"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.

Sex in the City: Shanghai's Sex Trade

A Sing-song Girl's "chit" or "dance card"

*****

“If God allows Shanghai to endure, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology”

-attributed to a visiting missionary of the 1930s

The five-to-one imbalance between male and female citizens in Shanghai during the Nineteenth Century meant that a rise in prostitution was inevitable. For centuries the Chinese had been at ease with concubines and the presence of brothels, or “flower houses”; polygamy was acceptable in Chinese society as was homosexuality, although most homosexual Chinese males were generally bisexual in practice. Western missionaries were of course shocked by this state of affairs and the Chinese came to be thought of by the Western invaders as somehow morally deficient.

Like the Japanese geisha, the Chinese courtesan was regularly employed as a companion for formal occasions where their decorous ways, musical and conversational skills shone a positive light upon the host, earning him much status, or ‘face’. Sexual favours were bestowed by the courtesan only if she felt it to be appropriate; however, a ritual ‘courting period’ involving the giving of many expensive gifts was the usual preamble. In the early days of Western occupation, from the 1840s onwards, these women were enchanting to the fan kuei (‘foreign devils’) and there were many unfortunate episodes based on a misunderstanding of the courtesan’s function.

The elite courtesan was educated, trained in music and calligraphy and possessed of high social skills. The fees for her services were extremely high and many were able to pick and choose their clients. They employed rickshaws and bodyguards and resided in luxurious rooms, sometimes even entire houses. Clients sent their ‘tickets’ to the courtesan outlining the time and place of their dinner parties or gatherings; sometimes the courtesan would be so booked-up that the briefest of appearances was all that she could offer in the course of an evening.

The activities of these glamorous figures were eagerly followed and society pages – known as the ‘Mosquito Press’ because their reports stung – detailed their every entanglement, romantic or otherwise. The high class courtesan lived under intense scrutiny, only too aware of others waiting to take her place and of an audience tracking her slow decline into decrepitude.

“Only two days ago, there was news that Zhu Ruchun had married. This is just baseless rumour. In fact, two more young [courtesans] will be ‘entering her household’ on the twentieth of this month, one called Zhu Yichun and the other Zhu Meichun; together with Zhu Fenchun, who has been there for quite a while, they will be a foursome in the business.”

-Newspaper report from the ‘Mosquito Press’

A rung down from the elite courtesan were the prostitutes attached to an establishment and managed by a madam, herself possibly an aged courtesan in reduced circumstances or simply pragmatic about her career after the bloom of youth had faded. The girls in these establishments were variously sent out to dinner parties to entertain, or worked out of rooms in the brothel. Those girls who went out on engagements travelled by barrow or, after the International Settlement of foreign occupiers imposed a tax on wheeled chairs, perched upright, carried on the shoulders of bodyguards to their assignations. The foreigners referred to these gorgeously-dressed women as ‘sing-song girls’. While less-intensively educated than the solitary courtesan, the sing-song girl was expected to be proficient in music and conversation; her carnal favours came at a somewhat lower price however, and with a shorter, waiveable, courting period.

With the influx of sailors from the port and the rise of sexually-transmitted diseases, the nature of the sex trade in Shanghai shifted. As a means of protecting their investments, the courtesans and sing-song girls began to serve Chinese clients exclusively, seeing the problem of ‘Canton Sores’ (the local term for syphilis) as a white man’s malady. However, demand inevitably clashed with supply: other establishments of a less choosey nature opened up throughout the city.

It would be naive to think that these brothels had not existed since the beginning of the treaty ports’ opening at the end of the First Opium War in 1842; far from it: Chinese pimps and madams had smelt opportunity in the wind and had set up establishments as soon as the foreign devils began to move in. No less than the white man, whose martial introduction to China was soundly based in economic gain, the Chinese saw an opportunity to make money and they took it. Initially, the brothels were discreet and located in out-of-the-way places; later, they were sprinkled throughout the city, each identified by a ubiquitous red lantern at its front door. When all of the girls in the house were occupied, the lantern would be taken down; this was also standard practice when all of the couches were occupied in an opium den, and many such operations chose to diversify as ‘flower houses’ as well.

