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Japan’s Tientsin – Tientsin at War – Part 1

This is the first article in the “Tientsin at War” series, written as a broad, colorful sweep to the violence that was soon to encompass the world. The violence, wars, treachery, and plots involved to control Tientsin corrupted all completely. Innocents, by the tens of thousands, died. From out of the ashes of a dying dynasty, warlords grappled for Tientsin’s lucrative port tariffs, bustling train tracks, and glittering night life, for to control Tientsin was to hold the key to the north. A neighboring power, however, had different plans, and like chess pieces moved into place by a master’s hand, Japan baited, bribed, drugged, and plotted, biding its time…

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – The bone-chilling Tientsin winter had passed. Gobi’s desert breath had done its worst, whipping sand and toxic coal dust down chimneys, caking window cracks and turning skies yellow for days on end. The quick-tempered year of the tiger gave way to the peace loving – albeit moody – year of the rabbit, and spring, the only truly pleasant time of year in Tientsin, had finally arrived.

Tientsin’s rose bushes bloomed. The Hai River thawed, sending a fresh stench throughout the Settlement area. Foreign children within the British and French concessions scrubbed and donned their Sunday’s finest for Easter services on April 9, 1939, while nervous parents feigned smiles after peeking through brocade curtains to survey the streets for roaming Japanese Kempeitai. Rickshaws and coolies were harassed at concession borders, but a handful still waited alongside the city’s narrow, winding streets to offer rides to one of the many churches inside the Settlement’s relative safety.

A typical scene in Tientsin – 1939

Tientsin (天津), whose name means Ford of Heaven, is a large port city southeast of Peking (Beijing), the capitol of China. The Tientsin Concessions stood on 3,475 acres of city land, and were shaped like a dragon’s teardrop oozed from the Hai River, one of China’s foulest rivers, which intersects the city and at one time allowed merchant ships and gunboats into the city’s heart. Besides being an important commercial city, it also became the nodal point for railways, mining, textiles, furs, matches and salt, according to a 1928 report filed by the old Tientsin British Committee of Information. The concession lands were relinquished by Qing Emperor Doro Eldengge during the Opium Wars to eight foreign nations. England and France held the most land; Russia, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Austro-Hungary had their own smaller plots, (some like the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian had already been retroceded), but Japan, the land of the rising sun, wanted it all. In 1937 Japan sacked the city, but left the concession areas’ shops, schools, theaters, brothels and businesses to simmer in a fragile peace.

Sporadic battles had destroyed buildings, telegraph lines and the Tientsin-Peking Railway, but on Easter Sunday some semblance of business remained inside the cloistered concessions.

At the southern edge of the British Concession, bordering Nazis in their German mansions, American soldiers of the Marine Legation Guard, known as Devil Dogs by the local press, shook off their hangovers and went about their duties. The British Volunteer Corps, a mixed group of poorly-trained foreigners, guarded entrances along the Hai River to the east, Racecourse Road to the south, the Rue Saint Louis to the north and as far as Glasgow Road to the west, (near present day Tong Lou). During shift changes the British, stateless Jews and White Russians, Indian and Greek nationalities comprising the volunteer corps lit local Hatamen cigarettes and wished for gaspers, or unfiltered Woodbines.

Trade had become increasingly difficult as the war between China and Japan progressed. Earlier in 1938 the West Australian reports Wang Chu-lin, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, was shot dead while entering a motorcar after dining in the French Concession. He was eighty-one and an advocate of better relations with Japan. The Fifteenth US Infantry Regiment, which according to newspapers at the time, had been in Tientsin continuously since the Boxer Uprising in 1900, left. Bombs were thrown into cinemas in the German and French concessions, killing no one but causing thousands of dollars in damage. The Japanese Black Dragon Society hired two assassins to kill T.L. Chao, headmaster of a British municipal school. Chao’s bodyguard, although wounded, captured the assailants, but the culprits refused to identify their principals. Expatriates sucked in their collective breaths when late in 1938 Japanese military authorities ordered all Japanese banks, businesses and nationals to withdraw from the concessions.

The invasion was ready; Japan just needed an excuse.

With nearly five thousand expatriates “sticking it out” in Tientsin, schools kept their doors open. The French Club at the corner of Rue de Baron

The manager of the Japanese-owned Federal Reserve Bank of North China, assassinated because of his pro-Japanese polices.

Gros and Rue de France still offered some of the best entertainment the city had to offer. Brothels on Bruce and Taku roads were thriving.

Tientsin’s Grand Theatre, which squatted next to the Gentleman’s Club a stone’s throw away from Victoria Park, was still showing movies popular enough to attract the attentions of the manager of the Japanese-owned Federal Reserve Bank of North China, Cheng Hsi-keng, and four Chinese assassins. Cheng was gunned down inside the theater while watching Gunga Din, starring Cary Grant and George Stevens.

Japan snarled, for Cheng was their prized puppet, but more importantly Japan demanded the disuse of the local fabi currency and demanded all Chinese silver reserves stored in British banks be transferred to the Yokohama Specie Bank. Great Britain snarled back, adamant that the six Chinese accused of the murder were innocent and refused to discuss Tientsin’s silver reserves. The United States shook its fist, but Japan, who was biding its time to take the Settlement land and expel all foreigners from China took matters into its own greedy hands.

Japanese gunships poured into the Hai River, blocking off all trade, food, foreign reinforcements and supplies. Searchlights crisscrossed the skies searching for British planes loaded with much-needed food crates from the aircraft carrier Hermes. Two US Marines injured Japanese police in an altercation at the Tientsin Railway Station. Chinese Nationalists attacked the Japanese garrison, losing 1,200 and killing 309 Japanese, and an artillery duel ensued. Stray bullets killed fifteen people in the French Concession and the Asiatic Petroleum Company was destroyed by fire. A Chinese mob demolished the offices of the British-owned International Export Company. Butterfield and Swire, Britain’s largest shipping company, canceled sailings north of Shanghai. Prices skyrocketed. Butter, when it could be found, cost nearly $7 a pound, which according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the equivalent of $117 today in 2014.

