The lost and future glamour of a Shanghai ballroom

WHEN IT OPENED in 1933, the Paramount ballroom was the belle of Shanghai’s decadent, war-scarred nightlife. Designed by Yang Xiliu, the illuminated Art Deco palace loomed over Bubbling Well Road, drawing starlets, businessmen, gangsters and officers for taxi dances and shows. Its sprung wooden dance floor—and a smaller, underlit crystal one upstairs—enticed clientele including Xu Zhimo (a poet), Zhang Xueliang (a warlord) and Charlie Chaplin. In 1940, while the city was occupied by the Japanese, Chen Manli, a dance star, was shot to death at the Paramount; some say she was an undercover Kuomintang agent and assassinated by the collaborationist regime.

Chen’s ghost is said to haunt the building, where the parties went quiet after the Communist victory of 1949. From 1956 it was taken over by the government and subdivided into shops and a cinema showing propaganda films, before closing altogether during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s the cinema reopened and the worn dance floors were occasionally retrod; in the 2000s new managers gutted the interior to install a garish, short-lived discotheque. Now, after a restoration costing 130m yuan ($20m), the Paramount is poised for a revival, overseen by a modern-day dance diva who would make Chen proud.