Three days after Christmas in the winter of 1918, a P & O steamer from Hong Kong sailed up the Huangpu River toward Shanghai. The most dangerous part of the journey lay behind — more than one P& O ship had been lost to a typhoon or wrecked on the rocks of the China Sea — but the sheer number of junks, tugs and barges that crowded the shallow Shanghai harbor required extra caution and concentration. Indeed, on this particular day, with heavy, wet snowflakes falling from the leaden sky, navigation was almost entirely dependent on sound. Only when each sharp burst of the foghorn had called forth a chorus of mournful whistles from the over-sized conch shells blown aboard the junks did the captain maneuver his ship onward. Despite his caution, a junk would every now and then loom up close, specter-like in the mist, its square brown sails billowing as the wide, heavy-lashed eyes painted on its bow almost appeared to blink.
The P & O’s cautious maneuvering into port must have seemed an eternity to its passengers, most of whom were no doubt straining their eyes to catch a glimpse of the Bund, Shanghai’s famous waterfront esplanade that was lined with such landmarks as the Shanghai Club, with its renowned Long Bar, and the flower-filled Public Gardens, entry to which was banned to all Chinese except those employed as servants of the city’s growing population of white residents. But for one passenger, a short, dark-eyed man named Mario Paci, these last hours of the journey were sheer agony.
A Florentine by birth and a musician by calling, Paci was traveling from his home in Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies, to Shanghai where he had been invited to give a series of piano recitals in the city’s Olympic Theater. For most of the three-day journey, he had been at the heart of shipboard social life, a lively . . .