Shanghai 1936. Word reaches the newsroom of the North China Daily-News that King Edward VIII is planning to marry an American divorcee, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, a one-time resident of Shanghai's International Settlement. Wallis Simpson has a thin but interesting file in the records of the Shanghai Municipal Police Department containing details of her activities in China-opium smoking, heroin peddling, learning the tricks of the trade at a high-class brothel.and posing naked for naughty postcards. The lost negatives of Simpson immediately become sought after by the Shanghai police acting on behalf of the British Government, the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the notorious Green Gang, agents of Adolf Hitler and Emily Hahn, the China Coast correspondent for the New Yorker magazine. Instead they end up in the clumsy hands of two naive young Americans, Eli Swan and Luther Flood, who have little idea of their international significance.or how much trouble they are in when they take the negatives with them on holiday to the nearby mountain resort of MOKANSHAN