Tag: CS Hagen

Interview with a Fox Demon

January 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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

 

By C.S. Hagen 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Fated for Possession

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

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

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

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

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

And both men underwent three years of intense sickness.

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

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

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

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

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

Old Wu and the First Possession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Wu practiced in secret.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He was happy until the end.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with the Boluo Fox

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

The answer was yes.

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

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

The Stone Buddha - photo by C.S. Hagen

The Stone Buddha – photo by C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hei-ki-ma-hei-ki-ma.”

 

Family Fox Feud at Boluo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ying refused to speak on the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Boluo Fox is real.”

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 / / 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more about fox demons here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeoow!  Yaaawww!  Meeeeooow! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Fox Poem

Author Anonymous, translated by C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

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

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

A Chinese charm for exorcising fox demons

A Chinese charm for exorcising fox demons

Barbarians as depicted by the Classic of Mountain and Seas

Us, Round-eyed Millet Eaters

January 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xenophobic Politics

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ancient character for barbarian.

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

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

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

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

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

The Millet Eaters

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

Monkey, some would say.

Foreign devil.  Longhaired demon, others would mention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

 

Red Lanterns Rising

December 7, 2013 / / 0 Comments

By. C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

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

A white lotus flower

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A representational painting of the Red Lantern - artist unknown

A representational painting of the Red Lantern – artist unknown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Front door to Luzu Temple, the world's only true Boxer museum

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

November 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

Except in Tianjin.

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

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

 

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

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

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

Luzu Temple

Luzu Temple, the world’s only true Boxer museum

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

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

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

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

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

Boxer weapons

Boxer weapons

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

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

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

Boxer workout weights

Boxer workout weights

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

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

According to Brown, the interviewee was a Boxer spy.

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

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

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

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

Former Chairman Mao Zedong idolized the Boxers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back room behind pulpit inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

A Tianjin Haunting

November 21, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Grave behind Purple Bamboo Grove Church outside of the old English Concession. Watchmen of the church say it belongs to a young boy, anonymous.

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

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

The ceramic toy Santa at the grave

The ceramic toy Santa at the grave

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

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

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

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

‘Mao Zedong Thought,’ the slogan says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

Inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

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

Purple Bamboo Grove altar

Purple Bamboo Grove altar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Partially stained glass window

Partially stained glass window

 

Back room behind pulpit inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

Back room behind pulpit inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

 

A Dark Drifter, or just a man alone fishing for snakes along the Hai River?

Tianjin Dark Drifters

November 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

By C.S. Hagen 

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

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

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

Dark Drifter History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Drifters Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dracula’s Lair

October 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments
Entrance to Snagov Lake, the final resting place of Vlad III The Impaler, more commonly known as Dracula.

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

By Chris Hagen 

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

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

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

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

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

Poenari Fortress - where the legends began

Poenari Fortress – where the legends began

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D01 10-29-2011 WDT

Story published in the Wilson Times 2011

D01 10-29-2011 WDT

 

 

 

 

 

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