During the Taiping Rebellion which wracked China during the 1850s and 1860s, violent gang wars in that part of Shanghai known as the Old Chinese City took place and, with the resulting property booms which they caused, the brothels expanded commensurately. Dispossessed peoples flocking in from the countryside sought ways to earn a living and the quickest and easiest method was to sell themselves. Men were quickly absorbed into the coolie workforce; many were often coshed or drugged and thrown onto ships bound for foreign climes to work as labourers, the origin of the expression ‘to shanghai’. Women, on the other hand, were dragged into the net of prostitution. Some peasants sold their daughters to brothels, or to courtesan-training madams where true potential was discerned; some peasants thought they were apprenticing their children to intermediaries who would find them work as servants to white folk but this was rarely ever the case. The most unfortunate girls were the ones who were caught by unscrupulous pimps or madams operating out of low-grade establishments – often single rooms separated into cubicles by strung sheets – and literally dragged off the streets and into the life of a whore. Such unfortunates were known as ‘wild pheasants’, or ‘wild chickens’ and were to be found soliciting in darkened street corners or in places where the authorities might not notice them, or not care if they did. The wild pheasants were often beaten for not meeting quotas of clients or cash; they were miserably dressed, poorly fed, bruised and usually afflicted by disease. Wherever they went they were closely followed by their avaricious ‘owner’ or their hired goons.

While it may seem strange that these callow girls from the country would be seen as worthwhile for a sexually sophisticated clientele, there was a definite cash benefit to be gained from capturing these naïfs: Chinese men would pay from five- to ten-times the standard amount for the opportunity of deflowering a virgin and therefore the madams and pimps were on high alert for the possibility of ‘fresh meat’. In straitened times when offerings were few, many canny operators could recycle a deflowered girl, using some special techniques and a deft application of concealed chicken blood.

Some of these girls ran away and there was at least one place to which they could escape: an inter-denominational congregation of missionaries’ wives helped establish a hostel called the ‘Door of Hope’ and they fought for and won the legal right to claim sanctuary for any girl who could make it through the mission’s front door:

“I can still see a little crowd of furiously hurrying people that broke across my path one evening. In front of them was the flying figure of a girl, her little silken coat torn and hanging from one shoulder. She was ten paces ahead of her pursuers as she passed me, her little face drawn and blanched with terror and exhaustion. Fortunately, her pursuers were not agile. A stout madam hobbled along on little feet; two burly men in blue peasant clothes lumbered along beside her, apparently the major-domos of her establishment. And all too apparently, the scudding miss ahead was a very recent inmate of that establishment, launched on a gallant and desperate break for freedom.

The crowd parted like sheep. A few heads turned around out of curiosity, but none out of sympathy. The pursuers swept by. Suddenly the girl turned under a bright street light and began to pound with both fists against a kind of matchboard doorway. A tall Sikh policeman started across the street from his traffic post on the opposite corner. Then the crowd closed in and it was all a blur.

When I got to the fragile doorway under the light the girl was gone and the Sikh policeman was dispersing the crowd. They scattered quickly, all but the stout woman and her two strong men. The woman scolded vehemently and viciously shook her fist at the sign above the doorway through which the victim had escaped. Then the policeman moved her on in true Occidental fashion and the incident seemed to be closed.”

-Gardner Harding, 1916

Once inside the mission house, the girl was free from any attempt to return her to her baleful life. The Mission sought to cure, dress and feed such delinquents and then found them work in the wider community, usually as servants to a notable taipan, or in the capacity of a receptionist, nurse or clerk. Often such rescued girls converted to Christianity and some made their way back to their country lives.

