Tag: Hai River

The Case of the Ghost Market Human Head

By C.S. Hagen

TIENTSIN, CHINA – The sun had set. Mama was braising supper, fresh carp with scallions and cone-shaped corn cakes called sticky bobo, Bangchui’s favorite. Baba, his usual grumpy self, was home from pulling a rickshaw, smelling sweaty, chain-smoking Double Crane cigarettes.

“Bangchui,” Mama said. She gave the giant wok a pull, slopping thickening soy sauce onto the stone oven. Flames burped from the hearth. “Go take a bath. Dinner is almost ready.”

“But…” The twelve-year-old boy’s stomach growled.

“No buts.” Blue smoke hid Baba’s face. “Do as you’re told.”

“Yes, Baba.”

“Should have named you Lazy Worm. You aren’t worthy to carry the Hao family name. Go. Hurry back. The American soldiers always cause havoc on the weekends.”

Giving Baba a wide berth, Bangchui closed the rickety front door behind him. The Hai River wasn’t far. He’d spent all afternoon swimming, he didn’t need a bath, and to make matters worse, he was hungry. Despite the lack of streetlights, Bangchui could find his way to the riverbank blindfolded.  Perhaps he could catch a water snake or a fat frog to take home and eat, fried with lots of garlic and chives.

A Chinese Junk - transliteration of the Portuguese word Junco - photo by C.S. Hagen

A Junk – from Portuguese word Junco – by C.S. Hagen

Moonlight painted the Hai River silver, inviting him in. Junks and sampans were silent, bobbing gently. An American gunboat billowed a long smoke trail, heading east toward the ocean. Barely two years since the Japanese surrendered, and the city was swarming once again with foreign soldiers, only these ones resembled monsters from the Monkey King’s Journey to the West. Fiery red hair and burning green eyes, they drove their Jeeps through town with abandon, laughing, and smelling of strange spirits.

Bangchui spat in the ship’s direction. Baba said the Americans were good for Tientsin, but he knew better. Stupid Roundeyes. They couldn’t even speak proper words.

Thick mud oozed between his bare toes. He enjoyed the sensation, and dug deeper, disturbing tadpoles and a frog too small to eat. Not far away, an object bobbed to the surface, winked at him, and then sank.

“What’s this?” Bangchui took a step closer, remembering his clothes. Hurriedly, he stripped and dove naked into the cool waters, his bathtub. Swimming toward where he last saw the object, it resurfaced two meters downstream. He dove, kicking his legs like the mighty Zhang Heng from Water Margin and caught the bundle before it sank too low.

The object was heavy, tied at the top with a string he couldn’t pry apart. He dragged it the river’s edge, and waited for the water to drain. What was inside? Silver? No, silver was too heavy to float. Paper money, yes that was it. Surely some local hooligan had dumped the bundle filled with loot into the river for a quick escape. Or perhaps a communist spy from the Eighth Route Army had lost his cash while fleeing from Kuomintang police. The possibilities were endless.

Tianjn hutong - by C.S. Hagen

Tianjn hutong – by C.S. Hagen

Making sure no one was watching, he hugged the bundle to his bony chest, and set off toward home. Flat feet smacked the stones loudly, but he was in a hurry. He couldn’t remember one time when Baba had said a kind word to him. Today, his luck had changed. Baba was surely to be impressed.

An elderly couple out for a stroll gave Bangchui pause at the corner to his alley. Squeezing behind a chicken coop, he waited. He could not risk being seen with such a prize. Arms wrapped tightly around the bundle, it felt strangely warm against his bare chest.

Baduum.

It had a heartbeat.

Baduum… baduum… The beats grew louder, faster, pumping into his arms, up to his shoulders and neck.   His ears burned. A chicken pecked his bare knee, drawing blood. The old couple shuffled past and then he realized the rhythm came from his own racing heart.

Fingering the bundle, Bangchui suddenly became a huihuir, no, better yet, a Han spy, escaping the Forbidden City with arms full of treasure. He was Li Kui and Guanyu and Liu Bei and Cao Cao, brave heroes from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, all rolled into one. The thought emboldened him. A chicken squawked in protest. He kicked at the cage. The chicken pecked at his toe, missed.

Chuckling, he broke into a run, speeding down the narrow alleyway, and burst into his house. The front door clanged against the earthen wall, showering him with dust from the rafters. Words caught in his throat. All at once the pungent fish aroma, his father’s cigarette smoke, and the oval-eyed, astonished looks from his parents were a breath-taking attack on all his senses. Mission accomplished. Proudly, he hefted the bundle toward the ceiling. “Look what I’ve found.” His voice cracked.

“Bangchui.” Mama nearly shrieked. “Where are your clothes?”

