Tag: C.S. Hagen

Interview with a Fox Demon

 Fargo resident travels to western China in search of one of the last known “fox demon” shamans in modern times

 

By C.S. Hagen 

SHAANXI, CHINA (PRC) – Chen Xing yawned for the tenth time and moved to the screened door of his shaman clinic. He yawned not from boredom, but rather in preparation for the spirit about to possess him.

Among other more painful effects, the yawns were a human side effect and a small price to pay for signing a deal with a fox spirit, he said. Xing yawned once more, this time longer and louder than before.

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Chen Xing, or Chen Saiwa, before being possessed by a fox demon – photo by C.S. Hagen

“When it possesses me I don’t know or remember anything,” Xing, who prefers to be called by his new name, Chen Saiwa, said. His final yawn was an impossible, bone-chilling intake of breath that lasted longer than half a minute. His eyes burned like slow-burning coals and he smiled a second before the possession was complete. “It’s all through the Boluo Fox.”

At the screen door he doubled over, retching, and then stood. His slightly plump, young body no longer resembled the 37-year-old peasant’s son. Ask the villagers of Boluo or the infirmed in Yulin, Xi’an, or Inner Mongolia and he was Chen Saiwa, local shaman healer, diviner and messenger of Guanyin Pusa, or the Goddess of Mercy.

Eyes squinted and teary, only two front teeth protruded from between his pursed lips. Although the day was clear and sunlight streamed through a crack in the tinted, boarded-up windows, his thinning, dark hair had gone almost completely grey. Hands behind his back and slightly bent forward at the waist, his movements were stiff and slow, those of a much older man. He used yellow charm paper to wipe tears from his eyes.

“Good, good,” Saiwa said in a different, gravelly voice. Dressed in blue jeans, a wife beater T-shirt and tennis shoes, he scraped his feet to the fox altar that held two bottles of Chinese wine and snatched one of them. Saiwa thirstily swallowed once – as easily as the potent alcohol was water – then spat a second on his left palm holding it to the light for study.

“I am nothing but a small, small fox spirit. Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma. What is it that you seek?”

 

The ancient town of Boluo - photo by C.S. Hagen

The ancient town of Boluo, the winding Wuding River, and the Ordos Desert – photo by C.S. Hagen

Fated for Possession

Beneath the crumbling, baked brick walls of Boluo Castle in northern Shaanxi province an entire village believes in the Boluo Fox. They have believed since before World War II. They say a man named Lei Zheng Wu, known to villagers as Old Wu, was the spirit’s medium before he died of liver cancer in 1994 and Saiwa accepted the fox’s terms.

They call Saiwa and his progenitor miracle workers, healers of the sick of body and soul, and many smile warmly when asked about their local hero.

“At first, like many others, I didn’t believe,” said Wang Xinxin, a former resident of Boluo now living in nearby Yulin. “But Old Wu treated me for an illness and he treated me well. Later, Chen told me everything from my past very clearly, things he could not or should not have known. I thought Saiwa was crazy at the beginning, we all thought he was crazy, but now many people from Boluo even Inner Mongolia come here to Yulin to get healed.”

Both men’s stories are similar, Wang said. Before accepting the fox spirit, neither of the men could read nor write. Both were poor, Old Wu learning the trade of goat herding and Saiwa that of an underpaid chef.

“His food was terrible to eat,” Wang said.

And both men underwent three years of intense sickness.

“I am a peasant’s son,” Saiwa said. “I was completely opposed to it at first. But I couldn’t work, couldn’t make money. I was so sick and the hospitals had no idea why and could do nothing for me. For three years I went through a bitter time. The fox beat me down until I agreed, and since it possessed me I got better, day-by-day until now I can live a normal life.

Saiwa is married and has paid the government fines by having a second child. His predecessor Old Wu was married with seven children, six boys and one girl. He admitted he feels blessed with virility and wants more children.

“It spoke to me and told me then it was the Boluo Fox,” Saiwa said, “and that it was fate that we should be together.”

Lei Ying, the "son of thunder" standing before his father's old fox clinic - photo by C.S. Hagen

Lei Ying, the “son of thunder” standing before his father’s old fox clinic – photo by C.S. Hagen

Old Wu and the First Possession

A fox shrine in Boluo stands behind the former home of Old Wu and is guarded religiously by his sons. On the southern side of the shrine there is a small house, an outdoor kitchen and a hollowed out cave where Old Wu used to heal and his grandfather once lived.

“This is the real clinic,” said Lei Ying, the eldest of Old Wu’s sons. He is the son of lightning, Ying joked, as the surname Lei means lightning in Chinese. Despite the rumors that the children of fox spirits are imbued with supernatural abilities, he says neither he nor his siblings are so blessed.

Legends that foxes are demigods of fertility stand to reason, he said. Ying is older than sixty and wears large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. His handshake is strong and he brandishes a friendly smile at every question. He opened the doors to his childhood home and gave a tour of the inside of the small fox shrine. Six stone markers stand like graves toward the east side of the structure.

The fox temple Chen Saiwa built - photo by C.S. Hagen

The fox temple Chen Saiwa built – photo by C.S. Hagen

The white, stone shrine had no stairs going up and yet was three stories high. A small room at the bottom of the shrine was made for worshippers. Old Wu’s son lights four incense sticks inside the clinic, bows and talks of his childhood.

“It was strange growing up with a fox spirit for a father, but I could do nothing to change that,” he said and pointed to the drawing of his father at the altar. In the picture, a white turban is wrapped around his father’s head and he wears a Mao-styled jacket. The room is lined with red silk banners emblazoned with gold-colored writing in appreciation for Old Wu and Saiwa’s shamanist work. Even as a child, he said, neighbors or classmates did not ostracize him and his family, at least not until the Cultural Revolution.

“My father was reluctant at first. Before the fox spirit possessed him he could not read and the only thing he knew how to do was tend sheep.”

After three years of sickness where he wore little but undergarments in the winter and thick wool coats in the summer, the fox spirit possessed Old Wu, and he could not only cure the sick, he could read and write charms as well. All without any study, Ying said. He was capable of performing shamanistic rituals, read people’s fortunes and write charms to ward off evil. He began each session by spitting wine into his left hand and examining it, Ying said.

“It was as if the spirit gave him the powers to read and write, to predict the future and cure the ill.

Inside the Lei family fox clinic - photo by C.S. Hagen

Inside the Lei family fox clinic – photo by C.S. Hagen

“He used to sit in a chair here,” Ying pointed to a desk near the old door where a chair once stood. “And he kept his door open at all times. People would come by, they would lie on the bed and he would spit wine on to his hand and perform miracles.”

He charged an average of five Chinese dollars per visit, not a trifling fee before World War II, but never turned a patient away.

“I was healed here once as a boy,” said Zhang Xing Rong, a neighbor. “And once my son was sick, it was a disease you would not understand but it had to do with the earth. Old Wu spit wine on to his hand and could see the problem by studying his palm. He then gently picked up my son’s legs and kissed them with his lips, like this.” Zhang imitated the fox spirit delicately taking his son’s legs and made a kissing noise.

“And then he was better. We didn’t even have to buy medicine, and in those days it only cost us five Chinese dollars.”

People in the village believe in the fox spirit, Zhang said, and consider its nearby presence a blessing. The village is between the mountain of Boluo Castle and a rural highway lined with shops. He was born here like his forefathers as far back as he can remember, he said. Each passing person who stood to stare and ask why a foreigner was walking through their village smiled and nodded their heads when told he was looking for the son of Old Wu. They quickly hurried on their way after a few words amongst themselves as the village had a wedding to prepare for. One woman named Chen Hua Hua, also reportedly possessed by a vixen spirit, helps the Lei family and looks after the village’s fox shrine, called Boluo Ting. It was built in honor of the Boluo Fox after the Cultural Revolution by funds predominantly provided for by Saiwa. She stood holding a hooked, wooden beam for carrying ceremonial buckets of water for the upcoming wedding. She recognized Old Wu as the former village fox spirit and excused herself to make ready for the newlywed’s arrival when firecrackers erupted back down the dirt path.

Following the path to the base of the village stands a thousand-year-old temple named Jieyin Temple, or the Receiving Temple of Boluo. The villagers nickname the temple, not the shrine near Old Wu’s house, the Boluo Fox Temple, Zhang said.

“We always respect it, and protect it when we could,” Zhang said.

During the Cultural Revolution all superstitions, cult magic and shamans were vehemently banned throughout China. Old Wu spent three years of a seven-year sentence in prison. He became possessed by the Boluo Fox in the late 1940s and was imprisoned in 1959 during the Anti-Superstition Socialist Education Campaign.

After his release he continued to practice in secret, Ying said. Although the government suppressed him, among his clients were high-ranking cadres from the regional government.

Old Wu practiced in secret.

The fox clinic in those days was a hidden-away room, which was part of a more larger temple complex. There was room for three kneeling supplicants.

“He got out early because of good behavior and everyone liked him.” Ying said. “Plus the government then had nothing to feed their prisoners.”

The Jieyin Temple holds the deteriorated leftovers of an old sandstone carving of Buddha that dates back to the Tang Dynasty. A monk completed the carving after he saw a natural outline of Buddha in the stone. Historically, the carving is called Stone Buddha, and although the first temple was built around the 6th century A.D., it has withstood fire, wars, and attempted lootings by Mongolians, Chinese, British, French and Spanish invaders. Centuries of violence and bitter desert elements have reduced Stone Buddha to resemble a two-faced demon today, but a visage remains. Recent government funding that includes the restoration of the Boluo Castle above has breathed fresh life into the village and despite China’s hesitancy toward the belief of fox spirits or demons, holds two larger than life idols in respect for two fox spirits.

Jin Chan Laotzu, or Old Master of the Golden Chan, the original fox demon - at left - photo by C.S. Hagen

Jin Chan Laotzu, or Old Master of the Golden Chan, the original fox demon – at left – photo by C.S. Hagen

The Boluo Fox, according to temple documents, is named Jin Chan Laotzu, or Old Master of the Golden Chan, and it stands amongst the seven Diamond Kings of Heaven, the protectors or governors of the continents, beneath the carving of Stone Buddha. Each king is monstrous in appearance and size and carries a magical weapon. One holds Blue Cloud, a magic sword capable of bringing the Black Wind – a thousand spears in a single swing. Another king brandishes the Umbrella of Chaos, formed of supernatural pearls that can generate violent storms and earthquakes. Strangely, inside the temple shrine before Stone Buddha that stands more than thirty feet high, only the fox spirit appears humanly normal. Dressed in blue robes and a red cape, it stands with his hands raised, palms upwards, neither smiling nor frowning.

The Boluo Fox didn’t leave Old Wu until shortly before his death in 1994. Old Wu died of liver cancer and didn’t once try to cure himself, Zhang said.

“He was happy until the end.”

“But he was sad when the fox spirit left him,” Ying said. “The fox spirit went out and possessed another man not from this village. His name is Chen Saiwa and he lives in Yulin.”

Heading back down the path through the village and away from the ancient Boluo Castle, Ying stopped at the wedding as the newlyweds arrived. He grinned and talked to neighbors and cheered as madly drumming dancers past. Although Ying would admit to being nothing more than a keeper of his father’s temple, one glance at his leathered face and the lifelong friends gathering around him sharing cigarettes said at the very least, the son of lightning was a highly respected member of the small village.

Boluo's crumbling walls - photo by C.S. Hagen

Boluo’s crumbling walls – photo by C.S. Hagen

Boluo, an ancient fortress dating back to the Ming Dynasty, circa 14th century A.D., was built to protect China against the marauding hordes of Genghis Khan’s descendants. It borders Inner Mongolia and the western Ordos Desert. Once towering walls surrounded the city have mostly crumbled. The city gate still stands and a handful of people reside behind the walls. Some of the inhabitants live in grottos carved into hillsides. The Wuding River lazily winds and shines silver in the valley below. Crops grow in abundance and the smells of maize, barley and fennel fill the air.

It is a perfect lair for a fox, said Taoist Master He Lutong, from Tianjin.

“Only in the ancient, undeveloped areas can something like this happen,” Master He said. “Only where history is long and the traditions are real will foxes make their appearance.”

Spirits, he said, do not like the light and the bustle of city life. They prefer to reside where they are respected or feared. They predominantly prey on the sick and weak-minded. Legends of fox spirits are mostly as whorish vixens capable of sucking souls and eating the hearts of men. But once they’ve become a nine-tailed fox through mediation, knowledge and deeds, he said, whether by the high road or the low or the path of evil, they become the Goddess of Mercy’s messengers and sometimes assassins.

“The difference between good and evil as we know today are humanity’s definition, not the fox’s,” Master He said. “They have their own definition. Give an evil person or a good person a cure, it doesn’t matter to them. And sometimes an evil person’s cure may be punishment.”

A cure, perhaps, as in the legend of Su Daji, an evil vixen who corrupted the heart of a once righteous emperor and destroyed the Shang Dynasty nearly four thousand years ago. According to the Chinese texts such as the Lost Books of Zhou and the Investiture of the Gods, she enjoyed eating men’s hearts, inventing new ways of torturing her many enemies and the art of seduction. She was sent to destroy the emperor after he ridiculed Nüwa, one of the most ancient Chinese gods.

The fact that a kind-hearted fox spirit reportedly lives in Western China did not surprise Master He, and he made mention of another fox spirit enshrined in the Queen of Heaven Temple in Tianjin, a city of eleven million people near the country’s capitol.

Granny Wang the Third at Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress - photo by Annie Gao

Granny Wang the Third at Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress – photo by Annie Gao

“Granny Wang the Third was very good with the people,” Master He said. Although he had never heard of Saiwa or Lao Wu, he said their stories are similar. Granny Wang predominantly resided near Tianjin during the end of the last dynasty of China. Those were days of great poverty and affluence and worst of all, war, Master He said. But Granny Wang kept away from the rivalries, sometimes helping villagers escape peril at the hands of warlords and bandits. “You would almost never find her in the temples, she was always in the people’s homes, curing the sick and helping the people avoid calamity.”

Temple reports dating back to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 say that she was a joyous person, always keeping herself busy until her death when one of the legends says she turned to stone inside Tianjin’s Queen of Heaven Temple. Her effigy remains there, and also at the Mountain of Marvelous Peak in Beijing, but she is unknown throughout most of China. She holds a vial of pills in one hand and people visit her to help with illness to this day, Master He said. They burn incense, bow three times, and rub her feet to cure illness, touch her hands to stay healthy.

“No problem was too little for her,” Master He said.

Mention her name in Tianjin to anyone born before the Cultural Revolution and they smile. “Big problem, little problem, Granny Wang will show,” said Boxer Rebellion Musuem curator Lin Xinqiao. He recalled as a child living in the crowded hutong streets of Tianjin where a shrine was dedicated to her. The shrine was torn down and her effigy thrown into the city’s main river during the Cultural Revolution, he said. As a child he remembers his mother paying homage to Granny Wang.

Across Asia worship of the fox is widespread. Some fear the spirit; others respect it. In China, the fox spirit is known as the huxian, or hulijing. In Japan, the kitsune lives on through the practice of worshipping Inari. Japanese families who are known as fox familiars reportedly raise foxes from generation to generation to achieve good fortune. In Korea the kumiho is a malevolent creature that enjoys eating human livers.

“In some places and instances it is known more or less as the opposite of Buddha,” Master He said. Although the fox spirit is a messenger for the gods, it can also help human kind achieve instant gratification for prayers. For instance, Master He said, a disgruntled wife whose husband is cheating on her or for vengeance of any kind. In the past in Southern China, rare instances of widespread panic have been attributed to the fox spirit for spreading a disease known as Koro. Koro is a culture-specific syndrome in which the person has an overpowering belief that his or her genitals will retract and disappear. Westernized doctors have treated such patients with psychotherapy, while in China Taoist priests beat gongs and incant charms to exorcise the fox spirit.

Taoist priests and legends generally agree that although vixens can be killed while in the form of a fox or trapped by experienced priests, peach wood, or toumuk in Cantonese, is the best weapon to use to kill them. A nine-tailed fox who has achieved the status by either the moral road or the path of evil, is very difficult if not impossible to kill, Master He said.

“Of course they exist,” Master He said while at his office. Two customers awaited him to have their fortunes read. “There is simply too much evidence throughout history and today to say they do not.”

Chen Saiwa, after possession in his clinic - photo by C.S. Hagen

Chen Saiwa, after possession in his clinic – photo by C.S. Hagen

Interview with the Boluo Fox

Before Saiwa became possessed he asked the Boluo Fox if it was willing to be interviewed. He invites the Boluo Fox when he needs but has no control over when the fox spirit will leave. After lighting four incense sticks, which he placed upon the altar, he lit a fifth curled incense and placed it underneath. He then kowtowed, or bowed three times before an effigy of Goddess of Mercy. Grabbing a carved canister filled with fortune sticks, he shook it until one fell out.

The answer was yes.

More than an hour passed before the final yawn and the possession was complete. The possessed Saiwa smiled frequently, and said he had met Westerners before but never for an interview. He drank periodically, straight from the bottle, coughed from the lower abdomen after each sip and kept one hand always behind his back.

“You desire information. Do not fear. I will not hurt you,” Saiwa said. He spoke Chinese but of an ancient form, one that is no longer used in modern China.

The Stone Buddha - photo by C.S. Hagen

The Stone Buddha – photo by C.S. Hagen

Saiwa, or the Boluo Fox, said he has no name. Neither does he need to eat or sleep. He has no humanly recognizable form any longer and is an assistant of the Goddess of Mercy. He said in human time he is older than 10,000 years and originally was a black fox that came from Mongolia. After crossing the Ordos Desert into Shaanxi he arrived in the form of a fox at the Stone Buddha carving before it was made. Upon entering the temple he injured his paw and The Goddess of Mercy took pity on him, taking him for a pupil.

Saiwa refers to himself only as “this monk,” and says many of the haunting stories of evil fox demons are little more than legend. The infamous Su Daji, concubine of the Emperor Zhou of the Shang Dynasty in 400 B.C., was not a fox spirit, he said. She was simply an evil woman.

“Just as with people, there exist the good and the bad. When this monk was in training this monk had many fox friends, just as people have friends, who were bad and tried to lead this monk astray. This monk made many mistakes. Many friends took the bad road. The xie dao (path of evil), is the easiest path.” The Boluo Fox took another sip from the bottle and shuffled closer.

“Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma,” the Boluo Fox repeated each time he finished a statement.

He merely smiled when asked if he had ever eaten a human heart. According to ancient Chinese texts human hearts keep a young fox’s complexion after they learn to shape shift into human form. A human soul on the other hand, is far more potent. It is a powerful aphrodisiac to help them achieve immortality.

Besides healing the sick and protecting humans, one of his responsibilities, he said, was to ensure that other fox spirits do not stray from the path of enlightenment. He reins them in when possible, and sees that they are punished when he cannot control them. Though he has never met one, fox spirits are everywhere, he said, even in the United States. When Saiwa listens he squints his eyes and drinks deeply from the glass bottle of wine. Afterward, he smiles, like a rabbit and differently from the man before the possession. He appears older, greyer, eyes puffier but genuinely interested in answering any questions he can.

Some questions he said he was not allowed to answer. Questions about the progress of mankind through the centuries, the end of the world and if heaven truly exists.

“This is the first time we have met and you are the first Westerner to interview me,” he said. “There are many things this monk cannot tell you for this monk is but a servant of the Goddess of Mercy and does only her bidding.

“You ask this monk why this monk chose Lei Zheng Wu and Chen Saiwa? Chen Saiwa is but a dock for this monk to inhabit and perform her will. This monk looked inside them and saw our meeting was destiny.”

The two men are related, but not directly. Saiwa’s mother was Lao Wu’s wife’s sister. The Boluo Fox did not choose one of Lao Wu’s direct family to inhabit.

Outside of his host’s body, the Boluo Fox said it is impossible for humans to see his true form. While he was in training before the first dynasty of China, he had to learn to take the shape of a human. He had to eat and sleep, just like any other fox. It took him one thousand years to reach the Ninth Tail, or the final step in a fox’s road to enlightenment. His training included performing good deeds, like healing the sick, helping the injured and the poor, and above all, protecting human beings in any way he could.

When asked about the legends of other fox spirits eating human hearts or stealing qi and souls away, he avoided the question and said he was far above such practices now and that not all legends are true.

“We have rules that are enforced. If fox spirits break those rules they are punished. There are many legends about us and many roads we can take,” he rubbed a hand across his cheek much like a fox might while cleaning his paw.

“And there are many of us on earth, and not just in China. Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma. This monk won’t be here forever but this monk will listen to the will of Buddha, whose most fervent dream is peace on earth and to fight against calamity.

“Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma.”

 

Family Fox Feud at Boluo

Wedding celebration in Boluo - photo by C.S. Hagen

Wedding celebration in Boluo – photo by C.S. Hagen

At the village of Boluo no one doubts the authenticity of Saiwa’s claim that the Boluo Fox chose him as a medium, but Lei’s children forced Saiwa from their community.

“His sons in their hearts are not happy,” Wang Xinxin said. “They did not like him at first and they do not like him now. It is a family problem.”

Saiwa’s mother and Lei’s wife were sisters, Wang said. In keeping with the tradition of fox familiars, Lei’s family is jealous that the Boluo Fox chose someone outside of their immediate family. Even after Saiwa built the Fox Shrine behind Jie Yin Temple in the late 1990s, the Lei family keeps watch over the shrine but does not want Saiwa to return.

“Old Wu’s family is jealous of me after I built the shrine,” Saiwa said. He spent upwards of eight hundred thousand Chinese dollars in constructing the memorial to the Boluo Fox. “It isn’t important that I go back, the Boluo Fox wants to return. Boluo has been his home for a very long time.”

Ying refused to speak on the matter.

Despite the family opposition, Saiwa is content and happy that he allowed the Boluo Fox to use him as a medium for healing. He has learned how to read and write and spends his spare time studying Buddhist scriptures. He receives patients daily and said the possession is sometimes painful.

“It was unpleasant at first,” he said before the Boluo Fox possessed him. “There is a pain or more like an emptiness in my head. When it’s over I remember nothing during the time he possessed me and I must lay down for an hour or so before I feel better.”

Thinking back twelve years before when he first encountered the Boluo Fox he said he did not believe such creatures existed when he was young.

“Now my days are simple. I am a simple man and do not regret my decision.”  Saiwa married after he accepted his fate of being the “port” or caretaker for the Boluo Fox. He sired two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom accept his role as a shamanistic fox medium.

“My wife thought I was crazy at first,” he said. “But through the years she has accepted our fate. Our children have never been sick. Not once.”  When the Boluo Fox possesses him, his friend and patient Wang said he speaks with the same voice as Old Wu. They both use the same methods to cure the sick.

“He even looks and acts the same,” Wang said. “Many people from Boluo come here to Yulin to get healed,” he said. “And you pay as you can, usually people pay 30 to fifty Chinese dollars but its up to the individual. Saiwa will not turn anyone away even if they cannot pay.”

Saiwa says he cannot cure all sicknesses however, some patients he leaves to the hands of science and modern medicine. He openly admits his skills, once possessed, cannot cure every ailment. A 24-year-old man whose muscles were deteriorating was once brought to him for consultation. The man was taking illegal drugs, Saiwa said. His parents did not know and the young man refused to admit his addiction until the Boluo Fox told them what his problem was.

“They told me what I said after I woke,” Saiwa said. “At least now they can seek proper care and treat the real problem and not just the symptoms.”  Saiwa said no matter how the Cultural Revolution repressed shamanism and mystic beliefs, there are many like him throughout China, some of whom are imposters seeking recognition. His patient, Wang, agreed.

“There are a lot of bad foxes out there,” Wang said. “Back in Boluo there is a woman there who claims to be a fox spirit as well, but I don’t believe it is true. I haven’t heard of any bad foxes that have done terrible things, it’s more like they are fake, and will treat you for an illness but you walk away feeling even more uncomfortable than when you arrived.”

