In the mid-1920s, Wallis Simpson spent a year in China. She went there "hoping to make a fresh start" after the breakdown of her first marriage to a "heavy-drinking" US naval officer who was stationed in Hong Kong, said Caroline Moorehead in The Spectator. A decade later, when Britain was tipped into constitutional crisis by the American divorcée's relationship with Edward VIII, her "lotus year", as she called it, became the subject of lurid gossip.
It was rumoured that in China, Simpson had been addicted to opium, posed for pornographic photos, and learnt a sexual technique – the Shanghai grip – which had "infatuated the king". All this was said to have been detailed in a "China Dossier" compiled by British intelligence.
In his new book, the Shanghai-based historian Paul French provides a more sober take on her travels. She had no "louche adventures" in China – just a few "respectable" affairs – and the dossier never existed. "Her Lotus Year" therefore lacks raciness, but is "delightful to read", thanks to French's detailed "knowledge of the place and period".
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Simpson's visit began in Shanghai, where a friend "introduced her to the city's wealthiest circles", said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. She shopped, played poker and attended "tea dances". She then travelled north to Peking, and spent the rest of the year living on the compound of a wealthy American couple while conducting an affair with an Italian gunboat commander. Her grasp of the language was limited – "Boy, pass the champagne" was a phrase she did master – but she was as "embedded in Peking life as a foreigner could be". This is a well researched book, but you can't avoid regretting that the realities of Simpson's life in the East are "less interesting than the myths".
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