 

The Hai River at night - photo by C.S. Hagen

Tianjin’s Hai River at night – photo by C.S. Hagen

WHEN BANGCHUI RETURNED, clothed, the bundle was resting on the family table. Baba was tugging the string to little avail.

“You’re only making the knot tighter,” Mama said. She brought scissors out from a drawer. “I’m just not sure about these things. Perhaps we shouldn’t open it.” She snipped the first string. “We all know the story about the poor merchant finding a pot of gold along the road.”

A second snip. The bundle loosened, an inch.

“You and your superstitions,” Baba said. “Just cut the strings.”

“The poisonous golden worm, I tell you. Once you let it in the house it might bring you luck, but it comes with a cost, and can only be satisfied with human blood. Best to leave these things where they lay.” She cut the final string.

Baba peeled the bundle’s layers back like a mangosteen’s thick skin. “This is a fine weave.” He fingered the cloth. Bangchui’s heart soared.

Mama’s scream pierced Bangchui’s ears with the nerve-shattering ferocity of a diving Japanese Zero. Suddenly, his skin crawled with Goosebumps. Baba stumbled backward, knocking over a chair, his fingers shaking as he pointed toward the bundle. Bangchui hurried closer for a look. Center table, wrapped in wax cloth, sat a human head.

The Case of the Ghost Market Human Head, noted in Tientsin historical documents as one of the “Eight Strange Cases of the Republic,” had begun.

 

The Restauranteur’s Second Wife

Police Investigator Xia Menghai appraised the crowd surrounding the Hao residence with hesitancy. Another call into the hutongs, third time this week, for his overworked, underpaid, and severely under-appreciated position. Wasn’t easy being a Tientsin police officer anymore. The day before he settled two domestic disputes, broke up an upstart thieving ring, pocketed their scores, and then was ordered into a Nankai University student march protesting the presence of American soldiers in the city.

His measly paycheck was hardly enough to feed his wife and two children, not to mention the mistress he kept on the sly lodged in the old French Concession. These days, he couldn’t spend money fast enough to keep up with the inflation. Ends had to be met, however, such was life. He didn’t blink twice when opportunities arose, such as manhandling a plump pimp for petty cash. His favorite, though, was drug smugglers, still shoveling their trade after the Japanese surrender. The call for illegal opium in Tientsin was still as strong, and much more profitable, as it was before the war.

Life was simpler during the war days. Cleaner, somehow. More righteous. If only he was paid enough perhaps he could straighten his ways. Now, he was just another cop, walking his beats, robbing rich and poor to stay one step ahead of his creditors. Investigator Xia sighed. Above it all, however, he was downright bored.

“Inspector, inspector.” A middle-aged man pushed through the crowd and greeted him. Inspector Xia nodded, puffed out his chest, and approached.

“Old Hao, I presume?” Inspector Xia said. “What is all the fuss about?”

“You aren’t going to believe it,” Old Hao said.  He was a middle-aged man baring rusty teeth. “Come in, come in, inspector. Please. Have some tea. It’s tasteless as a northwest wind, but it’s wet, and warm.”

“No thank you. State your business. I’m a busy man.”

“Yes, yes, my apologies for bothering a man of your lofty position,” Old Hao said.

Investigator Xia stooped to enter the shack, which reeked of mud and something not unlike sewage. He stifled a cough. Eyes slowly accustomed to the gloom. A one-room apartment. Kitchen. A stone kang doubled as a couch. Hardly room for a family of three. He’d seen it all before, too many times to count. Day-old fish sat uneaten in a wok. Flies swarmed. That was a pity. All Tientsiners, including himself, enjoyed braised fish and sticky corn cakes. Perhaps, these poor people truly did have an emergency after all.

A child, tear tracks across his cheeks, slumped in a far corner. A plain woman, dressed in black pantaloons and a sleeveless shirt, presumably the mother, patted the child’s back none too gently. Old Hao excitedly pointed to a bundle sitting on a small table. The cloth was beyond this family’s means, most likely fine linen.

Without waiting, Inspector Xia peeled back a layer, and jumped.

“What’s the meaning of this?”

“My son…”

“I should have brought backup. Who is responsible? Who is that… that head?”

“Please don’t be angry,” Old Hao said. “I can explain.”

“You better explain, and speak quickly, or you’ll all be wearing shackles.”

“My son was bathing in the river, and he found this head. He brought it home thinking it was treasure. Oh why, couldn’t he have left it alone? No good son of mine. He’s too curious for his own good.”

“Is this true?” Inspector Xia turned his wrath on the son. “What is your name?”

“Bangchui.” The boy wiped snot across his nose.

“Bangchui? What kind of a name is that? Why are you called a wooden hammer?”

Old Hao stepped too close. Inspector Xia held out a hand.

“We named him Bangchui so that he would be passed over by the King of Hell,” Old Hao said.