Japanese propaganda picture of the strip search – Life Magazine

Hell broke loose. Tientsin was nearing ochlocracy.

Japanese soldiers began strip-searching men and women at the concession barriers. One Englishman, named H.J. Lord, was ordered to strip. With proper British pride he refused, and was struck in the face with his passport – three times.

“Thank you,” Lord said each time he was struck.

He lost the battle of wills, however, and was made to stand naked at a busy intersection for fifteen minutes. Later, five British youths were manhandled and forced to strip, according to the Daily News. Massive numbers of Chinese refugees were allowed into the British Concession, but were not allowed to leave. The British escort vessel ironically named Sandwich arrived to help, and other ships scheduled for departure stayed moored. The concession’s volunteer corps was on full alert.

“All people are treated alike,” a press release from the Japanese military authority said. “But are dealt with according to their individual merits. Britons are typically arrogant.”

A British merchant named G.A. Smith was beaten and arrested on June 18. A New Zealander named Cecil Davis, who lived in Tientsin for thirty years was also assaulted by Japanese soldiers. Three hired Chinese gunmen kidnapped H.F. Dyatt, chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce, but he was found relatively unhurt a month later, gagged and bound and thirty miles east of Tientsin. A British woman, Mary Anderson, was ordered to disrobe at a barricade, but she evaded the soldiers by running back into the concession.

Japanese officials swore to continue the blockade “as long as Great Britain aids the Chinese.”

“I have decided on all the necessary arrangements to resist the Japanese to the death,” Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek said from the ruins of Chongqing, the third Nationalist capitol. The Generalissimo’s promises did little to alleviate the suffering of Tientsin’s foreigners and Chinese.

Thirty miles of electrified wire was placed around the British and French concessions, taking one Chinese person’s life near the US Marine barracks on Shansi Road and trapping everyone inside.

The Great Tientsin Flood of 1939

The Japanese poured more troops into the concession areas and continued to blockade the city for two months. All expatriates inside the concessions were confined to their houses for fear of the Japanese soldiers prowling the streets. Temperatures soared. Japanese soldiers forced eighteen Chinese farmers to kneel by the roadside on June 13, 1939, with petrol lids over their heads. Six of the farmers died from heat stroke. British pride was stretched to its breaking point, and in June they released four of the six assassins back to the Japanese military authority to be executed and negotiated a compromise on the silver reserves.

Foreigners breathed a little easier. Trading resumed once again. And then in July, the summer rains came and flooded Tientsin for thirty miles in all directions.

“Hordes Drown at Tientsin,” reported the Daily News on August 23, 1939.

“Hundreds have drowned, thousands are missing.” The concessions lost all power; Japanese soldiers gave up attempts to repair the electric perimeter but delayed foreigners at the barriers. British troops manned sampans to rescue the endangered.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported on August 28, 1939 that all foreigners who could possibly leave were evacuated, and that the Japanese blockade of the British concession had been relaxed. More than 600,000 Chinese were marooned, and upward of 1,000 bodies had been recovered from flooded areas. White Russian women were seen poling wooden bathtubs through the water-filled streets begging for alms. Dysentery was rampant, and fungus infections that started in the feet resulted in many cases of blood poisoning.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the flood had affected more than three million people.

“Facing fresh perils of flood, starvation and epidemics, the residents of the British and French concessions at Tientsin are fighting a grim battle against rising waters,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Companies and individuals pooled money and functions were arranged to raise monies for the Tientsin Flood Relief Fund, according to the Singapore-based The Straits Times.

Ada Hanson, a Tientsin journalist for the North China Star at the time, wrote in a letter that the flood was nightmarish.

“That first night was the worst. Chinese who did not have second-story houses were clinging to roofs shouting for help. Explosions lit up the water since fires were raging in all parts of the city.” She and her newborn baby boy survived on goat meat and coarse flour pancakes for a week until the floodwaters subsided.

School buildings, such as the Tientsin Grammar School and the Tientsin Jewish School became shelters for the homeless. Huge caldrons of gruel

Stopped at a barricade in Tientsin

were prepared by missionaries to feed those with no food. US Marines gave out typhoid and cholera shots. Slowly, the city returned to a normalcy that continued to catch headlines across the world.

First, Japan imposed trade sanctions that according to the Courier-Mail was tantamount to another embargo. Then, Japanese Zeros bombed the French Indo-China Railway and took the city of Nanning, near Guangdong Province. Japanese military forces seized American property in Tientsin, and conscripted 500,000 Chinese for slave labor in northern Manchuria, where the puppet Qing Dynasty Emperor Henry Pu reigned. Imports and exports on sugar, tea, oil, steel, cotton, wool and of course opium, plummeted, threatening the international stock market.

A wave of nationalism spread throughout the Settlements. Children eagerly joined patriotic groups such as the Noble Order of the British Spitfire, to raise money for the Royal Air Force. Anthems such as “There’ll Always be an England” replaced hymns at school. German boys in brown shirts and black shorts swinging swastikas sewn on to their upper arms sang “Horst Wessel” while marching down Victoria Road (now Jiefang Street). In the schools it was Englander verses the Jerries, but everyone kept a sharp eye out for the Kempeitai.

For nearly two years Japan played a game of cat and mouse with the West, until at dawn, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops quietly entered the British Concession, marched down Victoria Road, seized the Tientsin Volunteer Armory, the Astor Hotel and Gordon Hall. Japan’s military machine completed its occupation of Tientsin by noon.

Japanese Arisaka rifles and Nambu light machine guns replaced the British Enfields at the concession barriers. British and Canadian citizens were ordered to wear red armbands with the Chinese character ying (英) printed in black. Ying stood for England, including Canada, but is also the symbol for hero and brave. Other “enemy nationals” were assigned similar armbands but with different characters.

