Tag: British

Floating Corpses – Tientsin at War – Part VI

TIANJIN

This is the sixth story in the “Tientsin at War” series, which delves deep into the terrifying years immediately preceding Japan’s invasion of the city.  Imagine a bustling metropolis sliced into angry factions.  The warlords have been beaten.  Britain clings desperately to a dying empire and Japan tips the scales with smuggling rings, heroin and vice, shot straight into the Tientsin veins.  Life in this city of nearly four million people can’t get much worse, until one spring morning in 1936 nearly one hundred young, male corpses float into the French Concession… 

By C.S. Hagen

TIENTSIN, CHINA – On the eve of Japan’s invasion of Tientsin, the floating dead were the city’s first invaders.

Human bodies came in the hundreds, bloated and disfigured.  They pressed into the Vichy French Concession’s banks near the International Bridge (now Liberation Bridge) during the spring of 1936.  More than seventy bodies were counted in one week alone, according to the old Ta Kung Pao Chinese newspaper.

The International Bridge, now known as Liberation Bridge at the north end of the old French Concession - photo by C.S. Hagen

The International Bridge, now known as Liberation Bridge at the north end of the old French Concession, where the floating corpses washed ashore – photo by C.S. Hagen

“Every morning floating corpses appear along the Tientsin’s Haihe [Hai River],” a 1936 article in the Ta Kung Pao reported.  “All kinds of assumptions are being made, and the legends are breathtaking.”

“When I arrived in Tientsin early in June, 1937,” John B. Powell wrote in his 1945 book My Twenty-five Years in China, “I found the Chinese population absorbed in what the newspapers called the “Corpse Mystery.  The sensation completely eclipsed local interest in the approaching war.”

At the time, newspapers prominently displayed  announcements issued by the provincial governor, General Sung Chehyuan, that a reward of USD 5,000 would be paid for anyone supplying information concerning the floating corpses.

Some thought the bodies were suicidal opium addicts, reminiscent of a similar mystifying debacle that occurred during the last dynasty’s twilight years.  Dozens of bodies washed ashore and could not be pulled out fast enough, reported an online audiobook’s true story called “Ghost Waters.”  Locals claimed a monster lived beneath the murky Haihe, one of China’s most polluted rivers, but after an investigation headed by the local magistrate a culprit much more menacing surfaced.

Patna opium.  All the victims died after smoking poisoned drugs inside a local opium den.  Their bodies were buried shallow, in a secluded spot along the river.  Summer rains washed the corpses free.

The floating dead in 1936 were different.  All the corpses were relatively healthy, and between thirty and forty years of age.  Not one woman or child was found among the dead and none appeared to have been beaten or shot.

“The bodies were all of the male sex, and ranged from twenty to forty years of age,” Powell wrote. “None of the bodies, it was said, showed evidence of physical violence.”

Recalling legends of river monsters and soul sucking fox demons, parents barred children access to the river’s edge.  The Tianjin Daily reported in a recent analysis of the case that hair-raising rumors of gang warfare, Manchurian prisoners pushed from a ship, and of secret Japanese poison gas chambers flooded the city.

The Five Rivers Police Department, Tientsin and municipal authorities hurried to investigate, but the clues led them nowhere, and the floating corpses kept rolling in.

 

The Mighty Haihe

No Haihe, no Tientsin.  The two are inseparable as the Jade Rabbit and the moon.  Tientsin’s truest residents are river people, unyielding as an undertow yet pleasant as a summer’s swim, not unlike the Tong brothers of the Chinese classic Water Margin.  They’re tenacious as leeches and lively as late summer hornets.  They’re builders, pirates and fishermen, traders and dreamers.  They build their roads to match the river, and nobody asks which way is north.

Fisherman on his own Haihe island - photo by C.S. Hagen

Fisherman on his own Haihe island (Wang Hai Lou Church in background – photo by C.S. Hagen

They’ve seen the world in crates and bundles, claim to know it all, and have no desire to see more because the river is their home.  From beneath the Haihe’s murky-brown-sometimes-poisonous-mostly-green-and-slimy surface, silver carp, frogs and water snakes make delicious dinners and childhood pets.  Seagulls are always on the watch for meals at its banks.  Despite the water’s tremendous undertow, old river men still enjoy summer swims.  Air is always cooler along its banks and at night, the Haihe’s sides are lined with fishing men and women, out more for an escape from humid homes and for idle gossip than a serious catch.  Sampans and rickety fishing boats still dock in the shade of weeping willows, which thrive so close to the life-giving water.

For centuries, Chinese engineers have battled this Haihe dragon, which is the confluence of five rivers: the Southern Grand Canal, Ziya River, Daqing River, Yongding River and the Northern Grand Canal.  The Haihe also connects to the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers before winding toward the Bohai Sea.

The Haihe, meaning “Sea River” was formerly called the Baihe (Paiho), or “White River,” but was originally named the Wudinghe, or “River with No Fixed Course” because it was constantly changing its course, and always left dead in its wake.

Rivers flood.  River people accept this.   The Haihe’s most recent flood occurred in July of 2012 killing 673 people and affecting 120 million across the Hebei plains.  And yet river people refuse to budge.  Farmers salvage what they can and hope for a better crop next year.  City people hike up their pants and skirts and wade to work.  When a house collapses, they rebuild, and with the endearing courage of a struggling grasshopper in a bluebird’s beak, they refuse to let the river break them.

Historically, Tientsin’s Haihe seems to be more trouble than it’s worth.  If the swiftly moving river wasn’t flooding, it was a watery road for gunboats, smugglers, opium and invasion.  During the colonial period merchant ships and gunboats steamed directly into Tientsin’s heart for trade or “unfair treaties.”  When Boxers stormed Tientsin in 1900, the river swallowed hundreds, if not thousands of victims, from both sides of the Boxer Uprising.

