The Last Kings of Shanghai

Jonathan Kaufman's 2020 parallel history of two powerful Jewish families — the Sassoons and the Kadoories — who dominated Shanghai commerce for a century, until Mao's revolution ended their world.

Documents the extraordinary story of Jewish merchant dynasties in China — tracing how the Sassoons and Kadoories built their fortunes on the opium trade, sheltered Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, and ultimately lost everything to the Communist revolution.