by Paul French
The city was divided. The SMP effectively retreated from north of the Soochow Creek, closed their stations, and turned into a skeleton force in the Eastern District—Hongkew, Y’Poo, and the Northern External Roads were all now Japanese gendarme and Kempeitai territory. Soldiers bunkered down and faced each other through sandbags, barbed wire and machine-gun nests; American M1903 Springfields faced Japanese Type .38s. The Japanese soldiers got confident and transgressed the long-established racial dividing lines of the Settlement. White women got their faces slapped by Jap police as they tried to cross the Garden Bridge over the Soochow Creek from the European Bund to refugee Hongkew. Those same Japanese forces would go on to capture Soochow, rape Nanking, and conquer almost all of China’s vast hinterlands by the end of the year.
But elsewhere on the Solitary Island, new opportunities rose up, new chances for the taking for men and women with nowhere else to go.
* * *
The wild beasts of the mountain have a king who rules over the wolves. This king comes from the east and commands the wolves to eat all human beings they meet, leaving the bones for their cubs to gnaw and sharpen their fangs upon. Now the wild men from the lands to the east have come again to the Yangtze, ordered by their king-emperor—they are Japanese and the wolves their obedient soldiers. The Japanese place loudspeakers near the Garden Bridge over the Soochow Creek separating Hongkew from the Central District, calling on Shanghai and all China to surrender. They demand the foreign devils leave the Settlement, they urge the Shanghainese to turn their backs on their Occidental masters as well as their corrupt Generalíssimo Chiang Kai-shek, and to follow Wang Ching-wei, their new leader, Tokyo’s friend and puppet. They are commanded to recognise and submit to the supremacy of the Greater Japanese Empire—Dai Nippon. The alternative is described in the Sanko Seisaku, the ‘Three Alls’ Policy: Kill All, Burn All, Loot All.
As the killing and the burning and the looting takes place, mangy, half-starved wolves have been driven from their lairs in Kiangsu and Chekiang. Wolves—ch’ai—are reportedly feasting on the mutilated dead in the streets of Nanking and tearing at the flesh of Chinese corpses on the banks of the Yangtze. They are rumoured to be roaming the abandoned temples of the Purple Mountains outside Peking, running along the shores of Hangchow Lake and even seeking victims in the hills of Sheshan, just to the west of Shanghai.
Pootung farmers say wolves are mauling their chickens and desecrating fresh-dug graves, ravenous for human flesh. They are digging up the bodies and feasting on corpses. Farmers with land left to farm now light bonfires at night to keep them away, standing ready with shotguns, sharpened hoes, and spades to protect their remaining livestock. Mothers keep their babies close, and small children are confined. The wolves are never sated.
The Japanese worship wolves at their shrines, where they bow before okami gods. The wolves comprehend Japanese speech. The wolves will be upon us soon and devour us all, tearing flesh from our limbs as we scream.
This, people believed …
* * *
PART TWO
The Lords of Misrule
Shanghai is full of Jews, Japs, and gunmen and it’s a toss-up which are worse. Law and order have gone with the winds and gambling joints and opium dives have taken their place. Shanghai has gone mad; everybody hippity-hoppin down the primrose path …
—Hilaire du Berrier, 1939
Shanghai is not a town at all; Shanghai is a poison. Man-eaters live here, naked cannibalism rules here. This town is the world’s refuse heap. Whoever comes here, white or Chinese, has cracked up somewhere before and Shanghai does the rest.
—Vicki Baum, Shanghai ’37, 1939
It was like living on the rim of a volcano.
—American journalist J. B. Powell on life in Shanghai in the 1930s
* * *
SHOPPING NEWS —‘BREVITIES’—
MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1937
These are extraordinary times and some pretty extraordinary things are occurring that do not speak well of our elected Municipal Council at this moment of crisis. So the bureaucrats of the Shanghai Municipal Council, and their opposite numbers in Frenchtown, have been doing everything in their power to curb rice profiteering and relieve the desperate plight of the masses. As a result of these strenuous efforts (hah!!) on the part of our esteemed authorities, local rice prices have increased only THREE HUNDRED PER CENT. It looks almost as though rice profiteers had received assurance from high places that the track was being cleared for them and the sky was the limit. Recently we at Shopping News called them rice profiteers and their political protectors vultures … today we extend our apologies to all vultures.