The missionaries also sought ways to help the older, more jaded prostitutes; unfortunately, these efforts sometimes backfired. A clinic to help women who had contracted syphilis was cried down by missionary workers and the moral majority of the foreign community, who felt that such an institution was a tacit acceptance of the disease and the lifestyle which promoted it: the clinic eventually had to close its doors. During its short period of operation, a law was passed that called for every working girl to attend monthly inspections to detect the presence of Canton Sores: a clean bill of health was noted on a special card which the subject was supposed to carry with them at all times. Initially, the prostitutes baulked at the notion until they saw that such a document certified them free of disease and, as such, amounted to a tradeable asset to boost the price of their services. The scheme had a very short duration.

Male prostitutes also existed and most of these worked a very select and elite clientele. The majority of male prostitutes worked in the theatre: as in Elizabethan times in England, all of the female roles in traditional Chinese opera were played by men specially trained from youth in conveying an authentic performance. Arts that were usually the province of women were taught to these boys, along with a whole range of erotic techniques; in the modern era of the Nineteenth- and early Twentieth Centuries, much of this training derived from the millennia-old traditions of creating eunuchs for positions within the Imperial palaces. Once established in a theatre group, these men would be wooed by high level figures, mostly male, and became de facto concubines of an unofficial kind. Their role was necessarily a discreet one however, as parallels with the neutered palace servants of bygone eras could be quickly drawn and the eunuchs were a byword for bureaucratic corruption and self-interest. Despite this, such young men often rose to very prominent and powerful positions within, say, a warlord’s inner circle, albeit background positions of great authority.

The practice of keeping ‘special favourites’ was not the purview only of the Chinese; many Western grandees also enjoyed collecting a coterie of exotic mistresses to attend to them. Some attached themselves to a single local woman, a practice that was first recorded in the early days of the British Raj in India and which ever after carried a frisson of Orientalist license for Western men on foreign shores. Others surrounded themselves with veritable harems, a situation that was universally frowned upon by the missionary enclaves: Sir Robert Hart, the well-known director of the International Maritime Customs Service based in Shanghai, was known to have ‘owned’ many young girls and his career was chequered by instances where the foreign community was roused into demanding that he relinquish his Chinese mistresses. When the time came for him to return to England, he found himself in the difficult economic position of having to provide for them all in his absence.

Tawdry as the flesh trade was in Shanghai at this time, things only got worse after the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The area known as Hongkew north of the Bund became the centre of the most rudimentary brothels – often just simple bamboo screens with a waiting line called ‘nail sheds’ – and this muddy magnet for seafarers and beachcombers became known as ‘Bamboo Town’. Gambling houses and opium dens diversified their trade and offered prostitutes as well as their standard fare: these ‘flower and smoke houses’ saw prodigious turnovers in trade.

The missionaries and other social reformers won a pyrrhic victory at this time: the practice of foot-binding – a centuries-old Han tradition of hobbling women and increasing their sexual desirability by deforming their feet - was successfully lobbied against and officially denigrated by the Imperial Court. Amongst the Imperial Manchu houses, the practice was not a cultural feature, so they certainly lost nothing by currying favour with the West in opposing it; it was, by-and-large, falling out of favour anyway across the country and was officially banned under the new Chinese Republic in 1912. It is interesting to note however, that the last Shantung factory that specialised in making shoes for women with bound feet closed its doors for the last time in 2006.

After the Republican Revolution in 1911, a sense of freedom and emancipation overtook the women of Shanghai and many girls indentured to work in brothels struck out on their own to map their own path through the seamy underworld. For the time being however, the whore’s lot in Shanghai was an unendurable drudge at best, a short life with only the temporary oblivion of alcohol and opium to dull the pain.

* * * * *

“...since there is no part of Shanghai that does not belong to the realm of dreams, those who enter it are without exception persons in a dream.”