(Left) A fisherman making repairs to his boat (Right) Haihe swimmers

(Left) A fisherman making repairs to his boat (Right) Haihe swimmers

The Haihe has always had an open door policy, no questions asked, all 1,329 kilometers of it.  Hungry?  Snag a fish.  Got garbage?  No problem.  Suicide?  Sure, come on in.  The water’s great.  Gang war?  Strap that bad man’s hands behind his back and give him a shove; the river will find a front row seat.  The Haihe defied the British Empire when it demanded a fat, city chunk just as much as it repelled the Japanese Navy in 1937.

Boating along the Haihe - photo by C.S. Hagen

Boating along the Haihe – photo by C.S. Hagen

Some say the river pointed to where the floating corpses of 1936 and 1937 came from, and it eventually led investigators away from the opium dens in the Japanese Concession to a sewage drain at Haiguangsi.

 

The Red Poppy, White Flour and Anti-Aircraft Guns

Sun Tzu’s Art of War was not lost on the Japanese military before their invasion of Tientsin in 1937.

“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

Whether or not city gossip and newspaper stories of the time were accurate, the floating corpses were an excellent diversion from impending war.  Investigators and the city’s attention first turned to Tientsin’s vast opium society for answers.

During the prewar years whole sections of the Japanese Concession were honeycombed with drug dens, known as yang hangs, or foreign shops, selling everything from Hataman cigarettes to heroin.  “During these years,” wrote author David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro in the book Yakuza Japan’s Criminal Underworld, “the Japanese Concession in Tientsin became the headquarters for a vast opium and narcotic industry.”

Scenes of the Japanese Concession, 2012 - once known as one of Tientsin's better places to live - photos by C.S. Hagen

Scenes of the Japanese Concession, 2012 – quickly disappearing – photos by C.S. Hagen

The cigarettes were called anti-aircraft guns, and were smoked pointing upward to avoid spilling.  The heroin inside was nicknamed white flour.  Highly addictive and debilitating, the Japanese used good product to entice new addicts, then weaned them to cheaper, weaker grades while charging the same price.

Yang hangs lined nearly every street of the Japanese Concession, according to Powell.

“I was told that the heroin habit acquired in this way was practically impossible to break,” Powell wrote.  “I visited the streets named Hashidate, Hanazowa, Kotobuko, Komai and others in the Japanese Concession, where practically every shop was given over to heroin manufacture or sale.”

One terrible quick fix for heroin addicts in Tientsin came from roadside vestibules, where a customer would knock on a door and a small sliding panel would open.  The customer simply stuck an arm through the aperture, with the appropriate amount of money, of course, and the customer would receive a quick hypodermic jab.

Beside the yang hangs and quick-fix vestibules, large hotels such as the Tokyo Hotel were places of interest for drug addicts.

More scenes of Tientsin's old Japanese Concession area - photos by C.S. Hagen

More scenes of Tientsin’s old Japanese Concession area – photos by C.S. Hagen

“The smokers would come in, usually in pairs, frequently a man and woman. They would recline on the matting bunks facing each other, with the opium paraphernalia between them. An attendant, usually a little Korean girl about ten or twelve years old, would then bring two pipes, a small alcohol lamp, and a small tin or porcelain container holding the opium, which resembled thick black molasses. Taking a small metal wire resembling a knitting needle, the girl attendant would dip one end into the sticky opium and turn it about until she had accumulated a considerable portion on the end of the wire. She would then hold the opium over the flame and revolve it rapidly in order to prevent it from igniting into a blaze. After the little ball of opium had begun to smoke the girl attendant would quickly remove it and hold the smoking ball on the end of the wire directly over the small aperture in the metal bowl of the pipe.

A Chinese family living in the old Japanese Concession - they run a small store, and despite the decaying conditions of the area do not want to leave. - photos by C.S. Hagen

A Chinese family living in the old Japanese Concession – they run a small store, and despite the decaying conditions of the area do not want to leave. – photos by C.S. Hagen

“The smoker would draw a deep breath, filling his lungs with the sickeningly sweet fumes of the opium. They would repeat the process two or three times, until they fell asleep.”

Each ritual cost one Chinese dollar, approximately thirty cents in American money.  If the house supplied the woman the price jumped to five Chinese dollars.

In the press, Japanese military authorities promised peace and order, all the while weakening Tientsin’s residents with narcotics and violence.  In October 1935, Shigeru Kawagoe, a Japanese ambassador and consul-general at Tientsin, declared Tientsin needed a stable and reliable government.  He later incensed the nation by making sweeping demands to suppress all anti-Japanese protests, and declared the Japanese Empire no longer recognized the Nationalist government, led by the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

In a May 12, 1936 “Top Secret” memorandum meant to be destroyed, written by M.S. Bates to Sir Alexander Cadogan, deputy under-secretary for Foreign Affairs in London, Bates declared that the Japanese treated Chinese worse than dogs.

Tientsin (communist) protestors - photo given by a friend

Tientsin (communist) protestors – photo given by a friend

“In the common thought and attitudes of ordinary people, there has been built up a most unfortunate picture of China and the Chinese.  They generally feel that the Chinese people are disorderly, untrustworthy, ignorant, scheming to injure their neighbors.  A further misfortune is that practically no Japanese have personal friends among the Chinese with whom critical questions can be talked over, and who could steady emotional attitudes in times of crisis.”

