Madame Flora Ying of The Forbidden City, San Francisco – according to Maurice Dekobra

A small addition to my recent post on the Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco a while back. Reading Maurice Dekobra’s (who I’ve blogged about multiple times on this site – use the search box to see) 1946 novel Shanghai Honeymoon (which I’ll blog about in more detail soon) the club pops up and we can assume that if he didn’t visit then he had certainly heard of it. Speaking of a certain Madame Flora Ying at a party in Shanghai Dekobra writes that she was not discovered on the Tartar City of Peking nor the Flower Boats of Canton but rather, and remembering Dekobra was a sophisticated Parisian and habitue of Montmatre and so a little scornful of American vaudeville entertainment:

“He had found Madame Flora Ying quite simply in a nightclub on Sutter Street, San Francisco, the Forbidden City, where half a dozen Chinese girls had been engaged to amuse touriosts by singing vulgar sailors’ songs with their own perculirar stylized gestures. Mlle Flora Ying put on a special act. She undressed in an extremely narrow golden cage. Although her act held some of the glamour of the Orient, it was not, in fact, unlike the typical striptyease performance of a New York show of the kind which invariably attracts curious youngsters, hungry eyed bachelors and blase widowers, and where for a dollar the audience may feast its eyes upon some ravishing beauty in evening gown nonchanalantly shedding her garments to the strains of a Strauss waltz.”

There’s a lot more on the Forbidden City here