-SunYusheng, Dreams of Shanghai’s Glamour (1903)

In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and the deadly debacle that was the Siege at Peking in 1900, the Foreign Legations exacted reparations from the Chinese people in yet another ‘unequal treaty’ referred to as the Chefoo Convention. Amongst its more humiliating demands was the call for the cessation of the Imperial Examinations, that rite of passage which guaranteed the young men of the noble and literati classes movement into and within the Imperial Bureaucracy. This treaty set in motion several chains of events: first, the loss of ‘face’ accrued by the military defeat was held as unsupportable by the average Chinese national; secondly, anti-foreign sentiment crystallised among the Han peoples of China and came to include their Imperial rulers comprising the Qing Dynasty who, as Manchurian natives, were themselves considered foreigners. The ramifications of these events were far-reaching: by 1911 China had evicted the Emperor from the Dragon Throne and became a republic and many Chinese began to look for a sense of national identity. Simultaneously, they sought for the keys to social progress and martial success among their hated but inevitably victorious invaders, the Western nations.

Those who could not travel to foreign parts went to visit those areas within the Celestial Kingdom where the West had taken hold. These were the treaty ports wrested from the Empire by greedy foreign traders, prime among them the city of Shanghai. Here idle young men with thwarted dreams of high attainment within the government could while away their burgeoning hours, writing poetry, drinking tea and revelling in the Western novelties which were anathema to their parents, such as Homburg hats, dining suites and paned-glass windows. It was during this time that an old piece of literature came to the fore and brought about a revolution in the sex trade of Shanghai.

That book was Honglou Meng, sometimes translated as The Story of the Stone but generally known as A Dream of Red Mansions. Begun by its impoverished author Tsao Hsueh-chin in 1791, it tells the tale of a prodigal youth, Chia Paoyu, who flouts familial expectations by retiring to a large clan estate, a vast garden dotted with pavilions wherein are installed his various female cousins, with whom he embarks on a series of romantic interludes. Eventually, his dalliances with these women pale in comparison to the true love he finds with the most beautiful and accomplished of them, Lin Tai-yu. Tsao Hsueh-chin was never able to raise the funds to publish his work, despite critical and popular success during his lifetime; he died before it was completed and another writer, Kao Ngo, finished it off and had it printed. In his hands it became a tragic tale: Chia Paoyu is lured from the garden and forced to agree to an arranged marriage with a woman from another clan; Lin Tai-yu, inconsolable, dies of grief.

The book struck a chord because many male readers saw a parallel between their own lives and that of the footloose Chia Paoyu. Denied the Imperial Examination process, they became idle, seeking entertainment and distraction from the political upheavals around them. Shanghai became a metaphor for the garden of pleasures, dotted with the ‘red mansions’ of the local courtesans. A tacit arrangement emerged, where young men courted the favours of the Shanghai courtesans, requiring that they pretend to be one of the many female roles within the novel, responding to their portrayal of the romantic rebel, Chia Paoyu. In this way the entire liaison could be played out almost as a script, including the inevitable bittersweet parting.

But lest anyone think that men were the sole architects of sexual activity within the decadent city, another revolution rocked Shanghai and the after-effects were mostly orchestrated by women.

The 1917 Communist takeover in Russia left a huge population of Russian Jews and Czarist White Russians fleeing their motherland and finding refuge in Shanghai. Many of these refugees move onwards from the port city to new homes in the Americas, Europe or Australia, but a large number of them stayed in China. Under the terms of extraterritoriality, Russia citizens were stateless in Shanghai, recognised by no local law; many unscrupulous operators took advantage of this to find safe havens in the city’s underworld. The White Russian women were a novelty in Shanghai: statuesque and blonde, they captivated the attention of the locals. For men it was the possibility of sex; for women, it was their clothes. The Russian women brought with them the latest Paris fashions: figure-hugging dresses, dainty hats and, most fascinating for the Chinese women, high-heeled shoes. Overnight, local fashions changed to accommodate the possibilities: the shapeless, Manchu gown, or qipao, became figure-hugging, spun from shimmering embroidered fabric and slashed to the hip to reveal shapely calves turned by daring stilettos: the cheong-sam was born and with it the ‘Shanghai Lady’, glamorous doyenne of the Jazz Age.