The smuggling business was good for Japan’s war machine.  In 1935 the Bank of China estimated the total value of Japan’s illicit goods smuggled into the city at USD 63 million, according to British Consulate records at Tientsin.

A 1936 Tientsin Customs report entitled “Smuggling in North China – Whole Customs Structure Undermined” reported the smuggling rings were well organized, and that Tientsin’s East Railway Station was a center for smugglers in North China.  Most goods arrived by ships, which due to their large size could not traverse the Hai River.  Small boats known as “puff puffs” transported the illegal goods from the ships to waiting sampans, which brought the merchandise inland.

“That Japanese-inspired smuggling activities, audaciously carried on despite official protests, have lately assumed alarming proportions in North China,” the customs report declared.  Due to a new demilitarized zone surrounding Tientsin, customs officials were no longer allowed to carry sidearms, and quickly became helpless against Japanese-led gangs of violent Koreans wielding cudgels, daggers and rocks.  The gangs refused to pay tariffs and attacked British officials whenever possible.  Rayon, artificial silk, white sugar, cigarette paper, sundries and most importantly gasoline for manufacturing heroin were the smuggling rings main products.

Both British and Chinese governments denounced the illicit trade, but local police refused to intervene.  Students took to the streets in protest and some Chinese generals and politicians demanded resistance to Japanese products.  In May 1936, the Nationalist Party issued a statement, which belatedly bolstered its ranks.

“Our territory is the heritage from our revered ancestors,” said Chang Chun, a prominent Nationalist advisor.  “We have to live on it.  To feed the enemy with it is national suicide.  We therefore insist that not an inch of our territory north of the Yellow River should be alienated.

“There is an old Chinese adage which says that feeding the enemy with territories is like feeding a fire with firewood.  Just as the fire demands the last piece of firewood, so will our enemy demand the last slice of our territories.”

Programs and monies were prepared to help addicts overcome their addictions.  Laws were mandated to end all narcotics sales, but Japan was untouchable, and generals Tomoyuki Yamashita and Yoshijiro Umezu responded by pouring more troops into Tientsin.  Japanese and Korean gangsters prowled Haihe’s docks, frequently beating Western custom officials and freely moving their trade.  Japanese garrisons needed expanding as well, and dungeons became too small.

At Haiguangsi, according to many Chinese newspapers, the Japanese secretly conscripted “watercats,” itinerant coolies not native to Tientsin, to make repairs to their garrison and dungeon.

By the time Chinese investigators began combing the Haihe’s banks for the source of the mysterious bodies, the floating dead became too many to count.  By spring of 1937, more than 500 bodies had been dragged from the river.  Most Western media still pointed to opium addicts, but stranger news began leaking out.

“In Tientsin scores of Chinese corpses have been found floating on the river recently” reported The Straits Times on May 26, 1937, “giving rise to all kinds of conjectures.  One belief is that the men were drug addicts, while a more widely believed theory, in view of the comparatively well-built bodies, was that they were victims of poison gas works.”

In an attempt to shift blame away form their secret projects, newspapers reported, Japanese military authorities rounded up Tientsin’s heroin addicts and turned them over to the Tientsin Municipal Government Police Bureau.

 

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Tientsin reporter Wang Yanshi broke the floating corpse story in early 1936, according to the Ta Kung Pao.  He published follow-ups until August 1937, counting 490 dead.

The Liberation Weekly, a communist mouthpiece, feared the numbers were much higher, as many of the bodies could not be retrieved and floated east toward the Bohai Sea.

An eerie sensation suffocated the city, The Liberation Weekly reported.  Some of the bodies appeared to have been strangled, and yet others had hands bound behind their backs.  All of the corpses were young, fairly healthy males, and because of their naked, bloated conditions, appeared to have been buried or had been in the river waters for quite some time.

View of the Haihe - photo by C.S. Hagen

View of the Haihe two weeks before the 2012 Flood – photo by C.S. Hagen

Powell wrote in his book that Chinese authorities were offering USD 5,000 dollar rewards for any information that would lead to arrests.

“When I arrived in Tientsin early in June, 1937, I found the Chinese population absorbed in what the newspapers called the ‘corpse mystery.’  The sensation completely eclipsed local interest in the approaching war.”

One man, Powell wrote, after being fished from the river “became alive.”  After hospitalization Chia Yung-chi said that he had gone with friends to the Japanese Concession to smoke opium and heroin.  He purchased an anti-aircraft gun cigarette, and that was the last thing he remembered.

The green-gren Haihe - photo by C.S. Hagen

The jolly green Haihe – photo by C.S. Hagen

As Tientsin investigators ran from one rumor to the next, in 1937 nearly half the new floating corpses turned out to be opium addicts.  And then, according to the Jinwan Bao, a Tientsin newspaper, the investigation could go no further for it ended at the sewage drain coming from the Haiguangsi Japanese garrison.

Investigators feared Japanese reprisals.

According to a June 3, 1936 article in The West Australian, the growing belief in Tientsin was that hundreds of men working on secret Japanese fortifications had been murdered, because “dead men tell no tales.”

The Auckland Star, however, on September 4, 1937 reported that although the floating dead of 1936 may have been victims of the “dead men tell no tales” theory, the more recent corpses of 1937 were primarily drug addicts.

“Officially no one knows why more than 300 bodies of Chinese coolies were found floating down the Haihe River here last year, or why 150 more have been found this summer in Tientsin’s floating corpse mystery.  It is still classed as a mystery, most observers believe, only because it is a by-product of a great international narcotics traffic. Tientsin, thriving crossroads of Far Eastern narcotics dealings, has recently been called the narcotics capital of the world.”