Saiwa has been treating people from Boluo, Yulin, Inner Mongolia and Xi’an for more than twelve years. Hanging from the walls of his clinic are crimson silk banners, each one in recognition for his healing work. Hanging closer to the altar are strips of blue paper, also giving testimony to those he has healed.

“If I treated someone improperly and that person died, no one would believe in me,” Saiwa said.

Wang Xinxin worshipping at the fox altar - photo by C.S. Hagen

Wang Xinxin worshipping at the fox altar – photo by C.S. Hagen

Wang described how Saiwa told him of a time when Wang had been in a traffic accident and burned his leg. Local doctors could not heal his injuries and the wound became infected. At one point doctors in Yulin told him he would lose his lower leg. As a truck driver Wang could not continue his work without the use of both legs and he turned to the Boluo Fox for assistance.

A foul smelling tincture of boiled herbs, bean paste, and yellow wine then administered by the hands of the Boluo Fox cured him.

“The hospital could not heal me, they said they might have to take my leg,” Wang said. “But he healed me within three days. There are many things that are hard to believe, but I’ve seen proof enough and I do believe.

“The Boluo Fox is real.”

MAGPIE BRIDGE – Chapter One – Table Scars

Rusty water dripped from a sagging ceiling on to a pockmarked table. The droplets pooled and slipped through a crack that ran through the only furniture Soren Anderson owned. Soren dipped a bony forefinger into the ruddy plash. Pipe water resembled blood, and then ink, then blood again from erratic neon light. Transformers buzzed like late summer yellow jackets.

He bought the table along with one rounded back chair from a belly-up bar on Goose Island, just before the Chicago city-state was formed and the island became Satan’s Sanctum, No Care Zone Number Fifty-Six. He needed to write, finish his story, but each time he brought pen to paper a nick in the hard wood caught his attention and his mind wandered. A gang fight, perhaps? A made man’s last mark before two in the head? Or maybe some woman’s boot heel, propped roughly on top for a sloppy screw. Three parallel lines along the table’s left edge resembled fingernail tracks. Cigarette burns formed a swastika in the middle. The table had stories to tell. Just like him. If only it didn’t hurt so much to remember.

Soren ran his hand across the nicked surface, exposing a forearm through his worn trench coat, which doubled as a bathrobe. Fifteen scars starting below his hand’s meaty part led to his bicep. His arm was a fleshy, barren field tilled by a razor’s edge. Each discolored furrow was equally distant, a thumb’s width apart. One final space was left to cut on his other arm, a space to mark the thirty-first year since his heart was stolen. And then he might start on his legs. The worst scar however, wasn’t on his arms. Starting below his jugular notch it ran down his sternum, took a violent turn over his left pectoral muscle and ended at his armpit. The giant, pinkish L-shaped scar made him shiver every time he saw it through the soap scum of his bathroom mirror.

L for love or lost, love lost.

Soren turned back to the yellow notepad and read what he had crossed out with his Uni-Ball.

“It wasn’t my fault. Danni Pan poisoned me.” True, but a boring beginning.

Spilled gin smeared the second sentence, something about foxes and hearts. Skipping to number three, which ran the width of the page to the ninth pale blue line, it was the best he had written yet, but gave too much away.

“I arrived behind the bamboo curtain with nothing more than a cold, one of those slow, comfortable sniffles that carry a husky, after sex voice but light enough to still cough through half a cigarette. And I escaped almost the same way, three years later, a fake Marlboro dangling from my lips, but without my heart.”

Words. That’s all they were. But strung together pained him to read. Instinctively, he reached his right hand to his chest, still wishing, hoping to feel a beat, anything that resembled a pulse.

His veins were silent.

A cool breeze shifted the curtains, turning the jaundiced gauze into a flaming wall heralding spices from the Mexican restaurant across the street. Sometimes through his window, usually in autumn, when the breezes blew just right, he could smell something resembling Norma’s alfalfa fields, in the former state of North Dakota, and the scent would take him on a journey home, to Klara waving proudly from the back of a red convertible after winning the Miss North Dakota Pageant, and to his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

Ah, Klara. Every single man within a hundred miles wanted to court her in those young days, but she only had eyes for him. She was his first friend, his first love. Before Danni he had only ever kissed Klara. He missed her. Not a day passed when he didn’t wonder about their daughter Vivi, short for Olivia. Stomach cancer had taken Klara’s life nine years ago. He kept track of local events and obituary notices with a subscription to the Kenmare News. Vivi, as far as he knew, was still alive, but probably wanted nothing to do with him. The only photograph he had of her was a wrinkled three by five still folded in his wallet. She was six then, which would make her thirty-six now. If he had the opportunity to see her though, he would, but from a safe distance, just to make sure she was all right. A man in his condition couldn’t afford friends or family. They always died in the end.

His left thumb caressed a groove in the table. It formed the letter C almost perfectly. That looks like a bite mark. But whose Lilliputian mouth could possibly bite the top of a table? He was procrastinating again.

Soren shook his head angrily and forced the pen’s tip through the notebook’s first few pages. Ink leaked from the tip and spread across the page. He was not a writer, but grammatology, like mechanics, always intrigued him. He had a story to tell, although nobody would believe him. They should though, everyone really should. Danni would find him sooner or later and retrieve what she had not taken that terrible night in Three Rivers, China. Already their yips and howls woke him at night. Fox screams had a way of unnerving a man especially in the dead hours of a crowded city.

His hand bumped a hard object under his unwashed, wife beater t-shirt. He gripped it tight and closed his eyes. Is there enough time to finish? The oblong object clung to an iron chain around his neck, and it was his only protection. Toumuk, they called it in the East. In English, it was nothing more than carved peach wood.

Slowly, Soren withdrew the wood from beneath his shirt. The metal links jangled, conjuring hobbles and led balls and weighed unusually heavy in his palm. So far the amulet protected him. When fox demons neared his senses heightened. Air gave him cottonmouth, but if he held his breath deep inside his vision cleared, his muscles tightened and inside, perhaps it was his soul, stirred.

He studied the amulet before slipping it back under his shirt. It was shaped like an Indian arrowhead. A strange, Chinese symbol was engraved in the wood’s center. He guessed it was a charm fox demons didn’t like. The symbol’s top resembled a horned beast with squiggly marks. At the bottom, lines connected by small circles resembled a Galilean star chart. It was the only gift from his one time friend, Little Jack.

“Curse you god,” Soren said. “Curse you to my hell.”

There were no gods. The gods were on a very lengthy vacation. He would live long enough to finish his story and warn the world, hopefully no longer than that. If nobody believed him then fuck them. Fuck them all.

Books at the far end of the table broke the harshest neon beams. Since his escape back to America he had collected every written work he could find on fox demons. The authors were most likely dead now, for he had never known another man like him. First, there was J.J.M. DeGroot, an eighteen ninety-two author of a six-volume series on the supernatural in China. Then there was Pu Songling, a seventeenth-century author who was either infatuated with fox demons or was one himself. In his books fox demons appeared as ghosts or tricksters who ate human hearts and sucked down souls like he drank gin. Sometimes they were benevolent, and helped a righteous king. Interesting reading but neither author offered ways to kill a fox demon. Sun Ce’s book Strategies of the Warring States Period taught him about toumuk, or peach wood, as a protective talisman. Once, in another collection written in Chinese, he read about an especially sinister fox demon named Su Daji who overthrew the Shang Dynasty nearly three thousand years ago. He couldn’t tell if her story was legend or fact, and decided it was a little of both.

Soren shook a last cigarette from his pack of non-filtered Giant Pandas, tried his lighter a dozen times before tossing it across the table and used the gas stove. He filled his lungs with the acrid smoke, enjoying the sensation of muscles tightening against his bones. It was the only pleasure he had. He finished the cigarette in three puffs, burned his lip and cooled the injury with the last of his gin. He needed more if he was to finish his story.

Before unbolting the vertical locks on his door he turned up the trench coat’s collar, slipped on a pair of loafers and cocked a fedora low over his forehead. “Another trip to the trenches.”

Sidewalks and busy streets were his battlefield. He preferred his room’s solitude to dealing with living people. His skin was paler than most, and he wore his trench coat and fedora no matter the weather. People with beating hearts had a way of seeing through the layers and discovering his secrets. Their judgment of him was evident in their eyes, the furtive glances followed by a slight nose wrinkling as they passed. Or maybe it was just his smell. No shower or eau de toilette could rid his faintly sweet scent of cloves.

Soren poked his head from the entrance and waited before being satisfied no one was watching. Eyes glued to the well-worn hardwood floor, he closed the door gently behind him. He didn’t want to alert his neighbor in Two-B, an annoying young woman who had moved into the apartment next to his several months before. She had taken the apartment after Mrs. Papadopoulos’ death last summer of a heat stroke. Mrs.

Papadopoulos spoke no English, but Soren always understood what she said. She had been a sweet, old soul. Two-B, however, was one of those alternative types, with a nose ring and purple hair, some tattoos, probably a lesbian because all her friends were girls.

He peeped through the eyehole the day she moved in and caught her standing at his door, as if contemplating whether to knock. One hand on the railing he hurried down the stairs, turned right outside the tenement apartment and headed toward the nearest store, Mishka’s Liquors.

Soren risked the streets at night, when shadows brightened with flickering bar signs or droning streetlights. It was the best time for anonymity, when most people in his neighborhood were between their drinks, or had their eyes set on short-skirted

streetwalkers who dared breach Satan’s Sanctum relative protection. Prostitution, outside the No Care Zones, was illegal.

Keeping to the sidewalk’s inner edge he evaded protruding stairs and trashcans. He passed dark windows: Chinese herbalists, a fortuneteller’s parlor called Lok Tai Fook, a sex shop with mannequins clad in leather masks, and then he came to an intersection. The Clark Street Bridge was silent.

A late night Cantonese vendor was packing chairs on to an overloaded, motorized three-wheeled bicycle. Behind him on elevated tracks, the first morning El Train rumbled closer. He turned right on Wacker Drive and inhaled the fishy Chicago River from across the street. He held his breath savoring the potent odor and the rippling sensation that coursed through his muscles.

Half a block from Mishka’s Liquors a man in a beanie cap emerged from a narrow alley. An alcoholic stench poured from his skin.

“Excuse me,” Soren said. He immediately regretted speaking for when he exhaled his muscles went limp.

“You got a light?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Hey man.” The man sidestepped to block his path. He spoke like an English man trying yooper English. “Assist a brother out.”

“I don’t have a lighter.”

He stepped closer and reached for his arm. Soren recoiled, as if the hand was an attacking snake. He inhaled deeper and waited for the man’s aura to appear, which always came when he held his breath.

“Listen to me,” the man said. His voice was low and gravelly and he no longer tried to hide his English accent. Shadows hid his face. “You must come with me if you want to live.”

Soren backed up against protruding stairs.

“Eight or nine of ten who behold her are defiled.”

He’d heard those words before. Where?

“Taken in by her beauty they’re defiled.”

He didn’t want to listen.

“Eater of souls, scavenger of hearts, within her arms sanity departs.”

“Shut up.”

The beggar grabbed his forearm. It was his words now that shriveled his testicles to the size of raisins. Breathing in didn’t help distinguish his aura. He had none. Nervously, Soren scanned the street behind his assailant. A drunk staggering across the street glowed light brown. Two women emerging from a parked car had crimson halos. In his experience only the dead and fox demons had no aura.

Soren pushed him back. “Step away from me.”

The man scowled. “You have no bloody idea, do you?”

Soren pushed past, but the man latched on to his shoulder, pivoting him. Streetlights dimmed. A distant car’s horn slowed, mooing like a dying cow. Air around him and within crackled with energy, and it coursed down his arm into his clenched fist and straight into the man’s cheekbone.

The man staggered. The car’s horn ended. Streetlights brightened. The man spat a long stream and wiped his lips before giving a short, disinterested chuckle. Soren readied for the counter punch.

“Not bad for a young pup.” He massaged his jaw.

“Fuck you. What do you want? What are you?”

“What I am is not important.” The man raised his head, revealing a hawkish nose and scraggly beard. His lips were cracked and his teeth stained yellow. Under the sickening layer of stale booze Soren detected a sweeter, familiar scent. “You are the last one. Prince Bigan wishes to meet you.”

“Prince who? I’m not going anywhere.”

“Fool.” He hissed. “Then we’re all bloody well done for.”

He stepped backward into the shadows. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Fucking drunk,” Soren said. But his voice shook and he suddenly needed a drink more than ever. Soren reeled away, puzzled about the man’s scent until he reached Mishka’s Liquor’s glass door. The welcoming bell chimed. Punjab, the store’s graveyard shift manager, popped his head from behind a counter. Tobacco’s musky tang rushed outward and he remembered.

The man smelled like cloves.

Broken Moons – Tientsin at War – Part VIII

TIANJINThis is the eighth story in the “Tientsin at War” series, taken from the unusual case of a Russian-born British citizen and her bloody struggle through Tientsin’s land of “broken moons,” the world of prostitution. Her story is unique, yet in some respects not atypical of Tientsin’s pre-war streetwalkers and “long threes,” who were an integral and yet unwanted part of the city’s society.  

By C.S. Hagen

TIENTSIN, CHINA – Two days after Easter 1930, Katherine Hadley slunk back to her dreary one-room apartment in a wretched section of the old German Concession.  Jobless.  Nearly stateless.  Hopeless.  Tears had not dried from her cheeks.  Her knockoff purse held the leftovers of her final paycheck – five Mexican dollars.  Last night’s vodka claimed the rest.

Katherine Hadley – courtesy Daily Sketch

Standing alone at the corner of 72 Woodrow Wilson Road, now South Jiefang Road, her shame returned.

She should turn around.  Beg for forgiveness.  Promise anything to have them take her back.  She’d only sampled the respectable life, but like a pinch of Sichuan peppers the taste burned her tongue.  Left her wanting more.

The good life was over, and it was all his fault.  Good for nothing ublyudok.  Calling her ex-lover a bastard had a calming effect, but made her incredibly thirsty.  She needed liquid courage.  Alexander Prokoptchik was a gorilla of a man, mean and moody.  He surely had a bottle or two lying around, after all, Easter week, a Russian time for celebration, had just started.

Hadley’s real Russian name was Yekaterina Khadlei, but she was commonly known as Tolpige, possibly Tolpyga, meaning “silver carp” in Russian.  Tientsin consular and court records cannot claim Hadley had murder on her mind when she found her old room empty of man and drink.  Prokoptchik, her ex-lover and mawang, or pimp, was not in.

She checked with her neighbors, asking first if they had seen him.  They had not since early morning, and they invited her in for some vodka.

Hadley accepted, taking the first step toward becoming the only woman sentenced to death by English courts in China.  Through the efforts of hundreds of admirers and death penalty opponents her sentence, which would not occur until 1934, was commuted to life-imprisonment on the eve of British Minister to China Sir Miles Lampson’s retirement, earning her a one-way trip around the world to London’s Holloway Prison where, according to consular reports, she was to remain for the duration of her natural life.

 

The Murderess

Tientsin and the international press painted a grim picture of Hadley.  She spoke Russian and broken English, liked brightly colored dresses and stylish hats.  At times, she also wore a smile, cold as a seasoned Cossack’s, and yet wept openly to incur public sympathy when the need arose.

Little is known about her early life, except that she was driven from her motherland by Bolsheviks, and spent an unknown amount of time in Harbin.  She procured British citizenship after marrying an English sea captain in 1919, who according to official record, committed suicide shortly after their wedding, when she was twenty-one years old.

According to her own testimony Hadley found easy money in the world’s oldest trade after her husband’s death, working in Tientsin cabarets and houses of ill repute for nearly eleven years.  Like many prostitutes of that time, she discovered alcohol helped her nerves, lowered her inhibitions and most importantly, made her forget.  Vodka came cheap in Tientsin, less than one US dollar a bottle, and the drink quickly became a curse that would haunt her the rest of her life.

In 1930, however, Hadley’s life took a fleeting upward turn.  She landed a respectable position in a well-to-do house working as a nanny for the Watson family’s only child.  Usually, Tientsin’s foreigners hired Chinese amahs for the position, but the Watsons preferred a Western woman.  She lived comfortably with her employers for a time; meals and salaries were punctual.  No need to haggle price or demand pay up front; salaries came at the end of the week.  She went on outings to Victoria Park, perhaps even took a summer trip to Peitaiho [Beidaihe], which was one of the favored vacation spots for Tientsin’s foreigners.  For the first time in her life, Hadley found respect.

She kept a photograph of the child with her at all times – proof – that she no longer sold her body for a living.  Sadly, her dream job didn’t last long.  The Watson family was sketchy on the details as to why she was dismissed, but according to Tientsin Consulate records Mister Watson told police he and his wife agreed only that they could not keep her.

Had she made advances on Mister Watson?  Did Mister Watson take advantage of her poor state?  Did she show up for work drunk?  Or was she fired for a simpler reason?  Did Mrs. Watson discover her secret past?  Or did a jealous paramour leak her real identity to her employers?  The reasons why she left the family’s employ are not known, and most likely will never see the light of day.

What is known is that Hadley could never escape her past, nor could she evade Prokoptchik’s seedy intentions, who according to some reports wanted Hadley to live with him, and work for him.  He stalked her, pestering her to return to their dismal apartment at 72 Woodrow Wilson Road.

Although Hadley admitted in court she had known Prokoptchik for nearly three years, and had lived with him for nine months, her job as a nanny kept her safe from his intentions.  The day after Easter, in 1930, a traditional time for rejoicing, Hadley was fired.  She returned to the Woodrow Wilson Road apartment seeking Prokoptchik.  When he could not be found she sought solace with a neighbor, Ann Petrovna Urshevitz, known for the sake of convenience in consular reports as Mrs. Karpoff.  Ushevitz lived “in sin” with Vasili Karpoff as a couple, but were not married.

She was having trouble with her mistress, Hadley said, and also mentioned a row with Prokoptchik, officially employed as a newsvendor from the day before.

“While accused was sitting and telling us her troubles we offered her a drink of ordinary vodka,” said Ushevitz, according to Tientsin court records.  They drank a bottle of vodka and two beers.  Hadley paid a dollar for Karpoff to go down to the local yanghang, or foreign goods store, to purchase the drinks.

Halfway through the drinks Hadley flashed the picture of the Watson’s child.  She cried, and complained again that Prokoptchik was hounding her.  Shortly after, Prokoptchik arrived, heavily drunk.  He hid no secrets of his feelings for Hadley.

“’You are mine Katerina’, and he kissed her,” Karpoff reported Prokoptchik said.  A knife-sharpener by trade, Karpoff lived in a one-room apartment next to the public toilet.  “I offered him a chair but he said he was too tried and was going to have a sleep.”

Urshevitz’s story was the same, but more detailed.  “Alexander arrived and kissed her twice and said ‘You are mine,’ then he said ‘I am going home to sleep’ and left the room.  His room is next to ours but for the lavatory.  When Alexander left the room he did not say anything to the accused but she left immediately after him.  Accused was happy and laughing.  Deceased was in a bad mood: he was heavily drunk.”

When Prokoptchik staggered out, Hadley followed, intimating the man’s control over her and her intentions.  Ushevitz started to clean up the mess left behind, saying in court records all of the alcohol was finished.  She left the apartment to carry out the trash and on returning found Hadley standing wearily in Prokoptchik’s doorway.  Blood was on her hands and dress.

“She said ‘I have struck Alexander.’  I looked past her and saw him lying on the bed and his shirt was covered with blood and a pool of blood on the floor.”

After Mrs. Hadley admitted to striking Alexander, she called for help from a nearby constable named Chang Kuo-pi, of the Special Area Police.  He arrested Hadley, and because she had no identification on her, he took her to the Chinese police station.  Tientsin provided a shady haven for thousands of stateless White Russian and Jewish immigrants during the 1930s.

Prokoptchik wasn’t dead yet.  Hadley stabbed him in the center of his armpit, severing a vital artery with a kitchen knife.  A crowd gathered.  An American Marine named Robert Hubert Seelos wandered in and attempted to give first aid.

“I took off my cap, belt and coat, rolled up my sleeves and started to try and find the wound: it was under the left armpit,” Seelos, a Marine aboard the U.S.S. Tulsa, said. “The Russian was lying in a pool of blood.”

Seelos cut away the man’s clothes with a second greasy knife.

“I tried to stop the flow of blood by putting a cloth around his chest just below the wound tightly.  The blood started to clot and did not flow freely.”

The room, Seelos said, was stuffy and had a foul odor.  Bottles and leftover meals were scattered about the room.  After doing everything he had been trained to do, a Russian doctor named Peter Michael Sokoloff entered the room.  Within two minutes the doctor realized nothing could be done for the wounded man.

“The Marine was pouring water over his [Prokoptchik] chest out of a kettle: I do not know why he was doing this,” Sokoloff said.  “I told him to stand aside and tried to find the actual wound under the left armpit right in the middle of the armpit.  There was no blood flowing from the wound.  It was dry around the wound, which indicated all the blood had come out and the heart was not beating on account of the loss of blood.  I noticed two or three faint breaths.  I realized that he was dying and no help could be given.”

The Russian, according to Seelos, said three final words, which no one understood.  After he died Seelos straightened the man’s legs across the bed and pulled a sheet over his face.

“If the wound had been attended to, that is, if someone had pressed the artery without a doubt this man’s life could have been saved,” Sokoloff said.  Alcohol, however, thinned Prokoptchik’s blood and hastened his death.

At the Chinese police station, Hadley became uncontrollable.

Yang Heng-chuan, of the Special Area Police noted in court that he had seen Hadley before, the day of the murder.  She was wearing a light yellow dress, and he saw blood on her sleeve and on her right hand.

“She was brought to the station by a policeman: she was drunk and speaking wildly and excitedly,” Yang said.  “There was blood and smeared blood, as if she had tried to wipe it off, on her right hand.”

Strangely, Mrs. Watson, Hadley’s former employer, vouched for her British citizenship, saying Hadley was nurse to her child and that, owing to certain troubles, mostly drink, she had left her employment on the previous day, and had not been seen since.  Being a British citizen procured certain rights stateless refugees did not have, one of which was to be tried in an English court.  She was handed over to the British Municipal Police.

Being without means to solicit a personal attorney, Percy Horace Braund Kent, barrister at law of Kent & Mounsey in Tientsin, agreed to defend Hadley.  After pleading not guilty, Kent’s first move was to plead the case down to manslaughter.

Denied.

Hadley’s trial for murder began at 10 a.m. on Monday, June 16, 1930.

The wound that killed Prokoptchik was classified as a heavy wound threatening the loss of life but not necessarily under the category of “mortal woundings.”  Death was due to a complete loss of blood.  The wound was less than five centimeters wide and not less than four centimeters deep.

Witnesses took the stand.

Chief Inspector P.J. Lawless of British Municipal Police took photographs of the murder weapon and checked for fingerprints.  The knife, Lawless said, was smudged with blood, but no fingerprints could be retrieved.

John William Hawksley Grice, a medical practitioner, examined blood splatters and determined that the deceased was most likely sitting up in bed when he was stabbed.

G.A. Herbert of the Consulate General’s office found a photograph of a small girl with the glass broken.  Broken glass found on the floor fitted into the frame, which was also littered with rubbish, and two knives, one bloody, the other greasy.  A third, unstained knife was found in an open basket. Herbert found no reason to believe a struggle had taken place inside the room.

Tientsin’s Consular Court allowed a confession made by Hadley to Michael Joseph Joffe to be entered as evidence against her.  “I saw Mrs. Hadley sitting in the police station,” Joffe, a fur merchant, said.  “She was heavily drunk.  I said ‘You have killed that man, what have you done?”  She said ‘I know it and confirm it.  I killed him because he wanted to kill me so I took the knife away from him and stabbed him.’”