The prostitutes of Shanghai reinvented themselves in the light of this new-found independence and enjoyed a greater freedom which lasted for decades until the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. Certainly, the old structures of sexual slavery still existed, the ‘Mosquito Press’ still churned, and any woman could easily find herself kidnapped off the street and sold to an unscrupulous brothel owner to meet the fantasy check-list of a powerful client; however, the Chinese no longer automatically saw themselves as the social or moral inferiors of the fan kuei and sought to make their own way in a new Republic which promised economic independence, medical benefits and a greater sense of equality. The situation was summed up in a local ditty from the ‘40s:

“Me no worry

Me no care

Me going to marry a millionaire

And if he die

Me no cry

Me going to get another guy.”

*****

History: 19th Century China

Dealing with the West (1842 to 1911)

Until the end of the First Opium War, China had existed in a state of splendid isolation, its ports unavailable to Westerners and their ships for the purposes of trade and their population ranked in an orderly Confucian ideal from the rarefied existence of the Celestial Emperor to the lowliest beggar. It seemed that the rest of the world wanted what China had to offer and the exportation of tea, textiles and porcelain to the four corners of the globe soon saw massive trade deficits opening up as the world’s silver funnelled its way into the Imperial coffers in Peking. What little foreign trade did reach China came through Arabic intermediaries or through the city of Macao – nominally owned by the Portuguese – but in the main, China wanted nothing to do with the world outside its borders.

“We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures. Our ways bear no resemblance to yours.”

-Ch’ien Lung Emperor, to Lord McCartney, George III’s envoy, 1793.

An unscrupulous pair of British merchants determined to change all this. William Jardine, trader and former officer of the British East India Company, saw myriad possibilities in trading opium from India to the Chinese. Teaming up with James Matheson, the son of a baronet with useful connections to government, the two formed a trading company – Jardine, Matheson’s & Co. but generally known as Jardine’s – and began smuggling opium into China by way of Canton.

By means of swift steamships and by using rivers and canals to penetrate deep inland from the coast, business was soon booming. Despite the traffic of opium (known to the Chinese as ‘foreign mud’) being banned under Ch’ing dynasty edict years before, the demand soon threatened to outstrip supply and it is estimated that, by the late 1830s, 1 in 10 Chinese citizens was an opium addict. At an alarming rate, the flow of silver into China began to reverse

With the Imperial Treasury facing bankruptcy, the Chinese government took a stand and sent militia in to confiscate and destroy stores of opium in trading centres around Canton. This action prompted Jardine’s and the other opium merchant operations to demand trade sanctions from the Chinese government. Inevitably rebuffed, Jardine’s mobilised interested parties in England, financed warships and gun purchases and, on June 19^th 1842, implemented the infamous ‘gunboat diplomacy’ which ultimately wrested control of Shanghai from Peking. This was the First Opium War and established the first of the ‘Unequal Treaties’ which foisted Western rule on coastal China and established Shanghai as, ultimately, the most depraved city on earth.

The Unequal Treaties

The Treaty of Nanking officially ended the First Opium War and was signed aboard the HMS Cornwallis on the 29^th of August 1842. Under its terms, Hong Kong was ceded to British rule and five Chinese ports – Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai – were opened up to foreign trade with substantially reduced tariffs. War reparation of 21 million silver dollars to be paid to the victors was also agreed upon. A further agreement – The Treaty of the Bogue, signed in October the following year – extended these terms, allowing access to Chinese ports by Western missionaries, giving foreign settlers the right to build spheres of influence around their trading establishments, as well as codifying the extraterritoriality (or ‘extrality’) status of the foreign settlements: treaty port subjects could only be tried for crimes which they had committed in China by courts of their own nationality. A further addition to the Treaty of the Bogue was the infamous ‘Most Favoured Nation’ clause which outlined that any benefit offered under treaty to one nation would also accrue to every other treaty nation.