In a case matching Powell’s version of the story, The Auckland Star reported one victim was dragged from the Haihe alive, and was

A nap beside the flooded Haihe - photo by C.S. Hagen

Naps beside the flooded Haihe – photo by C.S. Hagen

able to gasp out the story of his migration from a village in search of work, his gradual inclinations toward narcotics, and his ensuing enfeeblement.  As death neared he was turned over to his pallbearers to be consigned to the Haihe at a fee of 12 cents; the cheapest coffin in Tientsin costs at least 50 cents.

“While this man’s case may not have been typical, the sensation his story caused was followed by a wholesale cleanup campaign by the Japanese concession authorities. While strenuously denying that Japanese had anything to do with the floating corpses, they rounded up hundreds of Chinese beggars and narcotics addicts about Japanese and Korean dens and shunted them into the Chinese city.  More than 1,000 of these vagrants are now housed by the Chinese authorities.”

Nankai University students took to the streets, shouting “Down with Japanese Imperialism,” and demanding an answer to the floating corpse case, the Tianjin Daily reported about the still baffling case in 2013.

The online audiobook reported in its rendition of “Ghost Waters” that Japanese soldiers had used watercats for secret projects, then buried the bodies in a large pit, which, once again opened up into the Haihe after heavy summer rains, washing the bodies downstream.  Such a theory, the audiobook proposed, would answer the corpses’ bloated conditions.

Another theory proposed by the Tianjin Daily was that after the watercats finished their jobs, Japanese soldiers strangled them, then sent them down the sewage drainpipe, which led directly into the Haihe.

A fisherman salvages his boat after the flood - photo by C.S. Hagen

A fisherman salvages wood after the flood – photo by C.S. Hagen

At the height of confusion, the Japanese invasion of Tientsin began.  The floating corpse story no longer took front-page news.  Anti-Japanese publications were shut down.  Thousands of Tientsiners were sent north to Manchuria for slave labor.

Slowly, Tientsin forgot the floating corpses, and seventy-eight years later the case remains unsolved.

 

Epilogue

If the Japanese war machine was behind the floating corpses, either by direct strangulation, gas or other means, or was indirectly involved through heroin sales, then the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal executed one of the culprits, and a second died of natural causes while in prison.

Tomoyuki Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malaya,” was assigned to northern China where he commanded the 4th Division of the Japanese Army.  Yamashita was hanged in Manila on February 23, 1946, according to records of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

Tomoyuki Yamashita - online sources

Tomoyuki Yamashita – online sources

“Various indelible stains that I left on the history of mankind cannot be offset by the mechanical termination of my life,” Yamashita said before he was hung.

Lieutenant General Yoshijiro Umezu, the “Stoneman,” was the commander of the Japanese army’s Tientsin command.  He was found guilty of multiple counts of crimes against peace, an accomplice in conspiracies for domination of China and countless deaths of “many thousands of civilians,” The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal reported.

While in prison Umezu converted to Christianity and died from rectal cancer in 1949.

Mad Dogs – Tientsin at War – Part VII

TIANJINThis is the seventh in the “Tientsin at War” series, highlighting a controversial English author assassinated in his own Tientsin home in the fall of 1930.  The culprits of his cowardly murder were never caught.  The suspects are still many.  After 84 years however, the most important question is not who killed him, but why Bertram Lenox Simpson, aka Putnam Weale forsook his writing to take up a cause most people considered lost.  

By C.S. Hagen

TIENTSIN, CHINA – When author Bertram Lenox Simpson set down his pen in 1930, he broke journalism’s cardinal rule.

The only picture I could find of Bertram Lenox Simpson, Putnam Weale - online sources

Putnam Weale, bottom right – online sources

He took a side.  And then he was murdered for his choice.

Simpson, better known by his pseudonym Putnam Weale, had an Englishman’s skin, but his heart belonged to China.  Born near Shanghai in 1877, he picked up a rifle during the Siege of the Legations.  He replaced the Enfield for the pen two years later, damning Western soldiers and missionaries for the ensuing rapes of Peking and Tientsin.  The Manchu Dynasty fell on his watch, and he became an advisor to Chinese presidents and warlords, who one by one stripped away his dreams of a united China.  With apocryphal clarity he foresaw the upcoming Japanese invasion and warned the world, producing nearly one book every year.

Despite critical acclaim, no one truly listened.  His novels and letters from China’s interior became conversational centerpieces, served at tiffin with crumpets and Yunnan tea in dainty porcelain cups.

English politicians called him an unsavory adventurer.  Newspapers frequently headlined Simpson “the cynic.”  Japanese demanded his deportation when he allied himself with the Shanxi warlord, Marshal Yan Xishan.  No longer able to stand by his journalistic oath, he staged a coup in the marshal’s name on June 16, 1930 of the Tientsin Customs House, ousted the “mad dogs,” and made sweeping changes to China’s northern maritime trade.

Simpson’s Chinese name was Xin Pusen, (辛博森), which can be phonetically linked to his surname, Simpson, but ironically means in part “plentiful suffering.”  Simpson saw himself as China’s avant-garde, perhaps even as a martyr, for few foreigners dared to leash the mad dogs starving for China’s brittle bones.  While Edwardian high society assured each other their lavish lifestyles could never end, Simpson foresaw the empire on which the sun never sets’ demise, and then, in one desperate act took matters into his own hands, hitting the politically-infused trading world in their most private place – maritime monies.

All his adult life Simpson strove for change.  He didn’t stop until the day three assassins entered his home on Woodrow Wilson Road in the former German Concession, now Jiefang South Road, and shot him in the back.

