Tag: US Marines

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

The Broken City – Tientsin at War – Part X

TIANJIN

This is the tenth story in the “Tientsin at War” series, which opens with the accounts of survivors of World War II, who called Tientsin their home before, during and after the Japanese occupation of the city.  Recalling Tientsin as it once was, they watched as children while Tientsin crumbled before Japanese troops, cried when their friends and neighbors were taken prisoner, rejoiced when US Marines liberated the city, and then once again, but as teenagers, watched as it fell before the communist armies.    

 

TIENTSIN, CHINA – Sophye “Fifi” Mavromaras saw Tientsin at its best, and a little paperbound guardian angel – her Greek passport – saved her from the worst of times.

Fifi, now surnamed Zoukee, was born in Tientsin, second generation China hand, and like other well-to-do children during the 1930s she frequented plays and movies at the Olympic and Odeon theaters, both of which her family owned.  An only child, she lived with her parents in the plush Victoria Building, safe from the horrors of civil strife, intrigue and war.  Classes under the moralistic watch of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and ice-skating in a foreign club filled her winter months.  Summers were spent swimming and hiking along Beidaihe’s pristine beaches.  Sixty-two years after her family left Tientsin, Fifi still speaks perfect  Beijinghua, or Beijing dialect, and remembers the old days of Amahs and cocktail parties, rickshaw coolies and war with a nostalgic clarity.

“You can’t imagine before the war, how beautiful the British Concession was, it was really lovely in every respect,” Fifi said from her Florida home.  “It was a good life, and people were never bored.  I never heard the word ‘bored’ until I came to America.”

Tientsin, Victoria Road, before World War II - online sources

Tientsin’s main thoroughfare before World War II, known as Rue de France in the French Concession,  Victoria Road in the British Concession and Woodrow Wilson Boulevard in the former German Concession, which was inhabited by many Americans   – online sources

Protected within the British Concession barricades, she rarely saw the poverty outside.  Beggars were primarily organized criminal gangs, possibly offshoots of the historic “Dark Drifters” or hunhunr societies.  In Beidaihe, however, she befriended locals in a nearby village never realizing until years later that a man with no nose and another afflicted person with sores across his body were lepers.

“But we were never hungry, the Japanese took everything, the theaters and buildings, everything so we didn’t have any money, but there was no famine in Tientsin.

“If you had the money you could buy anything.”

The Cambridge History of China edited by John Fairbanks reported the lifestyles of foreigners in the concessions were envied across the world.  “A glittering life, all things considered,” the Cambridge History of China reported, “which makes it easy to understand why ‘old China hands’ guarded their privileges.”

Fifi recalled few details of Japanese atrocities in Tientsin.  “In Tientsin, they were a little bit more circumspect, but they terrorized people in the countryside.  I don’t know what they did to the Chinese areas of Tientsin, but what I saw at the French Bridge – they would search all the Chinese, and they would line them up and they would kick them, push them around with the bayonets.”

She stayed inside the familiar confines of the old concessions.  “There was no reason to go anywhere else.”

Gold was king, during the war years, and Marcel Leopold, an affluent businessman later dubbed the “number one gunrunner in the world” by LMS Newswire, once hoodwinked her mother.  “He was swindling everybody.  He told my mother and a lot of other people to bring him gold and he would store it and build interest.  So she gathered all her gold and gave it to Mr. Leopold.”

St. Joseph's School, Tientsin - online sources

St. Joseph’s School, Tientsin – online sources

Leopold paid out twice, and then the monies vanished.  Leopold built the Leopold Building, now called the Lihua Building, on Victoria Road, while his “investors” lost their entire fortunes.

When the Japanese struck in December 1941, her world cracked, but did not fall apart.  Being Greek, she was forced to wear an enemy armband, but was not interned.  Her father, however, lost his job and the family’s extensive holdings.  The Japanese confiscated all, and offered nothing in return.

As an only child Fifi and her parents survived the war years with help from friends and the Swedish Red Cross.  Her mother sold family paintings and personal jewelry to buy food.  Friends from unlikely places offered assistance, while old acquaintances forgot her family existed.

“There was one gentlemen, I will never forget him as long as long as I live, who was married to a French woman, and he came up to my father and offered oil, and after the war he said we could settle accounts.  The man was almost a stranger and yet friends of ours from before the war turned their backs on us.