In October, 1856, the Second Opium (or Arrow) War broke out. Cantonese officials boarded a privateer vessel named the Arrow at the port of Whampoa. The crew was accused of piracy and smuggling and the ship impounded; despite the vessel having a lapsed registration to operate out of Hong Kong, the British consulate in Canton claimed the ship as British property and accused the Chinese customs officials of having ripped up a British flag during the inspection. Consequently British forces attacked and seized Canton shortly thereafter. Two years later, the impasse was lifted by the signing of another Unequal Treaty – The Treaty of Tientsin. This treaty allowed Britain, France, America and Russia the right to establish legations within Peking; opened up ten more treaty ports for trade and residence; allowed foreign ships – including warships – to navigate the Yangtze River; allowed all foreigners the right to travel within the borders of China for the purpose of trade or missionary endeavours and forbade the Chinese from using the character Yi (‘barbarian’) when referring to British subjects in official correspondence. There was also a heavy compensation to be paid to the various countries involved, as well as to the British traders.

Despite agreeing to this treaty, tensions rose again when the Chinese refused to allow the British to build an embassy in Peking in 1859. Conflict flared once more and an Anglo-French force stormed the Imperial capital, setting fire to and looting the Summer Palace. By the end of 1860, British forces were securely holding Northern China (which they did until April 1862 at the height of the Taiping threat against Shanghai) and another treaty – The Convention of Peking – was ratified. This document underscored the previous treaties as well as ceding Kowloon, part of Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutter’s Island to Britain in perpetuity and gave part of Outer Manchuria – the Ussuri krai, that part of the ancient Manchu province known as East Tartary – to Russia.

The Taiping Rebellion

Internal dissent, corruption, decadence and a failure to realise the potential threat which the fan kuei (‘foreign devils’) represented, caught the Imperial Ch’ing court off guard and resulted in a huge loss of face. The ruling Manchu court was seen as ineffective and incompetent, especially by those in the more volatile southern provinces. Although they refused to acknowledge it, the writing was on the wall and the days of Chinese Imperial rule were numbered.

The Taiping Rebellion began with the proclamations of a sickly (and quite possibly mad) individual named Hung Hsiu-ch’uan who founded ‘The Society of God Worshippers’ in Kwangsi in 1846. Combining a smattering of missionary literature which he’d read with an inflammatory monologue directed at incoming settlers to the province whose presence had begun to overtax the land, Hung developed the notion that he was the brother of Jesus Christ and that God had impelled him to create a ‘Heavenly Paradise of Great Peace’ (Tai-p’ing T’ien Kuo). From these crazy and parochial beginnings was launched a fifteen-year conflict which, by its end, claimed the lives of some 20 to 30 million people.

The tone of the Rebellion rapidly turned from a provincial outbreak to a full-on attack against the Manchu overlords. The Taiping army began a long march down the Yangtze towards the sea, eventually capturing Nanking, the old capital under the Ming dynasty, in 1853. There they established the nascent headquarters of the ‘Heavenly Paradise’ and started to attract followers. The Taiping recruits were mainly Chinese from the southern provinces but they included in their ranks Moslems from the western and north-western regions, bands of mountain-dwelling outlaws, tired of living rough and a host of the aboriginal Miao peoples who had been marginalised by the Manchu administration. In time their numbers would also include western foreigners - mercenary Britons, Yankees and Frenchmen - seeking fortune and glory.

While striving north to the Manchu capital of Peking, the Taipings sought targets of opportunity elsewhere, seeking to consolidate power; inevitably, their attentions were drawn to the burgeoning boom-town of Shanghai. Strategically important as a military port and a haven for many refugees fleeing the Taiping advance, the rebel armies hoped to place a stranglehold on the Manchu capital by cutting off access to the Yangtze at its source. As well, the Taipings believed that their pseudo-Christian rhetoric and the common enemy of the Imperial Court would make the foreign settlements sympathetic and possibly lead to a bloodless coup. Here too, much as the Imperial forces had done before them, the Taipings underestimated the tenacity of the foreign community.