 

Simpson’s Assassination Attempt – October 1, 1930

Simpson was listening to his gramophone in his drawing room shortly before 8 p.m., when his Number Two Boy knocked on the door, according to December 5, 1930 inquest report at the British Consular Court in The Straits Times.

Three men had come calling.  They showed Number Two Boy, a common name in those days for a domestic servant, a card bearing the name Fu Lu-lin of the Enlarged Plenary Session, the newly formed and short-lived government that Simpson supported.  Simpson ushered two of the men into his drawing room.  One man stayed outside the front door.

“My master was walking in front of the two guests who followed behind,” Number Two Boy said at the inquest.  “As soon as my master entered the room I heard the shots fired.”

The Peking and Tientsin Times reported the following day that Simpson’s shooting was a “sensational sequel… to the long controversy in regard to the Tientsin Customs.

“Mister Simpson was about ten feet from the door, with his back to the strangers, when one of them drew a pistol and fired twice.  One of the shots penetrated the spinal column, and the other, believed to be the second shot, missed its mark.”

The assassins spoke in a Fengtian, or Manchurian dialect.  One was dressed in a long black Chinese coat with a black outer jacket; the second man wore a long light blue coat and carried a leather bag.  The third was dressed in a military fashioned Zhongshan suit, and after the attempted assassination pulled a pistol on Number Two Boy.

Number Two Boy ran to the street after a waiting vehicle sported the assassins away, and yelled for police.

Simpson’s gatekeeper helped Number Two Boy call for police, he said at the inquest, although he did not know that Simpson had been attacked.  The gate to Simpson’s yard was closed, he said.

“I started to shout with the boy just as the car started to move,” the gatekeeper said.

“The boy said the gate was open and not closed and that you were outside on the pavement,” coroner Sir A.G.N. Ogden said at the inquest.

“The boy was lying.”

According to Tientsin Consulate records Chief Inspector P.J. Lawless affirmed most of Number Two Boy’s story, who also had the sense of mind to remember the car’s license plate number, but Lawless blamed local police for inactivity in apprehending the assassins.

“When I arrived at least thirty minutes after the shooting, no action had been taken by their police,” Lawless said.  “They had failed to telephone information to various police stations on Peking Road, nothing had been done with a view to tracing the car or owner.  A party of armed police were simply lolling about the house and the compound.”

The car was identified as a taxi number 517 from the Hua Mei Motorcar Garage in the French Concession.  Inspector Tsui Ch’an Fu found the car as it was pulling into the Tien Hsiang Bazaar, a shopping area, but the assassins had already escaped.  The twenty-six-year-old chauffeur, named Ching Hsien, was visibly shaken and made no attempt to flee.  He told authorities the assassins ordered him at gunpoint.  While parked at Simpson’s house, he was told to keep the engine running, and after four or five minutes the assassins returned and he drove them to an alleyway beside a Catholic church.

“The man sitting abreast with me threw on the seat five dollars and said in Fengtian dialect, ‘Turn off the switch.  If you drive away the car now, I shoot you,’” Ching said.  The assassins walked north, toward the train station.  “When I saw they had gone very far, I just drove the car to our garage.”

The Hua Mei Motorcar Garage received a call from Room 65 of the Pei Yang Hotel at 7 p.m. the same night and ordered car number 517, consular records reported.  The assassins checked into the hotel earlier that afternoon, and had paid their bill in full by the time they left.

“It appears that four men arrived at the Ta Pei Hotel in the Japanese Concession at four o’clock this afternoon,” the Peking and Tientsin Times reported on Simpson’s attempted assassination.  “They looked like military men, though wearing plain clothes, and it is asserted that they spoke the Fengtien dialect.  They pretended that they had come from the railway.”

The hit squad’s fourth man, according to hotel staff, had hired a rickshaw to take away the men’s luggage.

The fact that Simpsons’ Number Two Boy reported all three men came to the house while the chauffeur said the third man remained in the car was not lost on investigators at the inquisition.  No one, however, was charged as an accomplice.

“That it was a political affair seems probable,” Ogden said, “as there was no attempt at kidnapping or robbery, and the assailants were not in Mr. Simpson’s house for more than a couple of minutes and no conversation passed between them and their victims.”

Simpson was first taken to the German-American Hospital and later transferred to the Victorian Hospital, where he suffered, paralyzed from the chest down, until ten o’clock at night on November 2, 1930.  Only after his death was the coroner able to dislodge the bullet stuck into his spinal column, which he showed as an exhibit to inquest investigators.

The assassins were never apprehended.  Suspects ranged from angry English merchants and politicians to Chinese servants and disgruntled employees to Japanese and Nationalist agents, and then veered to Tientsin’s drug lords, but the majority of international press and British politicians believed his assassination was the work of Nationalist soldiers under orders from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

 

Treaty of Tientsin

Anger toward Simpson stemmed from what officials believed was his interference with the Tientsin Treaties, also known as the Unequal Treaties, which were effected after the Opium Wars in 1858.  The treaty gave foreign traders the right to pay all taxes due on imports at the port of entry, then a pass exempting further taxation along the way.  These tariffs, both in Tientsin and Shanghai, were of vital importance to Great Britain.

The treaty was also the gateway to open more Chinese ports, demanded foreign legations in Peking, allowed Christian missionaries free movement throughout the country and legalized opium as legal tender for trade in China.

For nearly one hundred years most of North China’s trade came in and out of Tientsin.  All tariffs were paid to the Customs House, which in Tientsin averaged USD 600,000 a month in revenues.  A small portion, roughly five to ten percent went to China, the rest lined merchant’s and Great Britain’s coffers.  Nearly all customs commissioners in those days were Englishmen.