“Because we had lost everything, you see.  We didn’t have our lavish lifestyle and parties anymore.  Some people are friends with you when you are up, then disappear when you are down.”

Local Chinese also became some of her family’s closest friends during World War II.  Once, while living in the Butterfield & Swire Mansion, a Chinese doctor operated on her father’s eye on top of a kitchen table.

“They were wonderful people, really wonderful.  They were top notch doctors.”

A rare picture of the French Bridge opening up for a ship - from a friend

A rare picture of Tientsin’s French Bridge opening up for a ship – from a friend

During the war her family was moved to a large house in the former Russian concession to an apartment on Hong Kong Road.  Later she was forced to move to Racecourse Road, then to the Butterfield & Swire Mansion and also the Jardine & Matheson Mansion, next door to the Nazi German Consul Fritz Weidemann.  She recalled German Nazis and Italian fascists frequently wearing their brown and black uniforms, and liked to hang swastikas out their windows.

“I used to see Weidemann every day,” Fifi said.  “They were all very proud of Hitler and Germany and didn’t make any bones about it.”  Weidemann, she said, was friendly and bid her good morning while walking his dogs.

“We wore armbands, and we were very proud of our armbands.  We looked down on the French who collaborated.  When the war was over, the Nazis came up to us and asked us to hide their jewelry, and we said ‘absolutely not.’”

Even at the height of Axis success, when Hitler swept through Russia and the Japanese appeared invincible across most of Asia, she never stopped believing the Allies would win.  Despite Japanese restrictions on foreign news, information trickled into the former concessions through letters and secret short wave radios.

“It never entered our minds that we wouldn’t come out victors of the war,” Fifi said.  “We knew at the end of the war we would be victorious.”

 

Marines entering Tientsin, 1945 - Gutenberg

Marines entering Tientsin, 1945 – Gutenberg

Tientsin Marines

Marines training in Tientsin - courtesy of The China Marines website

Marines training in Tientsin, near present day Machang Road and a block or two away from the Foreign Language Institute – courtesy of The China Marines website

In October 1945 a sea of jubilant Tientsiners flooded the former British Bund to welcome, for the first time, a “barbarian” invader – the US Marines.

Fifi didn’t see the Marines land, but she heard the celebration from her home blocks away on Hong Kong Road, now Munan Road.

“That was one of the biggest regrets in my life that I didn’t go downtown.  I saw them, these young men, all these strangers.  You can imagine their surprise seeing a white girl walking down the road, and they all came to talk to us.”

It was a day of celebration, she said, a time impossible to forget.  “The Chinese really went overboard with welcoming them, with banners and this and that – after nine years of occupation.”

Her old school friends began to return, bringing stories of their experiences in Japanese prisons.

“They all came back.  We were so happy to see each other.  People were very resilient then.  Nobody moaned and whined or cried.  They took it all in stride.”

Watched over by chaperones, she attended soirees held by the Red Cross, where she learned new dances, such as the jitterbug.

“The Marines were very, very nice, very respectful.  We had such a good time, dancing, laughing and joking.”

“After the war, things were even better,” Alex Liu, also a Tientsin native who later immigrated to Australia, wrote.  His father was Chinese, and a high-ranking maritime official.  His mother was a White Russian.  “They [Marines] had parties every night and we had many, many Marine friends.  We would all pile into Major Dunlap’s jeep and head for the Country Club, where Coca Cola and ice creams were free.  Watched many a ball game there too.  It was truly an idyllic time for me.”

Although the US Marine Corps had a long-standing presence in Tientsin, dating back to the Unfair Treaties and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, foreign soldiers were unsurprisingly met with defiance, at times violence.  On the same day Japan launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Tientsin’s token Marine contingent numbering forty-eight men surrendered to the Japanese Kwantung Army without firing a shot, spending the duration of World War II in Japanese prison camps at Woosung, near Shanghai, and later Kyushu, among other places.

After four years of shame, the US Marines Corps returned to Tientsin as liberators.

The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's picture hanging on the Forbidden City in Peking - Mao Zedong's picture now hangs in the same place - Scuttlebutt

A Marine standing before the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s picture hanging on the Forbidden City in Peking – Mao Zedong’s picture now hangs in the same place – Scuttlebutt

“We were the victors,” Jack Blagman, a former Marine wrote in a September 2002 issue of the China Marine Scuttlebutt.  “We conquered the Japanese, we were the saviors of China and the world.”

