- By Dr Robert Bickers

This is a superbly researched, delightfully written personal history of an ordinary man in an extraordinary city. It tells the story of Richard Tinkler, a British ex-soldier who served in the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1920s, both as uniformed officer and in the CID. But it has a resonance today. As a British expat working in Shanghai for the last two years, I have felt exactly the same fascination and frustration with this Chinese city that looks and feels very Western at times, but is not entirely.

The book is based around a box of Tinkler's letters that the author found by chance in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London. Dr Bickers' painstaking and patient research is also an excellent example of how to do this kind of history. It is a detective story - appropriately enough - about a detective, and he pieces together the evidence carefully. Where there are gaps - and there are many - in the documentation, his speculations seem spot on. The writing style is a little academic, but if you know Shanghai, or China, or the period of history, it is an enjoyable read.

When Tinkler first reaches Shanghai in 1919, his views are typical of any new arrival, even now - "Shanghai is the best city I have seen and will leave any English town 100 years behind....it is the most cosmopolitan city of the world bar none....at night it is lit up like a carnival..." In the early 1920s, Tinkler reported that new buildings were "shooting up like mushrooms...Shanghai has altered me too".

Serving as a CID officer, he seems to become rather less enamoured with the city, perhaps having seen its dark side at very close quarters. A bitter tone starts to creep into his correspondence, "foreigners should be treated as the animals they are...Jews and Scotchmen are the curse of this town..." He was, as Dr Bickers note, "a typical white supremacist of his day". Empire manliness was about "hard work and hard play" and Tinkler spoke, wrote and acted violently. His fellow police officers did not seem to take to him, one noting, "he lost his temper very quickly". Tinkler never seemed to settle into local society, calling the British "the most prejudiced, uneducated, ignorant people in the world". Although he was white and British, as a police sergeant he was in a "no man's land" between the foreign commercial community and the Chinese. His lady friends tended to be White Russians, who maybe shared his sense of being "out of place".

The book discusses not just Tinkler but other expatriate workers, "labourers, farm workers, railwaymen, warehousemen, quarrymen", the "little people" of Empire. As Dr Bickers said at the launch of the book in Shanghai last year, for such people, "nothing but Empire really mattered". There are many more histories of this kind to be written, of ordinary people in extraordinary times and places, using old letters and similar material - "look in your loft !" as Bickers puts it.

Tinkler left the police in 1930, for reasons that are not entirely clear. After some years away, he returned to the city and became manager of a Pudong factory. He died in Shanghai in the summer of 1939, bayoneted to death in an argument with Japanese troops outside his factory. However, he is still remembered in Shanghai, out at the International Cemetery at Hongqiao - it is not his actual resting place, which was destroyed along with other foreign graves during the Cultural Revolution. But the memorial stone is still there, hard to find and buried in undergrowth.