Old picture of the Tientsin Customs House, still standing today along the old English Bund - online sources

Old picture of the Tientsin Customs House, still standing today along the old English Bund – online sources

The Mad Dogs

The fact that Simpson’s assassins spoke a Manchurian dialect was a brain squeeze on case investigators.

Accusations first fell on Marshal Zhang Xueliang, who controlled Manchuria after the Japanese Black Dragon Society assassinated his father.  But the Shanxi and Manchurian armies had once been allied under the Fengtian Clique during the Warlord Era, and the “Young Marshal” offered assistance with the criminal investigation.  Simpson had also been an advisor to the Young Marshal’s father, and the Manchurian government was not entirely at peace with the southern Nationalists.  There was no motive.

Great Britain’s legal finger, much stubbier and weaker than it had been in years past, then pointed to the Japanese, who were already suspects in a long list of assassinations.  When dealing with Japan’s secret assassination societies, proof was difficult to find.

Tientsin Customs House Seal - online sources

Tientsin Customs House Seal – online sources

The law waved frantically between Tientsin’s opium magnates and the Nationalists, the only Chinese government Great Britain officially recognized at the time.  The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Nationalist, or Kuomintang government could have easily hired Manchurian assassins to shoot Simpson in the back and shift blame toward the Young Marshal, who had only recently weaned himself off opium and was preparing for war with Japan.

Once again, police had no proof since the assassins had disappeared.

Police officials could not forget to include trading giants like Butterfield & Swire, or financiers of England’s “Lion Bank,” the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, or angry ship captains now forced to pay double duties.  Ironically, despite veiled threats made by high-ranking consular officials, the only entity investigators didn’t accuse was their own good selves, for Great Britain had the most to lose with Simpson’s coup.

Although thousands read Simpson’s books, few, it seemed, enjoyed his company.  He was known to be stubborn, a hothead, and always looking for an argument.  Although Simpson had injected himself into politics many times before, when the writer cum warrior stepped up to Tientsin’s Customs House, he entered a political world from which there was no turning back.

Since Simpson’s first internationally acclaimed book Indiscreet Letters from Peking, he began to stockpile enemies, but he also garnered a handful of like-minded friends.  His controversial books frequently hit the best seller’s lists, and his newspaper articles told the truth about China through his looking glass.   After publishing Indiscreet Letters from Peking in 1906, which was a personal account of his experiences fighting Boxers and Manchu soldiers during the Siege of the Legations at Peking, his writing became increasingly bitter toward Western colonialism of China and the wars raging up and down China’s coast.  Simpson considered himself an expert on Chinese affairs, and many publications of the time agreed.

“I can lay claim to an intimate knowledge of the Far East and of everything that affects it,” Simpson said in a March 4, 1922 interview for The Register.

Until June 16, 1930, nearly a month after Marshal Yan Xishan’s Shanxi Army defeated the southern Nationalists and took control of Tientsin, Simpson’s words offered little more sting than a Tientsin mosquito to British authorities, but his coup, performed suddenly at gunpoint, kick started top secret letters and accusatory notes between British consulates in China.

Zhang Xueliang "The Young Marshal" - online sources

Zhang Xueliang “The Young Marshal” – online sources

“On June 16 the Shanxi Authorities appointed Mr. Lenox Simpson, an adventurer with an unsavory reputation, Commissioner of Customs at Tientsin,” Sir John Thomas Pratt, a British diplomat, reported to consular authorities.  “On the same day Simpson appeared at the Customs House and gave Hayley Bell [the previous customs commissioner] a letter stating he had taken charge of the Customs by force.”

Colonel Hayley Bell had stated previously that if this happened, he and the whole staff, Chinese and foreign would withdraw.  Simpson clipped the colonel’s wings.

“Simpson stated that any Chinese who obeyed Colonel Bell’s orders to withdraw would be shot, whereupon Colonel Bell alone withdrew, and the staff stayed,” Pratt said in the report.

Simpson’s coup, according to Pratt, was not only a betrayal of British interests, but froze all Tientsin trade.  The British-recognized Nationalist Government wanted their cut, but Simpson allocated the funds to support Marshal Yan Xishan and his money-poor Shanxi army.

Tsuneo Matsudaira - online sources

Tsuneo Matsudaira – online sources

“Customs employees complained of Simpson’s attitude as over-bearing,” reported The West Australian on June 21, 1930.  “He is conferring with the rebel leaders regarding the further steps to be taken.  In the meanwhile  shipping is completely tied up at Tientsin, and the Nanking [Nationalist] authorities are demanding Mr. Simpson’s punishment and deportation.”

Since the Nationalist Government was receiving no monies from Tientsin, they threatened an embargo, and levied double taxes on all ships coming from or going to Tientsin.

The doubled tariffs infuriated merchants, predominantly Butterfield & Swire shipping lines, whose agents wrote an angry letter to the Tientsin Consulate.

“The tacit recognition of Simpson’s improvised control on behalf of Yan Xishan may have far-reaching consequences and if some action is not taken by the Power[s] to undo the unfortunate damage already done, the effect… may well prove to be disastrous.”

Edward Ingram - online sources

Edward Ingram – online sources

Consular officials considered the company’s words a threat to Simpson’s life, but the writer refused to hire bodyguards and did nothing to protect himself.

“The precedent set at Tientsin is a most dangerous one, inasmuch as upstarts such as Lenox Simpson – and there are unfortunately more than one in China – may be encouraged to influence the militarists to follow the example set by the North.”

An agent named in consular records as W. Park worked for the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, through which customs revenues were usually saved and sent, and complained Simpson had been speaking publicly before the coup.

