Handbook for China

Carl Crow (1884–1945) was a Highland, Missouri-born newspaperman, businessman, and writer who managed several newspapers and then opened the first Western advertising agency in Shanghai, China. He ran the agency for 19 years, creating calendar advertisements. He was also the founding editor of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and for a quarter of a century worked there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and ad-man. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book 400 Million Customers, which encouraged a flood of business into China.

In 1935, the Shanghai Municipal Council published a map for visitors to the city which they commissioned Crow to produce. A reproduction of the map was printed in 2005 to help fund the copying of the archive of Crow's unpublished works, diaries and correspondence held at the University of Missouri.

Among Crow's exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on the Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of western hostages from mountain bandits, and being one of the first westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met and interviewed most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao Zedong's second-in-command Zhou Enlai. During the Second World War he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, coordinating US policies to support China against Japan.

He was very anti-Japanese, and fearing retribution he left Shanghai for good in 1937, just days after the Japanese attacked as part of the Second Sino-Japanese War's Battle of Shanghai. (Wikipedia)