Which reminds us that, with the full permission of our elected representatives, the gougers at the Shanghai Telephone Company have been permitted to raise prices to astronomical levels, all at a time when the necessity of making calls to loved ones has never been greater. How much more blatant must the Settlement’s profiteering become before the ratepayers rise up in revolt? Call the Municipal Council now—if you can afford it!!—and tell them they’re doing the enemy’s work for them!!
Radio Station X.H.M.A. has made a catch—Carroll Alcott will start broadcasting for them ‘toot suite and pronto’, according to Station Manager Jack Horton. Quite how the bloated newspaper columnist will sound to his legion of fans we do not know, but Alcott has sworn that he’ll ‘tell it like it is’ in Shanghai and ‘anyone who don’t like it can go jump’. We wonder what the boys over at the Japanese Consulate will make of that!! Alcott’s show will be at 8 p.m. daily and sponsored by FLIT, the World’s Leading Insecticide. FLIT ALWAYS KILLS.
Can the recent spate of murders of foreigners in Hongkew be divorced from the fighting between rival dope gangs that’s ongoing? Shopping News thinks not. The Brains Trust at Municipal Police H.Q., headed by Commissioner Bourne, may be scratching their heads, but surely the current flurry of nighttime arson attacks north of the Soochow Creek are narcotics related? Does anyone honestly think different? And why does our police force appear so ineffectual?
It’s high time the Settlement smelt sweet again, don’t you think? And that’s why readers can claim a 15% discount against any purchase at SUZETTE’S, 133 Yuen Ming Yuen Road. Right now Suzette has fresh stocks of Potter & Moore’s Old English Mitcham Lavender—quietens tired nerves and soothes you into a refreshing sleep.
Something on your mind? Editorial: Rm 540, 233 Nanking Rd. Tel: Shanghai—10695
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18
The dead haunted Shanghai that autumn and winter of 1937. Since Bloody Saturday at least three hundred thousand had been killed, predominately Chinese: bombed, shot, strafed, burnt, diseased, frozen, and starved. Their relatives demanded they be interred, buried, returned to their ancestral villages, but these privileges would be only for the wealthy. In the Northern External Roads, to the west in Hungjao, in far eastern Y’Poo and across the Whangpoo in Pootung, the corpses were gathered on giant funeral pyres, both humans and the dead mules and horses left behind by the retreating Chinese army. In one day more than a thousand bodies were burned.
The crematorium smell hung over the city, and the ash of the dead turned to grey slush in the gutters when it rained. Living Shanghai literally waded through the remains of the city’s dead. Those whose families or clan guilds could pay were embalmed in coffins and stacked one upon another in hastily erected bamboo godowns along the city’s western fringes. Yet with Shanghai surrounded by marauding Japanese soldiers, the dead could not be transported to their home villages. These hundreds of coffins, many piled up along the banks of the Siccawei Creek, were gradually covered with rubbish and, eventually, forgotten, as they and their contents were slowly absorbed into the sodden banksides.
Walk quickly, step lightly, past the junction of Avenue Haig and Edinburgh Road. Pay attention to your stride, look down, and avoid the building that stands on the corner, its windows blacked out. This place is the Vien Coffin Storage Company, a giant repository for the
dead. The Municipal Council collects the dead left unclaimed in the Settlement and deposits many of them at Vien’s. In the Western External Roads, just beyond the jurisdiction of the SMP and the Frenchtown authorities, the job is left to devout Buddhist volunteers. The numbers rise and so, people say, do the ghosts of those unable to settle. The coffins are filled, nailed down, and sealed with wax. Alongside the dead sit hundreds, perhaps thousands of empty coffins, hurriedly produced by carpenters for the future. Shanghai has become a city of the dead, and Vien’s holds sixty thousand coffins in readiness in their Edinburgh Road repository. When Vien’s is full, the Buddhists put up yet more bamboo shacks nearby to store the bodies, and hope burial spots are found before the spring comes and the corpses thaw.