Prokoptchik was painted as a large man, forty-four years old, standing taller than six feet, with thick shoulders and gangly arms.   He was also moody, seemingly tired of life and had sought assistance for delirium tremors.  He sold newspapers for a living, but was considered unsavory, rumored to be a pimp, perhaps a small time drug runner as well.  No one vouched for his character after his death.

“Why did you kill him?” V. Priestwood, of the Crown Advocate’s Office said.

“We were both drunk, we quarreled and I kill him with a knife quite unknowingly,” Hadley spoke English with a heavy Slavic accent.  “I do not know how I did it.”

“What were you quarreling about?”

“I don’t know as I was drunk, and even I did not know how I stabbed him… He said if I was not his lover I would be no one else’s and I repeated that I was going and I was not a child.

“I think he might have done this to frighten me.”

Hadley later mentioned that she had told Prokoptchik she was leaving him, and was going to return to Harbin.

“Mrs. Hadley was in a comfortable position in an English family,” wrote Herbert to consular officials.  “Was she not being pressed and pressed by her lover to leave this home and join his filthy hovel?  Was she not sick to death of his pestering and so stabbed him in a moment of utter hopelessness as to the position?”

“You must bear in mind, gentlemen, that the charge the Crown brings against this woman in the dock is murder, said Judge A.G.N. Ogden in his summoning up of the case.  “They charge her that she did on the 22nd day of April of this year at Tientsin murder a Russian called Alexander… Murder may be defined as ‘When a person of sound memory and discretion unlawfully killeth any reasonable creature in being, and under the King’s peace, with malice aforethought, either express or implied.’”

Ogden further went on to reveal that the people involved in the murder either as witnesses or perpetrators, were hardly better than the society’s dregs.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings – you must remember these people are not of the highest education,” Ogden said to the jury.  “She cannot remember anything.  She never touched the knife.  Does not remember being taken by a policeman to the station.”

On June 18, 1930, an impartial jury found Hadley innocent of the murder.

“It may interest you to hear that Mrs. Hadley met Dr. Grice after the trial and told him that she thought she had been very lucky,” Lancelot Giles of the consul-general’s office wrote on June 24th to the Crown Advocate’s office.  “Grice’s reply was in the affirmative.”

Two years later Hadley was a suspect in a similar murder in Hankow, although she was never charged.  She later moved to Shanghai and into the arms of another lover, and her second official victim.  Before moving to Shanghai, Hadley was under treatment for incipient insanity in Tientsin, according to a letter from Consul Allan Archer.

 

A Tientsin courtesan - online sources

A haunting picture of a Tientsin courtesan, notice upper right hand corner – online sources

Tientsin’s Land of Broken Moons

In most Western lands, areas for prostitution are known as red-light districts.  The color changes in Amsterdam to blue while in China, yellow is the hue of illicit sex.  Prostitution was legal in Tientsin before 1949, and although communists attempted to stamp out the trade and teach former streetwalkers and flophouse girls a trade, turning tricks never truly vanished and is visible, once again, in modern Tientsin.

Their world was known by many names, sometimes called the “bitter sea” or lands of “wind and dust,” or “broken moons.”  Working girls who were usually sold or kidnapped and forced into the trade were called “damaged flowers” and when old enough, the road to success lay in competing to the top of local tabloid popularity lists and become a zhuangyuan, or a master of their trade.

Modern day prostitutes are a far cry from the painted courtesans at the turn of the twentieth century.  Such courtesans, who weren’t always prostitutes by the strictest definition of the word, were virtually unobtainable.

“Courtesans are the main personages in the brothel,” wrote Gail Hershatter in her book Dangerous Pleasures.  “They must be skilled enough to attract guests, gentle and bewitching, and solicitous at entertaining.”  Many houses, or brothels, fought over popular courtesans, and they were regarded as “money trees.”

They rode on the shoulders of their boy servants, dressed in the finest silks with bejeweled fingers.  To procure a courtesan was nearly impossible for most men, and was considered foolhardy, like “raising golden carp in a jar; they are just good to look at, not to eat.”

Today, such Eastern allure is gone.  Classless karaoke girls eager for quick money have replaced the sing-song girls, who once trained their adolescent lives in the entertainment arts, including those of the bedchamber.

Before liberation there were five types of prostitutes in Tientsin.  The changsan, or the “long three,” stood at the top of the hierarchy after popular demand for “quick fixes” shrunk the ancient courtesan community.  Their nickname was derived from the mahjong domino with two groups of three dots.  They charged three Chinese dollars a drink and three more to spend the night, according to Hershatter.

Next came the ersan, meaning “two-threes,” and the yaoer, or “one-twos,” also named after domino patterns.  One Chinese dollar included watermelon seeds; two dollars bought drinking companionship.  The taiji, or the “stage pheasants” worked in tax-paying brothels known as “salt pork shops,” they sang in sing-song parlors and teahouses, and they charged customers a flat fee of three dollars to spend the night.

Near the bottom of the hierarchy came the yeji, or “wild pheasants.”  These girls were tenacious and considered dangerous, charging one Chinese dollar for a “one cannon blast-isms.”

Second to the bottom, not including the aged prostitutes and those working in “flower smoke rooms” or opium dens, were the Chinese girl guides, who charged by the hour and were colloquially known as “sleeping phrase books” or more commonly in recent times as “long-haired dictionaries.”  After World War II they became known as Jeep girls, and could be frequently seen riding in US military jeeps en route to a meal at the Astor Hotel.

Although many women were sold into the trade, many also learned to accept they had nowhere else to go.  Few initially accepted offers of help.  “Why should we eat bean sprouts when in our homes [brothels] servants address us as ‘Miss?’” was one common ideology amongst Tientsin’s broken moon society.  When they got noticeably sick, there were painful injections of salvarsan, known by its nickname 606, before penicillin was invented.

Costs of living in China was low, but most of the “respectably” employed could not keep up monetarily with the ever changing times.  Labour Cabinet Minister Tom Shaw wrote to consular officials in 1925 that women and children were extensively employed in industrial jobs they were not physically fitted for; their work hours were long, and many had to travel long distances.  Foreign and Chinese employers exploited their employees, squeezing thousands into early graves.  Entire villages were poisoned through the mining of cinnabar, coal and salt, creating little wonder why many women, sometimes even men, who were known as yazi or “ducks,” chose prostitution to survive.

Most prostitutes had their pimps, known as mawang.  White ants, bai mayi, were the traffickers, who usually tricked or kidnapped young girls into the trade, and always sold for a profit.

Customers were known as dry, wet and beloved.  Dry customers could spend time and money, but could not afford sexual relations; wet customers bought sexual relations but could not compare to a beloved, which naturally included both sexual and emotional bonds.  One of Tientsin’s “baddest girls” included Lin Daiyu, birth name Jin Bao, who became a prostitute at age seven and was known in Tientsin as Xiao Jinling, or “Small Golden Bell.”  Although Lin contacted syphilis in Tientsin, she was later cured, hid her pockmarks with thick makeup and became one of China’s most infamous and charismatic courtesans who never stopped seeking a “fatter wallet.”

A typical scene inside a "flower smoke shop" - online sources

A typical scene inside a high class “salt pork shop” – online sources

Originally, Tientsin’s brothel areas were outside the north gate of the walled Native City just to the side of one of the city’s largest markets, near present day Food Street shipinjie.  Outside the Native City’s West Gate was an area for older prostitutes who served the working class.  They were “Charming women of middle age, incarnations of hell, and it is rather hard for them to attract people,” Hershatter wrote.  Another area was the Purple Bamboo Grove area, near the old American barracks known as the Muckloo by foreign soldiers.  Tientsin’s worst brothels were in qian dezhuang, a sanbuguan at the southwest corner of the city.  Here, the better brothels were known as old mother halls, and although they were polite and attentive to mill hands, they lacked the funds for treating diseases.

Sanbuguan – 三不管 – A “No Care Zone,” literally translated to mean Three Who Cares and sometimes referred to with a more lengthy description as ‘beyond the control of the three foreign powers,’ (Chinese, Japanese and Western), were boisterous places, filled with cheap theaters, teahouses, brothels, vaudeville halls, devil’s markets, scrap hoarders and dubious drug shops known as yanghangs.  The most famous No Care Zone was at the southern edge of the old city of Tianjin, near the Japanese garrison at Haiguansi.  Another No Care Zone surrounded Nanshi Food Street, which was infamous for houses of ill repute, opium dens and bandits.

Nanshi No Care Zone - Tianjin Archives Museum

Nanshi No Care Zone – Tianjin Archives Museum

Among the most popular brothels for Tientsin’s soldiers and expatriates were the Muckloo brothels.

“Tientsin was a ready source of women of all nationalities,” reported Alfred Emile Cornebis in his book The United States 15th Infantry Regiment in China, 1912-1938.  “A number of brothels… specialized in White Russian women who had escaped the Soviet Union…  Many prostitutes lived in the “legendary” street called Muckloo, or Mucklu… not far from the American Compound.  Inside the Muckloo were better-known prostitutes such as “Lizzie,” “Peepsight,” and the most famous of Tientsin’s prostitutes “Dutch Annie.”

A modern day teahouse with stage - typical of the old days - where prostitutes would perform dances, sing song or tell stories - photo by C.S. Hagen

A modern day teahouse with stage – typical of the old days – where prostitutes would perform dances, sing songs or tell stories all the while being wined and dined by their patrons  – photo by C.S. Hagen

Chinese brothels were divided into high-class establishments called “big shops” and the less expensive places, which could be found in the winding hutongs.

The frequent cry still heard today of “lai kele!” or “receive the guest” was the typical welcome heard in any brothel.

Another book written by Hershatter called The Workers of Tianjin, 1900 – 1949, gives a glimpse of business inside a brothel.

“Whenever a guest arrives, a male servant welcomes him, asks him to have a seat, and then lifts up the screen and calls loudly, “receive the guest!”  As soon as he sees the fabled beauty enters the room in a leisurely fashion, her hair ornaments moving as she passes by, his eyes are riveted upon her.  He may pick a prostitute, and she will open the cigarette box for him and prepare some tea.  This is called “having a seat,” and costs half the price of spending the night.  If for some reason the guest says that she doesn’t meet his fancy, and leaves, it is called “hitting the chaff lamp” (da kang deng).

A US Marine in Tientsin - online sources

A US Marine in Tientsin – online sources

According to 1920s survey by Nationalist Bureau of Social Affairs, Tientsin had 571 brothels, in which 2,910 workers were local Tientsiners.  The rest came from Japan, Korea, Guangdong Province, Russia, Poland, United States and other Western countries, and worked mostly out of the Muckloo area, which was also near the British Bund along the Hai River.  A perfect escape for US Marines.

“The regiment’s high command was perennially up against two hard faces of Army life in China: their soldiers’ propensity to excessive drinking and their cohabiting with the natives,” Cornebis reported.  “There was also concern of drug abuse, and these soldiers were known as “snow birds” but this never became a major problem.”

“Up the pole” referred to being “on the wagon” and mottos like “When intoxication is a bliss ‘tis folly to be sober,” were common.  A military sentence for alcohol abuse was one month’s hard labor and two-thirds loss of pay for US Marines. 

Colonel Newell of the US Marines frequently told his men to be wary.  “You have come to a country where the 18th Amendment is not known and where the temptation to lead a sordid life is in every corner.  A man can ruin himself physically in a few weeks.”

Soldiers in Tientsin were recognized to have a venereal disease level at three times the Army’s average, and despite the general ambivalence Chinese prostitutes had toward venereal diseases, soldiers continued to find “sleeping phrase books,” according to Cornebis.

Although the Nationalist Party regulated the trade, prostitutes were categorized into one of the five grades, the largest of which was the third-grade, prostitutes who earned from one to four mao or 40 cents a day, while the fifth grade made from seven fen or cents, known simply as cash, to three mao a day, Hershatter reported from a Tientsin guidebook.

The 18th Amendment is the only amendment to be repealed from the US Constitution. This unpopular amendment banned the sale and drinking of alcohol in the United States, taking effect in 1919, and was a huge failure.

“Third class brothels are more poisonous than those of the first or second class.  Lower still are the local prostitutes who live in filthy places.  Laborers congregate there.  For three mao they are permitted to spend the night… People who come in contact with them immediately contract syphilis, injure their health, and kill themselves… Further, there is a secret kind of secret prostitute who is especially dangerous.  Those in this group do not have a fixed address.  They come from other places, and use the cover of prostitution to practice their tricks.  People who fall into their clutches at minimum will lose their money, and in more serious cases their lives may be in danger.  New arrivals in Tianjin, please be kind enough to avoid this pitfall.”

Katherine Hadley fell into this transitory category of streetwalker.  With no fixed address, she bounced from one brothel or cabaret to the next, somehow making ends meet.  When her first victim, Prokoptchik, tried to pressure her into working for him, she killed him.

As times progressed, so did attire and Tientsin's broken moon society.  Instead of meeting a teahouses and salt pork shops, more and more prostitutes frequented places such as the French Club or the Blue Fan, which catered more toward foreign customers - online sources

As times progressed, so did attire and Tientsin’s broken moon society. Instead of meeting at teahouses and salt pork shops, more and more prostitutes frequented places such as the French Club or the Blue Fan, which catered more toward foreign customers – online sources

 

Shanghai 1934

Shanghai’s summers are wet and oppressive, stifling as a ship’s boiler room even when the sun goes down.  August is one of the Yangtze basin’s hottest months, a time when there is little escape from tempers spurred by late summer heat.

Efim Rivkin and his wife, Rosa, were trying to cool off on their balcony when they both spied through a window a couple sitting at a dining room table opposite them of Muirhead Road.

“We could see her through the window of the house opposite,” said Mister Rivkin, a barber, in his testimony at the Shanghai Supreme Court.  “There were two people in the room – there was a man.  They were sitting on chairs.  The woman was waving her hand and breaking the crockery.  She was holding a knife.”

Rosa said a one-sided argument took place.  The man, a Captain Walter Clifford Youngs, sat quietly smoking a cigarette while the woman, Hadley, broke crockery with a knife.

Youngs coolly smoked, but said nothing.

“Then she stabbed him in the upper part of his body,” Rosa said.  “He rose a little from the chair and fell down.  The woman sat down on another chair and rested her head on her arms.  Then after two or three minutes – she got up and went round the table to a chair where a jacket was hanging.  She took out something from a pocket of the jacket.  It was hanging from the chair on which the man had been sitting.  I could not tell what she took out

“When the police arrived she was lying on the bed.”

Michael Koretsky, a neighbor, ran for the police.  They soon arrived and Officer Gleb Dubrovsky, who was also an interpreter, entered through the house’s French window and found a man half sitting against the wall.  Blood was pouring from the right side of his neck and he covered in blood.  “He was still breathing,” Koretsky said.  “He was covered in blood.”

While en route to Shanghai’s General Hospital Youngs was still alive.  He was quiet, however, while Hadley was talking excitedly and trying to get out.

“In the operating room she was still talking and trying to get up from the table,” Koretsky said.  “I was trying to keep her down.  She took hold of my arm and said: ‘Did I kill him?’  I did not reply.  She then said: ‘If I didn’t kill him, I will kill him ten times over.’  I patted her shoulder and told her to keep quiet.”

Youngs died of a neck wound on August 16, 1933.  Hadley was treated for a small cut to her left breast, but doctors never revealed if the wound was self inflicted or was caused by other means.

While in the hospital Hadley asked repeatedly for Eliza Robinson of the Foreign Women’s Home, a shelter for foreign prostitutes and drug addicts.  She had called Robinson, known as the Matron, earlier that night.

“It’s Katherine speaking,” the Matron said Katherine told her on the telephone.  “Miss Robinson all that you have said has been perfectly true.  I made a big mistake in leaving the home.”  She said that Captain Youngs had come home much the worse for drink and started to abuse her.  He had threatened to tell me what kind of a woman she was.  She could not stand it any longer so she left the house.  She said she would not come back that night.  She would go and see what condition he was in and if things were not all right she would return to the home in the morning.  She was not excited – I had no difficulty in hearing her speech.”

But prosecutors in the Shanghai Supreme Court didn’t fall for the Matron’s defense of her one-time ward or Hadley’s heart broken account of her life.

“I was in the kitchen preparing for supper,” Hadley said in court.  “And saw the vodka.  I was so annoyed that I returned to the kitchen.  I brought the food.  I sat in front of him.  He said I did not know how to cook.  I said I would go back to the Cottage.  Then he pushed me and called me a bloody whore.  I left the house and telephoned Miss Robinson.  I went to a Chinese shop and got a bottle of vodka.  I drank it.”  As she didn’t want to go home, she went to another friend’s house, but saw his wife was standing outside with her friend.  “I returned to the Chinese shop and got another bottle of vodka.  I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up in Wayside Police Station.”

Both bottles of vodka she did not pay for.  “I drank the vodka because I was annoyed – not to get my courage up.”

The Matron later vouched for Hadley’s traumatic life in a letter to Chinese Minister Lampson, pleading to spare her life.  “As one who was in close contact with her, and knew her as few did, I wish to testify to her good influence over the other inmates of the Home, where her cheerful submission to discipline and general helpfulness were strongly marked.  Katherine Hadley had done her best to secure honest work, but had been pursued by Captain Youngs’ attentions; the sapping of her moral and physical nature by vice and drink, coupled with her defective education and low mentality, wore down her resistance.

When Hadley was at the Foreign Women’s Home, which according to Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949 by Christian Henriot, was one of two homes in Shanghai that received foreign prostitutes and also worked with “repentant girls,” Hadley suffered from mental disturbances, headaches, for which she was given bromide three times a day.  Toward the end of her stay she had a slight attack of pleurisy, a lung condition, and was bedridden for a week.

“The case is one of a naturally kind and happy woman, of defective education, addicted to drink at periods of mental excitement, carried away by the treatment of a man who had persisted in re-entering her life, till the cumulative effect of excessive remorse, indignation at her treatment, accentuated by the mental excitement already referred to drove her to excessive drink, and then to commit a crime of which she has no recollection whatsoever.”

“I am thirty six [years old],” Katherine said in court.  “[I] came to China in 1917.  Met Youngs in 1924.  He asked me to live with him as his mistress.  He said he would marry me.  I went with him in 1924.  I stayed with him a couple of months.”  She went to Hankow in 1925, after Youngs started drinking, and worked in a cabaret.  “He wrote asking me to return to him.  I asked him to send me money.  I borrowed money and came to Shanghai.”

She worked brothels and cabarets in Dalian, known then as Dairen, and at Chefoo and Tientsin, never mentioning the murder charge to court officials.

First page of the petition for Hadley stay of execution, spearheaded by "the Matron" and the British Women’s Association, whose membership consisted of more than 1,000 British women - Shanghai Consulate records

First page of the petition for Hadley stay of execution, spearheaded by “the Matron” and the British Women’s Association, whose membership consisted of more than 1,000 British women – Shanghai Consulate records

“This year I met Youngs again.  I was then in a house of ill fame.  He asked me to live with him and I refused.  In the house I was drunk night and day.  I went to the Foreign Women’s Home and saw Miss Robinson.  She took me in – on April 14th I wrote to Youngs and told him where I was.  He came one day and asked to take me out.  He asked me to live with him and I refused.  I said I would much rather stay in the Cottage.”

She called Youngs a “wolf man,” who never failed to hunt her out and force her back to the terrible existence she had begun with him.

And then she said she willingly saw him on Wednesdays and Sundays.  “He said he would marry me by American law and make a will in my favour.  On July 26th I left the Cottage and we took a room in Newham Terrace.”

According to an October 26, 1933 story in the The Straits Times, Youngs, 54, was a British “gypsy,” and had a reputation of being a reckless soldier of fortune.  He arrived in China in 1914, working at Jardine, Matheson and Co., the China Merchants Steam Navigation Co., and for Major Chancey P. Holscomb aboard the steam launch Silver Start, which operated between Shanghai and small islands.  He was a gunrunner, a drug smuggler and although he possessed a British passport he had the tough, wiry complexion of a nomad.

After all the witnesses had been called and H.A. Reeks conducted her defense, dependent mainly on the premise she remembered nothing, the jury deliberated for seventy-two minutes before reaching a verdict.

Guilty.  But the jury strongly recommended leniency.

Judge Penrhyn Grant Jones then passed the death sentence on October 18, 1933.  “Katherine Hadley, the jury has very rightly and properly found you guilty of the terrible case of murder.  You have brutally and wantonly taken the life of a fellow creature, and for this the law of England justly claims your own life as forfeit.  I find no reason whatsoever why you should not pay the extreme penalty.”

Wearing a bright blue knitted dress, black coat and brown hat, Hadley stoically received the sentence.  “Although she received the sentence calmly, she collapsed during the hearing yesterday, and sobbed bitterly as she related the story of a life of misery with a lover whom she characterized as ‘a wolf man,’” The Straits Times reported.  “Hitherto no woman has been executed in China by order of a British Court.”

She was sent to the Amoy Road Gaol, one of the British Empire’s worst prisons in the 1930s, to await death by hanging.

The Matron, who was in charge of the Foreign Women’s Home, didn’t give up on her former ward.  She rallied friends and opponents of the death penalty to sign petitions, beseeching Lampson for mercy.

Katherine Hadely en route to Holloway Prison - courtesy of the Daily Sketch

Katherine Hadley en route to Holloway Prison. In this photo her knit cap is pulled low over her forehead, and she appears to be fighting back tears while wrenching a pair of gloves. – courtesy of the Daily Sketch and Douglas Clark

“I cannot believe that Katherine Hadley deliberately killed Captain Youngs for although she did not love him she said he had always been good to her and spoke of him in most friendly terms,” the Matron said.

Hadley also changed her tune, saying that her English wasn’t as fluent as she once thought and wanted a retrial.  While at the Ward Road Gaol she began showing signs of insanity, reported A.G. Mossop, chairman of the 1934 Visiting Committee for British Prisoners to consular officials.  Hadley was sent to the Municipal Council’s Mental Hospital twice, where she improved, but relapsed upon return due to the poor conditions within the Ward Road Jail.

“The Council’s medical officers reported that in their view continued confinement either in the gaol or in the mental hospital at Shanghai was not conducive to the prisoner’s recovery and that sooner or later definite insanity would manifest itself if adequate psychological treatment was not provided,” Mossop wrote.

All 5,607 prisoners in the Ward Road Gaol wore leg irons, W.P. Lambe, an acting chairman for the 1935 Visiting Committee for British Prisoners reported.  The warden walked the halls with a baton.  Suicide rates within the prison were seven times higher than in other British penal institutions.

Four months after her death sentence and on the eve of his departure from China only hours before the final deadline to commute Hadley’s sentence, Lampson ordered Hadley’s reprieve of execution, according to consular records. “Now therefore I, Miles Wedderburn Lampson, His Majesty’s Minister in China, in virtue of the powers conferred on me by the said Article of the said Order-in-Council, do direct that the sentence of death passed upon the aforesaid Katherine Hadley be commuted to one of imprisonment for life.”

Ten months later on November 8, 1935, and in accordance with the Colonial Prisoners’ Removal Act of 1884, The Times and the Ogden Standard-Examiner reported Hadley was shipped to England, a country to which she belonged but had never seen.

“A journey across the world to serve a life sentence in prison has been the strange experience of Mrs. Katherine Hadley, a Russian-born British citizen,” The Times reported.

She disappeared behind the thick rock walls of London’s Holloway Prison, and was never heard from again.

 

 

Gates of Holloway Prison, London

Gates of Holloway Prison, London

Courtyard of the Happy Way – Tientsin at War – Part IX

TIANJINThis is the ninth story in the “Tientsin at War” series.  The pinnacle of Japanese success during World War II meant the downfall of Western colonialism in Asia.  Nearly 750 foreign enemies of Japan were arrested, marched “in shame” through Tientsin’s streets and sent to prison in Weihsien, currently Weifang, Shandong Province, China.  These are their gripping stories of survival, the memories of heroes. 