The Settlement’s bearded Sikh guards and untouchable colonial police were gone, so were the electrified fences and the ‘No Chinese Allowed’ barriers.  Tientsin’s customs office was firmly in the hands of the Chinese after nearly ninety years of British colonial dominance.  The barbed wire barricades that once divvied the Settlement into nine separate spheres of influence, replete with their Gothic spires, pristine parks, medieval crenellations and towering rock fences melted at long last into one city – Tientsin, the “Ford of Heaven.”

The first Marines to disembark on to Tientsin’s Bund did not know what to expect, but the welcome they received was intoxicating as the copious crates of beer and bourbon that followed.

Japanese soldiers awaiting repatriation - Gutenberg

Japanese soldiers awaiting repatriation – Gutenberg

“The crowds erupted in wild cheers and frenzied waving,” Australian journalist David C. Hulme wrote in his book Tientsin.  Royal blue Corsairs and torpedo bombing Avengers came first.  The American fighter planes buzzed the tops of Tientsin’s buildings flying low enough for onlookers to see the pilots waving from inside their cockpits.  “The noise was a thundering racket, fearsome, deafening and absolutely thrilling.”

Then came the leathernecks, hard, veteran soldiers, and behind them rolled the tanks, Jeeps, artillery and much-needed supplies.  They came in tugs and in bullet-riddled launches.  Children laughed and scrounged excitedly for tossed cigarettes and chewing gum as Marines stepped from their landing crafts, boots still lined with Okinawan mud.  Liberated parents cheered wildly, many waving miniature US flags.  A sea of smiling faces – unknown tens of thousands – both black-haired Chinese and brown, blonde or red-haired foreign residents – welcomed the liberators with opened arms.

Motoring without impediment across the Hai River’s jaundiced waves US Marines quickly set to work.  Allied forces did not want the city falling to the Russians, who were sweeping south with vengeance through Manchuria, nor did the Allies want Tientsin to succumb to the “Balu Bandits,” or the Eighth Route Army, which had been an ineffective military force comprised of communist and Nationalist soldiers during World War II.  Mao Zedong, the future chairman of China, took control of the army after the Japanese surrender, and with renewed vigor was on the march to stake his claim across the country.

More than 30,000 Marines arrived in Tientsin with a political agenda: to oversee Japan’s surrender in North China, repatriate more than 630,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians to Japan, protect the railroad between Peking and Tientsin and to ensure the city’s protection from communist forces by helping the Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

“Led by a pair of advanced-party Jeeps, the battalion marched, at a snail’s pace due to the throng, through part of the Chinese city and into the former concession area, down Victoria Road, [Jiefang Road] into Meadows Road, [Qufu Road] then right again into Elgin Avenue,” [Nanjing Road] Hulme wrote.  “The streets were packed all the way… They were a very different sight to the Marines of pre-war years, but they filled the role and enjoyed a delirious welcome.

“It was just the beginning.”

The old Italian barracks, which housed US Marines after World War II - photo by C.S. Hagen

The old Italian barracks, which housed US Marines after World War II – photo by C.S. Hagen

The Marines flooded Tientsin with supplies.  Trade flourished, with the US dollar taking a firm lead as legal tender.  The Chinese yuan inflated, but the old French Bazaar sputtered back to life.  Coffee and chocolate, powdered milk and lime, flour, rice, sugar and trinkets lined shops’ shelves once more.  Canned cheeses, canned hams, tinned beer and boxed American cornflakes replaced Japanese wakame seaweed, mochi rice cakes and kadomatsu, a festive Japanese decoration once readily available in all Tientsin shops.  Rundown shacks became taverns, selling American Jack Daniel’s and beer.  Marines found lodging where they could, in places such as the Italian and Japanese barracks, the French Municipal Building, the racetrack on Racecourse Road and the Japanese Girls’ School.

The III Amphibious Corps withdrew from Okinawa to Guam and then to Tientsin, according to John V. Gardner who was one of twelve men assigned to Tientsin and trained in teletype communication by the Army Signal Corps.  According to a Scuttlebutt article Gardner arrived in Tanggu, Tientsin’s eastern deep-water port, in September 1945, then traveled by boat west into the city along the Hai River.