When the yellow dust storms came again in 1941, it arrived with the Japanese Imperial Third Fleet, which sunk a British gunboat, and with a warning for all British people to leave, according to a notice in the Peking and Tientsin Times. Many refused. A large billboard on Racecourse Road boasted a map of Southeast Asia and the western Pacific with plaques hammered into the countries Japan conquered. A Japanese truck cruised the concession tirelessly, announcing victory after victory.

Many who had money to leave, left, including

The old Butterfield & Swire offices on Victoria Road – photo by C.S. Hagen

Germans, whose emptied houses left a unique vacuum for Jews escaping pogroms and Hitler’s “Final Solution” to occupy. White Russians and Hitlerites attempted a Tientsin pogrom, which failed, and Jews were not safe across the Hai River in the former Russian Concession area.

The Japanese Black Dragon Society sought collaborators, assassinated school principals and leaders who were anti-Japanese. The Talati House, now the First Hotel or Fengguang Restaurant on Victoria Road and Cousins Road, became a hotbed for espionage and counter-espionage as well as the Brooklyn Café on Dickinson Road. According to recently opened secret documents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) called the “Tientsin Card Files” Tientsin was filled with unsavory characters, all on a wanted list.

Kachiwara – a Japanese disguised as a Chinese person named Ho Wen-chih, who traveled in secret searching for collaborators.
Mrs. Minako Nagata – fifty-three years old, but looked twenty-eight, chief of Japanese propaganda
K. Kondo – in charge of the Japanese garrison, chief consul for the Japanese Consulate in Peking
Masaji Shogi Kageyama – Black Dragon Society, part of an assassination group
Second Lieutenant Ito – sponsored and promoted secret organization of the Japanese Military Police, had an assassination group consisting of eleven members
First Lietenant Ogawa – of the Tangu-Taku Peace Preservation Corps in Tientsin, formerly worked for the Kempeitai
Iocoiama – a lawyer, forty-four years old, married a French woman and was considered third top ranking Japanese spy, receiving special schooling few had ever received

The Japanese had their local recruits as well, like a man named Liu Yingshi, who worked as chief of Foreign Section Chinese Puppet Police. Liu was wanted on extortion and bribery charges, was forty years old, weighed approximately one hundred-eighty pounds and was extremely wealthy.

Amongst the stateless White Russians, however, the Japanese found their greatest assets. A Russian fascist group named the “Forty-Seven Group” was originally from Harbin, but traveled back and forth on a train furnished by the Japanese. Vladimir Goltzeff was one of the Forty-Seven Group, and was helping Japanese dispose of arms, cameras and stashing money, for a hefty fee.

White Russian spies often met at the “Seven Sinners” café and bar in the former Russian Concession, and occasionally clashed with Red Russian spies, as in the altercation that occurred at the intersection of Meadows and Taku roads, (Qufu and Taku North roads) where Ivan Petrovich Kaznoff, a White Russian, choked an unnamed Red Russian to death. Kaznoff spent three months in jail and then was released to work with the Kempeitai.

Despite the pressures of war, hunger and persecution, there were many more foreigners who would not kowtow to the Japanese occupation

DCI Dennis with British ambassador at Tientsin. Dennis was also one of the investigators into the mysterious Pamela Werner murder in Peking (Beijing).

troops. Men like DCI Richard Harry “Dick” Dennis, a former Scotland Yard detective before becoming Tientsin’s Chief of British Municipal Police, stayed true to the end. The Japanese attempted to break him by throwing him into a small cell, restricting water and food and forcing him to sign a confession before driving him throughout the city for all to see in the back of a truck.

Another hero is Eric Liddell, the “Flying Scotsman,” preacher at Tientsin’s English Anglican Church and gold medalist of the men’s 400 meters at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. Along with hundreds of other uncooperative foreigners he was taken in 1943 to the Weihsien Internment Camp in Shandong Province where he died of a brain tumor. His life was portrayed in the 1981 Best Picture and Best Screenplay film Chariots of Fire.

Angela Cox Elliott was born at the Weihsien Compound, known as the Courtyard of the Happy Way. Although she doesn’t remember much more than what her mother and friends later told her, the camp created their own laundry, hospital, kitchens, library, a classroom and sanitation crews.

The civilian prisoners even had their own black market where they smuggled letters and messages out through Chinese farmers. On Victory in Europe Day the camp’s bell clanged at midnight, calling everyone out for roll call. Searchlights swept the yard. Guards were shoving and pushing and counting and someone from Block 57 said they were all going to be taken out and shot.

Eric Liddell’s victory march after 1924 Olympics – The Guardian

No one was shot. On August 17, 1945, after more than two years of incarceration, American paratroopers liberated all 1,400 civilian prisoners, many of whom were old Tientsin hands, in a mission called “Operation Duck.”

By October 1, 1945, Tientsin was liberated. American soldiers marched once again down Victoria Road, freeing 2,900 Allied captives, disarming more than 232,000 Chinese puppet troops and guarding 200,000 Japanese civilians and soldiers.

On that day, and perhaps one of the only times in Chinese history, tens of thousands of Tientsiners lined the Hai River Bund to welcome American troops.

Tientsin Incident – The Australian Women’s Weekly pictorial – 1939

Human Devil – Tientsin at War – Part II

April 26, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

This is the second article in the “Tientsin at War” series, written to remember a mysterious Manchurian spy, presumed dead in 1947. She was officially executed as a traitor to China by the Kuomintang, but recent evidence suggests that she evaded the final bullet and lived until 1978. She was a dreamer, a warrior, a bisexual that charmed her way into the inner workings of her many enemies. Called the Human Devil by the Kuomintang, she was a hailed a heroine by the Japanese. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit back, and enter a world of sexual predators, espionage, murder and betrayal.

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – Some days Eastern Pearl dressed as a young soldier boy. She wrapped her small breasts with silk, cut her hair and pulled on a uniform. Other days she wore a hanbok, and became a Korean prostitute, teasing her way up her enemy’s chain of command, almost within reach of the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to discover Nationalist secrets.