By C.S. Hagen

TIENTSIN, CHINA – Colonial rule in Tientsin ended with three whimpers.  The first was one of the city’s most heart-stirring days, according to historian, author and Tientsin native Desmond Power.

English military battalions such as the First Lancashire Fusiliers, the Second East Surrey Regiment and platoons of the Tientsin British Special Police lined the streets to bid US troops goodbye.

“And here they come,” Power wrote in his book Little Foreign Devil, “the band crashing out Stars and Stripes Forever.  Then the men, nine hundred strong, marching shoulder-to-shoulder, grinning sheepishly at the ovation.  And a deafening ovation it is with all that shouting and cheering and handclapping and firecrackers.  Women break through our cordon and fling themselves on their departing sweethearts.”

America's Fifth Infantry on parade in Tientsin - 1931

America’s Fifth Infantry on parade in Tientsin – 1931

By 1938, one year after Japan’s invasion of China began, the situation in Tientsin had become untenable, according to the Assistant Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs Walter Adams.  The US Army Fifteenth Infantry was withdrawn from Tientsin and was replaced by a token force of US Marines.

“It’s all over…” Power wrote.  “The crowd filters away.  A breeze disperses the lingering wafts of burnt powder, but it will be hours before the sweepers deal with the litter of spent firecrackers.”

The second whimper came two years later and “without notice, without fanfare, without the roll of a single drum, the beep of a single fife.”  With war raging across the globe, Great Britain called the Tientsin’s East Surrey Regiment to Singapore.  British troops marched for the last time north on Victoria Road, laid in part with bricks from Tientsin’s old “Celestial City” wall, demolished after the Boxer Uprising in 1900.

“For the first time since its inception in 1863, the concession was without the protection of the Imperial Army,” Power wrote.  No one truly thought colonial life would ever end, much like the Edwardian Era; the good times would last forever.

But mayhem reigned.  Chinese protests of the Unfair Treaties endangered British Commerce.  Japan’s navy blockaded Tientsin’s port.  Policemen went on strike.  Opium and heroin were easy vices, the drugs were smuggled across the Hai River by Japanese gangs and sold into every city district, demoralizing and lethal.

The yellow emergency flag replaced the Union Jack on the topmast of Gordon Hall, Tientsin’s political center and formidable castle, which to the Chinese was a symbol of colonial domination.

The third whimper came a year later.  A handful of poorly trained Tientsin British Special Police were left to defend the city’s remaining foreign residents, numbering approximately 750 resident enemies of Japan.  Many of the French had gone “Vichy;” the Germans and Italians were allied with Japan; the White Russians and Jews in Tientsin were predominantly stateless, having few enemies and even fewer friends.

Tientsin, unknown date, Gordon Hall standing center, Victoria Road on right

Bird’s eye view of Tientsin withGordon Hall standing proud center – top – with Victoria Park spread out in foreground, Victoria Road on right, Astor Hotel on far right.  Gordon Hall, built in 1890 in commemoration of General Charles Gordon, was torn down due to damage after the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake. Date of picture unknown – online sources

To avoid bloodshed, ammunition was confiscated, according to Power.  His thirty-seven-member-group in charge of defending the British Bund had no bullets.  On December 8, 1941, which due to the international time difference was the same day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the “Island Dwarfs” – a Chinese derogatory term for Japanese soldiers – also poured into Tientsin’s British Concession.

Anne Knüppe-de Jongh was twelve-years-old and a student at St. Joseph’s High School in Tientsin’s French Concession when she was “arrested” by Japanese soldiers.

For fifteen months following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, she lived in fear with her parents and siblings in Tientsin.  Being a Dutch citizen, she was forced to wear the identifying red armband.  Barbed wire barricades and Japanese soldiers pointing Arisaka rifles separated the concessional areas, making usual routes to school and favorite parks difficult to travel.

“My parents were very troubled,” Knüppe-de Jongh said.  “They dreaded an internment.”  Her father was a manager for the Holland-China Trading Co.

Before the war began however, her life was filled with pleasant memories, of fancy dress parties, pond skating in winter, playgrounds and horse racing.  Every five years her family would travel by sea or by the Siberian Railway home to Europe, and her summers in China were spent vacationing at Peitaiho (Beidaihe).  The life her parents provided was of a style no one thought could end, and when the good life was taken, it shattered with the ferocity of a Gobi sand storm.

Japanese guard - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Japanese guard – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

“Just could not get out of the house facing a Japanese machine gun,” Ron Bridge, an Englishman, said.  Bridge was born into the British Concession at Tientsin.  His family’s history in China dates to 1885, when his grandfather Albert Henry Bridge acted as an interpreter during the post Boxer Uprising negotiations in 1900. “Movement was restricted with night curfew, but one could walk about with a red armband in Tientsin.”  His father and uncle were directors of Pottinger & Co., among other projects a real estate company established in the late nineteenth century.  Being bilingual he knew the red armband was also a symbol of bravery, or “elite,” which “really got up the Japanese noses,” he said.

Mary Previte, who is now an American and a noted speaker on life as a child during World War II in China, was from Chefoo, known today as Yantai.  With warring armies separating her and her siblings from her parents, she was taken from school along with nearly three hundred other classmates and interned at Chefoo before being sent to the Courtyard of the Happy Way in Weihsien, now Weifang, Shandong Province.  In Weihsien, she said, all internees were required to wear cloth badges with a prisoner number.  She did not see her parents until after the Japanese surrender and spoke of her experiences at the Sixtieth Anniversary celebration of the Weihsien Concentration Camp on August 17, 2005.

“They brought a Shinto priest to the ball field of our school,” Previte said.  “He conducted a ceremony that said our school now belonged to the Great Emperor of Japan.  They pasted paper seals on the furniture, seals on the pianos, seals on the equipment – Japanese writing that said all this now belonged to the Great Emperor of Japan.  Then they put seals on us – armbands.

“We belonged to the Emperor, too.”

The noose tightened.  Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere began with blitzkrieg speed at Pearl Harbor, simultaneously spreading south over Asia’s islands and west across China’s provinces.  Tientsin’s foreign residents were named “enemies of Japan” and were issued letters from Japanese authorities stating they would soon be relocated to Civil Internment Centers, where “every comfort of Western culture will be yours.”

By March 1943, the enemies of Japan, which included Great Britain, Australia, Greece, the Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, Danish, the United States and more, were paraded from places such as Victoria Park and the Volunteer Headquarters down Victoria Road to Tientsin’s East Train Station.

Bridge was only a boy of  nine years when he became an enemy of Japan and was sent to the Courtyard of the Happy Way.  His walk from  home to Tientsin’s East Train Station was pushing a baby buggy  stuffed with food tins with his baby brother perched precariously on the top.

Weihsien children pics 1

Weihsien children pics 2

A handful of the children of Weihsien around the time of incarceration 

“Among those being jostled about by the arrogant Japanese were agents for large American oil, auto, and tobacco companies, British shipping magnates, and representative of banks of all nations, who traded in the Far East for a century,” Pamela Masters wrote in her autobiography The Mushroom Years.  Although Masters was not born in Tientsin, her family had lived and worked in China for three generations, and frequently made trips to the troubled metropolis.

Everyone, Masters wrote, from the youngest infant to the oldest shipping magnate, wore the “demeaning” red arm band, with the character 英 (ying), the symbol for England, which ironically also means hero, emblazoned for all to see.

Despite the incessant turmoil in Tientsin before World War II, not one local Tientsiner cheered the foreign exodus while they were marched at gunpoint to the train station.  Third class carriages waited to transport all enemies of Japan to concentration camps, known as “civil assembly centers.”  Masters remembered her family’s coolie servant, named Jung-ya, running up and offering to carry their heavy suitcases.

“They [Master’s parents] smiled their thanks, and without thinking, handed their suitcases over to him.  A soldier rushed up out of nowhere and hit Jung-ya across the head with his rifle butt.  As he fell to the ground, the guard snatched the two cases from his unresisting hands and shoved them at Mother and Dad, shouting and waving his rifle and stamping his foot.

“The message was clear to all who witnessed the incident.”

Most of Tientsin’s foreign enemies, including other foreigners from Peking and Chefoo, were sent to Weihsien’s Courtyard of the Happy Way.

Before the Japanese takeover of Tientsin’s concessions, Power was entrained to Shanghai along with consular staff and high end company officers and their families for repatriation on the prisoner exchange ship Kamakura Maruwas, but he landed in Shanghai’s Pootung Camp, a tobacco godown, or warehouse, before being herded to the Lunghua Civil Assembly Center.  He was later transferred north to Weihsien, where he was reunited with his family and 1,540 other internees.

While en route to his first prison, Power walked the “White Man’s ultimate humiliation” along the wide esplanades of the Far East’s banking capital.  Japanese strategists declared themselves saviors of China for ridding the cities of “Roundeyes,” and Japanese soldiers fully expected the Chinese to ridicule the Western prisoners along the way.

Not one Chinese uttered a single insult, Power wrote.  Despite repeated attempts to banish the foreigner from their country, Chinese onlookers were strangely quiet.

“No insults thrown, no jeers, no catcalls.  A sea of silent poker faces saw us onto the waiting tender.”

 

Courtyard of the Happy Way as it was during World War II - China Daily

Courtyard of the Happy Way as it around the time of World War II – China Daily

 

WEIHSIEN, CHINA – Great Britain’s Asian colonies fell like dominoes, spurring a sense of failure in some colonialist men, overturning their self-image of the dynamic, colonial, indefatigable male.  According to one account written by Bernice Archer called The Internment of Western Civilians Under the Japanese 1941-1945, many Western men at the onslaught of World War II were demoralized.

“There we were literally reduced to our bare selves.  We no longer had about us the aura of our offices, our clerks and tambies, our cars and comfortable homes and servants.  All the trappings of our Western civilizations had been ruthlessly shorn from us.  We were prisoners and nothing more.”

Women prisoners, according to Archer, were expected to share the same corporate and patriotic loyalties as their husbands.  When they married a colonial man, they married his job as well, and were expected to play their designated roles no matter the costs.  Chins up, shoulders back, “be calm and carry on,” even while walking straight into internment.  

 

Courtyard of the Happy Way picture and corresponding map - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Courtyard of the Happy Way 樂道院 (le dao yuan) –  picture and corresponding map – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

“This was a prison.”

Tientsin’s foreigners were crammed into trains, herded south through war torn fields, then marched into a grey brick walled prison – the Courtyard of the Happy Way – lined up on an athletic field next to a church for roll call.

Through the eyes and diary of David Treadup, a former internee, John Hersey wrote in his book The Call: “I was listless, tired, downhearted, in pain, but that wall roused me.  My buttocks prickled at the sight of it.  It was as if I were in an old wooden house and waked up from a deep sleep smelling smoke.  This was the usual eight-foot gray brick mission compound wall, familiar to me as an often seen boundary of refuge for foreigners, setting the limits of a peaceful sanctuary form the Chinese universe roundabout – except that now there was a difference: guard turrets had been erected at the corners of the wall.  This was no refuge.  This was a prison.”

Out of the twelve Japanese internment camps holding foreigners in Mainland China, the Weihsien Civil Assembly Center was one of the largest.  The internment camp was originally built by American Protestant missionaries in 1924, and requisitioned by Japanese military and consular officials as a camp to hold foreign enemies in 1943.  The prison’s commandant was Mister Izu; the prison’s captain was known by children as “King Kong,” who passed on most of his duties to his aide, a wiry and obnoxious man nicknamed “Gold Tooth.”  The Courtyard of the Happy Way became a propaganda showpiece, Japan’s idyllic centerfold, featuring electrified wire and an encircling stone wall, manned gun towers, rows of cells for internees to live, coal-burning kitchens, eighteen Chinese-styled squatty potties and forty Western-styled toilets, all of which drained into cesspools.

“This place, they knew and could see, was a former missionary compound,” Hersey wrote.  “Now all was drab and befouled.  Most of the passageways were cluttered with all sorts of furniture and trash thrown out from the buildings, presumably by uncaring bivouacs of Japanese troops and, later, by quartermasters in hasty preparations to receive these internees.”

The Japanese had not made any arrangements for a hospital, but they were proud of the fine job internees created out of rubble.  They photographed Weihsien, according to internees, and sent the pictures across the world as propaganda showing how well they were treating the prisoners.

Most internees worked diligently at their assigned tasks, some rose before dawn to stoke kitchen fires; Catholic nuns volunteered for latrine duties.  Management fell to the internees, as the Japanese wanted little to do with their prisoners.

Canadian citizen Angela Cox Elliott was born in the Courtyard of the Happy Way, and although too young to remember many details, she returned in 2005 to visit her birthplace for the first time since 1945.  Her father, George Edward Cox, was the prison camp’s tinsmith and a friend of the Power’s family.  Before incarceration he was a graduate of Tientsin’s St. Louis College and a secretary at Credit Foncier de l’Extreme Orient.  He also served with Power in the Tientsin Volunteer Defense Corps.  Elliott’s mother, Philomena Splingaerd, half Chinese, half Belgian, was one of many granddaughters of Paul Splingaerd, the “Belgian Mandarin,” who was knighted by Belgian’s King Leopold II and raised to the ninth level of Mandarin by the Qing Imperial Court.

Elliott was born in the camp’s hospital, which had already been ransacked for supplies before the internees arrived.  Leftover hospital equipment was pieced together.  Doctors learned to improvise.  Requests for supplies were never fully granted; medicines trickled in at a snail’s pace.

Elliott remembers Japanese guards treating her kindly, as they did most children.

“The Jap soldiers may not have been that kind to other children, but I looked somewhat Japanese or Asian,” Elliott said.  “They more or less left people alone.  My ma said that a Japanese soldier used to come by and liked to play with me, probably reminded him of his kids as I am so Asian looking.”

Many adults, however, were not treated with such kindness.  According to an “I Remember” post in Weihsien-Paintings, a new father was beaten for the name he chose to give his newborn son.

“At Weihsien whilst his wife was actually giving birth to their child, Japanese guards barged right into the delivery room and demanded the name of the child to transmit to Tokyo.  [He] replied that until the child was born he couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl.  He told them that if it was a boy, he would name him Arthur in honor of General MacArthur.  This enraged the guards and they beat him in front of my eyes.  They beat him three times.”

Local Chinese farmers were also frequently beaten or tortured, sometimes shot for minor offenses.

The camp was approximately 49,000 square meters, and held at one time or another more than 2,250 internees.  It also held an assembly hall, formerly a church, used by all denominations, a small baseball field, which was used to play softball after too many balls sailed over the wall, a large bell by Block 23, which was off limits to internees.  Cobbled lanes were given names, such as “Lovers Lane” and “Tin Pan Alley.”

Roll call was mandated one to two times a day, according to some former internees.

Clean water was one of the camp’s most significant problems.

“Water was a problem at Weihsien,” Bridge said.  “The wells were often within ten yards of the cesspits.”  His family, including two adults and two children, were initially given one room, twelve feet by eight feet, in which to live.  Communal meals consisted of vegetable scraps, potatoes, turnips, soybeans, millet and Indian corn, and rarely rice.

Food was scarce, especially toward the end of the war.  “Of course there was that horrible hungry feeling, that had to be covered by kaoliang [sorghum] porridges and thin soups,” Knüppe-de Jongh said.  Her family had arranged with a Swiss friend to be sent parcels several times a year, which included smoked bacon, lard, egg powder and other food products.  “I remember my mother baking a kind of omelet from egg powder with chips of bacon and it tasted really delicious, in my memory.”  Her brother, Paul, who was also born three months after arriving at the camp, was undernourished, weak and small for his age.

Meals consisted mainly of sorghum breakfasts, thin turnip soups with precious little meat called S.O.S. or “same old soup” for lunch.  Occasionally  horse meat was on the menu.  Vegetables and eggs were worth their weight in gold when the black market ran unhindered, but obtained only with money or by trade.  The internees’ savior was bread, baked daily by George Wallis and his kitchen crew, which kept starvation from becomming acute.

“I remember the Menu Board on which the cooks used their creative writing skills to describe the coming meal in the most exotic terms,” said a former inmate in the “I Remember” section of Weihsien-Paintings website.  “You would think that you were in the grandest hotel in the land.  What was actually served was bread porridge for breakfast, watery stew in the middle of the day, and whatever was left over for the evening meal.”

Weevils and crushed eggshells became important sources of protein and calcium.  Ted Pearson, who was seven-years-old when he was imprisoned, had lived at  Villa Jeanne d’Arc, off Racecourse Road on the way to Tientsin’s Country Club.  “The camp committee decided that to prevent rickets the children should get powdered eggshells, one tablespoon for each child.  All eggshells were saved for this purpose.  I know I never got rickets.”

The Japanese guards through children’s eyes were not seen as objects of hate, but of ridicule.  Janette Ley Pander, who formerly lived at the Belgian Bank on Victoria Road in Tientsin, was four when she arrived at the camp.  “We were very ‘lucky’ in Weihsien to have been held in Northern China-Japanese Territory, and kept by consular police as well as the military.  In my memory King Kong Bushido was a laugh, a kind of bogey man. Of course the Japanese were our captors and we felt that very well, but many were very kind in a personal way.  After all, we were all stuck in the middle of nowhere with the Chinese civil war surrounding us.  I only felt the danger of our situation through my parents’ angst.”

With approximately 2,500 internees waiting lines became inevitable.  There were lines for the toilets, chow lines and lines for lukewarm showers.  The winters were bone-rattling cold; summers were hot and humid.  Every capable person was assigned chores.  A discipline committee headed in part by former Tientsin Municipal Police Chief Inspector P.J. Lawless and Ted McLaren was organized, and punishments were unique to the environment.  Once, according to Hersey, Treadup was sentenced to make two circles of the camp wearing a sign saying “I Am a Thief” around his neck after stealing a piece of meat.

"The Morning Water Queue" drawing at Weihsien by William A. Smith - courtesy Weihsien-Paintings

“The Morning Water Queue” drawing at Weihsien by William A. Smith, an OSS officer – special courtesy and thanks to the family of William A. Smith, Weihsien-Paintings and the OSS Museum Collection

In the Courtyard of the Happy Way, trading taipans lived next to hooligans, former prostitutes and drug addicts alongside Catholics and Protestants.  Single men and women had their own dormitories; families were put into thirteen feet by eight feet cells.  Hersey offers a unique description of Treadup’s roommates in the single men’s dormitory.

“A potbellied retired sergeant of the U.S. Fifteenth Infantry Regiment in Tientsin, a bully by nature and training; he had lived a shady life in the French Concession there, some said as a middleman in sales of smuggled curios.

Food distribution at Weihsien - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Food distribution at Weihsien – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

“An Englishman with startling mustaches like porcupine quills, a grand personage high up in Kailan Mining, owner in Tientsin of the great racehorse Kettledrum, which had won the Tientsin Champion Stakes five straight years.

“An American derelict, formerly a Socony engineer, whose “better years,” he told everyone, had been in the Bahrein oil fields in the Persian Gulf, now a lank, gaunt sausage of a man suffering agonizing cramps and sweats in forced withdrawal from his beloved paikar, [lao bai gar] the fiery Chinese liquor.

“A muscular American Negro dance instructor from the Voytenko Dancing School in Tientsin.

“A Eurasian, half Belgian and half Chinese, a salesman of cameras in a Tientsin store, who looked and acted like a ravishingly beautiful woman.

“A Pentecostal missionary, a bachelor with rattling dry bones under leathery dry skin, a kindly but rather repugnant man, with little dark velvety bags like bat bellies under his eyes, who groaned and babbled hair-raising fragments of sermons in his sleep ― bringing loud roars for silence from the sergeant and the dancer.

“An English executive of Whiteaway Laidlaw, the largest department store in the British Concession, a sensible, direct, practical, unemotional man, an observer of rules and a mediator in all storms in the room.

“The former chief steward of the posh Tientsin Club, who still wore the black coat, double-breasted gray waistcoat, and striped trousers of his Club uniform, all of which he somehow kept impeccably clean, a straight-backed figure, honorable and correct, yet also mischievous, a fountain of laughter, a man, as David soon wrote, “too good to be true.”

“A mean little Australian errand runner for the Customs Service, with a fake limp, who told a new lie every day about imaginary past glories ― as the pilot of a smuggling plane, as a photographer of nude women, as a big-time Shanghai gambler ― reduced now to a finicky, sneaky, sniveling complainer, scornful of Americans whatever their station but embarrassingly obsequious to upper-class Englishmen.”

Helen Burton, reading the letter notifying her of her brother's death, taken by the Times Magazine

Helen Burton, a North Dakota native, reading the letter notifying her of her brother’s death, taken by Life Magazine

One woman at Weihsien, Helen Burton, a North Dakota native, had been the proprietor of the Camels Bell curios and candy shop in Peking before incarceration.  At the Courtyard of the Happy Way she started a bartering shack, called the White Elephant’s Bell, for goods to be exchanged, including one instance of a luxurious fur coat for jam.  Months with no sugar can have a depreciating effect on luxury goods.  She was a socialite, always keeping busy, adopted four Chinese girls before imprisonment, and never married.  A photograph of Burton reading a letter about the death of her brother for the first time was featured in Life Magazine after liberation.

Surprisingly, according to all Weihsien survivors, few incidents occurred between the internees.

Suicide attempts, however, were not uncommon.

“Looking back on all the attempted suicides, there seemed to be a common denominator: each person had, at some time, been a “somebody” in a once exciting world,” wrote Masters, who admits in her book she once came close to grabbing the electric wire surrounding the camp, which would have killed her.   A Catholic priest rescued her.  One Chefoo schoolboy however, was killed by accidentally touching the wire.

“The woman who swallowed the box of match heads had been a famous fashion model in the States back in the thirties.  She was still very beautiful, with a doting husband – and no children, as she didn’t want to ruin her figure.  She was living in the past and couldn’t stand the anonymity of being just another lost soul in the prison camp.

“The girl who slashed her wrists was also extremely beautiful.  Her mother had been the most famous madame in Peking, and she the toast of the nightlife of that cosmopolitan city.”

One of the most mind-boggling events during the war years at the prison was when the American Red Cross sent a shipment of foodstuffs to the camp, which the Japanese allowed.  A handful of American missionaries, however, became indignant when they discovered the packages were to be handed out to each internee, saying the packages were from America and therefore meant for Americans only.

“Afraid of an uprising, the Commandant took immediate control and had all the parcels locked up until he got instructions from Tokyo.  While we waited for them, the camp that had once been tolerant of all the different nationals became bitterly divided.”

Even after Tokyo’s instructions to distribute one Red Cross package to each internee, regardless of nationality, the American missionary family, fat and slovenly and known as the Hattons in Masters’ book, threw themselves upon the parcels and wailed, “We want our due!”

Other missionaries, such as 1924 Olympic champion Eric Liddell were invaluable to the internees’ moral.  Liddell who was born in Tientsin is said by some Chinese to be

Eric Liddell, before the war, at right - courtesy Weihsien-Paintings

Eric Liddell, before the war, at right – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

China’s first Olympic gold medalist, but was most famously known as the athlete who refused to run on Sunday.  He was a soft-spoken, bald, Scottish missionary, who never talked about his past successes in sports, both track and rugby, and wore a permanent smile.  He lived in Block 23, Room 8 at the Courtyard of the Happy Way, and according to Power was the most respected man in camp.  Liddell also taught mathematics, gave sermons and was known for his sense of humor.  His running shoes, shortly before his death due to a brain tumor, were given away to fellow inmate Stephen A. Metcalf who helped Liddell with the camp’s recreation committee.

“During the following years it was my privilege to help Eric in his work on the recreation committee,” Metcalf wrote in his story about Liddell entitled Eric Liddel A Man Who Could Forgive.  He repaired the prison’s obsolete sporting equipment with thin sticks of Chinese black glue made from horse hoofs.