“The trip up river was most interesting, and was uneventful even though the banks of the river were lined with Chinese waving flags, and Chinese communists and Japanese soldiers, just standing and watching.  None of us had any idea what to expect, but upon arrival at Tientsin there were crowds on the docks waving and cheering.  Many white faces in the group and we were interested to find out that these were the nationals from Russia, Italy, France … that had been living in China throughout the war.”

Although the Japanese had surrendered six weeks earlier, remnants of the Kwuantung Army still stood watch, keeping the peace and protecting the city from the communists, frequently referred to as the “Balu Bandits,” but officially known as the Eighth Route Army.  After the communist victory in 1949, the Eighth Route Army changed names again, to the commonly known People’s Liberation Army.  Leftover Japanese soldiers gawked as thousands of US Marine soldiers, tanks, artillery and machine gunners spilled across Tientsin’s docks.

While the Marines returned victorious, shamed Japanese officers committed hari kiri, or ritual suicide in the streets.

“On Rue de France, [Jiefang Road] right in front of French Police Headquarters, a Japanese general in full military regalia, with his two sons, spread out a clean rug,” Hulme wrote.  “An agitated crowd, mostly Chinese, quickly gathered.  The general sank to his knees, the two young men flanking him in similar posture.  Without ceremony or delay the defeated soldier emitted a mighty ‘Long live the Mikado!’ and plunged the long blade deep into his belly.  The sons did likewise… The general was still moving the gory hilt of his dagger when he saw his sons collapse on either side of him.”

Lieutenant General Ginnosuke Uchida, commanding the Japanese 118th Division, signs the surrender documents for Japanese forces in the Tientsin, North China area during ceremonies on 6th October 1945. Major General Keller E. Rockey, Commanding the III Amphibious Corps, whose Marines had occupied Tientsin at the request of the Chinese National Government, accepts the surrender. - Scuttlebutt

Lieutenant General Ginnosuke Uchida, commanding the Japanese 118th Division, signs the surrender documents for Japanese forces in the Tientsin, North China area during ceremonies on 6th October 1945. Major General Keller E. Rockey, Commanding the III Amphibious Corps, whose Marines had occupied Tientsin at the request of the Chinese National Government, accepts the surrender. – Scuttlebutt

Japan’s surrender of Tientsin took place in front of the French Municipal Building, which still stands today.

Once again, Tientsin changed hands.  Since the collapse of the Qing Dynasty the growing metropolis was considered a lucrative gem to warlords, Nationalist and communist commanders, to drug lords and violent gangs, and finally to the Japanese.  Those that knew how to work the system became rich while thousands of refugees starved.

For most Marines life in Tientsin was a cultural shock they remembered to the end of their lives.  All soldiers were given liberty time, which was spent roaming the city for bars such as the Golden Shoe, the Little Club and the Victoria Café, or various bathhouses and brothels. Furs, jade and jewelry could be found for shockingly low prices.  Children and women were for sale across the city.

Pimps, or mawang, would sneak close to Marine quarters to whisper their wares – saltwater girls in rickety sampans.  Corporal James D. Seidler made his first stop at Tanggu, and wrote about the experience in a Scuttlebutt article.

“Hey, Marine!  You like nice China girl, very nice.  Chop, chop!” A voice came from the waters below the ship in which he was sleeping.  “Quite a few of us took advantage of the situation, climbing down the anchor chain onto a sampan.  It was dark inside the sampan, so whether the “ladies” were fifteen or eighty-five, I cannot say.”

In Tientsin Seidler’s favorite eatery was a restaurant run by White Russians.  Anything on the menu was available, from Peking duck, beef steaks, (which according to some reports was actually dog meat), chicken, lamb, coffee and apple pie for the equivalent of $1.25.

“It was a good duty, day on, day off, except when we rode as train guards to Tanku [Tanggu] and back to Tientsin, with the ‘Chicoms’ taking pot-shots at us.  What ticked us off was we weren’t allowed to shoot back for fear it might cause problems with the big shots of our two countries.”