* * *
In November the last dregs of the Chinese Nationalist Army withdraws from the very far reaches of Shanghai in defeat and humiliation under the thunder of Japanese cannon. They have been totally routed throughout the Yangtze River delta. The city’s crime boss, Big-Eared Du, follows shortly afterwards, leaving Shanghai for Hong Kong. Thus ends the Green Gang’s fifteen years of absolute control of the city’s underworld. Green Gang thugs disappear or are absorbed into Wang Ching-wei’s puppet thug gangs. The Western Roads, undefended, are left to their fate.
Before the Chinese collabators took control, before the old gangs fled, the city’s Western Roads District was where the wealthy lived, where they relaxed. It was beyond the frenetic fringes of the International Settlement and the French Concession, far from Hongkew, with its cluster of raucous honky-tonk bars, refugees and sailors; safely beyond the forbidding slum of Nantao; the old city of Shanghai, with its smells of peanut oil and camphor; and the far-flung Chinese quarters of Chapei and Paoshan. The air was cleaner, the sky bluer—or so it seemed. The cigar-smoking foreign taipans, money-obsessed bankers, share hawkers, and bullion sharks of Shanghai’s giant hongs lounged by the pool of the Columbia Country Club sipping cocktails, congratulating themselves on their privilege. Couples danced sedately to White Russian jazz bands performing tepid versions of the latest standards: foxtrots at a regulation seventy beats per minute; a waltz every fourth tune. Hot, humid, airless Shanghai summer nights. Sometimes they journeyed out to the Avenue Haig for dinner and the floorshow at Del Monte’s nightclub; otherwise they dined in their palatial homes with soft-slippered servants at their elbows.
After the Japanese invasion, the Western Roads District changes overnight. Speculative construction firms erect barnlike premises on the wasteland along the Great Western Road, Edinburgh Road, and the Avenue Haig, on the very edge of the Settlement and Frenchtown’s jurisdiction. Two floors, three floors, four, five … it’s all jerry-built, but with a lick of paint and muted lighting they can become atmospheric dance halls. Despite prohibitions the new venues soon morph into gambling dens—roulette wheels are spinning again, alongside baccarat tables, craps, fan-tan. Where once the Del Monte had stood on its own, out on the western fringes of the city with its lawns, Versailles-inspired statuary, and naphtha-lit driveway, comes a cluster of palaces of sin, stretching from Siccawei in the south to Jessfield Park in the north. In the alleyways and lanes between them bamboo shacks become brothels, dope dens, grind shops for low-end gamblers, shabu methamphetamine merchant stations, and Hwa-Wei lottery parlours.
19
The Badlands becomes a lawless no-man’s-land, encircled by Japanese-manned barbed-wire barricades that rise or fall depending on the quality of your papers and the cumshaw tip you profer. The genteel Shanghailanders, shocked by the assault on their citadel, rapidly depart China on evacuation ships or retreat into the fragile safety of the foreign settlements, hoping in vain that the Japanese will be vanquished.
The Kempeitai form a collaborationist Chinese police force and put it under the control of Wang Ching-wei. Wang had once been Generalíssimo Chiang’s closest ally but now, as Wang sided with Tokyo against his own people and became China’s very own Marshal Pétain, they have become deadly enemies. Wang’s thugs are reinforced by the remnants of Big-Eared Du’s hoodlums, supplemented by corralled hungry and desperate peasant boys under orders from the Japanese military police. General Kenji Doihara, a legend to be feared in Manchukuo where he personally oversaw the implementation of the ‘Three Alls’ policy, comes south to Shanghai. He sits down with Wang Ching-wei and gives him titular authority over the Western Roads, along with the operation of number 76 Jessfield Road, a gothic mansion in the heart of the district. Number 76 will go on to become one of the most feared buildings in Shanghai—a twenty-four-hour bordello, dirty money-counting house, and torture chamber. Wang takes his orders directly from the universally feared Kempeitai.