“Simpson, a foreigner, has abused his extraterritorial status by suggesting in a public speech that Yan should take this step.  Any seizure of additional duties would create a dangerous precedent and shatter China’s credit at home and abroad.”

Desperately striving to remain neutral, Pratt suggested a series of compromises, which included Simpson’s removal by force, if necessary.  Letters written back and forth between Peking and Tientsin debated if Simpson’s actions were tantamount to treason.

Sir Miles Lampson - online sources

Sir Miles Lampson – online sources

“I think probably that Mr. Lenox Simpson’s action, in accepting a post which involves his assisting the Northern authorities to divert customs revenues… would be held to amount to aiding and abetting the Northern [Shanxi] authorities in their ‘war, insurrection or rebellion,’” Pratt wrote in a consular reports.  “The question whether a prosecution should be launched is very largely a political one.”

“His Majesty’s Government saw Simpson’s activities as an incursion into Chinese organized politics,” reported Edward Ingram, vice consul-general and was also coroner for Simpson’s final inquest.  Great Britain recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s national government, and deemed the newly arrived Shanxi government as an insurrection.

One of the reprisals considered against Simpson was to lift British protection of him, which would make Simpson “liable to the severest punishments that could be meted out under Chinese law in such circumstances.”

“We could hardly sit silent if he was murdered or otherwise barbarously treated,” British Minister Sir Miles Lampson argued on July 18, 1930.  He opposed drastic measures taken against a British subject, not for any harm that may have come to Simpson, but because he knew the author.  “Simpson is not a man to be influenced by threats unless they are obviously serious.”

Sir Frederik William Maze - online sources

Sir Frederik William Maze – online sources

“Simpson will probably indulge in a journalistic campaign and publish claptrap interviews meant to hoodwink the public,” Sir Frederick William Maze, inspector-general of Chinese Customs, wrote.  He supported any action to right the situation and appeal to British maritime interests.

“The issue is a clear-cut one: do or do not the Powers consider that the existing Maritime Customs system ought to be preserved?  If the answer is “yes,” then we are entitled to ask: What are they doing, either collectively or individually?  I can’t answer, because I am left in the dark.  But by transacting customs business with Simpson they have in fact interfered… and the Central Government [Nationalist] takes a serious view of the fact that Simpson’s action – which they declare is entirely illegal – appears to be condoned.”

Maze became the inspector general of Chinese Customs in 1929, taking an oath to obey the president of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party.  He saw Tientsin’s hesitancy to stop Simpson’s coup as a mistake, and angrily declared tacit recognition of Simpson worse than active intervention.

“The Tientsin Consular Body in their collective wisdom advocated the latter policy [tacit recognition], and it seems the Diplomatic Body have not rejected their advice.  This, of course, is exactly what Simpson desires.”

Dr. Wang Ch'ung-hui - online sources

Dr. Wang Ch’ung-hui – online sources

Nationalist diplomat Dr. Wang Ch’ung-hui demanded Simpson’s removal with a “veiled threat.”

“He suggests that I might still do something to clip Simpson’s wings,” Lampson wrote.  “I said I had not the power… I made it absolutely clear I was not prepared to do anything further: but equally clear that we deplored Simpson’s getting mixed up in the affair at all.”

Japanese secretary Tsuneo Matsudaira called upon Great Britain to deny Marshal Yan and his northern government any recognition.  Both the Shanxi and Nationalist governments refused all compromises made by Great Britain.  When the Japanese and the Nationalists demanded Simpson’s deportation, English consular officials went to Marshal Yan asking him to release Simpson from his duties.

“Simpson has done his work loyally and Yan will stand by him,” wrote Dr. Tchou Ngao-hsiang, director of department of foreign affairs for the short-lived Shanxi Government.  “Yan will have nothing to do with Bell and Maze with whom he is much incensed on account of closing of Customs…”

For nearly four months consular officials and angry politicians fought each other to a standstill.  In the interests of objectivity, no move was made against Simpson.  According to newspaper reports at the time, Simpson made sweeping changes within the maritime trade, attempting to make the office a model for others to follow.

 

Why did Simpson Choose Marshal Yan Xishan?

Marshal Yan Xishan - online sources

Marshal Yan Xishan – online sources

Marshall Yan was known as a survivor and social reformer.  Lord of Shanxi Province since the end of the Manchu Dynasty, he survived five eras by shifting allegiances when needed: the Yuan Shi-kai era, the Warlord Era, the Nationalist Era, the Japanese invasion era and the ensuing civil war between communists and Nationalists.  Firmly anti-communist, Yan later fought the “Reds” to a standstill for many months before finally fleeing in defeat to Taiwan in 1949.

According to newspapers at the time, Yan was a proponent of Western technology to protect Chinese traditions.  Instead of involving his armies in the civil wars, he strove to modernize Shanxi Province, one of China’s poorest areas, earning him the title of “Model Governor.”  He hired Western doctors and advisors, and befriended the Generalissimo in the 1920s by suppressing local communist movements.

Some analysts say Marshal Yan joined the Generalissimo’s enemies, including Feng Yuxiang “the Christian General,” subsequently invading Tientsin because his armies needed money, and the Tientsin Customs was one potential source of income.  While in Tientsin he attempted to set up a new national government in direct opposition to the Nationalists, or Kuomintang Party.  But the marshal’s dreams were short lived.  The Generalissimo first beat the Christian General’s armies in Shandong, and then turned on Tientsin, ending the Warlord Era in the fall of 1930.