A sauna, bath and massage cost two dollars, Seidler remembered.  “Getting a bath at a bathhouse was a must.  First came the sauna, cold shower, sauna, then a warm bath with a pretty China gal washing you all over with a soft sponge, (no hanky-panky, strictly business,) a warm shower, then a twenty-minute massage… left feeling like a million bucks.”

A Tientsin bar - Scuttlebutt

A Tientsin bar called Both Cats, the sign reads: “Welcome Allies Troops, Special Cheap Price” – Scuttlebutt

Phil Stehle was a horn blower with the First Marine Division Band and lived in the former Italian Concession while stationed in Tientsin.  In his liberty time he frequented restaurants and nightclubs, such as the EM Club, he wrote in a Scuttlebutt article.  Locally distilled vodka cost fifteen cents a pint.

The communist threat was real, he wrote.  While traveling through communist territory he noticed the bed of his truck full of empty carbine shells.  “Each time we hit a serious pothole the jar would cause the carbine bolts to actuate,” he wrote.  “A big lot of us were packed in tightly and with weapons ready to fire.  I yelled at the driver to slow down.  His answer, ‘I aint going to get shot by no gook.’  I waved my carbine at him and told him he was going to get shot by me.  Travel quickly became more comfortable.”

While billeted at the former Italian Barracks Stehle would climb to the roof where he could watch the communists and Nationalists firing artillery at each other.

When local Tientsiners turned on their captors, Marines came to the rescue.

A favorite childhood haunt for Liu was the British Bund, where he watched steamships belch acrid smoke into the air.  He also survived Tientsin’s occupation, and remembered the anger bent toward the Japanese after the war.

“When raging crowds of Chinese attacked Japanese civilians in Tientsin on October 13, riot squads of the First Marines waded into the fighting to rescue the Japanese and quickly quelled the disturbances before serious damage was done.  Here, as in Tsingtao, the city’s unruly element was given a sharp warning that the Marines would act strongly to prevent disorder whenever local authorities failed to do so.”

Although much of the Marines’ time was spent on guard duty and managing raging crowds bent on retaliation against the Japanese and former sympathizers, North China duty

The Mickey Cafe, now long gone, but was once a popular eatery - Scuttlebutt

The Mickey Cafe, now long gone, but was once a popular eatery – Scuttlebutt

was a posting most soldiers wanted.  Despite the city’s squalor and beggars, fine dining establishments such as the Mickey Café offered steak sandwiches and plenty of beer.

“China duty had been coveted in the prewar Marine Corps, and, for the men who garrisoned the major cities in 1945, a China assignment still had much of that appeal,” Henry I. Shaw Jr. wrote in The United States Marines in North China 1945 – 1949.

Blagman was assigned to a land based naval support unit, Gropac 13 in Tientsin and had just turned eighteen when he was sent from San Francisco to “Ivan,” the Navy’s code word for China.  He arrived during one of Tientsin’s coldest winters, and had to double up with a fellow soldier in one sleeping bag for body warmth at night.

“Wherever we looked squalor and cheapness of life were an ominous presence.  Like a dark, hovering cloud, life was truly cheap in China.  There was universal starvation, especially seen in the cities.  Large cities were crowded with the desperate, untold thousands having been displaced by the Japanese devastation, famine and crop failures.”

Blagman hired a “number one boy” for fifty cents a month, who worked as a personal gofer and valet.  Fifty cents could also buy an unwanted nine-month-old baby girl, which one fellow soldier purchased, Blagman wrote.  The soldier cared for the baby until she was discovered by the commanding officer and he was forced to return the baby back to her parents with an additional sum of five dollars.

Most soldiers, according to other Scuttlebutt reports, found their own Chinese girlfriends.  Some married.  Those prone to one-night stands could hire a girl for one dollar, and these girls soon became some of the richest people in the city.

“All of us had an air of condescension,” Blagman wrote.  “Marine and sailor alike.  Although no one speaks of this today, we looked down on the Chinese.  I remember an editorial in the North China Marine or similar paper that demanded we be more courteous to the Chinese – and less aggressive.  The paper was shocked and editorialized against Marines who spat at Chinese traffic police when trucks passed them on the streets.  I cannot tell of the hundreds of incidents I saw of Americans denigrating or degrading the Chinese.  But for that matter, we felt that way about everything not American.

“As ‘conquerors’ our sense of superiority was manifest, from our equipment to everything we said and did.”