“He was always so enthusiastic and never thought of it as a sacrifice to tear up his sheets to bind up old bats and hockey sticks etc.  Even some of his trophies were sold on the black market to help the suffering.  As the years passed, we were all suffering in one way or another, and the tremendous workload he took on himself began to take its toll.

Eric Liddell's room - courtesy Weihsien-Paintings, via

Eric Liddell’s room – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

“About three weeks before Eric began to succumb to the brain tumor he came up to me with his pair of dilapidated running shoes.  They were all patched and sewn up with string. In a shy and almost offhand manner, he said, ‘Steve, I see your shoes are worn out and it is now midwinter.  Perhaps you will be able to get a few weeks of wear out of these.’   Then, with a knowing nod, he pressed them into my hand.”

Months later, due to necessity, Metcalf traded the shoes for a pair of US Army boots.

According to an “I Remember” report in the Weihsien-Paintings website, a young internee at the time remembered Liddell’s burial service.

“I remember that grey winter day, when a bedraggled procession of children in threadbare, outgrown overcoats followed the coffin of our beloved “Uncle Eric” to the small camp graveyard.  Our legs were bear in the bitter cold; our woolen stockings were the first things to wear out, and trousers were not part of our wardrobe in those days… As we followed the pallbearers on the frozen ground, one of them, my brother Norman Cliff, the cheap coffin creaked and groaned: would it hold together until they reached the grave?  It did, and no one else knew of their distress.”

Eric Liddell's grave - courts of Weihsien-paintings

Eric Liddell’s grave – courtesy of Weihsien-paintings

Tientsin native, Yu Wenji, now eighty-six-years old, was Liddell’s ball boy when he played tennis before incarceration, the China Daily reported on August 12, 2012.  Yu attended Liddell’s English classes and also Liddell’s sermons at Tientsin’s All Saint’s Church.

“He had the chance to leave for Canada with his pregnant wife and two children, but he refused to leave his brothers in church behind. I guess that must have been a tough decision for him,” Yu said.

Yu wept openly, he said, when he heard the Chariots of Fire theme song during the London Olympics in 2012, and has spent fifteen years writing a biography of Liddell.  “I watched the movie three times in a row when I first got the videotape,” he said. “He always leaned back his head when crossing the finishing line.  That scene is still vivid in my mind.”

When asked about his goals for his book on Eric Liddell, Yu, who is almost blind, said his memories of that time will never fade.

“I don’t want fame or money, I am eighty-six,” Yu said.  “I just want to show that Liddell is a good example of someone who can erase misunderstanding between China and Western countries.”

Liddell, along with at least thirty-one other Weihsien internees, died and was buried in the Courtyard of the Happy Way.  A Japanese soldier, according to the China Daily, secretly preserved Liddell’s death certificate when he was ordered to destroy all evidence.  Despite the city’s recent renovations, a red marble memorial stone in memory of Liddell still remains inside the Courtyard of the Happy Way.

 

Escape

Laurance Tipton in 1988 - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Laurance Tipton in 1988 – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Laurance Tipton, a British businessman, distributed cigarettes by camel caravan to China’s northwest before his incarceration at the Courtyard of the Happy Way.  He wrote a book entitled Chinese Escapade, published in 1949, about the loss of his business, which took him to Peking, Tientsin, Mongolia and elsewhere, his escape from prison and the months he spent fighting alongside Chinese guerillas.

Tipton was a kitchen fire stoker during his time at the Courtyard of the Happy Way.

“For the first few weeks it was exhausting work but one gradually got used to it. I first worked in the Peking kitchen as general help and then graduated to the butchery, where the maggot-ridden carcasses and the myriads of flies which laid eggs on the meat faster than one could wipe them off were rather more than I could stomach.”

Internees, Tipton wrote, saw little of Mister Izu, the camp’s commandant, or his staff, as management was left mostly in the hands of a foreign committee.  Complaints and requests were passed through the committee and to the commandant.

A black market with local Chinese on the other side of the prison wall began two weeks after his arrival.  “The Catholic Fathers were the first to operate on a large and well-organized scale,” Tipton wrote.  “It was merely a matter of finding a convenient spot out of the sentry’s view, a few words of hasty bargaining, throwing a rope and hauling up a basket of fresh country eggs.”

Outside, regular bootlegging gangs were organized: the Hans, the Chaos and the Wangs.  “In the dead of night they would send a representative over.  Greased and clad only in a G-string, he would slip in, take the orders, “shroff” over the accounts, receive payment and quietly disappear.  Transactions were made through a drainage hole along the wall.

In the thirty-third year of the Republic of China, a letter written by Wang Yu-min, of the Fourth Mobile Column of the Shantung-Kiangsu War Area, was snuck into the prison.

“My division is able to rescue you, snatching you from the tiger’s mouth…” a part of the letter said.  “We can well imagine that your life in Hades must reach the limits of inhuman cruelty.”

With continued correspondence, an escape plan formed.  Tipton asked Arthur Hummel to accompany.  On June 8, 1943, around 8:30 at night, Tipton and Hummel waited until the changing of the guards, scaled a guard tower and dropped over the side of the wall.  They hid in a graveyard fifty yards away.

“A pause to collect our breath, and we made another dash which took us out of range of the searchlights, and, taking our bearings from the camp, we headed directly north over ploughed fields, through wheat crops, stumbling over ditches and sunken roads until we reached the stream that flowed north of the camp. Wading across this, we headed in the direction of the cemetery.”

Members of the Fourth Mobile Column of the Shantung-Kiangsu War Area found them, and after saying the password “Friends,” unrolled a triangular white cloth that said ‘Welcome the British and American Representative! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!’

Tipton and Hummel spent the next two years fighting alongside the guerillas, informed Western military authorities of the camp’s troubles, and returned to the camp as internees after liberation.

Internees were spared repercussions when the committee promised the commandant not to attempt escapes again if the commandant provided an X-ray machine from a nearby city.

 

Entertainment

Not everything at the Courtyard of the Happy Way was dismal.  Many children who survived look back on their incarceration with fond memories.  Boredom, to adolescents, was an enemy more incipient than their Japanese guards.

Internee Earl West formed a jazz band.  He had been a Tientsin musical star before incarceration, playing at a nightclub called the Little Club, according to Power.  The band, comprised of black musicians, performed most Friday nights inside one of the prison’s kitchens.

“What a boon those dances were for the romantically inclined, especially among the shy!” Power wrote.  “Many a couple’s relationship started at a dance, some leading to marriage.”

“I certainly enjoyed the dances in Kitchen Number 1,” Knüppe-de Jongh said.  “We had some fine bands.  I did more watching with my friends than really dancing, I’m afraid, being thirteen or fourteen years old, but I had fun there and occasionally I had a younger partner to dance with – but it was all very exciting for a teenager.”

Brigadier Len Stranks formed the Salvation Army Band, which played at sporting events and church services and on occasion the outlawed Star Spangled Banner.

Mclaren, of the discipline committee, built a secret radio the Japanese never found.  He was also privy to Tipton and Hummel’s escape, and organized an ‘underground police’ force of reliable, able-bodied internees, ready to take control of the camp if the opportunity arose.

The black market over the compound’s wall was kept alive for the duration of the war, despite Japanese intentions of either controlling or stopping the secret trades.  At least two Chinese farmers were killed by firing squad when caught.  Internees heard the rifle shots.

A Trappist monk named Father Scanlan had a foolproof method for receiving eggs undetected.  His order lifted the strict rules against speaking so the monks would be able to work with internees.  From a far corner of the wall he pried loose a few bricks and would pull eggs through the hole, in trade with a Chinese farmer.  If a guard happened along, two Trappist monks down the line would begin a Gregorian chant and Father Scanlan would quickly cover the eggs with his long monk’s robe, squatting protectively like a mother hen.  After four months he was caught, according to Langdon Gilkey in his book Shantung Compound, when a guard lifted his robe and discovered 150 eggs.  Although Japanese guards held the bushy-bearded monks to some degree of respect, egg laying was not among their “holy powers.”

“Father Darby [Scanlon, name changed in Gilkey’s book] was whisked off to the guardhouse,” Gilkey wrote.  “The first trial of camp life began.  The camp awaited the outcome of the trial with bated breath; we were all fearful that the charming Trap­pist might be shot or at best tortured. For two days, the chief of police reviewed all the evidence on the charge of black market­eering, which was, to say the least, conclusive.”

The commandant sentenced Father Scanlon to one and a half months of solitary confinement.

“The Japanese looked baffled when the camp greeted this news with a howl of delight, and shook their heads wonderingly as the little Trappist monk was led off to his new cell joyously singing.”

Drawing made by a Weihsien internee of the black market - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Drawing made by a Weihsien internee of the black market – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Throughout the duration of imprisonment there were others not of the cloth and not accustomed to long months of silence who were caught and also sentenced to solitary confinement.  During these times dozens of internees volunteered their own private stashes of food and endangered their own lives to sneak carefully-hoarded provisions into the lonely prisoners.  Such as the case of Peter Fox, who rang the prison bell in celebration after hearing the good news of Nazi Germany’s surrender over the homemade radio.  The entire camp went joyfully without rations for a week before he turned himself in.

Some vices continued, such as trading for Chinese “bai gar” liquor, and at least one Russian woman opened her bed as a brothel in trade for food or money.

During the warmer months the recreation committee, led by Eric Liddell, held softball matches and track events.

“The ball games were a big part of our lives and we had a girls team and we played against the younger boys,” Chefoo School student Maida Campbell Harris said.  “We hung out at all the ball games and for myself I think I was in an adolescent dream world rather than being aware of the danger around us.”

Many young internees learned new card games or played marbles, hopscotch and jump rope, while the more adventurous young held rat, bedbug and fly catching contests.  According to an “I Remember” report in the Weihsien-Paintings website, a young boy and a Chefoo School student named James H. Taylor III won the fly catching contest with a count of 3,500 neatly counted flies in a bottle.

“The winner got a rat’s skull,” Pearson said.  “The rat’s skull was amazing as the lower fangs curled right over it’s head.  I remember it clearly.”  Besides softball games and dances, he remembers drawing classes and plays that his father acted in, such as Androcles and the Lion.  There were also ballet shows, oratorios such as as Handel’s Messiah, mostly led by a man named Percy Gleed, and Tchiakowsky’s Swan Lake.  Catholic children had their first communions inside the camp.  Brave young boys made daring trips into the “out of bounds” Japanese area to steal coal and sugar from under their captors’ noses.  Pearson’s first crush fell on a young girl named Henrietta, whose mother fried cheese sandwiches when they had the makings.  “It was like manna from heaven,” Pearson said.

B --- is for BRITISH:  James H. Taylor, III, wears the armband required for prisoners of the Japanese in Chefoo (now called Yantai), Shandong Province, China. Immediately after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the Japanese commandeered the Chefoo School and its students and immediately required that when any "enemy alien" left the school campus he must wear an armband that included a large black letter to indicated his nationality -- B or British, A for American, etc. Taylor was a 12-year-old student when the Japanese took over the Chefoo School. - courtesy of Mary Previte

B — is for BRITISH:
James H. Taylor, III, wears the armband required for prisoners of the Japanese in Chefoo (now called Yantai), Shandong Province, China. Immediately after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the Japanese commandeered the Chefoo School and its students and immediately required that when any “enemy alien” left the school campus he must wear an armband that included a large black letter to indicate his or her nationality — B or British, A for American, etc. Taylor was a 12-year-old student when the Japanese took over the Chefoo School. – courtesy of Mary Previte

School continued for most of the prison’s children.  Few left the camp behind in their studies.  Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, Cub Scouts and Brownies clubs also were formed.  Although limited to short hikes, children practiced Morse Code, knot tying.  They made various badges like hiking badges, singing badges and naturalist badges.  When children turned fifteen, they were allowed to work.

“I turned fifteen in June 1945 and that was when you got a camp job,” Harris said. “Believe it or not I was very keen to have a job. Mine was washing dishes.  I  worked at Kitchen Two.   It was the summer of 1945 and two or three of us had a bowl of water on a table outside – I don’t think there was any soap in it and we had a kind of dish mop and people lined up to have their dishes washed in greasy water.  I was so proud of having a job.  I guess it was like a fifteen-year-old getting a job at McDonalds today.”

Like most teenagers, Harris became interested in boys.

“I know I was getting very interested in boys like my classmates were and we always knew when the boys we liked were on pumping duty,” Harris said.  “We liked the Weihsien boys rather than the Chefoo ones and the Chefoo boys liked the Weihsien girls.  I remember we would walk around the camp hoping to see the boy you liked.” She found an English boyfriend, Harris said, who left for England after liberation.  “We wrote to each other for a while.  His parents were Tientsin business people.”

Clothing shredded, but the internees learned to mend.  “Since we men have been reduced to the level of Chinese farmers and coolies, we go, as they do, with our bare backs to the sun, and some wear nothing but underwear briefs,” Hersey wrote.  “I have joined the brown race. The women wear the most abbreviated ‘sports suits,’ cut to modern bathing suit patterns, and sometimes even more spare. Female beauty (and, alas, ugliness) is being evidenced, in some cases flaunted. Some of the missionary women, who have been most strict in their speech in the past, have suddenly become startlingly immodest in their dress. Is one supposed to look away, or not?”

During the cold Shandong Province winter months, much of the internees’ spare time was spent trying to stay warm in bed and making coal balls, part coal dust from their Japanese guards, part clay and a small amount of water.   “We younger girls made a game of carrying the coal buckets,” wrote Previte.  “In a long human chain – girl, bucket, girl, bucket, girl, bucket, girl – we hauled the coal dust from the Japanese quarters back to our dormitory, chanting all the way, ‘Many hands make light work.’”  

Non-denominational church services were held on Sundays, and although the Protestants wanted to convert the Catholics, and vice versa, anyone was welcome to attend.

Another “I Remember” post in the Weihsien-Paintings website said, “I believe that is why I look back on Weihsien with joy – I believe it molded me and the adults who kept us entertained beautifully and we did not feel like we lacked – we all ate the glop so what difference did it make?  I didn’t feel needy or forlorn because there were so many people building us up and keeping us going.”

Liberation Day - courtesy Weihsien-Paintings

Liberation Day – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Allied parachute drop over Block 23 of the Courtyard of the Happy Way - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Allied parachute drop over Block 23 of the Courtyard of the Happy Way – special courtesy and thanks to the family of William A. Smith, Weihsien-Paintings and the OSS Museum Collections

Liberation

On August 17, 1945, eleven days after atomic “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” devastated Japanese cities, members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) called the “Duck Team” parachuted into camp.  The seven-man team did not know what they were jumping into, or if the Japanese guards were prepared to surrender, but they knew that the Japanese Military Authority had issued orders for all foreign POWs and civilian internees to be exterminated.

According to Doc 2701, Exhibit “O” of the Nara War Crimes Tribunal, the Japanese Army had a policy in place to liquidate all prisoners, by gas, or rifle, or any other available means.

Few commandants, if any, complied.  Some defeated officers chose seppuku, ritual suicide, instead.  Before Japan’s official surrender the Weihsien guards took to drinking too much saki, and could be heard late into the night singing and wailing their misery at the moon, for no one else cared to listen.

Harris remembered whispers that their lives were about to end.  “Mrs Graham our neighbour in Block 57 said we were all being taken out to be shot and it was pretty scary when all the search lights were on and the guards were pushing us around as they were trying to count us.  The story was that instead of anyone missing, they counted extras.”

Older internees, such as Power, remembers that just before liberation stress was beginning to show.

James Taylor and Mary Taylor Previte find their names engraved in marble on the monument wall. - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

James Taylor and Mary Taylor Previte find their names engraved in marble on the monument wall. – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

“A lot of people are getting on edge, some are close to cracking, one for sure has already cracked.  He or she is an ax-wielding maniac who has taken to decapitating cats.”

Power kept himself on an even keel for most of his imprisonment, but toward the end of the war his cabin fever got the best of him.  He threw a curse at a Japanese sergeant while he was taking roll call.

Wo tsao ni mama!” Desmond wrote he said.

“He saw me, but I dashed down to my place in the stairwell.  Not knowing who the culprit was, he grabbed hold of David Clark, the fifteen-year-old ward of Reverend Simms-Lee and began throttling him. I had no alternative but to present myself as the perpetrator.  To this day I can see Bushingdi’s toothy snarl, I can feel the vice like grip on my neck, and I can smell the nap of his black uniform.  I was lucky the war was nearly over.  My punishment was only several slaps to the face.”  The sergeant was nicknamed Bushingdi, meaning “not good” in Chinese, because he was always waving his finger and telling everyone “bu xing, bu xing,” or “no can do.”

Masters was standing in the breakfast chow line when she heard a distant purring noise.

“There was a hush in the chow line as the hum of the plane got louder.  It struck me that the sound was different; not the funny, tinny drone of Japanese Zeros and Judys, or the rattling-roar of their bombers, but a strong, steady comforting sound that seemed to push up against the heavens and reverberate back down to earth.  I knew instinctively this was one of ours!”

Picture taken by American liberators (William Arthur Smith) end of August or beginning of September 1945. Anne Knüppe-de Jongh is the third on Left, holding brother Frans, looking over camp wall - courtesy Anne Knüppe-de Jongh

Picture taken by American liberators (William Arthur Smith) end of August or beginning of September 1945. Anne Knüppe-de Jongh is the third on Left, holding brother Frans, looking over camp wall – courtesy Anne Knüppe-de Jongh, and the family of William A. Smith and the OSS Museum Collection

A B-24 Liberator roared over the camp before ejecting OSS officers Major Stanley Staiger,  Ensign Jim Moore, Sergeant Tadash Nagaki, Technician Fifth Grade Peter Orlich and Technician Fourth Grade Raymond Hanchulak.  Interpreter Edward Wong and US Army First Lieutenant James Hannon also made the jump.  With wild jubilation, internees stormed the gateway to the Courtyard of the Happy Way.  Japanese soldiers made no effort to resist.  Their war was over.

The Salvation Army band struck up America’s national anthem, which they had practiced secretly in pieces.  A teenager in the band crumpled to the ground, weeping.  American soldiers entered the camp passing out spearmint gum, which the internees chewed then passed from mouth to mouth.

“It was beautiful to watch,” Pearson said.  “A clear summer day and the chutes came out like steps in a flight of stairs.  Evenly spaced.  We burst the gates.  Being summer, all I had on were shorts, pass-downs from my brother… no shirt, no shoes, no hat and pretty dirty to boot.   I was small and fast and curious.  I ran through the gates and headed off to where I saw the chute one of seven had come down.  He had landed in a field of cut kaoliang so the stubble was pretty rough even on my calloused bare feet.  I came to this soldier who had a buzz cut, had his eyeglasses taped to his temple and was wearing a khaki uniform.  When he saw me he had one hand on his sidearm holster and he pointed to his shirt and slowly rotated around.  I saw that his shirt had been printed over with Chinese and perhaps Japanese writing.  So I said to him, in my very, very British English accent, “Sorry sir, I don’t read Chinese.”  At which he relaxed and asked me if the others had landed safely.  I told him that he was the only person I had seen.  He asked me where the camp was and I started to take him in that direction and then the adults came along and took over.”

“I remember tailing these gorgeous liberators around,” Previte said.  “My heart went flip-flop over every one of them.  I wanted to touch their skin, to sit on their laps.   We begged for souvenirs, begged for their autographs, their insignia, their buttons, pieces of parachute. We cut off chunks of their hair.  We begged them to sing the songs of America.  They taught us You are my sunshine.  Sixty years later, I can sing it still.”  Much later in life, Previte spent years tracking each living  member of the rescue team down to personally thank them.

Harris remembered babysitting Elliott on liberation day.  “She was about two and we were in the same 57 Block, and she had been born in camp.  She was very cute and smart and I just loved her and all that liberation day I carried her everywhere including being at the gate to meet our heroes.

“I was so thrilled to meet her at the sixtieth celebrations in Weihsien [2005].   She wondered why I was babysitting while we were being liberated but I know I loved doing it and her mother was probably wondering and worrying what happened to Angela.”

Heavily laden B-29s ruled the skies after liberation, replacing Japanese “Sallys.”  Much needed supplies were dropped by parachute into camp, sometimes landing on buildings but injuring no one.  Chocolate, hot cocoa, tinned corned beef, raisins, powdered milk, canned peaches, were on the menus while internees waited in some cases months for evacuation.  Immediately following Victory Over Japan Day, new perils arose.  The civil war between communists and Nationalists renewed with fury, making travel by land unsafe, depending on which side controlled the railroads.  No more roll calls were needed, however, and American OSS officers wired the camp with loud speakers, blasting news and songs like Oh, What a Beautiful Morning! and This is the Army, Mrs.  Jones.

Some internees found more than their freedom during incarceration.  Treadup, according to Hersey, began questioning his own religious upbringing and discovered the busier he became, “the more time he had to do things.”  Months before liberation Treadup found a kind of freedom within the strict confines of the Courtyard of the Happy Way.

“Stripped down, all of them, to their most primitive conditions of value… there is a huge hollow place, yet at the same time I am joyous and feel free.

“I am waking up from a sleep.”

Most internees could not return immediately to their homes, due to the ensuing civil war.  Some eventually flew for the first time on military airplanes back to Tientsin to find their homes gutted.  By 1949, most had been forced out or left willingly, and those that stayed found life increasingly difficult in communist China.

Mary Previte and siblings ib September 10, 1945 eating a meal shortly after being flown from Weihsien - "When the plane touched down in Sian, the men at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) base served us ice cream and cake and showed us a Humphrey Bogart movie . I think it was "Casablanca." Kathleen and I slept that night in an officer's tent -- unaccompanied by bedbugs. The next night -- 9/11 -- we were home. We hadn't seen our parents for 5 1/2 years." - courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Mary Previte and siblings on September 10, 1945 eating a meal shortly after being flown from Weihsien – “When the plane touched down in Sian [Xian], the men at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) base served us ice cream and cake and showed us a Humphrey Bogart movie . I think it was “Casablanca.” Kathleen and I slept that night in an officer’s tent – unaccompanied by bedbugs. The next night – 9/11 – we were home. We hadn’t seen our parents for 5 1/2 years.” – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings

Leopold Pander wasn’t two years old when he was “arrested” in Tientsin.  His only crime was that he had round eyes, and held a Belgian passport.  His memory is naturally vague before his family’s arrest, but he remembers the day of liberation as a recurring nightmare.

“World War II was over,” Leopold said.  “I had this nightmare that came back to me, night after night — always the same dream and just before I wake up, I see myself bare footed, almost naked in the middle of a light brown dirty slope, surrounded by big dark grey stones, under a blue sky without clouds and the sun shining bright.  People running all over the place.  Collective hysteria.  I don’t understand what is going on.  I am completely panicked.  Somebody picks me up — that is when I wake up.”

The recurring dream was a riddle, which took Leopold many years to solve.  When he did, he realized it was the hot summer day US paratroopers liberated the camp.  For many years after his freedom he didn’t talk about his experiences.  “We never spoke about Weihsien, as if it never existed.”

His internment, although he was only a toddler during those years, affected him in a myriad of ways, he said.  He prefers silence, never leaves a plate of food unfinished.

“I could stand in the middle of nowhere, stare at a treetop or anything else and not noticing the “time” passing by.  My mind would drift away.  I could sleep awake.  Who can explain that?  It still happens to me now.”

The word Weihsien came back to him only fourteen years ago, after retirement.  He purchased a computer and learned how the Internet worked and began researching his history.  At first he haunted chats pertaining to the Weihsien experience, slowly opening up after finding Father Hanquet, who told him countless stories of the Courtyard of the Happy Way.  Not long after he started his own website, www.weihsien-paintings.org, which is a moving collection of memories, pictures and stories of the Weihsien internees.