The first attempt by the Taipings to open a dialogue with the Settlements in 1860 met bitter resistance from the combined Anglo-French forces; a second attempt in 1862 was even less successful as the Shanghai community had built its own militia – the Ever Victorious Army and the Shanghai Volunteer Corps – and, with the assistance of the Imperial Forces, had established a 30-mile perimeter around the city to deflect the Taipings’ incursions. By 1866 the Taiping Rebellion had been reduced to a series of regional skirmishes which were quickly put down. The Rebellion was over.

Yangtsze Boomtown

“Shanghai is like the Emperor’s ugly daughter; she never has to worry about finding suitors.”

-Chinese saying

Having thoroughly humiliated the Chinese during the Opium Wars, the foreign settlers moved in to consolidate the powers that the Unequal Treaties had given them. With companies like Jardine’s leading the way, the trade in opium skyrocketed and it became a commonplace occurrence for young men from England, France or America to move there to seek their fortunes. And find them they inevitably did, as long as they didn’t let their consciences prick them too much. Beginning with the ‘foreign mud’, other opportunities soon arose in textiles and in transport companies; during the Taiping Rebellion with the refugee influx, land prices boomed and slumlords made a killing; at this time too, crafty businessmen made fantastic amounts running guns and other weapons to the poorly equipped Taiping and Imperialist armies, usually at the same time that they supplied the forces protecting the foreign communities in Shanghai.

These ‘captains of industry’ soon built mansions and clubs and stately offices to accommodate themselves and their heady lifestyles. Nothing was too good: the finest marbles and most precious woods decorated their dwellings and their daily diets comprised nothing but the finest European and American cuisine with wines to match. Within their enclaves and workplaces, these ‘taipans’ lived like kings and wanted for nothing.

With the burgeoning trade, crime also flourished. In short order, alongside and often accompanying the seedy opium dens of the Chinese and French Settlements, brothels proliferated. With men of all nations in Shanghai outnumbering women at a ratio of about 5 to 1, business was brisk and soon another industry developed, that of kidnapping women from country districts and selling them to the bordellos. Syphilis, known to the local doctors as ‘Canton Sores’ had been introduced from the West by sailors arriving from Macao in the Eighteenth Century; now the disease was rife throughout the Shanghai district. Young men arriving from abroad to seek their fortunes were often required to sign contracts preventing them from being married in the first five years of their business life with a company (or ‘hong’) and they were frequently sent home to get engaged during this initial period. Of course, none of this stopped any man, married or otherwise, wealthy or not, from keeping mistresses and visiting prostitutes, much to the despair of the local missionaries.

“If God lets Shanghai endure, he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah”

-Shanghai Missionary.

With the Treaty of the Bogue, missionaries were soon plentiful in Shanghai. For the most part, the Catholic missionaries, spearheaded by the Jesuits, concentrated their efforts on educating and caring for the needy as well as promoting their holy word. The Protestant missionaries on the other hand became notorious for fighting bitter crusades against the lawlessness and sinfulness of the ‘Whore of Asia’ as Shanghai had become known. Their efforts were invariably mixed: the foreign settlements, while vocal in support of ‘Christianising the locals’, were anything but accommodating in their private lives; the Chinese, for the most part, wanted nothing to do with a religion that generally patronised them and recidivism was high amongst converts.

The International Settlements grew and prospered, surrounding the original walled Chinese City. The English and American concessions merged into one large International Settlement to the north of the city while the French Settlement remained staunchly independent to the south. In 1853 the Municipal Council of Shanghai was formed to govern the city and it was composed entirely of foreign stakeholders excluding the Chinese from local government entirely. That being said, each section of the city had its own courts and police forces and claimed separate jurisdiction from the others. The British fielded a large force of Sikh officers recruited from India, supplemented by foreign soldiers of fortune and some local Chinese translators; the French concession was mostly composed of Chinese officers under the lax guidance of French commanders. The Chinese City was left pretty much to its own devices as few foreigners went there anyway, considering it beneath them to do so. In this environment, crime inevitably flourished. Where a murderer could kill a man in broad daylight and evade capture simply by crossing to the other side of a street, criminal activity burgeoned.

