Tag: spy

Japan’s Tientsin – Tientsin at War – Part 1

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

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

A typical scene in Tientsin - 1939

A typical scene in Tientsin – 1939

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

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

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

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

The invasion was ready; Japan just needed an excuse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Japanese propaganda picture of the strip search - Life Magazine

Japanese propaganda picture of the strip search – Life Magazine

Hell broke loose.  Tientsin was nearing ochlocracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Tientsin Flood of 1939

The Great Tientsin Flood of 1939

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stopped at a barricade in Tientsin

Stopped at a barricade in Tientsin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many who had money to leave, left, including

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Liddell's victory march after 1924 Olympics - The Guardian

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

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

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

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

 

 

Tientsin Incident - The Australian Women's Weekly  pictorial

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

Human Devil – Tientsin at War – Part II

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

By C.S. Hagen

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

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

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

Eastern Jade wearing summertime men's shirt, pants and tie, with riding boots

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Step into Tientsin’s Underground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A picture taken of Eastern Jade while she was in Tientsin.

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

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

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

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

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

He calls her father. 

 

Hunter of Military Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eastern Pearl in a military uniform

Eastern Pearl in a military uniform – from online sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Puyi relented. 

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

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

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

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

 

The back door (door is original) from which Eastern Pearl helped Puyi escape

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

“Pearl’s Place”

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

Enemies said she was evil since seventeen.

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

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

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

She failed in both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cryptic note Eastern Jade allegedly left behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

The picture taken after Eastern Pearl's execution - graphic - but its authenticity has been debated since 1947.

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

 

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