When Leopold left Weihsien on October 19, 1945  on the back of a lorry, his father told  him to have a good last look because he would never see the place again.  “Then on the plane back to Tientsin, a C47, quite a bumpy voyage, I was sick.  The GIs laughed at me and one nice guy gave me a little stuffed puppy.  Gosh.  I can’t forget that.  My parents left the toy puppy in Tientsin when we left for Shanghai.”

Janette Ley Pander, who is Leopold’s sister, remembers one of her first meals after returning to her family’s empty apartment on the upper floors of the Belgian Bank.

“Being back in Tientsin wasn’t easy at all, we were helped by French friends who had declared themselves ‘Vichyists.’  I had my first real meal at their house: plates, knives, forks, spoons to the right, napkins.  Some kind of crinkly green stuff (salad) bathed in oil – uneatable – rabbit meat.  What’s a rabbit?  I found out and pushed my plate away.”

All of her family’s belongings were gone, and they had no one to blame.  “So we, as so many others, started our life all over again.”

Today, the Chinese Government recognizes to some degree what Western citizens gave up during their imprisonment.  According to a recent article in the China Daily, a newly constructed 20-meter sculpture commemorates the hardships both foreigners and the Chinese faced during the Japanese occupation at the Courtyard of the Happy Way.  “The base is covered by carved Chinese characters that spell the names, ages, professions and nationalities of 2,008 people – 327 of them children – from more than thirty countries,” the article written by He Na and Ju Chuanjiang said.

Although the Japanese government has never acknowledged their crimes during World War II, many former internees found forgiveness is possible and have made return trips back to the prison, parts of which, minus the wall and guard towers, remain to this day.  Another reunion of Weihsien survivors is being planned for next year in China, to commemorate the liberation’s 70th anniversary.

“War and hate and violence never open the way to peace,” Previte said in the China Daily article.  “Weihsien shaped me.  I will carry Weihsien in my heart forever.”

Leopold Pander's father's armband - the character "bai" meaning white, or the symbol for Belgium - courtesy Weihsien-Paintings

Leopold Pander’s father’s armband – the character “bai” meaning white, or the symbol for Belgium – courtesy Weihsien-Paintings

 

 

Crate Ripper Case

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – Twisted love triangle stories from time immemorial outnumber the flakes of a winter’s snow, but there is one instance, especially appalling, that occurred in Tianjin.  This true story, called the “Crate Ripper Case,” takes place in the old English Concession area in October 1947, and is listed in historical records as one of the “Eight Strange Cases of the Republic.”

Gather closely. Add a log to the hearth.  Light and good jasmine tea will scare the demons away.  Listen in; you don’t want to miss a single word.

Fifteen months before Mao Zedong’s communist troops stormed into Tianjin via the Qingnian Road, the Li family lived in four identical houses at the golden corner of Hong Kong and Glasgow roads, known today as Munan and Guilin roads.  Father Li, an industrious entrepreneur, the brainchild behind the Tianjin Zhongtian Electric Factory, passed his legacy to his children, but failed to endow his fortitude to his youngest son, Li Baowu.

Baowu was a loafing playboy, most likely inbred traits inherited from Tianjin’s Dark Drifters.  He kept er nais, or concubines, in Tudor houses from the northern-most Austrian Concession all the way to the south, where the Germans and Belgians lived.   His wife of twenty years, Dong Yuzhen, daughter of the Kuomintang mayor of Tianjin at the time, Dong Zhengguo, he kept at the corner house on Munan Road with his four surviving children.

Lucky, lackadaisical Baowu, being an educated chap, a Tianjin College of Business graduate (now the Foreign Language Institute on Racecourse Road), was naturally a curious fellow, for his sexual escapades and frivolous parties were the talk of the town.

Baowu could not be tamed.  Under his stretched belt he had three wives, a host of concubines and saltwater girls who lived in boats along the Hai River.

Saltwater girls came from sampans like these, throughout history they were denied the chance to live on land and became brothels on the water

Saltwater girls came from sampans like these, throughout history they were denied the chance to live on land and their homes became brothels on the water – photo by C.S. Hagen

Not until 1945, days after the Japanese left in defeat from Tianjin, did Baowu find his perfect match and fourth wife.  A half German, half Chinese beauty named Shi Meili,  English name Marion Sze, winner of the Miss Beidaihe Beauty Pageant.  Before she met Baowu she was a secretary with round, wet eyes, a pointed chin, and eyebrows arched like silkworms, the Tianjin Republic Daily reported in 1947.

Love fell on Baowu.  Meili agreed to become his fourth wife and he bought her a house at Number 53 Dali Road, or perhaps it was the other way around: Baowu bought the house and Meili agreed to marry.  Either way, the love struck couple married in secret and Baowu spent most his nights with her in carnal comfort on Dali Road, leaving his quieter, rounder first wife alone with his children at 74 Munan Road.

Life was grand for Baowu, a notorious do nothing and mouse-hearted villain of this true story.  He spent thirteen thousand US dollars on a coat, ordered catering service from the renowned Kiesslings for lunch.  He bought Meili a Buick, hired her a chauffer, and insisted his first wife, mother of four surviving children, take rickshaws to the market.  When he was feeling especially energetic he beat his first wife, sometimes bashing her head against a coffee table or kicking in her pregnant stomach, killing his fifth and sixth unborn children.

On October 25, 1947, Yuzhen, the first wife, traveled by rickshaw to Dali Road, insisting that her husband accompany her to buy a new coat.  When he refused, they argued.

(Bad picture, only one taken from internet) Number 53 Dali Road, where the heinous murder was committed

(Bad picture, only one taken from internet) Number 53 Dali Road, where the heinous murder was committed – online sources

“You give me money so I can buy myself another day,” neighbors reportedly heard Yuzhen say.

Not wanting to disturb the neighbors more than necessary, Yuzhen accepted an invitation from the fourth wife to come upstairs and enjoy lunch and some wine.  The argument continued.  A bottle was thrown.  Baowu naturally protected himself with a hammer, striking Yuzhen across the head.  When Yuzhen fell, Meili pounced.  She held the first wife by the legs until Baowu exhausted himself by smashing her head in with the hammer.

For four hours after the heinous murder, Baowu and Meili sat and watched Yuzhen’s body, perhaps hoping she would wake, or somehow magically disappear.  When the first wife neither awoke nor vanished, they rolled her up in the bloody carpet and placed her in the bathtub.

According to the Tianjin Republic Daily later that afternoon Meili faked a loud, fond farewell out her bedroom window.  “Zou hao, zou hao, Wu Nainai,” farewell, farewell, fifth grandmother.  She called out Yuzhen’s pet name.  The loyal couple then proceeded to clean the house, taking care not to leave a trace of their bloody deeds.  Baowu made one trip outside to buy a whicker crate, which cost him ninety thousand francs.

Long after the city slept, with only the harvest moon as a silent witness, Baowu and Meili took a butcher’s knife to the first wife’s corpse.

They hacked.  Thwack, thwack!  They sawed.   Gzzz, gzzz!  Chopped her into three pieces and then burned her face so she could not be recognized.   Carpet and Yuzhen fit perfectly – a bug in a rug – into the crate.  When they finished they rested from their labors, and saw that it was good.

Now, Meili was not just a porcelain vase.  She had a head of fine brown hair and a brain to go with her pale beauty.  She contacted a Latvian friend, Naylor and Maleina, who were involved in the shipping business.  Thinking if there was no corpse there would be no crime, she asked to store the whicker crate in the Latvian’s warehouse, and equip it with an address to be shipped to Germany.

“Dearest Maleina,” Meili wrote in a note on October 26.  “I need to place with you this carpet and possessions because my husband’s number one wife is bothering me.  I am afraid and cannot live here on Dali Road any longer.  I also don’t want my husband to know about this and I will explain at another time.”

A second note quickly followed, hand carried by a servant girl.

“Beloved Maleina, sorry for the disturbance.  I will prepare the crate immediately and make sure it is wrapped securely.  I’ve already told my husband, who will come by soon to take measurements.”

When they arrived with the crate three days later on the afternoon of October 28th to Suite 16 Tai’an Road, inside the Jingming Apartment Building, the four of them carried the crate to the warehouse.  Naylor mentioned the crate was unusually heavy and had a strange, fishy smell coming from inside.

“It’s because my lazy cat peed on the rug.”  Meili tossed her auburn hair and threw a laugh into the sky, replying casually and with the lightning-fast thinking processes of a fox demon.

Read more about fox demons here:

Later that day Baowu purchased a wooden box large enough to insert the crate into and had it nailed up tight as a fish’s arse.

“Oh, by the way,” Baowu said to Naylor and Maleina.  “My first wife is missing.  Have you seen her?”

If only our villainous hero had said nothing.  If only he had one less drink the night before, one less romp in the bed to clear his head.  But he didn’t keep his mouth shut, and he couldn’t stop at one drink too many.  Villains rarely can.

The Latvian couple of course had not seen Baowu’s first wife, and according to police reports found Baowu’s remark course and extremely strange.  Not only did the Latvian couple begin to wonder why Baowu cared more for a crate than his missing wife, but their cat, a snow-white creature with a black diamond on its forehead, found the crate intriguing as well.

Usually, Maleina spent her afternoons playing with her cat, Snowball, which her husband had bought for her because he spent much of his time away from home. Snowball, however, had more important business and spent the next two days circling Yuzhen’s secret coffin.

Snowball’s wails from the warehouse drew Maleina’s attention.

Meeoow!  Yaaawww!  Meeeeooow! 

Upon close inspection a foul and sticky substance was oozing from a crack.  Maleina called the police.

After Yuzhen’s younger sister identified her sister’s legs, the investigation that followed first targeted rickshaw drivers and the local bandits.  Baowu told Tianjin Chief Superintendent Xiao that bandits had probably overheard the argument he had with his first wife and that she was robbed for money, all the while sliding a thick wad of bills into the officer’s lap.  Baowu spent hundreds of thousands bribing police, so much that it was learned later that nearly every Tianjin police officer benefited from his unreserved charity at some time during his incarceration.

On October 31st, police could no longer deny the facts and public outrage on behalf of Yuzhen and her family was threatening a riot in the streets.  Baowu and Meili were arrested while they slept.  The Crate Ripper Case rocked Tianjin with its barbarity, and became known as the “Republic’s final case.”  Baowu was sentenced to death, but spent the next two years in luxury at the Xiaoxiguan Prison in Xiqing District.  Meili was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The couple lacked for nothing while in prison and before the communist forces overwhelmed the Republic.   Baowu wore his own clothes, slept on a soft Western bed.  He even hired his personal chef to cook his meals.

Not until May 4, 1951, was Baowu tried and sentenced a second time by a new communist court.  He was executed by firing squad twenty days later.

Meili was released in 1954 and was rumored to have opened a hotel in Hong Kong.  Local legend says she returned once to her Dali Road home in the 1960s, but no one has seen her since.

As every egg cracks when struck, so can it be said true love will never crack when struck.  Love is not selfish.  Love does not kill, or hack up a spouse to please a lover.

Love does not covet and is never jealous, for if it does it turns into more insipid things: lust and hate, to name a few.  Love is earned and given freely, and has its best results when one learns first to love his or herself.  Only then does one own the right in a romantic relationship to say those three little words “I love you” and only then can love manifest all its wondrous, sticky, tender strings.

Perhaps guided by a fox demon’s lust we all can love, but at most for a day, more likely only a minute.  For a beautiful fox demon like Shi Meili will eat your heart faster than it takes to write this sentence.

 

The Fox Poem

Author Anonymous, translated by C.S. Hagen

The fox of an old grave when in its day, into a woman of lovely features it decays.  Female coiffure, exquisite suffer, where no man dwells she abides and slowly, between rustic hamlets she strides. 

Eight or nine of ten who behold her are beguiled.  Taken in by her beauty they’re defiled.  Eater of souls, scavenger of hearts, within her arms sanity departs.

When at sunset, no human sounds are heard, she sings, she dances, wails the absurd.  Without raising her eyebrows velvety as a kingfisher, but bowing her face, she bursts into laughter, a thousand, a myriad of joys for her prey to taste. 

The vulpine enchantress brings absolute ruin.  Understand her ways and potions brewin’!  For a man’s mind she makes boil without rest.  Beware of her wiles, or forever lie trapped in her breast!

Eight or nine of ten who behold her are beguiled.  Taken in by her beauty they’re defiled.  Eater of souls, scavenger of hearts, within her arms sanity departs.

A Chinese charm for exorcising fox demons

A Chinese charm for exorcising fox demons

Us, Round-eyed Millet Eaters

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA (PRC) – Blood thirsty, sex crazed demons lurked to the frozen north and beyond the western mountains in what was known to ancient Chinese as the Great Wilderness.

Toward the setting sun fiery-haired ogres known as Longlegs prowled.  Their eyes were round as teacups and shot green, envious rays when their appetites were aroused.  Normally, these Slavic barbarians ate millet.

The northern nomads had surnames such as Hairy Folk, Reap Rage and Droughtghoul.  Their children were born without bones, and some clans sprouted wings.  Naturally, these Hunnic ogres ate millet.

From where the hurricanes brewed and mentioned briefly in The Classic of Mountains and Seas, dwelled cannibalistic giants with lips that covered their faces when they laughed.  Not far from the giants lived the Black people, who had tiger’s heads and walked on bird’s feet.  These African specters ate green snakes, and of course, millet.

But never rice.  All the lands outside of the Middle Kingdom were pictured as undesirable, uncivilized, without rice and full of terrors.

For more than five thousand years the mere mention of such horrid places struck fear faster than a dagger’s thrust into the hearts of young and old alike.  In order to keep the demons and marauding hordes away Chinese emperors conscripted millions, built and buttressed the Great Wall.  When the Mongolians broke through in 1215 C.E. and then the Jurchens in the seventeenth century, secret quasi-religious sects such as the White Lotus Society incited rebellion against the foreign usurpers.

Xenophobic Politics

In one of China’s most ancient historical chronicles called the Bamboo Annals the stage for the connection between demons and outsiders was set.

“In the thirty-second year of his reign he attacked the spectre-regions and camped in King, and in the thirty-fourth year the royal armies conquered those countries.”

And then again, written on bamboo slats for Tang dynasty court records, outsiders became ghosts capable of establishing trade.

“There are, at the Western Sea, markets where traders, without seeing each other, put down beside the merchandise the price which they offer; those places are called spectre-markets.”

According to J.J.M. De Groot in his nineteenth century massive study called The Religious System of China, outsiders are mentioned as cannibals with monstrous characteristics.

 

A southern barbarian eating a snake as depicted by the Classic of Mountain and Seas

A southern barbarian eating a snake as depicted by the Classic of Mountain and Seas

“In the South Sea regions a mother of spectres lives in the Lesser Yü mountains.  She gives birth to all the kwei (demons) that live in heaven and on earth.  At every litter she brings forth ten, which, born in the morning, she devours in the evening.  She is the shen (god) who, under the name of Spectre-lady, exists in Ts‘ang-wu (i. e. the region about the spectre-gate pass). She has a tiger’s head, feet like a dragon, eyes of a python snake, and eyebrows of a kiao dragon.”

Such fear of outsiders invariably turned to hatred, which in some respects was warranted during the Opium Wars.

“When land had to be ceded to the hated foreigner along the coast of China, as a so-called foreign concession, the Chinese Government invariably selected ground condemned by the best experts in feng shui as combining a deadly breath with all those indications of the compass which imply dire calamity to all who settle upon it, even to their children’s children.”  According to De Groot, approximately 1855.

Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin, all of which were treaty ports, all of which were swampy, disease-infested areas in which no one desired to live.  According to De Groot during the Qing Dynasty disease was spread by demons, which naturally came in the form of outsiders.

“People from a yang country have came hither; yang influences have thronged into this place; this is why the king has fallen ill; those men have come here accidentally and caused this spectral evil unintentionally; we therefore can ask them to go away, by means of food and drink, carts and horses.”

The ancient character for barbarian, especially referring to the northern tribes above China.

The ancient character for barbarian.

Another poignant example comes from time immemorial, the Chinese written language, which harshly differentiates insiders from outsiders.  For instance animal radicals were attached to the names of some barbarian groups.  In medieval times, according to Kang Xiaofei’s book The Cult of the Fox, Hu   (狐) meaning fox and Hu (胡) meaning barbarian were homophones that shared the same rhyme and tone.  Starting in the Tang Dynasty the Chinese word for barbarian always referred to the Western, Indo European speaking peoples and the phonetic connection made the fox a convenient tool to describe feelings about foreign elements.  Barbarian odors became fox stench, or huchou (狐臭).  Surnames such as Zhao and Zhang, Bai and Kang were reserved for those with barbarian ancestry and Hu became the surname of most fox demons throughout Chinese literature.

At a political level China has never liked outsiders.  Round-eyed, yellow-haired barbarians are the harbingers of upheaval, sickness and war and little has truly changed since ancient times.  Mao Zedong’s adage “Use the West for Chinese purposes” does not mean old prejudices have broken.  Quite the opposite.  Since Deng Xiaoping opened the doors to capitalism in the 1980s dozens of Western companies, such as Motorola, Galtronics and Ford Motors to name only a few have invested in Tianjin and left, tails between their legs, sucked dry of funds and inspiration.  Other foreign-owned and joint venture companies have succeeded, but for how long and at what price?

If history has anything to say on the matter: not long, and with a heavy price.  Tianjin, to name one Chinese city, has a troubled portfolio.

After the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 the Eight Allied Nations of United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, Hungary, Belgium, Italy and in some respects the United States, invested heavily in Tianjin after destroying the city and its former feng shui.  The Hai River was dredged.  Swamps were dried.  Electricity and indoor plumbing were installed into daunting Gothic buildings.  Waving a freedom flag but intent on imperialism, the Western powers paved roads and created bridges, funded schools and hospitals, restaurants and taverns only to have them stripped during the Japanese invasion in 1937 and then seized in 1949 by the victorious communist party.  One of Mao Zedong’s first “leaps forward” after gaining control of the country was to expel all ‘Roundeyes.’

Today, the foreigner in China is tolerated, sometimes even welcomed.  Much like the red-haired, green-eyed demons of the north the foreigner is a curious creature, but best kept at arm’s length.  A foreigner in China will always be a stranger, looking in, like a child poking a hole through a rice paper window.

The Millet Eaters

During the 1980s, just after China’s bamboo curtain parted for Western investment, most people in Tianjin hadn’t seen a “Roundeye” in nearly forty years.  A blond adolescent foreigner instantly became a novelty to be stared at, groped, pinched and occasionally molested.  Stop to ask how much a jin of bananas were worth and inquisitive crowds would swarm, much like onlookers to a rare animal in a zoo.

Monkey, some would say.

Foreign devil.  Longhaired demon, others would mention.

And then came the prolific term lao wai, meaning old out, the most common modern word for foreigners and a synonym for stupid.  The nickname, although some think it endearing, is used between the Chinese for instance when a plumber attempts an electrician’s job, or when a monkey pilots a ship to the moon.

In the past other more sinister names were used such as the paper man, a demon who rose from the Hai River to kidnap and harm the natives.  Foreigners, and in the north the southern Chinese, also speak the language of birds, and in some places are called Ah-ki, or baby demons that chirp like birds.

The nicknames and curses are said effortlessly, with the mental prowess of tossing a cashed cigarette butt, and in most cases are said not to hurt, but subconsciously to separate the “lao neis” from the lao wais, the insiders verses the outsiders, the rice eaters and the millet eaters, the barbarian from the gentry.

In Tianjin, two types of expatriates exist.  And they’re on opposite ends of a very short street.

There are those who learn the language, accept the cultural differences and barriers and frequent Dog Food Halls, dubiously cozy snack shops not recommended by any sane health professional.  This type of expatriate is like a dry sponge, ready to soak in a new word, a fresh experience and in a blissfully innocent state to befriend and trust and dare.  They can be seen riding bikes or taking public busses.  They’ll work for travel money, become short-lived movie stars and keep intricate journals.   Sometimes they are found at local discos and even less occasionally the five-star hotels like the Sheraton, where the second type of expatriate is usually hovering over a third beer at eleven o’clock in the morning.

The second type of expatriate is financially successful, and usually arguing about sports at safe, English-speaking drinking houses scattered across the city.  This second type of expatriate refuses to learn the language, save for the few choice curses or pillow talk needed to bed a local, leaving translation when needed to a secretary, who is sleeping-with-material as well.  Typically sporting a Buddha belly and throwing unfeigned laughs into the sky, a little Sichuan pepper in a short skirt and legs longer than sugar canes clings close by.  This type of expatriate’s “little golden safe” is filled with hardship allowances from the mother company and safely stowed in a Swiss bank.

Both types of expatriate, and all those that fit in-between, are more frequently than not tools used by both government and populace.  Neither, however, no matter how assiduous their pursuits, will ever truly own a place in Chinese society.  Their places are for rent.

Historically only a handful, such as general of the Sino-Western joint forces Ever Victorious Army in mid nineteenth century, Frederick Townsend Ward, enjoyed official recognition – for a short time.  A temple was erected for the American soldier, known in Caleb Carr’s book as The Devil Soldier.  After Ward was fatally wounded fighting to defend Shanghai, a shrine in his honor was erected in Song Jiang District according to Qing Dynasty decree in 1876, and was torn down by communist soldiers who despised the idea of a Round-eyed hero of China.

“In pursuit of their revisionist goal, communist scholars sometimes misplaced or destroyed invaluable relics and documents relating to the Ever Victorious Army.  But the profound communist discomfort with Ward and his legacy demanded even greater destruction: In 1955 Ward’s remains were dug up, and his grave site and shrine were destroyed and paved over.”  According to historian and author Caleb Carr.

And so that leaves none.  Ward’s selfless mark on China also was rented.

Conclusion

Red hair, black hair, white skin, yellow skin – people are not born hating those who are different.  Society does not segregate itself.  This volatile emotion is learned through fear, funneled by governments, organized religion and agenda-holding pettifoggers and then spilled like crude oil, easily slipping into every societal crack.

Only when mankind surpasses the boundaries of self-defining religion, cultural and historical prejudices – on either side of the ocean – can rice eaters and millet eaters alike see that in the end, we’re not all that much different.  No one is adamantly right, and no one is inherently wrong.

That day, however, is still very, very far away and would most likely take an alien invasion of truly long-legged, red-haired, cannibalistic giants to erase the barriers that exist between East and West, North and South.

 

Tianjin’s Protective Fox Fairy – Granny Wang the Third

Granny Wang the Third at Tianjin's Temple of the Heavenly Empress

Photo by Annie Gao — Granny Wang the Third at Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress

 

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – Qiao Hongshan’s neighbors knew her as a laomazi, or an old maid servant.  Those she healed with spit and charms called her fox fairy, Granny Wang the Third.

Although she’s been dead for nearly two hundred years, her hands and lotus feet are still alive.

From her vantage point inside Tianjin’s Temple of the Heavenly Empress Granny Wang has seen the end of China’s last dynasty and the turning of two centuries.  She’s watched the Opium Wars and half a dozen warlords battle for Tianjin, China’s Pearl of the North.  With heavy lidded eyes perched above rounded, rose red cheekbones, thin lips pursed into a tight, diligent smile, she has offered one tireless hand to all her followers despite the Japanese invasion and the ensuing civil war.  Granny Wang survived damnation during the Cultural Revolution and sits, to this day, an arguably regal figure along Ancient Culture Street.

“Touch Granny Wang’s hand and live to ninety-nine.”  Granny Wang’s followers say.

Photo by C.S. Hagen -- Entrance to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress

Photo by C.S. Hagen — Entrance to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress

For more than one hundred and seventy years she has sat in painted plaster.  A red silk longevity robe is draped across her shoulders.  Her followers burn black incense over tealeaves and call it ‘Brilliant Tea’ (can chaye), a reputedly magical elixir able to cure all sickness.

