Caroline Moorehead

‘Life was good, very good, almost too good’ – Wallis Simpson’s year in China

Arriving in Shanghai in the summer of 1924, the elegant 28-year-old embarked on a busy but harmless life of pleasure which would later be cast as a wild debauch

Wallis in 1927, at the time of her divorce from Earl Winfield Spencer. [Bridgeman Images] 
issue 09 November 2024

Few women have had more written about them, mostly of a critical, salacious nature, than Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Edward VIII gave up his crown. Much of the gossip has fed on what became known as the ‘China Dossier’, a supposed compendium of the year Simpson (or Spencer, as she then was) spent in China in the mid-1920s while she was trying to get a divorce from her heavy-drinking, abusive, naval first husband.

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