastructure, like roads and railways, or in institutions, like schools and hospitals. In contrast to the stunning university the British built in Bombay, in Dubai they didn’t found a single college. Dubai was seen as junior partner in the empire, a lowly adjunct to the Indian jewel. It wasn’t even given its own currency, instead using the imperial Indian rupee as its legal tender. As long as it was peaceful and trading, Dubai was largely ignored by its imperial overlords.

Though Dubai meant little to the British, it meant a lot to its region. In 1900, when Persian authorities raised their port duties, the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Makhtoum bin Hasher, declared his city a tax-free, customs-free, license-free port. Soon Persian merchants were pouring into the city, relocating from across the Gulf. Dubai’s urban structure became a perfect reflection of its name. As the “two houses” grew into two neighborhoods facing each other across the creek, one developed into an Arab neighborhood and the other into a Persian and Indian one; segregation rules privileged Arabs, allowing them to live wherever they pleased while prohibiting Indians from living on the Arab side.

Having established itself as the leading trading center in the Gulf, a British visitor in 1908 recorded that Dubai had a population of ten thousand, drawn from around the Middle East and South Asia. Defined by trade, the city boasted two bazaars, four hundred shops, 385 pearling and fishing boats, 380 donkeys, 960 goats, and 1,650 camels. The Briton concluded, “The trade of Dibai [sic] is considerable and is rapidly expanding, chiefly in consequence of the enlightened policy of the late Shaikh Maktum-bin-Hashar, and the stringency of the Imperial Persian Customs on the opposite coast.”

Given their loose ties to the city, people only flocked to Dubai as long as there was economic opportunity. In the early twentieth century, a vogue for pearl jewelry brought tremendous wealth to the Gulf; its warm shallow waters produced the largest pearls in the world. Bombay merchants seized the moment, sailing to Dubai on buying trips and then trading the pearls on the British-dominated global market from Bombay. With the massive boom, pearling soon composed 95 percent of the Gulf economy. But when the Japanese developed a method of culturing pearls by inserting grit into the oyster rather than relying on chance, the Gulf industry went into steep decline. When the 1929 stock market crash sent the Western economies into free fall, demand for pearl jewelry crashed as well. The foreigners who had made Dubai a booming regional hub went home, and the city looked doomed to revert to its centuries-long stagnation.

Problems elsewhere brought prosperity back to Dubai. In what would become a pattern, the city-state would turn its location in the middle of a troubled region—political instability in the surrounding Middle East, mass poverty in nearby South Asia—into an asset. With the unquestioned rule of the Makhtoum family and a commitment to laissez-faire economics born of trading-port traditions, Dubai became an island of prosperity and stability.

The first large influx of traders came from a newly independent India, particularly from the nation’s commercial heart, Bombay. With Nehru’s nationalization of the commanding heights of the Indian economy and the strictures of the License-Permit Raj, scores of Indian traders decamped for Dubai. Bombay textile plants, now limited in the amount of product they could sell in India each year by new antimonopoly laws, unloaded their surplus in Dubai for distribution around the region and beyond. In time, Dubai developed into a kind of Bombay-in-exile where Indian merchants participated in the global economy from which they were barred by a government pursuing economic self-sufficiency, not trade links. In Dubai, it was Indians who became the importers for all the leading Japanese electronics companies, including Sony, NEC, and JVC, that were slapped with insurmountable import tariffs at home. A creek-dredging project to accommodate larger ships, launched by royal decree and completed in 1961, helped cement the deal with the regional traders as Dubai now provided both the economic environment and the physical facilities necessary for international commerce.

While many Indian merchants used Dubai as a base to do business with the world’s open economies, others used it as a base to illegally do business with their homeland. When a Nehru-ordered tax on precious metals sent the price of gold in India to two times its price on the global market, gold smuggling became a major business in Dubai. With Bombay effectively knocked out of the world’s gold market, tiny Dubai became the second-largest destination for gold purchased on British exchanges, surpassed only by Britain’s wealthy, luxury-goods-producing neighbor, France. Of course, the Gulf emirate was just a proxy for Bombay, where most of the gold ended up, sold on the black market at a huge markup. The illegal importation of gold into India was masterminded by Bombay underworld figures. At night, ships would sail from both Dubai and Bombay and rendezvous in the Arabian Sea, where they would exchange cash for gold.

With a prosperous Indian merchant class firmly entrenched in Dubai—some above board, others operating in the shadows—Indian professionals, like lawyers and accountants, followed along. Working-class Indians arrived to work as drivers, shopkeepers, and barbers for wages above what they could earn back home. By the late 1960s, one thousand South Asians were arriving in the Arabian Peninsula each week, most of them destined for Dubai. By 1970, foreigners made up the majority of Dubai’s population, the largest groups being Iranians, Pakistanis, and Indians.