Many still preform ritual obeisance and can’t resist rubbing her well-worn hand.

Grey hair coiled under a simple skullcap, wearing loose, peasant trousers and a short-collared mandarin shirt, she holds flowers, sometimes magic medicine balls, sometimes copper coins in one hand and offers the other, cupped over a bony knee, for healing.

Legends say touch her hand and be protected against a hundred diseases.  Touch her foot and eliminate a hundred ills.

Qiao Hongshan 乔红山

Before Granny Wang became known as a fox fairy she was a mother of three.  Before being a mother she was a sick child rescued by Doctor Wang Sansi, a traveling scholar formerly of Beijing’s reputed Tai Hospital.  Before being rescued however, she was born into squalor in Tianjin’s Wuqing District.  She was spared the “killing trouble bowl,” a drowning tub often used by parents on female newborns, only to fall ill at a young age.  Outside the Qiao family’s doors smallpox, dysentery, cholera and typhoid haunted city streets.

“The country was plagued with disease, spirits and odorous vapors, swamp, piles of coffins awaiting in the open for an auspicious time and place for burial,” wrote Colonel G.J. Wolseley, quartermaster for the British forces in Tianjin at the time.

“A handkerchief became an indispensible weapon against protecting the olfactories…” Wolseley kept intricate journals during his eighteenth and nineteenth century travels.  “There is no part of the world to which distance lends more enchantment to the scenery than in China.  When actually amongst the highly-manured fields of that empire, the olfactory organs are so rudely assailed by the variety of stenches… that a second trip across the fields is seldom taken.”

Hongshan was born one hundred and fifty years before penicillin and into a city slowly being eaten by opium smugglers, foreign gunboats, superstition, disease and rebellion.  Magistrates faked blindness and turned deaf to Tianjin’s poor, and pettifoggers, or  yamen runners ‘vomited their hearts out’ to squeeze money from where they could.

When little Hongshan became possessed by a fox spirit is unknown, and mostly the leftovers of urban legends, but if other fox possession stories hold any relevance Hongshan became possessed during her childhood sickness.  Wang Sansi, the heroic doctor for whom she was later named after, took her under his wing, taught her his trade, made her his fourth wife and sired Hongshan’s three sons.

Photo by C.S. Hagen -- A crippled beggar outside the Temple of Heavenly Empress

Photo by C.S. Hagen – A crippled beggar outside the Temple of Heavenly Empress

After her husband’s death she circuited Zhili Province’s villages and practiced her shamanistic arts.  She was known as a midwife, a fortune teller, a healer and a miracle worker.

A favorite place for Hongshan was the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak (miaofengshan), some forty kilometers northwest of Beijing.  She made countless pilgramiges to worship  Mother Tianshan (Bixia Yuanjun), a reported disciple of Queen Mother of the West, who according to some sources was the Queen of Sheba and was also known to recruit fox fairies and fox demons as her messangers.  Under the mountain’s walnut, apricot, hawthorn and peach trees she healed the ‘mountain climbing tigers’ or the coolies who hired themselves out as human donkeys.  Amidst the fruit vendors and peach wood walking stick hawkers at the temple’s entryway, she gave away tea to thirsty pilgrims, never asking for a copper in return.

Sometimes she carried massive stones up the mountain’s slopes for much-needed temple repairs and was was reportedly visited by the Empress Cixi on two occasions.  Nearly all documents describing Hongshan reported she healed incurable diseases, calmed the masses when bandits threatened, and never wasted a moment when someone’s life was in danger, said Taoist Master He Lutong.

“She was good with the people,” Master He said.  “She was approachable, unlike the Queen Mother, her predecessor.  She kept away from the rivalries and helped villagers escape bandits at her own peril.  You would almost never find her in the temples, she was always in people’s homes, curing the sick and helping the people avoid calamity.”

According to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress reports dating back to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Hongshan was a joyous person, who never stayed idle.

“No problem was too little for her,” Master He said.  “There’s a colloquial saying in Tianjin – ‘Big problem, little problem, Granny Wang will show.’”

Granny Wang 王三奶奶

Tianjiners called Qiao Hongshan Granny Wang long before her death around 1843.  She accepted her husband’s surname, Wang.  After her death, of which there is much debate, she became known as Granny Wang the Third.

Beijing claims she died during a blizzard on the way up the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak.  Tianjiners swear she died on what is now known as Ancient Culture Street, only she didn’t truly die.

According to the Tianjin Daily while on her way to the Temple of the Heavenly Empress, she grew tired and hailed a rickshaw coolie.  Upon arrival she discovered she had no money and told the coolie to wait outside.  Her last words were for the coolie to go in and look for her if she didn’t come out momentarily.  The coolie waited until noon, and then went inside where he found Granny Wang still as stone, holding out ten copper coins and a note thanking the coolie.

She transcended death and became an immortal.  In fox fairy terms, she had reached the ninth tail.

Granny Wang became known as a ‘fox fairy of local fame,’ according to Xiao Feikang’s book The Cult of the Fox.  Her selfless life as a healer and fortuneteller made her a deified representation of female mediums who played active roles in the local community.  The Granny Wang Cult followed soon after her death and both Tianjin and Beijing laid claims to the woman turned goddess.

Photo by C.S. Hagen -- Burning incense in the Temple of the Heavenly Empress

Photo by C.S. Hagen — Burning incense in the Temple of the Heavenly Empress

In Beijing, 1927, according to temple records she revealed her true form beside her own statue at the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak, and a photograph was presumably taken of her.

Tianjiners wouldn’t believe the story.  They had to see the photograph with their own eyes.  Tianjin’s affluent salt merchants, actors and craftsmen guilds and lighting companies established charities to help people make the journey, which in turn embarrassed Beijing as Tianjiners far outnumbered their own cult members.

In a time of rampant disease with little hopes or monies for cures, both Tianjiners and Beijing commoners turned to the supernatural for assistance.  According to some technocrats of the time gods like Granny Wang held real power.

“Western science, although it cleverly seeks the Way of weishing, [sanitation] does so entirely on the basis of investigating form and material composition,” wrote Zheng Guanying, a comprador and an ardent Taoist student in his book Chinese and Foreign Essentials of Hygiene, 1890.  “It does not understand the marvelous [ability] of non-matter to give rise to matter, or the ability of the formless to give rise to form [wu zhi sheng zhi, wu xing sheng xing].  Will Western physicians ever understand this?  Even though they know about it, they do not believe in it and only find it laughable.  I can only hope that as Western science progresses, in the end it will be able to comprehend the Way of the Immortals.  Those who perfect the [Chinese] art [of self-cultivation] earn merit and virtue and enter the abode of the Immortals. Those who practice it even imperfectly can still avoid calamity and illness and live to an advanced age.  Is this not a wonderfully felicitous thing for the entire world?”

Today, one way of practicing the Way of Immortals is to rub Granny Wang’s hand or foot.  Another method is to respectfully burn black incense over a bag of tealeaves before Granny Wang’s unblinking eyes, and then take the leaves home to drink.  Upon seeing Granny Wang however, salutations must be made.

“Granny Wang the Third, I’ve (name) come to worship you.”

Upon leaving make sure to let her know she is not forgotten.

“Granny Wang the Third, I’m leaving now.  See you next year.”

Tianjin’s streets are safer and cleaner than they were in Granny Wang’s time.  Western medicine has shattered more than superstitions.  It’s ironic, however, that Alexander Fleming invented penicillin in 1928, but Granny Wang – Tianjin’s protective fox fairy – has been curing the sick since the eighteenth century.

Red Lanterns Rising

By. C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA (PRC) – Red Lanterns once flew over Tianjin.

The skies crouched with anticipation as bewildered children and eager onlookers jostled toward the South Canal.  One by one the red lanterns sailed east, flickering like demons’ eyes.

“What’s happening baba?” A child in the crowd asked.  Bone-rattling drums drowned the child’s question and baba leaned closer, wrapping the seven-year-old in an embrace.  Before placing her on his bony shoulders for a better look he spoke into her ear.

“The Red Lantern flies toward Moscow and Tokyo,” said the child’s father.

A white lotus flower

photo by C.S. Hagen —  A white lotus flower

“Why?”

“To destroy the foreign devil’s and Island Dwarf’s cities.”

At the South Canal’s north embankment, near the current Japanese Concession area surrounding Heping Road, the drums reached a fevered pitch.  Trumpets blared.  A thousand voices cried out in unison welcoming the Yellow Lotus.

From a sampan unfurling red sails, dressed in red, holding a red lantern in one hand and a similarly colored kerchief in the other, Lin Hei’er stepped from the boat and on to Tianjin soil.  She had left in disgrace, but returned as a goddess.

“Who’s that baba?”  The child yelled into baba’s ear.

“Yellow Lotus Holy Mother.”  Baba spoke in a whisper that somehow drowned the chanting and throbbing drums.  “Fallen from the sky and here to drive the foreign devils into the sea.  Happy heaven, happy earth.”

More than ten thousand Tianjiners watched as Lin Hei’er, former zaji actress turned saltwater girl, sworn to destroy the foreign occupation soldiers and religions, stood still as an idol while Zhili Viceroy Yu Lu wrapped an official yellow cloak around her shoulders.  Nine sister fairies dressed in red silks, red shoes, red scarves, red tasseled flying knives sheathed across their backs held up their red lanterns, reflections of the floating lights above and casting the harbor into a bloody, wet sheen.

“I want to be like her,” said the child.  “She’s beautiful.”

“Aiya, little yaya.  You poke your head into the clouds while your feet are still here on earth.  Don’t think such foolish things.  There is no ivory in a dog’s mouth.”

Although little yaya was too young in 1900 to join the Red Lantern Brigade, Lin Hei’er, the Yellow Lotus, elusory brigand, whore and leader of the Red Lantern, opened the doors to women’s liberation for little yaya and millions like her.

Remembered today as a revolutionary hero the Yellow Lotus, (黄莲圣母林黑儿), was born in a fishing boat on Tianjin’s South Canal in 1871.  She matured under the rigorous training of zaji acrobatic entertainment.  Before an early marriage to Li Youchuan, she was a saltwater girl, selling her body on river and on dry land.  One of her suitors, a man named Li Youchuan, became her husband.  Little is known of their relationship other than she married at a very young age.

At the Hejia Hutong, near to the South Canal, nearly deserted.  According to residents this area once flourished, and would have been a focal point for the Red Lantern.

photo by C.S. Hagen —  At the Hejia Hutong, near to the South Canal and marked for destruction as of 2012. According to residents this area once flourished with business, theater and markets, and would have been a focal point for the Red Lantern.

Love, although in Chinese is a fairly modern word, is as old an emotion as hate, and must have bloomed between the young couple, for she swore vengeance upon the foreign nations squatting in Tianjin after British soldiers arrested her husband for opposing the opium trade.  Li Youquan died shortly after being interrogated, beaten and starved inside prison.

The Yellow Lotus, at that time still known as Lin Hei’er, fled to Tianjin’s outskirts where she eventually became involved with the White Lotus sect, a popular quasi-religious, martial band of Chinese who opposed the Manchu rule and more importantly, the foreign occupation of China’s trade ports lost in the Opium Wars.  Tianjin Boxer leader Zhang Decheng became Hei’er’s benefactor.  Like thousands of zealous followers before her, she knelt before the Boxer leader, swearing her life to freedom, to mutual faithfulness and to secrecy.  She swore to take the heavens as her father, the earth as her mother, the stars as her brothers the moon as a sister and drank a bowl of chicken’s blood.

Hejia Hutong, resident looking at the house he has lived all his life - soon to be torn down

photo by C.S. Hagen  —  Hejia Hutong resident looking at the house he has lived all his life – soon to be torn down

“If I, your pupil, do not respect your law, or if I divulge this Way of Immortals, may my flesh be reduced to congealed blood.  I will never go against this teaching.  If I should go against this teaching may a thunderbolt strike me dead.”

Incense seeping into her nostrils, Hei’er bowed three times, striking her forehead on the ground.

“I am a teacher.”  Decheng returned his oath.  “I do not teach a heretical sect.  If I should transmit any heretical teaching or if I should use tricks to get people’s money for myself, then may a thunderbolt strike me dead.”

Hei’er, which means ‘black child,’ soon learned the true words, eight character-long protective incantations that would keep her safe as long as she prayed to the three Easts, three times a day.  Once in the morning facing east recited twenty-seven times; once at noon facing south, recited fifty-four times and once in the evening facing west, recited eighty-one times.  Cross-legged, hands clasped to her chest, she learned how to empty her mind.  Forty-nine days later after intensive martial arts training, and a burn mark seared with wormwood leaves most likely at the back of her head, she was a fully inducted member of the Boxer’s Righteous and Harmonious Fists, and leader of the Red Lantern Brigade.

During the early 1900s, rebellions swept China’s northeast.  The Red Lantern, however, originated in Tianjin and became a nation wide symbol of revolt and mystic power.  With their red kerchiefs the Red Lantern became the Boxer’s arsonists, destroying buildings with a gentle wave.  Nearing midnight the lithe, young Red Lantern women took to the streets, shouting propaganda and drawing thousands of onlookers who were swept away with their elegance and violent slogans.

“Women don’t cut your hair,” the Red Lantern shouted.  “Cut off foreign devils’ heads.  Women do not bind your feet.  Strike away the foreign devils’ smiles.”

The Red Lantern was more than arsonists and the Boxers’ propaganda machine.  They were shrouded in mystery.  Legends from the time report they carried flying daggers on their backs, which when thrown, could strike the head off an enemy from leagues away.  The Red Lantern women were also known to possess powers of astral projection, and spied on the Western armies and concession areas.  At dusk, while chanting their protective true words, they stared into the setting sun until their eyes glowed with fire and then pinpoint the enemy’s locations.  Some said their souls floated on copper bowls filled with water or their bodies could fly through the air simply by waving a fan.

One of the spells, or true words the Red Lantern taught Boxers to chant was known as the Closed Fire and Sand Curse.  The true words, when recited with a righteous heart, repelled bullets and made the body impervious to harm.

“Disciples in the red dust, obstruct the cannon’s mouths.  Let their guns resound together and part the sands on both sides of us.”

A representational painting of the Red Lantern - artist unknown

A representational painting of the Red Lantern – artist unknown

A 2013 article in China’s Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences reports the allied armies countered the Red Lantern’s spells by painting naked women on their cannons.

All unmarried women with unbound feet were welcome into the Red Lantern.  The Yellow Lotus trained prostitutes and beggars, giving the young girls red robes when they finished training.  Only those with lotus feet – the rich – were rejected from the Red Lantern ranks.  Widows and those too old to participate in the fights formed the Blue and Black Lantern brigades.  A fourth brigade called the Sha Guo Zhao, or the Cooking Pan Lantern, was also formed.  Armed with magic saucepans that never went empty, they fed the sixty-thousand-strong Boxer army.

Reports published shortly after the Boxer Rising, such as in A Miscellaneous Record of the Boxers and A Month in Tientsin, attribute the crazed actions of many Boxers and Red Lantern women to the ingestion of mercury sulfide.

“The teacher first draws a circle in the ground,” the A Miscellaneous Record of the Boxers reported.  “He orders those who wish to receive instruction to step inside it.  They stand with their eyes closed, and the Teacher murmurs spells into their ears.  Before long, some fall prostrate on the ground.  These he teaches.  Those who do not so fall are regarded as un-teachable. When they practice boxing the instructor holds the boy’s right ear with his hand and makes the boy himself recite the spell three times.  When the spell is completed, the boy lies supine on the ground, almost lifeless.  He is then slowly urged to rise and dance about… Pairs of such boys will fight together as if facing a mighty enemy.  In truth, they are like people drunk, or in a dream.  After a time, the Teacher will slap the boy in the middle of the back and… he will wake up, and stand there like a wooden chicken, having entirely forgotten the art of boxing.”

At the Boxers and Lantern’s helm stood the Yellow Lotus.  When her troops were ready, she fought alongside Boxers.  Hand in hand with Boxer men, (a strict taboo of the times to be seen outside the home touching a man), they marched through Tianjin streets defying Manchu rule and foreign aggression.

According to a 1900 article in the Atlantic Monthly, Boxers revered the Red Lantern women, and Yellow Lotus was judge and jury of all those brought before her.  Found guilty of befriending foreigners or aspiring to foreign ways and heads would roll.  She pardoned a small handful when enough gold was presented.  Viceroy Yu Lu, the governor of Zhili Province, which included Tianjin, invited the Yellow Lotus once to his home and begged her to predict the result of the Boxer movement.

“I have arranged for an angelic host to destroy them (foreign powers) with fire from Heaven,” she told the viceroy.  “You need not be alarmed.”

The viceroy believed.  Tianjin believed.  Foreigners, according to Brian Power in his book Ford of Heaven, believed, to an extent.  Newspapers such as the Tientsin-Peking Times and magazine The Atlantic Monthly reported the Yellow Lotus was wounded during the Battle of Tientsin, caught by British forces after the short-lived Boxer Rising, and was decapitated.

Many other sources, such as the above-mentioned Ford of Heaven, report the Yellow Lotus disguised herself once again as a fisherman and escaped.  She continued striking fear into the hearts of Tianjin’s concession children.  Western soldiers after the Boxer Rising looted Red Lantern sites, specifically Luzu Tang, for Red Lantern memorabilia.  Three decades after the Boxer Rising, the Japanese spy network had exhausted itself searching for the Yellow Lotus’s secret lairs.  Years preceding World War II numerous pirate raids on boats and godowns, or warehouses, plagued Tianjin.  Trains were attacked and robbed.  Kidnappings, which were called ‘seizing a goddess of mercy’ for taking women and ‘grabbing a fat pig’ while snagging men often coincided with train raids.  On May 7, 1923, one hundred and fifteen people, twenty of whom were Westerners, were kidnapped outside of Tianjin from the Shanghai-Peking Express train.  One British citizen, surnamed Rothman, was killed, according to the Winnipeg Tribune.

The Nationalist government at the time would not admit the raids or rash of kidnappings were the work of the Yellow Lotus.  But Tianjiners still believed.  Legends say she escaped to Tianjin outskirts where a cloud awaited to take her up to heaven.

Alive or dead, Lin Hei’er, the Yellow Lotus, at only twenty-nine years of age, broke the shackles of feudal ethics, showing the world women were just as capable as men.  She was the first revolutionary in modern China, according to some an ‘inventor of tradition’ and mother of the Chinese women’s liberation movement.

Her methods can be questioned, and have been for more than a century.  Writers during that time name her whore, bandit and witch.  Her motives, however, cannot be denied.  The foreign hands responsible for her husband’s murder lit the Red Lanterns, burned her love to hate, and cast its bright light for the world to see.  And in a way, more than one hundred and thirteen years later, her red lanterns still fly over Tianjin, and have reached much further than Moscow or Tokyo.

 

Red Lantern monument, erected 1994, at the spot where Lin Hei'er the Yellow Lotus, landed along the South Canal

(Taken from Xinhua Net) — Red Lantern monument, erected 1994, at the spot where Lin Hei’er the Yellow Lotus, landed along the South Canal

 

Nationalism or Healthy Pride – World’s Only Boxer Museum in Tianjin

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA (PRC) – Once upon a previous century, not all that long ago, one hundred and twenty thousand righteous and harmonious fists mauled Tianjin, the pearl of China’s north.  It was a prizefight the West has all but erased from the history books, and a death duel the memories of which the Chinese faithfully nurture.

The bloodbath between what came to be known as the Boxers, pitted against the Eight Allied Nations (United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, Hungary, Italy and the United States) flattened Tianjin’s old Celestial City, shackled the Manchu dynasty to its coffin, and thrust open the shameless pods of the poppy plant.

But nowhere in the world is there so much as a whisper to commemorate the Chinese side of the Boxer Rising.

Except in Tianjin.

Statue commemorating the Boxers at Luzu Temple - photos by C.S. Hagen

Statue commemorating the Boxers at Luzu Temple – photos by C.S. Hagen

 

Nestled into an impoverished corner of Hongqiao District, within a spear’s throw of the Hejia Hutong, sits an old Daoist temple, originally built in 1719 BCE, the Luzu Tang, or the Lu Dongbing Ancestral Hall.  The temple has been refurbished to become the world’s only Boxer museum.

“As far as I know this is the only Boxer memorial in the world,” said Li Xinqiao, the Boxer museum curator.  Displaying none of the angst his forefathers vented against foreigners, Li is soft spoken, until he speaks of the museum’s artifacts and history.  His thin face flushes with sudden warmth, his eyes glint like fireflies when he recounts the stories.

“This is where they built the Boxer altar for Tianjin,” Li said.  “Here at Luzu Tang.”

Luzu Temple

Luzu Temple, the world’s only true Boxer museum

Mammoth halberds, spears and double-edged straight swords line racks, the way weapons used to be displayed, Li said.  The blades no longer hold an edge.  Rust has eaten most of the iron away.

Inside the main room royal yellow vests emblazoned with magic charms are folded neatly behind glass cages.  Gifts, Li said, to the Tianjin Zhili Province Boxers, which exemplified the highest imperial favor.  Wrinkled, sepia toned photographs, paintings and official communiqué are also on display.

The Zhili Province Boxer chiefs, namely Liu Chengxiang, Cao Futian and Zhang Decheng were revolutionary heroes to Li, as they were to former Chairman Mao Zedong and more recently to many of the young people in China today.

At the temple’s main entrance where the Boxer altar was built, Li said the Boxer chiefs burned charms.  Followers would drink the charm’s ashes mixed in strong wine to summon ancient heroes and gods to possess their bodies, making them impervious to barbarian bullets.  At the front gates was where the women of the Red Lantern gathered, staring at the setting sun until their eyes glowed like fire and they possessed the ability to summon lightning.  A towering statue of Boxer heroes rests approximately where the altar was made today, but in 1900 it was at this spot where the drums were beaten, torches were lit and Boxers danced themselves into a frenzied rage.

Sha!  Sha!  Sha!  Shao!  Shao!  Shao!” (kill, burn) was the Boxer chant, which when screamed from sixty thousand throats must resemble a sound somewhere between a volcano’s eruption and the galloping Mongolian hordes.

Boxer weapons

Boxer weapons

“Surely government bannermen are many,” the Boxers also cried.  “Certainly foreign soldiers a horde, but if all the people spit once they will drown bannermen and invaders together.”

Another favored slogan was, “Whenever you meet foreigners, you must kill them.  If they try to escape, they must immediately be killed.  Destroy Christians root and branch.”

No tree or flower was left in the ground.  Foreign dogs and cats were killed.  Chinese Catholics and Protestants were tortured and beheaded.  Anyone possessing any item made from a foreign country was marked for death.  More shells fell into Tianjin’s International Settlement, which hugs both sides of the Hai River near Liberation Bridge, in June 1900 than the entire Boer War, according to military personnel defending the International Settlement.  In total, more than one hundred and eight thousand people lost their lives during the few short months of the Boxer Rising.

Boxer workout weights

Boxer workout weights

A book written in 1902 by the Reverend Frederick Brown entitled From Tientsin to Peking with the Allied Forces gives a descriptive account of an imperial Chinese soldier’s fear of the Boxers.

“An old man came from the village at two a.m.,” the soldier said.  “It was very dark.  Then thousands of soldiers (Heavenly Soldiers) came down and we fired at them, but the bullets would not enter.  Some did knock men over, but they would jump up, spit the bullets out, and fight again.  How could we fight against such men?”

According to Brown, the interviewee was a Boxer spy.

Missionary journals and first hand accounts written shortly after the uprising describe the Boxers with scorn, dependent mainly on their magical charms, incantations and Plum Flower Boxing.  “Boxerism” is synonymous with words like foreign devil and public beheadings, and sparked Irish author Arthur Ward’s fictional character, evil Doctor Fu Manchu in the early nineteenth century.