Tientsin’s initial good will soon soured.

Nationalist armies, due to corruption, crumbled before communist advances, surrendering by the hundreds of thousands, and the Eighth Route Army fought closer to Tientsin.  The communists grew bolder, attacking Marines on convoy and in trains, kidnapping soldiers when possible, once even, while several Marines went duck hunting east of Tientsin.

“They soon were plagued by incidents involving blown tracks, train derailments, and ambushes, which were to be the lot of Marines on duty in the midst of the Chinese civil war,” Shaw wrote.

On April 7, 1947, communist “Reds” killed five Marines twenty-two miles southeast of Tientsin at the old French Armory, according to The Argus and the Examiner.  The Reds managed to steal artillery shells and detonated part of the ammunition supplies before disappearing shortly before sunrise.

Two months later a Marine convoy traveling from Tientsin was ambushed outside of Peking, according to The Daily News.  Three Marines were killed and seventeen were wounded.

“As the convoy slowed down at a communist road block, armed Chinese suddenly appeared from cornfields on both sides of the road and threw several hand grenades,” The Daily News reported.  “The Marines instantly took cover and a pitched battle began.”

“The fight continued throughout the afternoon, many Chinese being killed or wounded.”

Communists, according to IIIAC WarDs (War Diaries), always dragged away their dead and wounded, making a tally of the dead difficult to count.

“There is a great bitterness against the communists among the wounded Marines,” The Daily News reported, “but so far it is uncertain whether the attack was by communists or by bandits.”

Major armed clashes between Marines and “Reds” from October 1945 to May 1947 left ten Americans dead and thirty-three wounded, according to IIIAC WarDs (War Diaries).  Two sentries were killed and nine wounded, and more than twenty-two airplanes were destroyed.  At least thirty Balu Bandits were killed and thirty-three more wounded.  Marines and the Balu Bandits rarely had pitched battles; the communists worked as guerillas, raiding supply dumps for ammunition, ambushing trains and patrols, bridges and reconnaissance parties and motor convoys.

Another attack was reported in the Scuttlebutt magazine by David W. Mervine, of Headquarters, 3rd Battalion, Seventh Marines, First Marine Division.  He was sent to protect the coveted Kailian coalmines in Tanggu, just outside of Tientsin.

“On one particular run between Tangshan and Chinwangtao [Qinghuangdao], the Chinese communists blew our train out from under us.  We experienced heavy enemy fire, which ripped through the wooden sides of the train in which we were hiding.  We hit the deck and crawled down the aisle to the door.  Once outside, we returned their fire and within 15 to 20 minutes the situation was well in hand.”

Tensions exploded when a 20-year-old girl claimed she was raped by two Peking Marines.  All soldiers were ordered off the streets when thousands of students, in Peking and in Tientsin, turned anti-American, marching in protest and demanding the withdrawal of American troops.  The situation was aggravated after the fatal beating of a Chinese worker near Tientsin by marines while celebrating Christmas, the Morning Bulletin reported on January 1, 1947.

One of the Marines accused of rape admitted that he had relations with the girl, but on a “professional basis,” the News reported on December 31, 1946.  “While communist propaganda is partly responsible for the popular feeling… the Chinese public has deeply resented the increasing number of incidents, particularly accidents, in which Chinese civilians have been killed and injured by American military vehicles,” the News reported.

Mei Baojiu () left with his mother Mei Lanfang (), both famous opera singers.

Mei Baojiu (left) with his father Mei Lanfang, who played a woman’s part in Peking Operas, both were famous opera singers.

Fifi dated a nineteen-year-old Marine, she said, and believed the charges against the marines at that time were pure communist propaganda.

“That was a lie,” she said.  “A complete lie.  First of all nobody in North China in the middle of winter would rape somebody outside.  You would freeze to death.  Nobody in Tientsin believed it either.  It was a communist plot.  The marines were all very respectful, very pleasant.  We have nothing but good memories of them.”

The final clash between Marines and communist forces occurred shortly after withdrawal plans had been formed on April 1947.  In a well-organized attack, communist forces raided the Hsin Ho ammunition supply dump outside of Tientsin.  Five marines were killed, and communist soldiers captured cartloads of ammunition.  By June, most Japanese had been repatriated home.  The US Marines’ mission was completed.