In a July 10, 1927 editorial Simpson wrote entitled The Masked Money Battle, he saw Western interference in China’s affairs much like a paper tiger, and destined to destroy itself.  “To be dramatic about money may sound like finding poetry in a dust heap; nevertheless the story of the past thirty years in China in terms of cash is so queer that it reads like an amazing romance.”  He goes on to describe China’s  love of money had been influenced directly by Western imperialism.  “This habit, which is imbedded in a hoary past, has been enormously influenced by the foreigner.  He became known as a phenomenon through the country… when he brought casks of Spanish dollars, minted in the Americas, to the open port of Canton, and commenced buying all sorts of commodities.

“It was the coined money brought by the nations of the West, which was the corrupter…”

Simpson’s writing became increasingly vexed toward 1930, bearing titles such as the Cauldron of Hate and a novel called China’s Crucifixion.  One of his last books, The Unknown God, dealt with the futility of missionaries in China and is “unflattering to the last degree,” critics wrote.  Simpson portrayed missionaries as voracious men and women who think more of dollars than human souls, and are instantly jealous of each other and stubbornly ignorant of the Chinese culture and faith.

He began blaming the Japanese, more specifically the Black Dragon Society in The Advertiser, for the Young Marshal’s father’s assassination.  Japan, of course, denounced the accusations.  And then in 1928 according to The Argus and then again in The Daily Mail, Simpson painted a grim picture of the hapless foreigner surrounded by mad dogs, and criticized the Nationalists, saying they are “murderers led by criminals,” to which the only remedy was bullets and cold steel.

Tientsin waterfront, along the Bund - online sources

Tientsin waterfront, along the Bund – online sources

“You have betrayed us!”  The Register reported Simpson saying in 1927.  “This is what men of all nationalities are saying; even the Chinese now marvel at the astounding phenomenon of a passivity that is self destructive.  Today there is yet time to wipe out humiliation.  Tomorrow it may be too late… We are surrounded by mad dogs.”

When Simpson took over editorship of The Leader in Peking, a position which he held until the Tientsin Customs House coup, he repeatedly called for a stronger China led by the Christian General and Marshal Yan.  Some say Simpson found Marshal Yan’s policies best suited for the China he thought he knew.

“Salvation must come from within,” Simpson wrote in a 1915 article entitled The Cleansing of the Augean Stables.

“It may be interesting to note in this connection that Mr. Simpson now holds the same post as his father did in 1909, when he died in Tientsin,” reported The Leader on June 17, 1930.  Simpson was no stranger to customs duties, having worked before with the Chinese Maritime Customs Service.

 

A Heavy Price

“Mr. Simpson had a personal interview with Marshal Zhang Xueliang, in which he requested that his services should be retained,” reported The Straits Times after Marshal Yan’s armies had retreated back to Shanxi Province.  “But the request was ‘flatly refused’ and an entirely new Customs staff was appointed at Tientsin.”

Sir Lancelot Giles - online sources

Sir Lancelot Giles – online sources

“He was warned more than once by friends that he ran a grave risk of being assassinated, but he pooh-poohed any such ideas,” consular records report Sir Lancelot Giles, the consul-general said.

“Whether, as Mr. Maze suggests, Mr. Simpson was the victim of nefarious dealings with opium or drug dealers, or whether, as seems more probably, he was simply the victim of his own recklessness in directly meddling in Chinese political strife, he has paid heavily for the part he played in this particular adventure,” Lampson wrote in a report to the Peking Consulate.  “His short-lived regime of control of the Tientsin Customs had gradually come to be regarded with some favor by local merchants, and he himself was loud in his claims that he had done much to eradicate the antiquated methods of the customs proper… With the lapse of time, however, and in view of the peculiar circumstances surround the crime, it seems unlikely that the criminals will ever be brought to the book… The exact truth will probably never be known.”

According to Tianjin Daily records within Tianjin Archives, the Ta Kung Pao newspaper reported in 1930 that Simpson and Marshal Yan obtained little from their takeover of the Tientsin Customs, accruing 1.5 million Chinese taels in silver, hardly worth the costs of a war.

“Mr. Lenox Simpson, who, under his penname “Putnam Weale,” was one of the most prolific and best-known writer[s] on Far Eastern topics, was an Englishman by birth, but a cosmopolitan through long residence among the peoples of many nationalities.  He was 53 years of age at the time of his death…” The Straits Times reported on November 12, 1939.

Simpson died at 10 p.m., November 2, 1930, a month after the cowardly attack.  The bullet that was lodged in his spine was inoperable.  He was buried at the Canton Road Cemetery in Tientsin, (between Chifeng and Yinkou roads), next to his father’s grave, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser reported.  His funeral at the Church of England’s All Saint’s Church, was private and simple, and he left behind his wife, an American named Mary Parrott, his brother, Evelyn, a mining engineer who worked in China, and a sister, Esme.

“There was an unusually large number of wreaths sent by friends and by various clubs and organizations both in Peking and in Tientsin, testifying to the deceased’s popularity and the fact that he was one of the most widely-known personalities in North China,” The Straits Times reported.

Simpson tried to leash what he called Tientsin’s Mad Dogs, and failed.  Ten short years after his death the same dogs were imprisoned in internment camps, sailed for home or pillaged Tientsin and many other areas of China, which most assuredly made Simpson turn in his grave.  He could be called a hero or villain, a revolutionary or rebel.  Whatever name Simpson is branded his reputation as being one of China’s most controversial Western authors is still true to this day.

The Canton Cemetery is gone.  Chinese clothing shops and a hutong now stand where Simpson and many others who once called Tientsin their home were buried.

The Church of England, or All Saints Church - photo by C.S. Hagen

Tientsin’s Church of England, or All Saints Church, no longer in use as a church – photo by C.S. Hagen

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