Inspector Xia had heard of such beliefs. Not prone to superstitions, he gave little credence to the seven hells or any heaven. Some lesser folk, however, believed in bestowing strange names to their children in order for Yan Wangye, the King of Hell, to overlook them.

“Do you have witnesses?” Inspector Xia said.

Bangchui shook his head.

“He’s a good boy,” the boy’s mama said. “Ask the neighbors. He thought he was bringing home a prize.”

Inspector Xia grunted. He’d seen beheadings before, during the Japanese occupation, and while he was fighting the Island Dwarfs in nearby Shantung Province, but not in Tientsin. The boy had sticks for arms. He doubted such a poor family had anything to do with murder. More than likely expected a reward, though.

“So who is this woman?” He peeled back a layer, eyeing the head. Young, even pretty, for a severed head. Long, black hair, lips thick as mandarin orange slices.

“We don’t know,” Old Hao said.

“Very well. All of you need to accompany me to the police station.” Mama gasped. “I’m not charging any of you. Yet.” Inspector Xia hefted the head. Heavier than he thought possible. “First, Bangchui, show me where you found it.”

 

A TRAFFIC POLICE officer identified the severed head. It belonged to Liu Shi, second wife or the er nainai of Wang Jinyuan, the famous Suxiang Zhai restaurant owner. Inspector Xia smelled a family quarrel, but when he arrived at the Wang residence, the house was quiet, tidy. Old Xu, the Wang household manager and his personal wine-meat friend, was finishing up an argument with a watermelon seller, saying the melons weren’t ripe, and had to be taken away.

Old Xu invited him in for tea.

“What can I do to help you, Inspector Xia?” Old Xu smoothed his long shirt across his legs, adjusted wire-rimmed glasses. He was a decent looking man, neither too thin, nor too fat, middle aged, without a wrinkle, and teeth white as ivory. He was a wine-meat friend because they were not close, but had met when the occasion called at Suxiang Zhai for drinks and dinners. He didn’t appear ill at ease with the inspector’s sudden arrival, but then a man of his position hadn’t achieved such success by wearing his emotions on his sleeve. Old Xu signaled for a servant to pour tea.

“How is Wang Jinyuan’s health?” Inspector Xia asked of Wang Jinyuan. The tea was fragrant, perfectly warmed. The servant left the teapot’s spout pointing directly at Old Xu, a mistake, in the olden days, worthy of dismissal.

Old Xu nudged the teapot’s spot toward the wall. “Well enough,” he said. “Does your arrival have something to do with Wang Laoye?”

“Umm, how is his first wife?”

“She is well. Thank you for your consideration. Why do you ask?”

“How about Wang Laoye’s grandmother on his father’s side?”

“She passed away years ago. Really, old friend, what is the reason for all these questions?”

Inspector Xia paused for emphasis. “And how about er nainai, the second wife?”

“She is well, although I haven’t seen her for several days.”

“You haven’t seen her?” Inspector Xia pushed back his chair and stood. “And why is that exactly?”

Old Xu nearly dropped his teacup. “They live in the interior of the compound. I stay here with Zhou Liang and Pang Guang, the runners.” Old Xu pointed out the Ming Dynasty window to where two young men sat idle in the courtyard. “Perhaps she isn’t feeling well.”

The answer made sense, but Inspector Xia wasn’t entirely convinced. Everyone was guilty in his mind until proven innocent. Still, he wasn’t going to get any easy information if he leaned on the suspects too hard without ample reason.

“I have no authority over where or when she goes.” Old Xu said. “Would you like to speak with Wang Laoye?”

The invitation stole some wind from Inspector Xia’s sails. It wasn’t proper for him, a simple police investigator, to barge in on a man of Wang Laoye’s position without evidence. “That wouldn’t be proper. I think it’s best you bring him the news.”

“News?”

Inspector Xia slumped back into the chair. A powerfully sour feeling rose from his gut, stinging his throat, warning him this case wasn’t going to be easy to solve. His teacup was empty. “News, old friend, of the direst kind.”

 

A Terrible Fright

After Wang Laoye heard the news, he was overcome with grief. And not the faked kind, Old Xu noticed. His boss was genuinely distressed. Old Xu tried to placate, insisting there was no need for him to personally identify the head, but Wang Laoye wouldn’t hear of anything else.

News of the murder swept through Tientsin faster than a Gobi Desert sandstorm, scooping all local news agencies, including the Takung Pao, the largest newspaper company in the area. Poor neighbors gathered around the Wang family’s large estate, nestled into the old city’s north side, begging for an audience. Some wanted to sell their living daughters to replace Liu Shi, the second wife. One woman, approximately Liu Shi’s age – around twenty-two – offered to commit suicide on the spot for a small fee, to be given to her children, so second wife could be buried with a body.