The Japanese hailed her a hero, and named her Yoshiko Kawashima.

“Whenever a section of the Japanese Army found itself in difficulties, the rumor was spread that Yoshiko was on her way,” the Daily News

Eastern Jade wearing summertime men’s shirt, pants and tie, with riding boots – from online sources

reported on March 22, 1934. “Flagging troops fought like demons, it is said, and every time her name was invoked it meant victory.”

The Nationalists wanted a bullet between her eyes, and called her the Human Devil. According to some newspaper reports in the early 1940s, she was stabbed once by an assassin and while convalescing was visited again by Nationalist soldiers disguised as doctors who beat her nearly to death with little hammers.

Weighing no more than ninety-five pounds, lithe and fox clever, skin pale as silken tofu, twenty-three year old Eastern Pearl survived to pursue her dreams with the fleetness of a Mongolian pony. Born Aisin Gioro Xianyu (愛新覺羅顯玗), with a courtesy name of Dongzhen (東珍), or Eastern Pearl, and a traditional name of Jin Bihui (金璧辉), she was a Manchu princess and cousin to the Qing Dynasty’s last emperor Puyi. Her father fled the Qing Court in disgrace to Japan after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, and on his deathbed when Eastern Pearl was only a child made her swear to free her Manchu homeland from Chinese bondage and see the Dragon Throne restored.

Her blood was of a prouder strain than her cousin’s, the boy emperor, a 1934 story published on Eastern Pearl in the Daily News wrote. “Sexually she was what is known as an intermediate type, an individual in whom glandular unbalance produces features, bones and build, texture of skin, hair and flesh, character and desires that are as much feminine as masculine.”

Eastern Pearl dedicated her life to the resurrection of the Manchu supremacy. From the Badlands of Shanghai, to the whorehouses of Peking to the opium dens and glitzy cabarets of Tientsin, she laughed at danger often times shifting her shape to slink behind enemy lines.

Step into Tientsin’s Underground

Tientsin (天津), known today as Tianjin, means Ford of Heaven, and is a sprawling port city southeast of Peking (Beijing), the capitol of China. The Tientsin Concessions were areas of the city sectioned off by Qing Emperor Doro Eldengge after the Chinese lost both opium wars to eight allied and foreign nations. Tientsin was also a retirement home for beaten warlords known for their chests of gold and silver.

A charming city, an interesting city, according to the Cambridge University Press, a city that washed the wealthy and fortunate ashore and into the foreign concessions. Shanghai was called a pearl, but real power – silver and gold – was buried in secret hiding places beneath the Astor Hotel.

The concessions were a haven for abdicated emperors, such as Puyi who resided in the Japanese Concession, and for ex-presidents like Xu Shichang, who enjoyed literature and gardening inside his British Concession mansion. After Republican President Cao Kun and his clique were beaten and betrayed by “Christian General” Feng Yuxiang, he came to Tientsin to lick his wounds. Few Tientsiners in the “Who’s Who in China” wanted to miss one of Cao’s birthday parties.

At the opposite end of the morality pole, Duan Qirui, once known as the most powerful man in China, lost his power through shady deals, and retired to Tientsin to build a private Buddhist temple. He was a weiqi player, and was quoted once as saying the troubles of China were demons sent down to earth and until they had all been killed the troubles would continue.

For up and comers like Eastern Pearl, and anyone else wanting to see and be seen, the “Paris” cabaret in the Japanese Concession was the hotspot during Tientsin’s roaring thirties. “Like moths to candles,” the Queenslander reported on April 16, 1936, “the wealth and fashion, the rapturous, the lost and the damned are attracted nightly to the tinsel and glitter of the “Paris” cabaret.”

Royalty and opium kings, soldiers and gunrunners, all were welcome, as long as they had silver.

Chinese, Polish and White Russian dancing girls lounged at postage stamp tables surrounding a dance floor, and were willing to romp for four shillings. Under pointed lights sparkling off lead glass decanters, the “Happy Hans” and his Russian musicians played the latest jazzy hits. The nightclub was always packed, always sizzling with intrigue.

Careful, weapons aren’t allowed, but nobody really checks.

Descending a short flight of stairs, the entryway opens up into a circular room. A piano enlivens the mood with a rendition of the Vernor Duke song “Autumn in New York.”

The nightclub hits all the senses. First the dim lighting, and as the eyes adjust the ole factories are buffeted by waves of thick smoke, the choking blues of cigarettes and sickly-sweet greens from opium. A fiery woman in a low-cut dress nudges past and heads toward the dance floor, wafting Old English Mitcham Lavendar – the “perfume that is England.”

The nose wants to follow, but the knees are suddenly weak.

Uniforms and golden epaulettes swallow the redhead, and a dozen languages, each vying for dominance in the room sound more like geese, late for their southern sojourns.

After a careful study, a White Russian hostess steps up to say the tables are taken, but there’s room at the bar. Before taking a short flight of stairs, she asks if company is needed…

In one dark corner, sandwiched between two concubines, the “Young Marshal” Zhang Xueliang, former Manchurian warlord, sips champagne. Hair neatly trimmed and slicked, Zhang’s boyish face is deceitfully innocent as he watches a well-known rebel leader dance the foxtrot with a woman in a bright pink dress. His gaze shivers the soul.

The most fashionable concubine leans into Zhang’s ear, momentarily distracting him. Jewels dangle from her neck, and as she whispers sweet nothings the second concubine pouts; her blood red lips form a perfect circle while she flicks ash from a long stem cigarette to the floor.

A picture taken of Eastern Jade while she was in Tientsin. – from online sources

Wu Yiting, the fox trotting man, may not have the Young Marshall’s armies, but he is no one to be trifled with either, and everyone in the “Paris” knows this. In Tientsin, however, it’s safer to be careful. Two bodyguards sit rigidly at a nearby table, light glinting off slender Nambu pisols, half hidden under napkins.

