Champly (Henry) The Road to Shanghai:

White Slave Traffic in Asia
London, John Long, 1938.

Fireside Library edition, second impression. 8vo. Original blue boards. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.

First published in 1934 and translated from the French by Warre B. Wells, this purports to be investigative journalism: Champly follows the trafficking route from Marseilles through Singapore, Indo-China and Hong Kong to Shanghai, “the Mecca of pimps,” interviewing assorted procurers and racketeers along the way. What it actually is, is a lurid exercise in colonial anxiety about the “White Race,” dressed up as social concern and sold (this copy being the eleventh thousand) extremely well, which perhaps tells you something illuminating about a proportion of the 1930s reading public… It survives now as a genuinely useful primary source on interwar Shanghai’s demi-monde.