Empire of the Sun

Ballard's wartime Shanghai, drawn from his own childhood: a boy is cut loose from his parents when the Japanese seize the city after Pearl Harbour. The map runs from the family villa in the western suburbs, through the International Settlement of the Bund and Nanking Road, out to the internment camp beside the Lunghua pagoda and airfield where he waits out the war.

Jim

The family house, western suburbs

Part One

The story opens in the sheltered world of an English business family in the western suburbs: a large house, servants, a chauffeured car, and a boy who cycles the leafy avenues. When the Japanese move in after Pearl Harbour, this settled life collapses and the boy loses his parents in the panic. Ballard drew the household straight from his own upbringing on Amherst Avenue.

Part One

inferred The novel places Jim's family in a comfortable villa in Shanghai's western suburbs but gives no address; this marks Amherst Avenue, now off Xinhua Road, where Ballard's own childhood home stood and which the fiction closely follows.

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Jim

The Bund

Part One

The riverfront boulevard of banks and hotels is where the foreign city meets the Huangpu. In the days around the attack the boy watches Japanese warships take the harbour and sees the flooded, corpse-strewn river that the war leaves behind, the grand facades now backed by an occupied city.

Part One

explicit The Bund is named in the book; this marks the historic waterfront promenade along the Huangpu River in the former International Settlement.

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Jim

Nanking Road

Part One

The great shopping street of the Settlement, lined with department stores and neon, runs west from the river into the heart of the foreign city. In the empty, looted Shanghai that follows the takeover the boy roams these streets alone, scavenging in abandoned flats while the ordinary world he knew disappears.

Part One

explicit Nanking Road is named in the book; this marks the eastern commercial stretch, today's East Nanjing Road, running inland from the Bund.

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