Noble though the requests may be, Old Xu denied them all. Second wife’s head was stored in an old wooden ice chest. Despite police efforts to find her body, two days passed, and then three. The funeral could not wait. Preparations were made, and second wife’s head was buried in a full-sized coffin with ceremony in the Wang family cemetery.

Typical  Chinese gravesite - photo by C.S. Hagen

Typical well-to-do Chinese gravesite – photo by C.S. Hagen

A new commotion stirred in Tientsin one week after the burial. Liu Shi’s body was discovered in a watermelon patch outside the city. The watermelon farmer, Lao Jia, was arrested, and later released for lack of evidence. Inside the Wang family’s mansion, preparations, once again, were made to reunite second wife’s head and her body, but the ordeal called for someone with surgeon-like hands, to sew the pieces together. Lao Xu turned to the local Da Liao, who was actually a teahouse owner, wise man, pharmacist, and brave soul, capable of such a chore.

“In those days the Da Liao was a type of local wise man,” the radio report from FSM Telecommunications Corporation on Dot FM reported. “People turned to the Da Liao anytime they were in trouble, and the Da Liao was expected to have the answers.”

Because second wife’s husband, Wang Laoye, was a pillar in the community, the Da Liao agreed to the gruesome deed. A second funeral procession, including Wang Laoye, Lao Xu, the Wang family runners Zhou Liang and Pang Guang, who were to dig up the grave, attended. Wang Laoye, in his distress, carried the white soul banner, a responsibility usually reserved for a son or daughter, and led the small procession to his second wife’s grave, weeping the entire route.

Second wife’s severed head and body could not be touched by sunlight, moonlight, and starlight; a golden blanket was spread across the grave. Blindly, Da Liao pried open the coffin, inserted a hand, and went no further.

“What is it, Da Liao?” Wang Laoye said.

“Don’t be afraid,” Da Liao said.

“Is her head there?” Wang Laoye pushed his formidable weight forward, short moustache twitching in anticipation. “What are you touching?”

The Wang family runners quailed, and dropped to the ground.

“I am touching a hand,” Da Liao said.

“What?” Wang Loaye pawed at the grave’s side, kicking up dirt like a dog digging a hole.

“Stop.” Da Liao said.

Wang Laoye slumped to his side. The white soul banner lay on the dirt beside him.

Da Liao closed his eyes and reached further inside the coffin. “I have found the hand again, and there is a body. Are you sure you only buried a head?”

“Yes.” Wang Laoye wailed. “How can this be? Has my beloved wife grown a new body?”

“Don’t be silly.” Da Liao withdrew his hand to throw back the blanket.

“No.” Wang Laoye shrieked. “We must wait for morning. I am a Scorpio, anyone who dares move will have to deal with my sting.” Old Xu was confused to what Scorpio meant, and feared his boss was losing his mind. Wang Laoye struggled to his feet, picked up the white soul banner, and began parading around the grave, chanting like a priest.

A Daoists's blue robes - photo by C.S. Hagen

A Daoists’s blue robes – by C.S. Hagen

The Da Liao relented to Wang Laoye’s wishes, sending Lao Xu to bring Tientsin police. The group waited until morning, and in the presence of a grumbling, sleepy-eyed Investigator Xia, threw back the golden cover, revealing a man’s body in Daoist robes meticulously placed beneath second wife’s head. The man had half a purplish birthmark on his neck, and no other injuries besides a missing head.

The sour smell sent onlookers recoiling in disgust. Zhou Liang and Pang Guang fled home.

 

Ghost Market Delights

Ghost markets are not named for hauntings or the sudden appearance of apparitions. The name stems from a Chinese idiom, “cold enough to crack a ghost’s teeth,” for they appear silently before the dawn, at the coldest time of day, and vanish with hardly a trace. Merchants lighting pipes and hand-rolled cigarettes from a distance resemble ghost lights, better known as will-o-the-wisps.

Another reason for the chilling name is that a ghost market’s vendors spread their wares on a rug, using the darkness to disguise chipped teacups, torn sweaters, and stolen goods. Their hearts have demons, according to local vernacular, meaning the merchants have ulterior motives, covering up scratch marks on a bicycle with charcoal, or deftly stuffing the wool back into a pair of ripped winter pants. Ghost markets are also places for the poor to sell their meager possessions, and for the less fortunate or curious wanderer to find a trinket or two, the replacement piece for a dish set. Always barter. Never accept a price at face value. Examine the goods closely, and if possible, simply stay home. Thieves, pickpockets, and sometimes murderers, are a ghost market’s specters.

ghost marketTJ

LATE SUMMER, 1947, He Laofu found his usually corner at the Xishi Avenue ghost market in Tientsin’s Nankai District. He spread out his rug. Placed bottles, glass cups, and trinkets in the middle and a stone at each corner. He arrived early, settled into the damp chill by lighting a hand-rolled cigarette. Down the street other early birds arrived, but here, they left each other to themselves. Nobody wanted to know another merchant’s trade.