In China, Boxerism is national pride.  Stand tall and defy the odds.  Some say the Boxer spirit is connected to triads like the White Lotus Society, or to Tianjin’s hunhunr, the Dark Drifters, and also to the quasi-Christian mystics of 1860 that called themselves Taiping Rebels, the “good Hans.”  No matter the source, Boxer courage is revered to this day, and the evidence does not stop with the dedication of a historical Boxer headquarters into a national museum.

Lu Dongbing, one of the eight immortals and the residing god at the Boxer museum

Lu Dongbing, one of the eight immortals and the residing god at the Boxer museum

Former Chairman Mao Zedong idolized the Boxers.

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Red Guards shouted slogans similar to the Boxers.

In 2009 the People’s Daily published an article on its website saying “anti-imperialistic, patriotic” Boxer movement caused panic among imperialist countries that wanted to carve China into their own private sections.

More recently young children at the Pingxiang Mingde Primary School are learning Plum Flower Boxing, which includes the martial art’s practice and its heritage, according to a December 6, 2010 article in The Economist.

The Chinese communist party walks a threaded rope when it idolizes the Boxer movement.  Public dissatisfaction, widespread corruption, censorship and random crackdowns are stretching the public’s nerves to near breaking point.  Jump into any taxi and ask what the driver thinks of Tianjin government, in particular.  Try to get a work visa switched to a new company and watch the Third Bureau flex its iron muscles.

When, not if, the rope snaps, a new wave of Chinese-styled Boxerism might not resemble the magical prowess of the Monkey King, or the fighting skills of Guan Yu, the god of war, but then again, it just might.

China has a long memory, and more than two billion axes to grind, and Tianjin is a stiff-necked city with powerful shoulders, with the world’s only true Boxer museum.

A Tianjin Haunting

Grave behind Purple Bamboo Grove Church outside of the old English Concession. Watchmen of the church say it belongs to a young boy, anonymous.

Photos by C.S. Hagen  –  Grave behind Purple Bamboo Grove Church outside of the old English Concession. Watchmen of the church say it belongs to a young boy, anonymous.

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA (PRC) – Behind the crippled Purple Bamboo Grove Church rests a poorly made grave.  Tiered red brick forms a horseshoe shape, yawning in the middle to reveal blackness beneath.  Ground surrounding the grave is moist and springy, a perfect breeding ground for the poison ivy that surrounds the site in warmer months like so many sentient soldiers.

Three carefully placed ceramic toys adorn the grave’s left side.  The most undamaged toy is of a Christmas tree with four smiling Santas holding hands.

“It is the grave of a child,” the night watchman said.  Fearing to lose his metal rice

The ceramic toy Santa at the grave

The ceramic toy Santa at the grave

bowl of a job, he preferred to keep his name private.  “An elderly foreign lady once visited this spot.”

The watchman didn’t know who placed the ceramic toys on top of the grave, but admitted the old church was haunted.  The boy’s grave was not the only body buried in the back of the Purple Bamboo Grove Church, but no other headstone or marker remain.  In June 2012 a man quit working as a second watchman because he believed the ruined church became alive with the dead at night.

The night watchman who remained knew of the atrocities that were once committed at the church’s front doors and agreed that if any place in Tianjin (formerly spelled Tientsin), should be haunted, the old church stood high on the list.

Cement mixing buckets, bricks, pipes and tarps lay forgotten at the entrance.  Trees are warped and mostly leafless in mid August.  The old Red Cross sign that once advertised the Sisters of Charity Orphanage in the midst of Purple Bamboo Grove, the heart of the red light district and a stone’s throw from the old English Concession, has been chiseled away.  Remnants of communist propaganda painted in revolutionary red still remain.

‘Mao Zedong Thought,’ the slogan says.

Entryway to the Sisters of Charity Orphanage, the Cultural Revolution slogan is painted on left side pillars

Entryway to the Sisters of Charity Orphanage, the Cultural Revolution slogan is painted on left side pillars

Ironically the entrance’s doors remain, but the archway is blackened by fire, reminiscent of the brutal atrocities committed in 1870.

“The sisters were stripped naked, and, one after the other, in full sight of the remainder, their bodies were ripped open, their eyes gouged out and their breasts cut off.  As each one was mutilated the body was hoisted on long spears and thrown into the burning chapel.”  O.D. Rasmussen wrote in his book Tientsin: An Illustrated Outline History (Tientsin Press, 1925).

Missionary reports dating back to 1871 report nine nuns from the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage were burned beyond recognition.

“…And of these most have been mere unrecognizable fragments; how as a fit accompaniment to the rest, thirty or forty of the children of the hospital were smothered in the vaults where they had taken refuge,” reported Charles William Wason in the Shanghai Evening Courier in September 1870.

Inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

Inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

The original church was destroyed, but was rebuilt.  Pillars the sisters were tortured upon are not the same ones dating back to the Tientsin Massacre in 1870.  The ground, however, hallowed or desecrated, is the same.  The sisters bodies were buried across the street from the Astor Hotel outside the British Consulate, Gordon Hall, demolished in 1984 after the Tangshan Earthquake.  A memorial was erected over their charred remains.

Purple Bamboo Grove altar

Purple Bamboo Grove altar

Events that led Tientsin’s populace to bloody deeds in 1870 and again in 1900 are not without merit, if one was to look through the eyes of the locals at that time.  In a world spiraling toward locomotives, electricity and division of labor, the average Chinese person in 1870 was still mired in superstition and ancient tradition.  Rumors began to spread in Tientsin of the paper man, a demon who rose from the Hai River, (then called the Peiho), to kidnap, injure and kill the natives.

The paper man, of course, had pale skin, colored hair and green eyes.

“…He transforms himself, by the aid of some mysterious power, into paper.  At times, it is asserted, he will appear as a scrap of plain paper; at other times he comes in the guise of an old newspaper.  A favorite dodge with him is to get himself made into a kite.  He thereby accomplishes his object of getting into people’s houses with greater facility…” wrote George Thin in his book The Tientsin Massacre, published in 1870.

According to George Thin the most common remedy was for families to sprinkle bathing water on every scrap of paper in the house, which would “certainly give the paper man his quietus.”

The paper man also took the form of women, and in Tientsin more specifically the Sisters of Charity, who in their black robes and horned white hats struck horror into the local populace.  Such an image to the Chinese sparked fear, for white is the color of death, and rumors the sisters were kidnapping children to make powerful magic spells and medicines quickly became panic.

In truth, the Sisters of Charity provided shelter, food and medicines for orphans, but due to Christian doctrines and the symbolization of communion the populace believed the nuns, as well as all Christian congregations, were cannibals, and were secretly slaying the city’s children to make Eye and Heart Bewitching Philtres.

Citywide panic turned to rage when graves were exhumed behind the Wanghai Lou, or Victory Mary Church.  Inside the graves were bodies of children, who according to missionary journals of the time died from plague.  Rage then became a riot when yamen officials caught three Chinese men who confessed they sold ten children to the Sisters of Mercy.  The rumors raged like a conflagration to every Tientsin district, coming to a head on June 21, 1870.  Missionaries were boiling babies to sell to opium merchants, the people cried.  Pettifoggers, or yamen clerks, ran through the streets and rain dancers with green wreaths, swinging peach wood swords, stirred the local populace to rise up against the foreigners.

Before the sun set more than twenty-two politicians, priests, nuns and merchants were killed.

Daoists believe each person has three spirits: the hun, or cloud spirit, which exits the body on death, the p’o, or the white spirit, which stays behind, and then a third part that enters a spirit tablet and demands reverence from surviving family.  Another essential part of the Daoist beliefs demand that a body must return home in order for its souls to be at rest.

If any credence is given to such beliefs, then surely, the Purple Bamboo Grove Church must be one of the world’s most haunted sites.  A trip within the decrepit structure is harrowing.  The original altar still sits where the church’s last sermon was given.  An unreadable bronze plaque in the wall commemorates the deaths of unknown members.  Stray sections of stained glass in back room windows defy the stench and decay and a humid breeze, sifting through the buildings cracks, whines as loud as screams.

Partially stained glass window

Partially stained glass window

 

Back room behind pulpit inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

Back room behind pulpit inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

 

Tianjin Dark Drifters

By C.S. Hagen 

TIANJIN, CHINA (PRC) – Hunhunr, the Dark Drifters, are alive and well and still thieving in Tianjin.

Once they wore martial pants and a turquoise pouch around the waist.  Their shoes were brightly colored.  A wig, adorned with a jasmine flower, partially covered their shaved foreheads and Manchu queues, which given the laws at that time was tantamount to treason against the emperor.  The hunhunr’s antics didn’t stop there however, they prowled the streets in force, as if wounded, dragging the right leg in unison and bristling with homemade knives and axe handles looking to da chunjia, or stage a rumble.

Today, the Dark Drifters are not as conspicuous, but their brave and somewhat masochistic feats have bequeathed to the city of Tianjin more than a legacy of pseudo gangster attitudes.  Some say the hunhunr, dating back more than two hundred years, still exist in Tianjin.

Dark Drifter History

During the hunhunr’s prime in the nineteenth century, the hunhunr (pronounced huir-huir), were hoodlums, allegedly an offshoot of the Elder Brother Society, who lived together and harassed merchants on market day, extorted monetary collections in crowds and used brute force to muscle their way into any money making endeavor.

The hunhunr society was not as rigid as the triads, and highly prone to savagery.

According to a former Tianjin newspaper Yishi Bao article written in 1935, the hunhunr were “capable of bearing great punishment, several hundred strokes of the rod, and they won’t let out the slightest sound.  Their mouths don’t beg for forgiveness, their faces don’t change expression.”

The hunhunr also loosely controlled transportation to and from the Haihe, Tianjin’s deep-water river along which most trade commenced.  They extorted rickshaw coolies and wheelbarrow pushers traveling through their turfs and inserted themselves forcefully as middlemen between peasants bringing produce from the countryside and urban peddlers, collecting commissions for their “services.”

The site where nine Sisters of Charity were brutally murdered, burned, and then their bodies thrown into the Hai River in 1870. Acts that were later attributed to Dark Drifters, hunhunr.

The site where nine Sisters of Charity nuns were brutally murdered, burned, and then their bodies thrown into the Hai River in 1870. Acts that were later attributed to Dark Drifters, hunhunr.

Because of their maniacal bravery and low standing in society, the hunhunr were also often used by officials as patsies for crimes, such as the rape, torture and burning of nine Sisters of Charity nuns outside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church off of Jiefang Road in June 1870 and then later taken from prisons and beheaded to appease the Eight Allied Powers after the bloody Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

A hunhunr’s lot in life was one of pain, extortion and more frequently than not, death.  Rarely did a hunhunr live to retirement.

The rules for being a hunhunr were simple.  A hunhunr must have heroic stoicism in the face of danger.  If someone rushes a hunhunr with a knife, bare the chest.  No mama, no papa, no whiskey soda?  Then muscle into a gambling den for a share of the profits, and when the bouncers arrive, lie down and demand to be beaten.  Need quick cash?  Enter a store and cut a chunk of flesh from the thigh.  If the proprietor accepts the flesh without flinching, a stalemate is called, if however, the proprietor rubs salt into the wound, continue talking and laughing as if nothing happened and the hunhunr would be entitled to a daily subsidy by virtue of his true grit.  Lastly, the night before a rumble death lots were cast, and those unlucky boys walked to the fight knowing they were the chosen ones to die.

One Tianjin legend dating back to mid 1800s holds that a hunhunr who wanted to run the street of a local transport guild challenged the competition for control of the turf by daring all comers to jump into a vat of boiling oil.  When there were no takers the hunhunr ordered a relative to jump in, who was immediately fried to a crisp.  The hunhunr, however, and his fellow hoodlums and relatives gained permanent control of the guild’s territory.

Any hunhunr who balked at pain was immediately a laughingstock to any other hunhunr, and was often beaten then banished to the nearest No Care Zone, a criminal’s safe haven away from the law both domestic and foreign, for in those days Tianjin was split into the old Chinese ruled “Celestial City” and the eight foreign concessions governed by colonial powers.

A No Care Zone, or Sanbuguan, literally translated to mean Three Who Cares and sometimes referred to with a more lengthy description as ‘beyond the control of the three foreign powers,’ (Chinese, Japanese and Western), were boisterous places, filled with cheap theaters, teahouses, brothels, vaudeville halls, devil’s markets, scrap hoarders and dubious drug shops.  The most famous No Care Zone was at the southern edge of the old city of Tianjin, near the Japanese garrison at Haiguansi.  Another No Care Zone surrounded Nanshi Food Street, which was infamous for houses of ill repute, opium dens and bandits.

Dark Drifters Today

Today, most people say the hunhunr are a plague from the past.  Disgruntled street side breakfast sellers sometimes connect the old hunhunr with the newly formed and government sponsored Cheng Guan, an ersatz, mafia-like police force responsible for cleaning out the “unwanted” inside the city.

According to one Hedong District family however, while walking along Houtan Street during the spring of 2013, an out-of-town farmer selling produce from a “Dog Riding Rabbit” three-wheeled vehicle, was threatened and forced to vacate the street by a group of rough-looking men.

Some are worried in Tianjin that the Dark Drifters, long thought to be extinct, are back.

Some are worried in Tianjin that the Dark Drifters, long thought to be extinct, are back.

“The man refused to pay,” said Chen Liang, a manager at a five-star hotel.  “They weren’t policemen either.  They were hunhunr.  Dressed in black shoes, rolled up shirts, tattoos and shortly cropped hair.”

Recalling stories her grandfather told her of the old days when hunhunr were the scourge on every Tianjin street, she moved quickly away.  The farmer, she said, saved himself a beating by hurrying away on his 3.88 horsepower engine.

“They are a group with a head and they don’t work,” Chen said.  “They take money from vendors outside of produce markets, and pay off the police when they have to.”

These urban hoodlums can be spotted in the market places, outside where the out-of-towner farmers splay their cabbages and mushrooms.  They offer protection to sing song halls and discos, eating and drinking to their hearts delight and never pay a tin coin.  Instead of wigs and jasmine flowers their backs are covered with tattoos, forearms parade cigarette burns, and most likely during the warmer months they lounge in their turfs with T-shirts rolled, unveiling Buddha bellies like a roll up window blind.

Not only has the hunhunr survived, but in the eyes of many outsiders the hunhunr have left behind their stoic, albeit lethargic spirit.  In many movies the Tianjiner is depicted as an uneducated, swarthy brigand, speaking Mandarin with a distinctly spiraled accent.  The Beijing bourgeoisie treats Tianjiners as the ugly, second cousins nobody wants to invite to the party, and yet every Beijing person knows better than to get involved in a street fight in Tianjin, against Tianjiners.  Tianjiners have been known to overturn cars, brandish meat cleavers and curse like sailors when their pride is threatened.

On a different note ask an unemployed Tianjiner to peddle breakfasts before the cock crows, or sweep the spit-stained streets, or maybe get in line for any menial job that gets the hands dirty, and the answer will invariably be no.  Not on your life.  Are you insane?  Leave those jobs for the watercats!  (Tianjin slang for poorly dressed, mop-headed migrants who will do any kind of work for money).  Tianjiners are far more content to stay at home, crunching sunflower seeds and sipping teas, complaining about how Goubuli Baozi is not what it used to be.

Lazy, but in an endearing way.  Headstrong, but in an outlandish way that makes you want to get behind them and cheer them on.  Despite their savagery these are the characteristics of the hunhunr.  Watered down they’re the attributes of Tianjiners.  Even if the hunhunr of today are not what they used to be, they’re still a fascinating historical anecdote of a city shrouded in violence, upheaval and mystery.

Dracula’s Lair

Entrance to Snagov Lake, the final resting place of Vlad III The Impaler, more commonly known as Dracula.

Entrance to Snagov Lake, the final resting place of Vlad III The Impaler, more commonly known as Dracula.

By Chris Hagen 

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA (2010) – The first step up the stone slabs to Poenari is a difficult one, especially just before sunrise when all is dark and an early winter mist pierces like a wooden spike.

Nearly one hundred and fifty flights and precisely one thousand four hundred and eighty steps upwards to his five hundred and sixty-three-year-old lair, the Poenari Fortress is not only “Dracula’s”  true home, it also is considered one of the most haunted place on earth.

Ears at attention and wide-eyed, the knees shake as raindrops mimic tiny footsteps and rolling thunder becomes a demon’s growl along the journey.  A stray dog’s nip at the heel is nearly enough to force the bravest man to cower.

“You know you feel like chills on your spine, have a little panic,” said Valentin Grancea, guide for the Butterfly Villa, a hostel near the Old Town in Bucharest.

“It was in the middle of the mountain where he executed half of the boyars,”

Poenari Fortress - where the legends began

Poenari Fortress – where the legends began

Boyars, the Romanian explained, were local leaders at the time who betrayed “Dracula,” or more accurately named Prince of Wallachia, Vlad “Tepes” or the Impaler.  Sometimes he was referred to as Vlad the Devil, as his father, Vlad Dracul, was bestowed a title in the Hungarian Order of the Dragon, a coalition to fight against the growing Ottoman Empire.

Fear, during the hike, begins when the legends are recalled.

In 1447 when Vlad was seventeen and he had yet to earn his nickname, his thirst for vengeance and the strictest of order began.  In a land torn with internal rivalry, betrayal and the ominous threat of the Ottoman Turks, Vlad sought to unify the three kingdoms of what is now known as part of Romania.

First, however, Vlad the Impaler wanted blood.  Under the guise of a banquet, Vlad invited boyars – guilty of murdering his elder brother – their families and soldiers to the Princely Capitol in Tirgoviste.  After fifteen hundred of the Boyars arrived and drank their fill, his loyal soldiers surrounded them and forced them on a fifty-mile march toward the Carpathian Mountain range and the fortress Poenari .  He impaled approximately half of the Boyars and enslaved the rest atop the fortress, which sits on a peak above the Arges River.  The dungeon can still be seen today along with part of the castle that has not collapsed.

“Sometimes it could take two days for people who were impaled to die,” Grancea said in his thick Slavic accent.  Starting from the buttocks, an executioner would place an enemy, a wrong doer or anyone else Vlad sentenced to the cruel fate on to the top of a sharpened pole.  Slowly, the pole would work its way through the body, usually coming out of the shoulder and sometimes the mouth.

“It was a terrible way to die,” said Reiner Katscher, owner of the Butterfly Villa.  “But Vlad was a fierce ruler and demanded honesty.”

“All is legend,” said a fortress ranger, Nicoloe Victor.  He lives next to the crumbling castle in a small shack, equipped with a simple bed and an old, ceramic heater called a soba.  His job is to ensure people are safe, as tickets are not sold to visit the fortress.

“There is no scoo-bee-doo,” he added with a wave of his hands and a chuckle.

Stories from his rule range from the prince placing a golden cup in his courtyard in Tirgoviste to catch a thief to paying a Italian merchant an extra gold coin after a robbery as a test of honesty.

“Nobody ever took the cup,” Katscher said,  “and Vlad told the merchant, ‘You are fortunate that you told the truth or I would impale you.”

Although impalement was his favorite, Vlad practiced a variety of other tortures. Once, when the Ottoman Turkish armies invaded nearly to Bucharest, he created the Forest of the Impaled, and slaughtered twenty thousand Turks upon wooden spikes.  At this point, the Ottoman armies retreated from disgust and fear, but soon returned and nearly captured the prince at Poenari Fortress.

He escaped however, after his wife threw herself off the battlements and seven brothers made the prince backwards horseshoes.

“The horseshoes made him look like he was going up the mountain and not down,” Katscher said.  A self-declared student of history, he has taken more than two hundred tours in the past five years to “Dracula” related sites around Romania.

All these thoughts and more plague the mind as the seven hundredth step approaches.  Breathing becomes difficult and a chill does run up the spine.  Slowly breaking dawn begins to part the mists but the darkness feels oppressive.  Gnarled oaks and elms, whose branches stretch away from the fortress, do little to help the sense of foreboding that plagues the mountainside.

A small, mostly wooden house, near the middle of the stony path, is considered haunted by locals, Grancea said.

“Some padurars, or people who protect the forest, saw some lights on but nobody has lived there for many, many years,” the guide said.   “They saw the lights and could not figure out why and ran, they say,” he added with a smile.

He went on to say that Romanians knew little of the legend of Dracula until after Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” film was released.  Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula,” mixed the legends together improperly identifying Bran Castle as the one in which Vlad lived.

Sunrise on Snagov Lake, outside of the monastery where Vlad the Impaler was supposedly buried.

Sunrise on Snagov Lake, outside of the monastery where Vlad the Impaler was supposedly buried.

“Before that, we knew of strigoi,” Grancea said which he believes may be a connection.  “It is when somebody is dying but they do not chill.  They are undead, and are still warm and you must stick a wooden pole into their chest to kill them.”

Many superstitions roam the countryside of Romania.  One of which includes tying a red string or cloth around one’s body in order to ward off evil curses.  The strigoi, which according to Romanian legend, have two hearts and are blood-drinking shape-shifters.  There are many ways to ward off strigoi, one of which includes eating or wearing garlic.  These myths and more have survived to modern times, Grancea said.

During Vlad’s reign, he was able to beat back the Ottoman Turks on many occasions, frequently seeking neighbors such as Hungary and the Moldavians for assistance.  He impaled and killed more than one hundred thousand people during his reign.  During captivity in Hungary, Vlad was used as a “face of terror,” to their enemies, Katscher said.

Legends point to a painting where Vlad sits amongst the impaled, drinking from a dripping cup.  The substance inside the cup, which is red, resembles blood, Katscher said.

After being betrayed by his own people, according to legends, Vlad was killed in 1476 after his second enthroning. He supposedly was found on Snagov Lake, decapitated.  Until the 1800s, his body was believed to lie in Snagov Monastery, one of the most famous during its day in the area.

Hundreds of bodies lie under Snagov Lake, Grancea said.  Once during Vlad’s reign, Ottoman Turks rushed across a bridge to the monastery but failed to reach the island as the bridge collapsed under their weight.   The most recent “Legend of the Lake,” reports that two divers went to the bottom of the deep waters in search of treasure.  One man, he said, came up missing a hand but had no idea how it happened.

Vlad the Impaler’s headstone inside Snagov Monastery is simple.  A single stone slab with an engraving of him propped up into a brass stand are all that remain.

Beneath the stone slab also remains a mystery.  In the nineteenth century his grave was unearthed to discover partial remnants of Hungarian-styled clothing and animal bones.

“Don’t believe it was Vlad,” Grancea said.  “This is supposing he is resurrect.  Maybe he change his shape.”

A last bend in the climb to Poenari and the final steps to the dark fortress, shrouded in mist, approaches.  If Vlad the Impaler truly is a creature of the night, or an undead, the narrow entryway to the remains of the fortress is an ideal location for an attack.

It is here, where the hairs on the neck stand on end, but only one decisions remains, continue forward.

Katscher scaled the mountain once during winter after he first invested in the hostel industry in Bucharest.  He said he does believe in hauntings and felt strange that early morning as he hiked through a light dusting of snow to reach the fortress.

“It’s hard to say about these things,” the German born businessman said.  “It was so silent.  It was a special feeling and after all this time I have only felt this at Poenari.

“When it is sunny outside and lots of people, nothing happens,” he continued.

“Some people bring back strange stories when they come back down.  At least Prince Vlad Tepes the Impaler is someone from whom Romanians derive no small amount of courage.  They’re proud, Katscher said, that they had such a strong leader for during his reign all who swore fealty were safe as long as they obeyed the law.

“I am not sure about all the legends, though, even though Poenari is just a ruin, you just can’t help but ask yourself.”  Katscher’s smile faded.  Despite Hollywood’s bastardization of the legends, local myths still ring true for him.  “Could it all really have happened?”

D01 10-29-2011 WDT

Story published in the Wilson Times 2011

D01 10-29-2011 WDT

 

 

 

 

 

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