"Terrifying Sphinx"

Shanghai’s Notorious Crime Lord, Tu Yueh-shen

 

I’ve often been asked about my fascination for China and especially the city of Shanghai. I think it stems from my early reading, which mostly consisted of comics and pulp fiction. My first thoughts about lawless Shanghai – ‘the Whore of the Orient’; ‘the Paradise for Adventurers’ – were moulded by such writers as Wally Wood in his Mad Magazine spoof of the 1950s comic serial Terry and the Pirates and such writers as Robert E. Howard, with his rollicking Steve Costigan stories of the China Seas. The common elements of these tales were the banditry, a heightened sense of lawlessness and danger, the seediness of drugs, and entrenched corruption. Movies such as Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) with Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong as jaded adventuresses, or ‘coasters’ as the jargon had it, and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) underscored the wild abandon of Revolutionary China and cemented these lurid associations. I later added such characters as ‘Sax’ Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and Earl Derr Bigger’s Charlie Chan to the mix and ended up with a very eclectic – and, I thought, probably wrong - idea of what this Chinese city was all about.

 

For reasons I’m still unsure about, I started investigating Chinese history about seven years ago (probably due to irritation about Gavin Menzies’ ridiculous book, 1421). What struck me first was that the story of China is practically a closed book, despite being such a huge place; my second revelation was that, in spite of my adult convictions that Shanghai could not be the immoral, abandoned sinkhole that I had read about in my youth, it actually was – if anything – more outrageous than I had thought. Following my literary and filmic associations, I started looking for the sort of colourful characters and stories that would people such a gangsters’ paradise, and I was not left wanting.

‘Peg-Leg’ Kearney was one such character: a self-proclaimed former admiral in the Chilean Navy; an inveterate gun-runner, information peddler and founder of the ‘San-K’, Shanghai’s answer to the Ku Klux Klan; known for having had both legs blown off in World War One, he proudly claimed that ‘technically, I am only half American’. There was also the warlord Chang Tsung-chang, the ‘Dog-meat General’, who captured Shanghai prior to 1925: the son of a witch and an itinerant trumpet player, he travelled everywhere with his own ornate coffin and a harem of wives that was a veritable United Nations of female representatives. He would decorate telegraph poles with the heads of those who displeased him, calling them ‘cut melons’. Then there was Sir Victor Sassoon (Bart.), heir to a generation of Jewish opium traders, a multi-millionaire real estate magnate and horse-racing enthusiast; having built the largest residential development in the world at the time in Shanghai, he declared that ‘there is only one race greater than the Jews, and that is the Derby’. This is not to mention everyone else who visited Shanghai in its lawless heyday: the infamous, the glamorous and the well-moneyed all came to stay, from Alistair Crowley to Ulysses S. Grant. But I was looking for someone who would be emblematic of the city, someone who could symbolise all that Shanghai stood for. Returning to my literary sources I tried to find a template for such an individual.

“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

–‘Sax’ Rohmer, The Mystery of Fu Manchu

The logical place to begin was with ‘Sax’ Rohmer (1866-1959) and his notorious fictional villain Dr Fu Manchu. Putting aside the fact that Rohmer never went to Shanghai, his ‘Devil Doctor’ has become the stereotype for the Chinese villain: the arch-browed, moustachioed, oriental aesthete in a Manchu silk cap and brocade gown, with long fingernails and the perennial pigtail, or queue. This image, in its physical outlines, derives much from the newspaper caricatures of the times, outlining the carving up of China by the West, and in reports of the Boxer Rebellion around 1900. But Rohmer’s character owes nothing else to China or its people: Fu Manchu surrounds himself with Indian Thugs, Burmese stranglers and Arab Assassins; he operates out of Egypt and Europe, using the weaponry and deadly creatures of Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Sub-Continent and the Levant. In short, Rohmer wrote of what he knew, which was what he’d assimilated from a boyhood library of the British Empire in its heyday; his knowledge of China, like that of most people of his vintage, was practically nothing.

 

Needless to say, looking through the history books, I found very little evidence of any real, historical person living in Shanghai who resembled the ‘Devil Doctor’. Certainly there were photographs of people who looked like Fu Manchu but then many Chinese people did back then: the image is the standard uniform of Chinese males, imposed upon them by the Manchu Qing overlords (1644-1911 AD). What I needed to do was to find information regarding actual gangster types of the Shanghai area.

 

My next port of call was Stella Dong’s Shanghai – the Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, which turned out to be a goldmine of information when it comes to Shanghai and crime. Within the pages of her opus I learned of the growth of Shanghai as a treaty port to the nations of the world in the aftermath of the First Opium War (1839-1842), and of how the city was re-imagined by foreign settlers and businessmen and rebuilt as an Orientalist fantasy that would make Edward Said proud. The foreigners crowded into a well-defined enclave; Americans, Italians, Germans and Japanese occupying a negotiated territory established by the British; the French occupiers created their own ‘Gallic zone’ below the International Settlement known as the French Concession. It was here that I found my first real gangster: ‘Pockmarked’ Huang Jin-rong.