A faint object not far away attracted He Laofu’s attention. He quietly stepped over and found a bundle wrapped in fine cloth, round, and heavy as a watermelon.

“Who left this here?” He Laofu spoke to himself. “A thief?” The thought dawned on him in the thick darkness. If a thief left such a wonderfully wrapped bundle in the middle of a desolate ghost market area, surely, a prize was inside. He could not open it here. Onlookers would grow envious. He stowed it in his corner, wrapped in a shoddy blanket.

Business was better than usual, and before dawn, he set his prize in the center of his rug, pulled the corners into a second bundle, threw the entire package over his shoulder to go home. He told a neighboring merchant he was sleepy, and that business was too poor to continue. The merchant agreed with a heavy sigh.

He Laofu surprised his wife making the morning fire. “Why are you home so early? Did you make it rich?” His wife said.

“How did you know?” He Laofu placed the mysterious bundle on the table. His wife’s eyes lit up like fireflies in the darkness of their tiny home. “You may have the honors.”

He Laofu’s wife opened the bundle carefully, trying to save the strings. “Oh, finally, our luck has changed. How we must have angered the gods to have led such a poor life so far.”

He Laofu leaned closer, smelling a faintly metallic stench. He wished his wife would hurry, but he kept his lips shut. She had the barbed tongue and quick temper of a Tientsin woman, and he didn’t want a provocation today.

Suddenly, wife screamed. Bile rose in He Laofu’s throat, and he threw himself against the wall. A man’s head, one eye gummed shut, the other opened wide, stared a dagger through his heart.

“Impossible.” He Laofu shouted, and then he fainted.

 

A Huihuir’s Life is the Life to Lead

By 1947, Tientsin’s huihuir, or Dark Drifter societies, pronounced hunhuner, were watered down to a faint shadow of what they had been during the Qing Dynasty. They no longer sported the long queues and flowered wigs. Nor did they carry ax handles and walk the streets dragging one leg. Occasionally, a huihuir wannabe was inspired, perhaps by a father’s stories, to walk into a small shop, slice a meaty thigh chunk away, slap it on the counter and demand free food, but without the numbers the huihuir society once had, individual hooligans had little sway.

Wars, revolutions, and bearing the brunt of too many crimes their members did not commit, dwindled the huihuir down to a laughably petty few.

Broad-shouldered Wang Siwen and his teenaged gang, however, longed for the old days, where huihuir were powerful and a young boy’s name could strike terror into a merchant’s heart.

Wang Siwen called himself Really Big Shrimp. His second in command chose the moniker Bad Luck for Life. Their top general was Hero, more a perpetually-nose-picking-ogre than teenage child. Typically, huihuir came from Tientsin’s poorest areas, including the No Care Zones, and the South Market, or the Nanshi Food Street, but not so for Wang Siwen and his gang. They hailed from wealthy families in Huangjia Park, near the old Concessional area. Wang Siwen and his gang enjoyed reading books, fishing, and other more civilized hobbies. They were known to perform good deeds instead of fighting and causing messes like their predecessors.

“We aren’t creating a name for ourselves,” Bad Luck for Life said. The huihuir gang was lounging in a park. Wang Siwen looked up from the classic Water Margin, cleared his throat.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re always doing good deeds. We haven’t gotten into a fight, well… ever. How are our names supposed to be feared far and wide if we don’t go out and cause a mess?”

Wang Siwen closed his book. “Do you all feel this way?”

Bad Luck for Life, Hero, and the others nodded. Dissension among the ranks was not good, and the boy had made a valid point. By anyone’s account, Wang Siwen’s gang resembled the Red Cross more than bloody huihuirs.

“Very well,” Wang Siwen said. “I propose a quest.”

The boys shifted excitedly. Hero stopped picking his nose.

“A quest for gold and treasure beyond your wildest imaginings,” Wang Siwen said. “All of you, go, now, and don’t return to me until you’ve procured some treasure. Steal anything you can.” Wang Siwen leaned back up against the gazebo’s pillar, reopening his book.

“Aren’t you going too?” Hero said.

“Did Liu Bei, the great king of Shu in the Warring States Period actually go out and fight?”

“Umm…”

“The answer is no. He didn’t. At least not very often, and only when he absolutely had to. My job is here, watching the fort and planning our next move. Now go, leave me be.”

Wang Siwei spent the hours reading until he grew bored, and then played hopping chicken with some neighbor children. At dusk, he returned home, ate his fill of dumplings, and waited under the family’s mulberry tree for his gang to return. Baba rarely ventured outside. The gnarled tree was as secretive a place as any. One by one Wang Siwei’s boys returned, each spreading out their finds as if in tribute to a king. Wang Siwei grunted at a ball of string, some flatbread, a handful of salt, and an orange cat. He cursed when Bad Luck for Life revealed an empty American whiskey bottle, but grew interested when Hero lugged in an oversized bundle.