At the bar a scowling Japanese Gendarme, or Kempeitai, throws a sneer toward the British Consul-General Lancelot Giles. The Englishman is pale, even under the dim lighting, and pretends not to notice by listening in to a joke from an American explorer. Both are drinking Johnny Walker Red. A well-known Nazi talks up a Polish girl, too young for her line of work. Her face holds a jade sheen, sure tell sign she’s a heroin addict.

On the other side of the rounded bar, an Italian naval officer exuberantly agrees to a price from a fresh White Russian beauty in a tailored sailor’s suit. She jumps from her chair displaying legs even the Young Marshall notices, and into the Italian’s arms.

A backslidden American missionary, a group of smarmy silver smugglers and a Japanese detective take up the remaining chairs. Standing room only. Except for one last table, opposite the Young Marshall’s, where the Manchu Princess, Eastern Pearl, dances with a hostess. Like usual, she’s dressed in men’s clothes: white linen pants, riding boots, a white shirt tucked in, starched collar, loose, with a man’s tie. Her hair is short, parted slightly to the side. Step a little closer and a stocky man with one long eyebrow materializes from the shadows. Only her sideburns, hair pulled to a point across her cheeks, give her sex away, and then again… Her eight-year old son, born from her first marriage with a Mongolian prince, wants to go home.

He calls her father.

Hunter of Military Secrets

When the Qing Dynasty fell, Eastern Pearl was whisked secretly east to Japan, and brought up by Namiya Kawashima, a Japanese spy and adventurer. She was rechristened under a Japanese name, Yoshiko Kawashima, schooled in the Japanese system with an education befitting a high born lady, learning among other subjects judo and fencing.

As a child, she was aloof and quiet, rarely joining her classmates in games or friendship.

As a teenager her adopted father enjoyed raping her, and she turned to a bohemian lifestyle funded by rich lovers. She appeared to settle down for two years with a Mongolian Prince, but the marriage in actuality was her first mission, arranged by General Kenji Doihara, leader of the terrorist Black Dragon Society. She provided him with intelligence on Mongolian defenses, maps and weak points.

The first time Eastern Pearl met Doihara she was dressed as a woman. He ordered her out of his office, and asked how she got in.

“By my charms and my wits,” Eastern Pearl reportedly said. “I want to work for you.”

Doihara threw her out anyway. He had little use for a stick-thin, saucy Chinese woman.

Three days later Eastern Pearl arrived again, but as a man. According to The World’s News, Doihara came close to shooting her.

Eastern Pearl in a military uniform – from online sources

“I am the girl who was here three days ago,” Eastern Pearl said. She was dressed in a mandarin’s suit and skullcap, her hair was cut short. “And I still want to work for you.”

In Doihara, Eastern Pearl saw the one man she could yield to as a woman, The World’s News reported. To Doihara, Eastern Pearl was the one woman who could match his one hundred faces, “from sweetheart to as many sacrifices as were needed on the altar of Japan.”

“I determined to bob my hair when I was 16, and become a man,” Eastern Pearl said in The World’s News story. “My reason is the condition of China. I resolved to help China. But another reason is that I received many proposals of marriage. Some were of a kind that I could hardly with decency refuse if I remained a girl. I have not had any proposals or love-letters since I became a man.”

She led four hundred horseback soldiers in her homeland of Manchuria, never meeting defeat. When Japan’s invasion of Manchuria finished, she was hailed a heroine.

Eastern Pearl went on to Shanghai, becoming Dr. Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen’s younger brother’s secretary.

“He was not aware of who I was,” Eastern Pearl said for a Japanese magazine interview in 1933. “And it was well for Japan he did not know. I could not reveal my mission in Shanghai.”

After gleaning information from the Nationalist Party, she hurried back to Tientsin, disguised herself as a coolie and pulled up to the back door of the boy emperor Puyi’s mansion. Although the mansion was guarded, she had lived with her cousin and the Empress Wanrong when she stayed in Tientsin, and knew the secret passageways. She found her way to her cousin’s bedside and whispered into his ear.

“I am just a rickshaw man, your Lordship, but mighty friends of yours have sent me. I have clothes that are an indignity for you to wear, but they will help you get a throne.”

Initially, Puyi resented the idea of Japanese assistance in retaking the Dragon Throne, but Eastern Pearl persisted, saying that once he had the throne and was made emperor, no one would dare to stand in his way.

Puyi relented.

She slipped him out the back door, into the rickshaw. Guards yelled and gave chase. Night prowlers tried to stop the rickshaw, but Eastern Pearl ploughed her way through.

Two days later she delivered the last emperor to the Manchurian throne.

Puyi's Tientsin mansion - photo by C.S. Hagen

Puyi’s Tientsin mansion, Eastern Jade lived here when she was in Tientsin – photo by C.S. Hagen

The back door (door is original) from which Eastern Pearl helped Puyi escape to pursue dreams of ruling Manchuria – photo by C.S. Hagen

“Pearl’s Place”

Eastern Pearl became mistress to Puyi’s advisors, married a total of three Chinese princes, each time disappearing shortly after she learned what she needed and successfully procuring their fealty to Japan.

Enemies said she was evil since seventeen.

“She has spotless skin, looks like a prostitute and has got too familiar with Japanese generals, prominent politicians and leading financiers,” Chinese newspapers said of her at the time.

Eastern Pearl wouldn’t have disagreed. She was their plaything and she was doing nothing more than fulfilling her training. She chose the life of a courtesan rather than a wife because she was influencing wills and had a purpose – the restoration of the Manchurian throne.

With her cousin on the throne, she had two ambitions left to fulfill: the real independence of Manchuria, and the conquest of China.

She failed in both.

The Japanese offered Puyi lip service only. When rich Manchurian natural resources were exploited and sent to Japan, Eastern Pearl raged. She denounced Japan, called on her lovers to keep their promises. She caused dissension in the ranks of the Japanese Kwantung and Manchurian puppet armies and reported to North China Nationalist authorities.