The Maktoum family had always seen Dubai as a trading port, but with the 1960s influx of guest workers—noncitizens whose presence in the city-state was contingent upon a specific offer of employment—Sheikh Rashid, who had assumed power when his father died in 1958, seized the opportunity to turn Dubai into a fully modern city. While still crown prince, he had embarked on his first public works project: dredging the creek. Seeing infrastructure as a wise investment, requiring capital up front in exchange for long-term returns, Dubai borrowed the money for the dredging from nearby Kuwait, which was growing wealthy from the discovery of oil within its borders. But Rashid’s full vision of a modern Dubai only came together after his 1959 trip to Western Europe, his first outside the Gulf, which began in Rome and culminated in London, the capital of the empire that officially still presided over Dubai. The prince, who had grown up in a “palace” with ceilings made of rough-hewn wooden logs and dried palm fronds arranged around a sand courtyard, found himself in a city where even the impoverished residents of public housing projects had plumbing and electricity. The sheikh rode the London Underground like a common commuter and wandered the streets, taking in the grand structures of the city. He was transfixed by the modern metropolis—a diverse, wealthy global hub on an island that was linked to the rest of the world solely by sea and air.

When he returned to Dubai, Sheikh Rashid was determined to bring the city into the modern world. To house his people, as well as the growing numbers of guest workers, Rashid replaced makeshift neighborhoods of palm-frond huts with concrete buildings. Electricity came to the city in 1961. While the superpowers were engaged in the Space Race, Dubai was installing the modern conveniences that London, Paris, and New York as well as Leningrad, Shanghai, and Bombay had all enjoyed since the nineteenth century. Possessed by grand dreams for his city’s future, when Rashid began building Dubai’s airport in the early 1960s, he ordered up a parking lot with more spaces than Dubai had cars.

Many investors dismissed Rashid’s vision for his city’s future as preposterous, but in 1966, when oil was discovered in Dubai, it gave Rashid an independent source of capital for further infrastructure improvements. It was not a grand find by Middle Eastern standards: at full levels of production, Dubai would have about $1.5 million in oil per capita—significant, but nothing compared to the oil-rich emirate down the road, Abu Dhabi, with more than ten times that amount. Dubai’s relative resource poverty turned out to be a blessing. Rather than view the oil deposits as a giant national trust fund that could allow his people to do nothing but read their bank statements in perpetuity, Sheikh Rashid viewed the windfall as start-up capital. By investing it wisely in infrastructure, he hoped to set Dubai on a path toward permanent prosperity that could sustain it when the oil ran dry. The sheikh plunged money into building Port Rashid, a new deep-water port to be administered by the state-run company that would one day become DP World, one of the largest port operators on earth. And he also plunged money into recruiting talented architects, engineers, and businessmen to Dubai.

Sheikh Rashid’s development lodestar was London. As such, he hired a slew of British experts to build his city who, in turn, scoured the globe for fresh talents. One of the recruits was a recent university graduate from the Philippines named Jun Palafox. While eager to put his urban planning education to use, Palafox had never heard of the city-state that was recruiting him. Before his job interview, he pulled out a reasonably up-to-date reference book with basic information on every country in the world and saw that its listing for Dubai included the statistic “Kilometers of Paved Road: 0.” What does a city planner do in a city with no paved roads? he wondered. Is it even a city?

Perhaps in an effort to find out, Palafox moved to Dubai in the 1970s. The sheikhdom was small enough that Palafox met the sheikh himself, who personally explained the urban planning office’s mandate. “The marching orders,” Palafox recalled, were “bring Dubai from the third world—or fourth world—into the first world in fifteen years. Number two: Dubai was only 200,000 in population, design it for one million. Number three: design Dubai as if there’s no oil. Number four: make it the center of the Middle East. Number five: go around the world and copy.”

For his templates, Palafox was most interested in enduring boomtowns. Traveling the world, he gravitated toward cities like San Francisco, which sprang from the Gold Rush but developed a diversified economy that sustained it long after the gold was gone. By contrast, the sheikh and the British planners in the office were more enamored of London, and newly paved Dubai was soon dotted with British-style traffic roundabouts. Taken with the boxy modernism then in vogue, Sheikh Rashid and his team saw nothing wrong with leveling the Persian-influenced architecture of the old neighborhoods along the creek. The traditional wind towers—essentially a ship’s sail within an open cupola that ingeniously catches sea breezes and redirects them down into the house—were replaced by cement boxes with air conditioners hooked up to the new electricity grid.