“I stole this from a dog,” Hero said. The bundle made a squishy noise when he set it down. The general was beaming.

“Well. What is it? Open it up.”

Hero spent an eternity pulling the strings every which way, until it finally came loose.

Aiya.” Wang Siwei sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth. Hero fell onto his ample bottom. Bad Luck for Life’s whiskey bottle shattered on stone.

In the midst of Wang Siwei’s huihuir gang, grinning through bloodied teeth, sat the bloodied head of a young man, long hair tied into a loose topknot. A purplish birthmark stained his neck and cheek.

“What’s all that racket out there?” Mama called from the house.

“Nothing, Mama.” Wang Siwei said quickly. “We’ll clean it up.”

The youngest huihuir began whimpering. “Hush,” Wang Siwei said. “Crying isn’t going to help anything. Quick, Hero. Cover it up.”

“I’m not touching it.”

“You will if you want to stay a huihuir.”

Hero reluctantly covered the head with the cloth. Wang Siwei strode between his little gangsters, stroking his beardless chin. Suddenly, he had an idea.

“What luck, Hero. You’ve done it.”

“Huh?”

“We’ve a proper quest now. Our job, brave blood brothers, is to find the killer. We will be inscribed as heroes into the annals of this fair city. We will find rank, power, and riches beyond our wildest dreams. No longer will we have to kowtow to…”

“Siwei.” Mama called again from back door. “It’s time for bed.”

“Just a minute, mama.”

“Now, child, or there’ll be no snack.”

 

Three Heads, Two Bodies, and No Motive

Inspector Xia finished his third fried bread stick and half of his rice congee when a deputy thrust his office door open. Before he could speak, five children entered carrying another bundle.

Congee lost its appeal. He pushed it to the side.

“Another head?” Inspector Xia said.

“What?” A tall, broad shouldered boy bowed. “Wait. How did you know?”

“Bring it here. I suppose you had nothing to do with the murder, correct?”

“Correct, elder brother.”

Inspector paused. Elder Brother was a term used in gangs and the old huihuir societies. These boys wore fine Zhongshan shirts, their teeth were clean, and hair washed to a shine.

“You simply stumbled onto the head?”

“Correct, again, elder brother.”

“I took it from a dog.” A stout teenager with a finger in his nose said.

“Did you now? And just where did this take place?”

“Near the river, not far from Xishi Avenue.”

“The ghost market, yes. As I thought. Very well.”

Wang Siwei set the bundle on his desk, and then introduced his gang with exaggerated pomp, swearing he would do anything needed to find the killer.

Inspector Xia puzzled over the teenagers’ nicknames, but he’d seen too much strangeness since the case began to ask the names’ significance. The room flooded with curious police officers, and he flipped the bundle open.

The room filled with a pregnant silence.

“Hello, Mister Chu,” a young police officer said.

“You know this man?” Inspector Xia said.

“Surname is Chu. Forgot his name. He’s a frequent caller at my favorite brothel. Another Luzu Temple monk.”

“Are you sure?”

The young officer pointed. “Sure as that birthmark is shaped like a spoon. Hope that helps.”

“Yes… well, I’m not sure. Yet. I need to think. Go find out where he lived.”

The police officers filed out, taking the head. Wang Siwei and his gang remained. All smiles.

“Listen, I may need your help after all. Do you think you can locate two runners from the Wang family residence?”

“The Wangs that own the shoe store on Victoria Road?” Wang Siwei said.

“No. The owners of the Suxiang Zhai restaurant. You know of it? Good. I am looking for two boys, Zhou Liang and Pang Guang.”

“Are they the murderers?” Wang Siwei said.

“I just want to speak to them.”

The nose-picking boy withdrew a finger. “I know Pang Guang.” Hero said.   “We went to school together. He lives in Hong Qiao District. He’s getting married soon.”

“Very good to know. Go and keep an eye on his house. Report back to me anything you see or hear.”

“Yes, sir.” Wang Siwei said in English, saluting with his left hand.

The boys left, leaving Inspector Xia staring at his half-finished congee. So far, second wife had been reunited with her body. Mister Chu was identified and put back together. The remaining head belonged to a Daoist monk surnamed Shan. Lao Xu had helped him identify the monk, who had frequented the Wang family house on many occasions. What was the connection? Who was the killer? Was it one person, or were there more? He had interviewed Lao Xu, and the big boss himself, more than once. Second wife, Liu Shi, had frequently left with Shan to visit Luzu Temple where Shan lived with another monk named Ren Likui. The two had been roommates. Had second wife broken her marriage vows with Shan? Nothing seemed amiss during the interview, but Ren Likui admitted his friend had been missing for nearly a week.