Aisin Gioro Puyi (left) as the puppet emperor of Manchuria (right) after incarceration in a communist prison – from online sources

Nobody trusted her any longer. The Japanese Black Dragon Society decided to assassinate her, and then changed its mind. The Nationalists reportedly made two attempts on her life and missed.

“They [Japanese] are so proud of what they did in establishing Manchuria that they regard the Manchurians as inferior people,” she is quoted as saying in an article in The News. “Even a Japanese beggar in Changchun looks down on a Manchurian beggar.”

She disappeared for a time, resurfacing in Peking as the proprietor of “Pearl’s Place,” a restaurant and meeting point for Japanese agents, their collaborators and her lovers. Her restaurant didn’t make money. She spent thousands on trinkets and opium. When she grew tired of one lover, male or female, she found another.

“A favorite method of disposing of a lover who displeased her, or failed in the carrying out of a promise, was to encourage jealousy,” The World’s News reported on September 1, 1951. “This was easy [for her] as few prominent men were strong enough to resist her beauty and fascination once she set after them.”

“She was the most remarkable woman spy the East has known,” reported The News on April 7, 1948. “A woman who was termed the Pearl of Asia, the Jeanne d’Arc of China and Japan’s Mata Hari.”

Eastern Pearl before shortly before her "execution" - not yet 40 years old

The painting of a photograph supposedly taken in 1986 of Eastern Pearl, years after her supposed execution. – from the Chinese Phoenix News Media

After more than a decade of undercover work, indiscriminate sex and opium, Eastern Pearl lost her luster. Her near forty-year-old body was racked with illness, which, according to some newspapers, was syphilis.

Ironically, it was a Chinese spy, posing as her servant, who betrayed her to Nationalist police. She was arrested after World War II on November 11, 1945 wearing a Japanese general’s uniform. Defeat and opium had dulled her mind and body. Her face, according to the Chinese press at the time, resembled the English letter V.

Eastern Jade spent her last days poorly clad, shivering and almost toothless in a prison. In Peking Central Court the “Human Devil” admitted her relationships to Japanese war criminals, but pleaded not guilty on treason against China. On October 23, 1947 Eastern Pearl was sentenced to death. Among other crimes she was accused of participating with the kidnapping of the Generalissimo, assistance with the assassination of warlord Zhang Zuolin, and as being the number one lieutenant of General Kenji Doihara. She would have been sentenced earlier if not for thronging crowds striving to catch a glimpse of her while on her way to a Peking court. When the judge read her death sentence, “she smiled with seeming unconcern,” reported The West Australian.

A black and white photograph taken after her execution was released and given to the Generalissimo, but rumors persisted that she had enticed a woman to take her place and she escaped. Only two American photographers were allowed to take Eastern Jade’s picture, who is named as Chuandao Fangzi (川岛芳子), after her Japanese name. The Chinese press was banned. The photograph is grainy, and out of focus. Not proof enough, with half her face missing, that the woman in the picture is Jin Bihui, Dongzhen – the Eastern Pearl, Yoshiko Kawashima – the Mata Hari of the East, the Human Devil.

In 2008 a Chinese artist named Zhang Yu (张钰) rocked Chinese media with an announcement that a person she had grown up with was none other than Eastern Jade, who passed away in 1978, not in 1947. She had been living in Changchun as a woman named “Granny Fang” (方姥姥). The Chinese Phoenix News Media featured the story in 2011, but said there was no concrete evidence to prove Zhang Yu’s claims. Both bodies had been cremated; DNA samples could not be investigated. Her fingerprints were not left behind on books as “Granny Fang” used tweezers to turn the pages. Among other artifacts “Granny Fang” left behind was a gold lion reportedly a gift for her former male secretary Xiaofang Balang (小方八郎), which she was unable to give. A cryptic and poetic note was found inside the statue, which had a filled-in crack at the bottom. The note is difficult to translate.

The cryptic note Eastern Jade allegedly left behind – from the Chinese Phoenix News Media

芳魂回天   Fang hun hui tian
至未归来   Zhi wei gui lai
含悲九泉   Han bei jiu quan
达今奇才   Da jin qi cai

Fang’s spirit returns to the heavens, not to return. There’s sadness from the nine springs, reach for genius only.

Investigators also found a pair of binoculars with Eastern Jade’s Japanese phonetic initials – HK – engraved into the adjustment rings inside a locked suitcase, Chinese Phoenix Media reported. According to some top police officials who performed handwriting comparisons, the evidence was enough; Granny Fang was Eastern Pearl. If true, the Human Devil would have been 71 years old at the time of her death, which then begs the question, who was the girl in the photograph? A lover? A fellow spy? A paid patsy? Or are Zhang Yu’s claims simply a desperate reach for attention, and Eastern Jade was executed when official records say she was?

“If you say she used tweezers to read books, you can’t help but suspect she was a spy,” the Chinese Phoenix Media commentator said. “Very mysterious.”

According to official sources from 1947 Eastern Pearl pleaded with authorities not to make a show of her execution. She wanted no press, and one clean shot to the back of the head. An unknown Japanese monk collected her body for cremation, sending her remains to a Japanese monastery.

The picture taken after Eastern Pearl’s execution – graphic – but its authenticity has been debated since 1947. – from online sources

The Broken City – Tientsin at War – Part X

April 18, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

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

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

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

“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 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

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 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

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, 3^rd 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

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.”

When 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 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.

Photos by C.S. Hagen - 74 Munan Road, formerly Hong Kong Road, Li Baowu's house, presently Goubuli restaurant. From 1997 - 2000 was known as Broadway Cafe.

Crate Ripper Case

February 16, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crate Ripper Case Revisited

February 15, 2014 / CSHagen / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA – Sixty-seven years after the Crate Ripper Case was solved, old Tientsin hands remember the mysterious murder like it was yesterday.

