Tael Lights, first published in 1936, is a guidebook to the seamier side of Shanghai in the mid-1930s, when it was at its most outrageous. The authors, two pretty dissolute foreigners living life to the fullest and working at least partially in a Whangpoo whiskey haze, stress the nightlife, particularly the sex and sin side of the city. Political correctness hardly enters into it.

“Absolutely the best guide to Shanghai in its most crazy and golden period by a pair of revelers who didn’t give a damn.” - Graham Earnshaw

Who is Pat Patterson?

Pat Patterson was an extraordinary man, a Canadian with a vast appetite for everything life and Asia had to offer. He was a pilot, and represented all the major U.S. aircraft manufacturers in China in the 1930s. He held the second of only two private pilot licenses ever issued in China, and he sky-wrote the character for long life in the skies above Shanghai in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. He was a man of legend in the bars of Hong Kong, but his drinking partners were mostly unaware of Pat's excursion into the literary world.