Other police officers had been searching for the Wang family runners since the day after their disappearance. What was he missing? Police investigation entry level taught relatives, or friends commit most murders, had to be someone close to the deceased. His blood began to boil. Never, in his policing days, had he ever felt driven to solve a case. Usually, the shackles were placed upon the first, and easiest, suspect he could find. Never mattered until now.

Inspector Xia slammed a palm on his desk. Congee spilled. He needed to have another talk with Ren Likui. The first visit had been brief, and the Daoist too calm, too poised. His answers short, albeit courteous. Almost as if he was ready for him.

Luzu Temple, 20th century - Tianjin Museum Archives

Luzu Temple, 20th century – Tianjin Museum Archives

 

Ren Likui

The Daoist monk opened the door to his shack at Number 7 Xinyili. His former pearly complexion had darkened. Once perfectly combed hair was ragged. Dark bags sagged under his eyes. Inspector Xia didn’t miss the momentary surprise on the monk’s sage like face.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Inspector Xia said. He was tired of running in circles, and decided on a more direct, disturbing approach. Bending the rules was his specialty, and if it didn’t work, no one would be the wiser.

“You look tired.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Guilty conscience?”

“Would you care for some tea? It’s from the Yellow Mountains. Good for …”

“No. Thank you. I’ll come straight to the point. I hear you and Liu Shi, you remember her? Wang Jinyuan’s second wife? Good. Anyway, I hear the two of you were lovers.”

Ren Likui quailed. “Lovers? Where did you hear such a lie?”

“A bird told me. Is it true?”

“No. No. No. I’m afraid that’s not quite possible.”

“Don’t lie to me anymore.”

“I’m not lying.”

“I think you are.”

“If you must know, I prefer a different type of company.”

“What do you mean?”

“I prefer the company of a warm-hearted soul, and not a snake, like Liu Shi.”

“Meaning?”

“I like men, Inspector Xia. That is no crime.”

“It’s not.” Inspector Xia surveyed the tiny room Ren Likui and Shan had shared. One large bed, crooked, and a simple washbasin. Books, scrolls, writing brushes were scattered across a table. Two chairs. Winter robes hung from a wall. No kitchen. They must take their meals in the temple. The ground was laid with bricks.

“We found Shan’s head this morning.”

Ren Likui stifled a sob.

“You loved him?”

“With all my heart.” Ren Likui sat on his bed. An opposing bed leg rose off the ground.

Inspector Xia kneeled, peering under the bed. Bricks bulged upward, strange for an old dwelling. Typically, after decades of use, the bricks compacted, or sunk. He had never seen bricks rise.

“Appears you have a floor problem.”

“Yes, yes. You see how I live. Wu liang tian zun.” A Daoist mantra for praising the gods.

“I think it’s time you tell me the truth, Ren Likui.”

“What do you mean? I’ve told you everything I know. Liu Shi came to the temple to burn incense. I gave instruction about her proper path. That’s all.”

“And yet you call her a snake.  Why is that, I wonder?  I knew about Shan and second wife’s affair all along.” Inspector Xia didn’t know.

Ren Likui pulled a worried face from his hands. “You did?”

“Yes, and I know much more.”

“I will say nothing. Not unless you produce Shan’s body.”

“Do you mean the body you have hidden under your bed?”

Ren Likui sobbed.

“She tried to seduce me first.” The Daoist monk became a sniveling mess. “But then, she turned on my dear friend. As the saying goes, for a woman to chase a man is like the wind slipping through yarn. My Shan resisted, at first, and I’d like to think it was for my sake, but we were not to be.” He sighed toward the ceiling. “Wine is a poison to the gut, fornication is a steel knife to the bones.”

“Go on.” Inspector Xia’s heart was racing. He coughed into his fist to hide his excitement.

“She wanted Shan to flee Tientsin with her, but he would not think of it. So she found another man, Chu, I believe his name was.”

“Was?”

“Shan lured him to the temple and killed him in a fit of jealousy when he found out she was having an affair with him.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. Continue.” Inspector Xia bit the inside of a finger.

“She had the heart of a snake. Stole my Shan from me. One day, after the period of clouds and rains were over, Shan came back to me. Distressed.” Ren Likui smoothed the bed’s frayed quilt. “He began telling me everything. How she was trying to squeeze flour from a bullfrog by threatening to tell everyone about their affair. I… he was so vulnerable. I couldn’t help myself.”

“And then?”

“It’s all a blur. At night, demons find me. They torment me. I keep seeing it over, and over again… If I could only sleep.”

“See what?”

“My Shan. When I came to, he was dead. It was as if I could not control my own hands. I cut off his head, wrapped it carefully in wax cloth, and in my finest linen, and… then it was stolen in the night.”