 

The French, unlike the International Settlers, took some time in organising themselves in Shanghai. With interests in Indochina (Viet Nam) they felt that the Concession could be well run from their holdings in that country with a locally-engaged figurehead to facilitate things in terms of the local language. The person they chose was a smallpox-scarred individual who, as head of the French Concession police force, became the quintessentially-entrenched corrupt official. This was Huang Jin-rong. What the French did not know was that ‘Pockmarked’ Huang was the leader of the notorious Red Gang, an organisation deeply involved with drugs, prostitution and racketeering. With his newfound legitimacy, Huang was able to streamline his legal and otherwise activities into a smoothly-functioning machine. And what is more remarkable, the French (when they finally got around to establishing local oversight of their holdings) left him to it. The British in the International Settlement always had their own police force, but it had a bureau of Chinese detectives which concerned itself with ‘native’ issues: in time, they took over matters in much the same way Huang Jin-rong managed things in the French Concession, as shown in this quote:

“...They can continue their opium dealings just so long as the [International Settlement] benefits – very materially – and is spared much of the trouble to which foreign authorities in China are so often heirs.”

-The British Consul-General, 1930

Within the International Settlement the main gang threat was from the Big Eight Mob, a group which controlled the actions of eight lesser gangs. It was headed by one Sheng Shing-shan, who was the head of the Chinese detectives in the Settlement. He was later replaced by one Loh Li-kwei, of whom it was said:

“[The foreign community] figured crime was here to stay. So they decided to let the pot merely simmer, leaving it to Loh Li-kwei to see that it never boiled over.”

-Ernest William Peters, Shanghai Policeman (1937)

It’s clear that the expatriate community was well aware of the criminality of their police force, and to underscore things it’s worth considering this image sketched for the local newspapers by Shanghai’s famous White Russian cartoonist and social commentator, Sapajou:

 

However, while reading of ‘Pockmarked’ Huang, the shadowy outline of another individual began to come into focus. At first he was a big-eared, long-armed, gangly youth with a lumpy face and a drooping left eye, the result of a childhood’s-worth of beatings from his maternal uncle. He started his career in crime as a bravo with Huang Jin-rong’s Red Gang, robbing, kidnapping, running protection rackets, even killing to earn the approval of his bosses. This was ‘Big-Eared’ Tu Yueh-shen. Here, at last, was my quintessential Shanghai crimelord.

“[Tu] himself was tall and thin, with a face that seemed hewn out of stone, a Chinese version of the Sphinx. Peculiarly and inexplicably terrifying were his feet, in their silk socks and smart pointed European boots, emerging from beneath the long silken gown. Perhaps the Sphinx, too, would be even more frightening if it wore a modern top-hat.”

-W H Auden & Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (1938)

The story usually attributed to Tu is that he inveigled his way into the arms of ‘Sister Hoodlum’: Ah Gui, Huang Jin-rong’s mistress. She in turn convinced Huang that Tu was a man to be listened to. She was proved correct. Tu approached Huang with a scheme to streamline the importation and distribution of opium from the outlying poppy fields, thereby maximising the profit and minimising the amount paid in ‘squeeze’, or bribes, to facilitate the process. The hitch was that the Red Gang, under Huang, would have to work in concert with the Green Gang. Huang took the plan to his opposite number in the Green’s territory: that fellow rejected the idea out of hand, so Huang had him assassinated and replaced by Tu. The young gangster was on the fast track to success.

In some ways the term ‘Green Gang’ is a little erroneous, giving the impression of a homogeneous organisation. While the various colourful gangs did indeed exist, talking of the ‘Green Gang’ in the 1930s would have been somewhat akin to talking about ‘The Mafia’ today; the umbrella term hides a number of other groups all beholden to a single ideal and purpose. Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby described the Green Gang thusly:

“The Green Gang was an urban outgrowth of one of the many secret societies that have flourished in China for centuries. Such a gang has no counterpart in Western life; it sank its roots into all the filth and misery of the great lawless city, disposed of its gunmen as it saw fit, protected its clients by violence, was an organised force perhaps more powerful than the police.”

-Thunder Out of China (1946)

This mention of secret societies set bells ringing for me. Secret organisations have been a mainstay of Chinese history since the earliest times, usually formed in opposition to the current Imperial regime. The British called them ‘triads’ because the first society which they encountered, the Three Harmonies Society, used banners with triangles on them. Over time, these secret groups incorporated various beliefs and ritual practices, much of them designed to maintain secrecy and to instil fear of the consequences of loose talk amongst its recruits. A formal hierarchy emerged stemming from legends of past eminences and their attainments, and such ritual positions as the ‘Incense Master’ and the ‘White Paper Fan’ became established features of a triad network. However the title that attracted my attention was that of the hung kwan, or ‘Red Pole’, a kind of enforcer or protector whose job was to maintain order among the troops and eliminate threats to the society’s existence. Effectively they were gang leaders who surrounded themselves with capable men to serve the triad; able to fight, to intimidate and to kill if necessary. It occurred to me that the Red Gang might be one of these bands and that ‘Pockmarked’ Huang Jin-rong might be a ‘Red Pole’.