“They were there one day and gone the next,” Fifi said.  “They slowly sort of disappeared from Tientsin.”  By the time the Marines had gone, she had developed other interests, and was studying Western Literature at Peking University.  She also befriended the famous opera singer Mei Baojiu (梅葆玖) son of Mei Lanfang (梅兰芳), both of whom were held in high regard by the communists for defying Japanese law during World War II.

 

“Liberation 1949”

Nationalist soldiers executing communists in Shanghai - photo from a friend

Nationalist soldiers executing communists in Shanghai – photo from a friend

The battle for Tientsin raged for two days before the Eighth Route Army took control.  Concrete pillboxes built with forced labor and machine gun barricades dotted the city for weeks before the attack began.  Tientsin’s Nationalist commander, Chen Chang-chieh, had less than 130,000 troops, and he was determined to fight to the last man.  A large area outside the city was flooded to block the communist advance, which had an overwhelming force of 890,000 soldiers and were riding the waves of victory in Manchuria.  The communists did not attack Tientsin immediately; they were patient, encircling Tientsin before their advance began.

Liu was home from college when the Red artillery barrage began.

“On New Year of 1949… the siege of Tientsin began in earnest,” Liu wrote.  “All through the nights one can hear the distant booms of the artillery and the staccato barks of the machine guns and sounding louder night by night.”

Liu lived in the former Tientsin Steamship Company building, a former customs house on Woodrow Wilson Road (now Jiefang Road) when the Reds invasion began.

“At around noon on January 15, 1949, a Saturday, an artillery shell exploded nearby, knocking out the windows and the plaster ceiling came crashing down.  We all scrambled down to the cellar.”

Artillery shells thumped closer, and each blast sucked the air from his lungs.

“Then someone shouted the building was on fire.  We received permission from the Kuomintang troops outside to move across the road to a German couple’s house.  Outside it looked like half the city was alight and thick, black smoke can be seen billowing from the north and northeast.”

Communists Get TientsinWhen the explosions stopped, hand to hand fighting ensued.

“That night and the next morning we smelled the heavy, choking cordite and heard the street to street fighting (shouts, grenades, automatic weapon fire).  From the windows, I saw the communist soldiers laying down field telephone lines, marking the pavements and others running with stretchers completely soaked with blood.

“But by evening it was all over.”

Bricks, glass, debris and torn Nationalist bodies were strewn across the streets.  Blood pooled, trickling slowly into drains.  Ash rained like snow.  No communist corpses lay on the streets, and yet the cemetery built to hold their dead numbered more than 20,000 graves.  When the dusts settled, Liu and his family walked to what remained of their home, skirting the frozen corpses.

“There were many dead Nationalist soldiers lying where they fell, and one was in a sitting position with his unseeing eyes still open.  Of course, there were no dead or wounded communist soldiers to be seen.  We were glad to be back home and luckily only the central part of our building was hit and caught fire.”

When the Reds bombardment began, most of Fifi’s friends had already left.  Her family remained because they did not want to travel to Australia or back home to Greece, both of which were foreign places to Fifi.  She remained inside her family’s home on Hong Kong Road when the invasion began.

“We were all hunkered in our homes, and when we heard the balu jun [Eighth Route Army] were here, we went out in the streets and saw them hanging around in the streets.”  She watched the soldiers, dressed  like peasants in their thick fur hats march through Tientsin.  Their welcome was hesitant, although few people feared the soldiers.  Corruption among the Nationalist political system had become so rampant most people wanted change.

“People were very wary of the Kuomintang,” Fifi said.  The soldiers weren’t being paid, which forced them to take what they could, when they could, thereby creating an army of soldiers hardly better than bandits.

Communists troops did not live up to their notorious reputation as brigands, and immediately began cleaning up the city.  Students followed the soldiers with whitewash, painting slogans along city walls.  No cases of rape or pillaging were reported.

“They were very, very respectful, they didn’t loot,” Fifi said.  “They didn’t mistreat anyone.  The communists were fine until they started the sanfan wufan.”