Angela Cox Elliott, born in a civilian prison at the Japanese Weihsien Internment Camp, was only a child when Li Baowu and his lover, Shi Meili, otherwise known as Marion Sze, killed, beheaded and dismembered Baowu’s first wife, Dong Yuzhen, sensationally startling the world in the process, and adding its own death nail into the traditions of polygamous marriage. She remembers it was the talk of the city until long after the communist takeover.

Time and gossip have pretzel-ed fact and fiction, but the truth – provided by eyewitnesses who still remember – proves the murder was premeditated, and is more gruesome than anything else reported on the incident since October 25, 1947, the day Dong Yuzhen died.

(Left) A movie produced in Hong Kong late 1947 called “Empty Crate Corpse” (空屋箱尸) featured the heinous crime. (Center) Dong Zhengguo, (董政國) a Tianjin warlord, died May 20, 1947 of illness, only four months before his daughter’s grisly murder on October, 25 1947. (Right) Dong Yuzhen (董玉贞), 35, mother of four, known in the Western press as Chaste Jade, was the victim.

Li Baowu, also known as Walter Li, was the vice general manager for the Tientsin Chung Tien Electric Factory. He enjoyed model cars and women, so much so he kept three wives and a host of prostitutes across the city. Marion was pale-skinned, of Sino-German blood, and a rare beauty – eyebrows arched like a kingfisher’s – who loved her furs and diamond rings. The couple was not married, but Walter Li lived with Marion at number fifty-three Dali Road, often neglecting his first wife and children.

A telephone made by the Tientsin Chung Tien Electric Company

Dong Yuzhen, known in Western media as Chaste Jade, frequently visited her husband at the Dali Road house where arguments inevitably ensued. If Marion received a fox fur coat, Chaste Jade naturally wanted a Siberian mink coat. They argued loud enough to disturb the neighbors.

The Crate Ripper Case was not only reported in Tianjin, known as Tientsin in pre-liberation days, but headlined in international newspapers ranging from Massachusetts to Singapore.

The Lowell Sun splayed the story on November 14, 1937 with the headline Chaste Jade’s Murder Rocks Tientsin.

“A beautiful Eurasian girl, a socially prominent Chinese businessman, and his first wife, Chaste Jade, are the principals in one of the bloodiest triangle murders yet splashed on the front pages of the Tientsin press,” the article written by Al Wedekind began. Dong Yuzhen is named Chaste Jade, her murderous husband’s English name is Walter Li, who was listed as thirty-eight years old, and Shi Meili was named Marion Sze, who was twenty-seven at the time.

“Li had been separated from his first wife several years,” the article continues. “On the morning of October twenty-fifth, Chaste Jade called at his home on one of her periodic guests [visits] for money.

“She did not leave the house alive.”

Story as published by the Lowell Star in 1947

The Indiana newspaper Tipton Tribune also published the story on the same day. The article states Chaste Jade had been mutilated and burned and that the family with whom Marion left the crate containing Chaste Jade’s dismembered body had notified police after noticing a strange smell.

Marion left the crate at her friend’s house as she was planning on leaving, and said it was heavy because it was filled with gold bars. She waved away concerns by blaming a strange odor emanating from the crate on cat urine.

According to foreign Tianjiners at the time, a dog found the crate several days later, and created a ruckus that could not be ignored. Shortly before Marion’s arrest and while carving ham for dinner at a friend’s house, Marion flippantly mentioned it was much like slicing human flesh. No one paid her any attention as their minds were on the supposed gold bars locked away in the smelly crate.

The stories scared Elliott, who was only five years old at the time. She reflected to when she was a child sitting in Victoria Park across the street from the Astor Hotel, watching Marion’s elderly parents.

“Why is that dog sniffing around the crate?” Elliott recalls her mother saying about the dog that wouldn’t leave the crate alone. “You would think there was a dead body in it.”

No one would have guessed that there truly was a dead body in the crate. It wasn’t until the fishy smell became too much to bear and a sticky substance bubbled from a crack that police were notified. After all, they were friends.

During the past decade Chinese media ranging from CCTV to the Tianjin Film Studio to the China Daily have electrified the Crate Ripper Case saying it was the “last case of the Nationalists, the first case of the communists.” Reports differ on where Chaste Jade’s body was stored and whether the animal sniffing the crates was a cat named Snowball or a curious dog. Another differing report is that according to CCTV Walter and Marion took the body back to Chaste Jade’s house at seventy-four Hong Kong Road (now Munan Road) to dismember in her own bathtub before hauling her in a whicker crate to a friend’s apartment.

As a third generation expatriate in China, Elliott remembers watching a play about the murder before being banished with her family after nearly a century of calling China their home. Her great grandfather Paul Splingaerd, known around the world at the time as the Belgian Mandarin, arrived in China in 1865. Paul Splingaerd was appointed a mandarin of the imperial Qing Dynasty, working not only as a magistrate, but also as an industrialist for China before his death in Xi’an in 1906.

“There was a reenactment of the play that I went to see with Mum,” Elliott said. “I can still picture it – the scene with Mrs. Li – he hits her, she konks out – she’s loaded into the bathroom and then him coming out and they’re discussing whether they would cut the body up. I can’t remember from then on. It was just a one-room act.”

In Singapore, the case was called the “Tientsin’s Torso Murder Case,” according to November 4, 1947 article in the Singapore Free Press. Tianjin locals became enraged. The president of the Tientsin Middle School, Lu Yi Jen, appealed in a heavily reported speech to all Chinese women demanding an end to polygamous marriages.

“Marion was a very pretty girl, a big show off,” Elliott said. “She bragged about all the items Mister Li bestowed on her. The story goes that his wife accepted the relationship. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for a man to have another girl or sometimes several, except the wife stipulated that whatever he gave Marion, she wanted the same thing.

“I can’t really remember what it was the wife missed out on. A fur coat, or a ring precipitated the final scene when the wife paid a visit to Mister Li ensuring her demise.”

