Madame Tussauds Shanghai

This guide to Madame Tussauds Shanghai traces the museum's name back to a cart rattling over Paris cobblestones in the early 1790s, carrying a head still warm from the guillotine to a young woman named Marie Tussaud. Freshly dragged from a prison cell and facing execution herself as a friend of the royal family, she is offered a grim bargain to prove her loyalty to the Revolution. A former art tutor at Versailles, she had once taught the sister of King Louis the Sixteenth. The gallery of film stars, athletes and statesmen around you today traces its craft back to that Paris workshop.