The Boxer Rebellion

The Foreign diplomats had steadily become used to the manner in which the Chinese conducted their international affairs. From the Tsungli yamen (‘foreign office’) in Peking, they prevaricated over the ratification of treaties, quibbled over the wording used, sent representatives with no plenipotentiary powers to conduct discussions (which could not proceed as a result) and finally denied having agreed to the treaty in the first place. Almost inevitably, the foreign powers would resort to force to secure the agreements they had made. The lessons of 1860 had been learnt well.

The Celestials had run out of tactics in their diplomatic armoury. Elements within the national government had begun to look to the West for ways of improving their systems of defense and management, while other backward-looking factions became resentful and sought for means of exacting revenge. The rise of yet another secret society, the I Ho Ch’uan (‘The Fists of Righteous Harmony’, or ‘Boxers’ as the foreign legations came to know them) began agitating for a wholesale expulsion of foreigners and their ways. Within the Manchu court, many powerful individuals, the Empress Dowager amongst them, tacitly supported their thinking.

In June of 1900, Boxer raiding parties entered the capital and attacked the Foreign Legations. Over the next 55 days, the eight countries of the foreign community defended themselves in a desperate attempt to hold them at bay while reinforcements strove to approach from Tientsing, through countryside swarming with the fanatic legions of the society, backed sporadically by Imperial troops. The Boxers professed to have magic powers, charms which repelled the bullets and artillery of the fan kuei; magical rituals which could revive their dead to fight again; and charmed weapons that could cut through the enemy’s defences. Many of the Chinese troops engaged by the foreigners were thrown into a panic by these rumours and the foreign leaders were hampered in their efforts by having to fight a psychological as well as a physical conflict.

The Manchu Court initially opted to show no overt support to the Boxers; however, over time, their directions to the Imperial Troops became less coy. The Boxers were to be lent every co-operation in their efforts. Still, elements within the military chose to diplomatically ignore such orders and, while most were punished by decapitation, enough remained covert enough so that the defenders in Peking survived and the Boxer threat was eliminated.

In the aftermath of the ‘Rebellion, further treaties were signed and quickly ratified in an accord known as the Chefoo Convention: this time, none of the standard Chinese tricks to avoid committing to the deal were allowed and the whole issue was cleared up in very short order. The Imperial family, which had evacuated the Forbidden City and fled to distant provinces, returned shamefaced and were allowed to resume their rule. However, the writing was on the wall: by 1911, Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionary forces had rallied and successfully toppled the Imperials. With the Chinese Revolution, Imperial China ceased to be and a new, modern age had dawned...

Pnakotic Kpuzzle!

We discussed the Yithian language recently, so here’s a puzzle written in that tongue. How cool is that? Everyone crack open your copy of the Pnakotic Manuscripts...

All you need to do is assign a letter to each hieroglyph and reveal the word. The decision as to what letter is represented by which hieroglyph is up to you (Hint: “frequency analysis”). Once you’ve worked out the translation, you can then rearrange the letters in the highlighted squares to identify the theme of this puzzle.

Too tricky? Then here are some clues to help you out:

 

Hurl At

A Dank Hut Known

Have Flan Top

Rave I Risk

Neatly Held

Hath Nil

Dark Mason

Cheap Lies

La, Sonny!

Elk Diva

A Flagpole Tune

Aha! Bran!

Gold Flees Junk

Ash Tarn

A Rook Sun

The Footwork

Rabies Folio

Fatten Hog? How?

Almond Flora

A Haircut

*****

Answers to last month’s Puzzle:

1) EphirotH

2) L’mur-KatHulos

3) DaOloth

4) “(The) Ethics of Ygor”

5) Rhan Tegoth

6) ShogGoth

7) Iukkoth

8) Gol-gorOth

9) Nug-Soth

10) OThuum

11) Father

12) KOth

Thus: HHOYTGOSTO = YOG SOTHOTH

See you next month!