Most media report Walter and Marion decapitated Chaste Jade and burned her face, wrapping her body parts in a rug. But this is not what happened. Not at all.

The night before the murder took place, Walter and Marion played nice with Chaste Jade, expressing a desire to make up for past mistakes. Chaste Jade purchased a typewriter for Marion, as Marion agreed to move to Beijing. Instead of moving, however, she invited Chaste Jade for dinner, catered by Kiesslings, inside her Dali Road house. Wine and liquor was poured. Conversations turned sour. Chaste Jade threw a cup and Walter beat her head in with a hammer, breaking her left arm in the process.

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

After four hours waiting the necessary tools were procured. Chaste Jade’s limp body was put into the bathtub and dismembered. Blood pooled down the drain. Four days later when police discovered the contents inside the whicker crate, her body parts wrapped in towels, they also noticed Chaste Jade’s head was missing. Her severed head was found inside Marion’s oven. Walter filed a missing person’s report on October twenty-sixth, but the couple was arrested on Halloween, October thirty-first. Marion admitted to holding Chaste Jade’s feet, urging Walter to strike harder during the altercation. She later recanted.

The bathtub in which Dong Yuzhen (Chaste Jade) was killed, according to CCTV.

The bathtub in which Dong Yuzhen (Chaste Jade) was dismembered, according to CCTV.

One eyewitness account reports seeing Marion the day she was arrested. She waved helplessly as a police car pulled up next to her. The next day Marion’s parents came asking for help, but there was no help to be had. Marion needed a lawyer.

“Marion’s mother was a portly, old German lady, but so sweet,” Elliott said. “Mister Shi was very thin. It was embarrassing for me to speak with them and I felt very sorry for the old couple. No doubt Marion must have been a spoilt child.”

Elliott was barely five years old when the Crate Ripper Case stole headlines across the world. Having just been rescued by US Paratroopers from the Japanese Weihsien Concentration Camp only two years before, Tianjin was not how she left it and tensions were brewing. The Japanese were gone, but the Nationalists were corrupt; the communists were coming, and Chaste Jade’s murder sparked fury not only against the culprits, but against foreigners as well.

One rumor was that Walter had hired a foreign surgeon to carve up his wife. Another story is that the couple had purchased tickets for Hong Kong to escape, but cold weather and ice floes on the Hai River delayed their route. Most international transportation started on passenger and trading ships navigating the Hai River in pre-liberation days, and then traveled south to Shanghai or Hong Kong. Another story, and possibly the strangest, was written in a short story by Tientsin-native Alex Auswaks, a Jerusalem-based crime fiction writer. He reports in 1994 that Marion was a breath taker, had olive skin, high cheekbones, long, straight, jet-black hair from her father and a curvaceous figure from her mother, a German woman named Josefa Hoffman. She was fluent in German, Chinese and English, and had a large crowd of suitors.

At school, Marion was a tomboy, but her mother said she was simply high spirited. When Marion came home once from an opium party, her mother said she had a fever. No matter her curiosities, Mrs. Hoffman, better known as Frau Shi, said her daughter was loyal. Loyal to the bitter end when she helped Walter cover up a murder he committed by himself – perhaps – going as far as to contact a German friend, Adolf Fleischmann, a lover or would-be suitor who would have done anything to help.

She was a model prisoner, adapting readily to the communist’s reeducation programs. Her loyalty is questioned, however, when she was released early from Xiqing District’s Xiaoxiguan Prison to shack up with the warden. Auswaks’ rendition of the story leaves more questions than answers.

(Left) The Dali Road House (25 Dali Road, 大力道25号) where Marion Shi (施美丽) and Walter Li (李宝旿) resided and where Dong Yuzhen (Chaste Jade) was killed. (Middle) The Jing Ming Apartments（景明大楼）on Tai’an Road (泰安道) where the whicker crate with Chaste Jade’s body was kept and later found. (Right) The Hong Kong Road (74 Munan Road 睦南道74号) Li family house where Chaste Jade lived with her family.

For days Walter and Marion avoided the truth and police inspectors. The investigation that followed first targeted rickshaw drivers and the local bandits. Walter told Kuomintang Tianjin Chief Superintendent Xiao that bandits had probably overheard the argument he had with his first wife and that she was robbed for money, all the while sliding a thick wad of bills into the officer’s lap. Walter spent hundreds of thousands bribing police, so much that it was learned later that nearly every Tianjin police officer benefited from his unreserved charity at some time during his incarceration. He eventually cracked under twelve hours of Kuomintang police interrogation, however, and was later sentenced to death, but spent the next two years in luxury at the Xiaoxiguan Prison. Marion was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The couple lacked for nothing while in prison and before the communist forces overwhelmed the Republic. Walter wore his own clothes, slept on a soft Western bed. He even hired his personal chef to cook his meals.

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

Eliott and her family stayed in Tianjin until 1956, nearly seven years after the communist takeover. The years between 1949 and her departure were bleak. The sparkling clubs lost their luster and once colorful parades down Victoria Street (now Liberation Street) disappeared. Meat, oil and rice were rationed. Coffee was brewed with chicory. Communist officials squeezed remaining families and factories until payrolls could not be met.

Angela Cox Elliott

Elliott’s father worked for the Credit Foncier d/extreme Orient at the corner of Rue de France and Victoria Road, and held out against communist demands as long as he could. Eventually, his company was forced to shut down, its property given up, and her family boarded the Heinrich Jessen ship to Hong Kong.

Elliott waited more than thirty years to return to Tianjin, which she now considers her home. As a child, however, she couldn’t wait to leave and go abroad where English was spoken and the streets were clean and filled with lights. In 1999 Elliott visited the Dali Road house and found the old bathtub. The house was in decent condition, and people still spoke of the gruesome murder. Marion was released in 1954 and was said to be working at the Ambassador Hotel in Hong Kong. Local legend says she returned once to her Dali Road home after the Cultural Revolution and then begged the Li family for forgiveness.

None was given.