The confession was as expected as a Tientsin summer rain, and the words drenched him head to foot, in exhilaration.

“Why cut off his head?”

“So Liu Shi could never find him. Even in the spirit world.”

“I see.” Inspector Xia had victory at his fingertips. The case was all but solved. What proof was needed when a signed confession was thrown into your lap? In his ecstasy, he stood, pointed an accusing finger. “So your friend Shan first killed Chu in a jealous rage, and then turned on second wife before she could…”

Ren Likui interrupted. “What are you talking about? My Shan had nothing to do with second wife’s death.”

 

An Inch of Ashes

Shan’s body was discovered in a tub buried beneath Ren Likui’s bed. Ren Likui was found guilty in Zhihli Province Supreme Court for Shan’s murder, and met his gods, and demons, before a firing squad.

In former years, Inspector Xia would have been satisfied that two-thirds of the murderous case was solved, but second wife’s murderer was still not discovered. The Wangs, being an influential family, pressured him and his boss to find the culprit. Summer chilled. Winter arrived with hardly a mention of autumn.

Daoist gods and demons - photo by C.S. Hagen

Daoist gods and demons – photo by C.S. Hagen

Wang Siwei and his merry huihuir were good to their promise, and found the Wang family runners. Zhou Liang was discovered dead at home from a knife wound. Pang Guang nearly asphyxiated from coal dust fumes in his home on the night before he was to marry. He revived, and implicated himself in the love affair between second wife and Shan, but not with her murder. No more information was forthcoming from little Bangchui, or his family, nor could Inspector Xia learn anything new from He Laofu, and his wife. The watermelon seller was investigated again, but Investigator Xia found no solid proof connecting him to second wife’s murder. At best, he had inadvertently carried her body to his fields, dumping her under a pile of melons. But who placed the body into his cart? Old Xu? Wang Laoye? He could not connect the dots.

SOME LOCAL STORIES say Ren Likui was also convicted of second wife’s murder. Other Tientsin legends say culprits much closer to home were involved. All sources for this true story admit second wife’s love affairs were not as secret as she thought they were.

Before the first snow, 1947, two years before Mao’s communist forces swept across China, forcing the Kuomintang to Taiwan, Old Xu was reportedly seen in the Xishi Avenue ghost market, late at night. Solemnly, he stacked paper money into a pile, weeping as he struck match after match, before lighting a small blaze. According to city legends, the paper money smoke flew straight and narrow, all the way to the heavens, and he confessed, as he added the last of the spirit money, that it was Wang Jinyuan’s first wife who ordered him to murder second wife. He also begged the heavens’ forgiveness for murdering Zhou Liang before he could confess to his assistance in hiding second wife’s body, under Old Xu’s direct orders.

After the fire dwindled to ashes, a sudden north wind swept through the ghost market, filling Old Xu’s mouth and throat with ash and hot coals, choking him to death.

Incense and ashes - by C.S. Hagen

Incense and ashes – by C.S. Hagen

This story is based from true accounts from the Ghost Market Human Head case, considered one of the “Eight Strange Cases of the Republic,” according to a radio report from FSM Telecommunications Corporation on Dot FM, records from the Tianjin Museum Archives, story databases Writing Collections and Docin, online directory Tianya, and the Elderly Culture Exchange Report. Most conversations, and some personality traits, including descriptions in this story are imagined, but the facts, the characters involved, the locations, and the harrowing murders, unbelievable as they may seem, are nonfiction.

 

Floating Corpses – Tientsin at War – Part VI

TIANJIN

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

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Mighty Haihe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Red Poppy, White Flour and Anti-Aircraft Guns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tientsin (communist) protestors - photo given by a friend

Tientsin (communist) protestors – photo given by a friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Dead Men Tell No Tales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investigators feared Japanese reprisals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Epilogue

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

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

Tomoyuki Yamashita - online sources

Tomoyuki Yamashita – online sources

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

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

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

The Broken City – Tientsin at War – Part X

TIANJIN

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St. Joseph's School, Tientsin - online sources

St. Joseph’s School, Tientsin – online sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Marines entering Tientsin, 1945 - Gutenberg

Marines entering Tientsin, 1945 – Gutenberg

Tientsin Marines

Marines training in Tientsin - courtesy of The China Marines website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Japanese soldiers awaiting repatriation - Gutenberg

Japanese soldiers awaiting repatriation – Gutenberg

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

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

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

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

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

“It was just the beginning.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tientsin bar - Scuttlebutt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tientsin’s initial good will soon soured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“Liberation 1949”

Nationalist soldiers executing communists in Shanghai - photo from a friend

Nationalist soldiers executing communists in Shanghai – photo from a friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But by evening it was all over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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