Old Shanghai wasn’t just crowded with longtang alleyways and opium dens; as most everyone knows, it was also full of garishly-lit clubs, where the drinks flowed freely, and the music played into the early morning. The most famous of these late-night hangouts was the Paramount, or in Chinese, Bai Le Men (百乐门), literally “The Gate of 100 Pleasures.” If you wanted high-class debauchery, this was the place to go.

The Paramount was built where the International Settlement met the local quarter. Designed in 1931 by architect Yang Xiliu and financed by businessman Gu Liancheng, the Paramount was three stories tall and included a kitchen, a banquet hall, a ballroom, and an elegant entry hall.

Beautiful rosewood floors in the ballroom were supported by armored plates taken from army trucks; it’s said that the Paramount dance floor could hold over a thousand people at once. In its heyday, the crowd was full of local tycoons, socialites, politicians and the house’s famed international hostesses—beautiful Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese dancing girls.
The Paramount was a meeting place of cultures, but it wasn’t always pretty; the seedy underbelly of Shanghai was never too far away.

The ugly side of the city reared its head in 1941, when a Japanese soldier, offended that a woman refused to dance with him, hired a hit-man to restore his honor. When the shot rang out in the ballroom, the crowd ran, screaming. Chen Manli, the Chinese dancer, had been shot and murdered.

After liberation, the ballroom of excess—the most famous in all of Shanghai—saw a series of changes, closing down, becoming a movie theater, and then a nightclub again, and finally a disco. Of all of the dance halls in Shanghai, the Paramount is the only one that is still standing today.