The Three-and-Five-Anti campaigns, which targeted corruption and enemies of the state, threatened Fifi’s family’s livelihood.  Spearheaded by Mao Zedong, the campaign began in 1951.  Neighbors became spies.  Landowners were arrested, tortured and executed.  Media encouraged compliance to the new policies targeting bribery, theft, tax evasion, cheating and stealing state information.  Toward the end of the campaign the communist party revealed it would no longer protect private property and businesses, sending Fifi’s family, once again, into destitution.

“We couldn’t’ graduate, but we got all the credits.  Everyone was sent on land reform,” Fifi said.  “There was a lot of reform in 1952, a lot of turmoil.  It wasn’t as bad as Cultural Revolution but it was the beginning.

“When the Chinese were jumping into the river, we knew it was time to leave.”

(left) Tientsin residents marching against the Xikai (西开) Catholic Church during the Three-anti Campaign. (Middle) Demonstrators at the doorsteps of the Xikai Catholic Church, originally built by Jesuits and named the MG Church, then St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, which was rebuilt in 1913 (Right) Demonstrators looting the chuch - photos from a friend

(left) Tientsin residents marching against the Xikai (西开) Catholic Church during a protest. (Middle) Demonstrators at the doorsteps of the Xikai Catholic Church, originally built by Jesuits and named the MG Church, then St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, which was rebuilt in 1913 (Right) Demonstrators looting the chuch – photos from a friend

Wealthy landowners, professors and those accused of being American spies were paraded down city streets wearing dunce hats.  “It was horrible.  I saw denunciations at Tientsin.”  A favorite Chinese professor who taught psychology was once forced to kneel before students, who accused him of being a spy.

“I felt sick, I really felt sick to my stomach when I saw that.”

Each time she came home from university she had to check in to the police station on arrival, and repeat the same process in Peking.  “Once in Tientsin, at a main police station, I had to get a new resident permit and I remember a Catholic priest came in who had no money.”

The new Tientsin police would not listen to the priest’s pleas, and Fifi paid out of her own pocket.

“I like to think I made brownie points with God as I helped pay.”

(left) A communist soldier or protestor standing before the Xikai Catholic Church (middle) Priests being denounced as spies in front of their church (right) The aftermath - Today, two mammoth shopping centers shadow the church to both sides, a walkway between them is filled with Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and a Watsons

(Left) A communist soldier or protestor standing before the Xikai Catholic Church (Middle) Priests being denounced as spies in front of their church (Right) The aftermath – Today, two mammoth shopping centers overshadow the church to both sides, a walkway between them is filled with Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and a Watsons – photos from a friend

A year after the Three-anti Campaign began, her family could take no more and left Tientsin with all that remained of their once extensive holdings – twenty-five dollars.  She has not seen her birthplace since.

Fifi and her family traveled to Hong Kong where her linguistic skills in English, French, Greek and Chinese helped procure a job.  Later, Fifi traveled to Japan and became a “grey lady,” a Red Cross nurse who helped take care of wounded men from the Korean War.  She met her former husband there, a Greek American, and married at the American Consulate in Yokohama.

In Tientsin today, remnants of the colonial period remain.  Local government in recent years has stopped tearing down the city’s concessional areas.  The Five Big Roads, a former British neighborhood, is protected as a tourist spot.  Horse carriages clop down the old streets.  Many couples prefer having their wedding photographs taken against a colonial-styled background of  buildings where the Empress Dowager once stayed, or where favorite warlords used to live.  Much of the Russian, Belgian and German concessional houses are gone, but the old heart of colonial Tientsin can still be seen.  The former Italian Concession has become a hotbed for hungry or thirsty tourists.  Banks have returned to the old Victoria Road, now Jiefang Road.  Two original bridges are still intact, although the seams have been welded shut.  Steamships are no longer allowed to sail the Hai River.

Tientsin, 天津, meaning the the “Ford of Heaven,” is much more than a tourist city today, in fact, few people choose the city to visit for its history is troubled and has been mostly lost, or lies hidden in forgotten books and missionary accounts.  The city is China’s northern powerhouse for manufacturing, and holds more than 11 million people, but until recent years has been eclipsed by Beijing, which was formerly spelled Peking, China’s capitol.

Some say Tientsin’s retreat into obscurity from 1949 until the early 1990s was punishment for embarrassing the nation by relinquishing lands to “barbarian” invaders, time after time.  Others say the city simply needed healing, like dry land from too much farming, and is now more fertile than it has ever been before.

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