Was Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson a sexual and criminal deviant in China? A rethink
Famous for a British king abdicating to wed her, Simpson spent a year in China tainted by vicious rumours. Paul French has a different story
Much has been written about Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American socialite who changed the course of the British monarchy in 1936 when King Edward VIII abdicated to marry her.
Most of it is pretty scathing. Particularly indecent are the stories linked to a so-called “China Dossier” cataloguing Simpson’s sexual and criminal exploits during her year in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing from 1924 to 1925.
The “dossier”, which nobody seems to have ever seen a copy of, is now dismissed by many historians as nothing more than a smear campaign.
It supposedly claimed that Simpson – then aged 28 and known as Wallis Spencer – was hooked on opium, modelled naked for photographs, visited brothels, had numerous affairs, and was a master of a bedroom technique known as the “Shanghai grip”. (According to the Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable, this technique gave “the ability to make a matchstick feel like a Havana cigar”.)
“There are all these rumours out there about the time that she spent in China that basically say Wallis was a white woman who went to the east and lost her moral compass,” says British author Paul French.
French, a China historian and regular Post contributor, says he wanted to tell Simpson’s China story through the lens of a sinologist rather than that of a British tabloid establishment hell-bent on destroying her reputation.