Rashid assumed complete control of Dubai in 1971, when the newly formed United Arab Emirates (UAE), composed of political capital Abu Dhabi, business capital Dubai, and five lesser nearby city-states, became fully independent of Great Britain. It was not until 1973 that the union had its own flag, postage stamps, and currency. (Even after Indian independence, Dubai initially continued using the Indian rupee issued by the new Republic of India. For a time in the 1960s, the Reserve Bank of India even issued a Gulf Rupee specifically for use in the region.)

With full authority to craft Dubai’s modernization, Rashid assumed the curator-in-chief role of the Westernizing autocrat. Under the motto “What’s good for the merchants is good for Dubai,” Rashid hoped to foster a freewheeling internationally linked economy while monopolizing all political power. He purchased the loyalty of Emirati nationals by providing a lavish welfare state and by granting powerful families lucrative import licenses for coveted Western goods like Mercedes automobiles. In return, he and his fellow UAE sheikhs got the least democratic political structure in the Gulf, with no parliament or political parties at all.

While the social contract in which people traded a vibrant economy and generous welfare benefits for a stagnant political system seemed stable, controlling the cultural environment of the merchant-driven city-state proved more difficult. Though the state maintained an austere version of Islam as its official religion, it could not be open to the world without being open to nonbelievers. While neighboring Saudi Arabia banned all non-Muslim houses of worship, Rashid gave land for churches and carved out exemptions from Islamic religious law for the non-Muslims who called Dubai home. In contrast to Saudi Arabia and even some of the other emirates, hotels were permitted to serve alcohol; drinks were simply slapped with high sin taxes. And despite his own conservative predilections, Rashid made peace with prostitution. In the 1960s, his attempted crackdown on the oldest profession foundered when so many Dubai prostitutes flocked to a British bank to withdraw their savings before leaving the country that it nearly sank the bank. The sheikh relented. The legitimate and illegitimate sectors of Dubai’s economy were already so intertwined that it would be impossible to sort them out.

Rashid rolled with his freewheeling boomtown. Many foreign workers came to the city illegally, sneaking in by boat or over land rather than going through the passport control booths at the airport, but Rashid didn’t care. “What is the problem, so long as they are paying rent in Dubai?” he asked his advisers rhetorically. The city, which had had just 60,000 people in 1960, grew to 100,000 by 1970 and 276,000 by 1980. With demand for housing and commercial space rising, the physical city grew rapidly as Rashid gave free land to favored developers who agreed to build on it. And the massive infrastructure projects continued. In 1979, Rashid opened the largest man-made harbor ever created: Jebel Ali. The city was spending as much as 25 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure each year. And yet it was still largely unknown on the global stage.

Reaching for the now well-worn playbook of upstart global cities, Sheikh Rashid sought recognition through iconic architecture. He commissioned a skyscraper, demanding the tallest tower in the Middle East and embracing an American building form that had rarely been used outside the United States (pre-Communist Shanghai being the most famous exception). In open homage to the West, he gave his building a purposefully unoriginal name, the Dubai World Trade Centre, and had it inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II, in 1979. From the start, the thirty-nine-story high-rise, clad in a symmetrical metal skin of small Arabian peaked arch windows, proved a highly successful real estate venture. Major Western multinationals including IBM and British Petroleum signed up to rent space, and the US Consulate moved its offices into the building. But a thirty-nine-story tower could only grab local headlines in a world where hundred-story towers were common. To the extent Sheikh Rashid’s infrastructure investment garnered any attention in the West, it was to be mocked. In 1980, The Wall Street Journal lampooned Rashid’s grand outlays, duly cataloguing them and then urging readers to “consider that not one of these investments is in an industrialized country.” But Rashid was confident that the city was on the path blazed by other developing world metropolises, and that the Westerners would soon stop snickering.

Rashid would not live to see Dubai become the business hub of the Arab world and a global household name. In May 1981, the sheikh hosted a state visit from Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and the torchbearer for his socialist vision of a centrally planned India. The schedule of events was grueling, with substantive meetings during the day and lavish banquets running late into the night. It must have been an awkward visit for Rashid. One can imagine the sheikh slyly urging the Indian leader to continue the economic policies that were so disastrous for India and such a boon to Dubai. The morning after Gandhi left, Rashid suffered a debilitating stroke from which he never fully recovered. But he had laid the foundation for modern Dubai, the strange society—cosmopolitan and fundamentalist, authoritarian and libertine—the whole world would come to know.