 

But if ‘Pockmarked’ Huang was a hung kwan and the Red Gang was his organisation of agents, why were there three gangs in Shanghai? Some more digging revealed to me that Dr. Sun yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, was a member of the Three Harmonies Society and that he had moved to Shanghai in the 1920s to touch base with the triad and to network with another of their agents, Charlie Soong, father of the influential Soong Dynasty. The Three Harmonies Society was possibly the country’s biggest triad organisation and it stands to reason that they may have had need of three ‘Red Poles’ to cover their activities. Certainly, after 1930 with ‘Big-Eared’ Tu’s successes piling up around him, they streamlined this aspect of their group: Tu began ruthlessly eliminating all those who stood in his way; Chang Hsiao-lin, the leader of the Blue Gang, became nervous in the face of the rising power of the other two gangs. Tu started to pressure the leaders of the Three Harmonies into subsuming Chang’s group into the Green Gang. A summit was called and Chang wisely decided to throw in his lot with Tu and Huang: together they formed a power bloc that controlled the Yangtze valley with all its poppy fields, as well as those in the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsu. ‘Big-Eared’ Tu was recognised as the pre-eminent gang leader and the three combined gangs became known simply as the Green Gang.

Tu was a lifelong opium addict, even turning to morphine and heroin in later years to maintain his perpetual high. His addiction lent him a reptilian air that frightened all of those who encountered him. His eyes were described as being like those of a taxidermist’s bird, pupil-less and dead black. In his early years, a fortune teller told him that he would die at peace in his bed as long as he always wore a dried monkey’s head stitched to his gown, in the middle of his back. These robes were tailor-made for him by a British ex-Savile Row tailor as Tu didn’t trust a Chinese tailor not to knife him in the back whilst taking his measurements. His oft-heard catchphrase was ‘you have my word’ and only very rarely during his life did he not keep it.

With his access to power in the underworld of the city, Tu began to look for ways to legitimise his position in a law-abiding citizens’ society. With a fortune conservatively estimated at US$40 million dollars in 1930, he began ploughing his funds into legitimate concerns which would serve the citizens of Shanghai, such as hospitals and other social infrastructure. He socialised with Soong Ai-ling, ‘Madam Kung’, the wife of Kung Hsiang-hsi, the Financial advisor to the Kuomintang, and together they arranged the wedding of her younger sister Soong Mei-ling to an up-and-coming leader in the National Republican Army, Chiang Kai-shek. In turn, Chiang appointed Tu as head of the Shanghai Anti-Opium League. By 1932, ‘Big-Eared’ Tu had been voted onto the Shanghai Municipal Council of the French Concession. He had become a bona fide pillar of society.

“[Tu Yueh-shen], the King of the Underworld, the opium magnate, the gangster chief whose terrible power was wielded over an empire of crime that out-ranged in evil even that of Al Capone in Chicago. Opium, the brothels, the trade unions, the hired killers, the slave-girl trade, the protection rackets, gold smuggling, gun-running and all kinds of crime were under the monopolistic control of Tu, the chief of the Ch'in Pang - the Green Circle Society - the Mafia of China.”

-Ralph Shaw, Sin City (1973)

Perhaps the most surprising efforts of Tu Yueh-shen were those in the political rather than the criminal sphere. Bernard Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai, with the benefit of access to newly-released secret files concerning Britain’s espionage activities in China, shows that Tu’s parochial concerns extended beyond the borders of Shanghai to China as a whole. After picking Chiang Kai-shek out of the mud of his rural beginnings and moulding him to become a leader of men in the Green Gang, he sent him off to the Kuomintang’s Whampoa Military Academy to take his place as a military commander. In the tensions after Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925 as to who would rule in his place, Tu had seen to it that there were enough Green Gang infiltrators at the Academy to keep Chiang free from assassination attempts, of which there were some; later that same year, he co-ordinated the atrocity that was the ‘Purging of the Party’ wherein Green Gang soldiers worked with Chiang’s troops to gun down hundreds of Kuomintang Communists on Shanghai’s streets. Later still, after the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937, Tu arranged for his Green Gang agents to spread disinformation and chaos among the Communists and the invading forces, despite the fact that he himself had been forced to flee to Chongqing in central China. The notorious Tai Li, head of the Military Bureau of Investigation of Statistics during World War Two, also known as ‘the Himmler of China’, was, unsurprisingly, a lieutenant of Tu’s.

After World War Two, China went back to civil war and the Kuomintang turned its sapped resources against the husbanded energies of the Chinese Communists. Things did not go well and by 1949, the Communists had won the day and began to slam down a wall of silence around China as effective as any constructed by the Emperors of past Dynasties. Tu was forced to flee once more, this time to Hong Kong. Tu Yueh-shen had commanded ultimate power in his day, rising from a lowly social position to a personage for whom the famous and fabulously-wealthy crossed floors to bow and scrape. He lingers as a virtual phantom behind the history of Twentieth Century China, despite being a shaper of it. His masters in the triad for which he toiled must surely have been pleased, as much with the lightness of his touch as the deftness with which he used his power. And the dried monkey heads obviously paid off: he died peacefully in his bed in 1951.