Doihara uses his contacts to distribute narcotics from depots in the Western Roads. There’s opium, both pure and refined into heroin and morphine, as well as specially manufactured sixteen-ounce vials of cocaine from patriotic Tokyo businessman-controlled factories on the Japanese-occupied island of Formosa, flooding in on Imperial Army and Navy transport ships. More is brought in by entrepreneurial ronin who stuff suitcases, army kit bags, funeral urns, and Korean prostitutes’ vaginas with even more dope to sell in Shanghai. Doihara makes the Badlands truly bad—awash with opium as well as philopon methamphetamine, an Imperial Army mass-manufactured specialty. Philopon is a so-called ‘murder drug’; it makes men killers, and Tokyo needs hundreds of thousand of cold-blooded murderers if it is to subjugate all of China. It is addictive, strips men of their consciences, allows them to Kill All, Burn All, Loot All with impunity and no moral sanction.
Dope prices fall below those of rice, shabu prices even lower, and addiction rates subsequently skyrocket. Doihara deliberately pumps narcotics through every channel he can to sap the will to resist. Low-rent whores are paid in opium; drug runners, mules, and dealers are all paid in dope. The market is flooded with Golden Bat cigarettes, the mouthpiece of which contains a small dose of heroin. Doihara creates addicts by the thousands as tobacco smokers find themselves slaves to a darker drug. And he knows just how easy it is to succumb: Doihara himself is an opium addict with a massive habit formed in Manchukuo.
The Japanese Army establishes the Shanghai Amusement Supervision Department, which ‘taxes’ the grind shops, dope dens, and lottery parlours on their daily take. The Hwa-Wei lottery, so beloved of Shanghai’s Chinese underclass, is rigged to high heaven. The taxes are phenomenal: fifteen thousand Chinese dollars a day to stay open at the largest casinos. The Kempeitai bosses enforce the taxes—no pay, no play.
Cabbage Moh, a Cantonese smuggler and drug dealer from triad-controlled Shumchun on the Hong Kong border, sees an opportunity to the north and opens dens supplying dope and philopon ferried up the Soochow Creek and distributed out of Fah Wah Village, adjacent to the new sin strip. Refugee peasants turned lieu-maung loafers patronise the Fah Wah alleyway brothel shacks, getting mean with the girls. Tuberculosis is quickly endemic among Chinese and Shanghailanders with a taste for the pipe, the pill, the needle. The Japanese bomb the Chengzong Sanatoria, the city’s major tuberculosis clinic for the poor and indigent. The patients are scattered to the winds and mostly end up begging in the Badlands. These unlucky sufferers die in the streets as pedestrians swiftly sidestep them and pull their scarves over their mouths.
The Japanese military presence in Shanghai is funded almost entirely by the Western Roads Badlands—dope, coke, morphine, philopon, girls, gambling, and Golden Bat. Wang Ching-wei’s coffers bulge despite much of the profits going to the Kempeitai to fund the war on China. Doihara gets a congratulatory telegram from Tokyo and is made a member of Japan’s Supreme War Council. To celebrate, he opens a tatami-matted Japanese officers’ bordello in Frenchtown on Route Dupleix, staffed by coerced Shanghai movie starlets. Regular soldiers file into ‘comfort houses’ in Nantao old town and on Menghua Jie, where Chinese women dressed in cheap kimonos are compelled to service the victors by the score.
The Green Gang gone, the foreigners step in to play. These are the men wit
h nowhere else to go, who are wanted pretty much everywhere, who have no letters of transit, passports, or exit visas. The exiled White Russians, the Jewish refugees, the desperate and the bad, those on the lam or AWOL marines now find the city’s vast empire of rackets dumped in their laps, gratis. No evacuation ships for these people. Jack Riley, with his false name, fingertips, and a long-expired Chilean passport, cannot leave; Joe Farren has no desire to return to Nazi-controlled Jew-hating Vienna; Nellie, Nazedha, Sasha Vertinsky and all the rest of the White Russians fear Stalin’s gulags even more than the Kempeitai. These men and women will stay come what may—there are no visas for them, no refugee ships, no new homelands to welcome them.
This is where Joe Farren and Jack Riley will choose to stake their claim … to become the lords of misrule in Shanghai. Eternal outsiders both, they choose no-man’s land as their kingdom.
20
Jack and Nazedha have been to the Grand on Bubbling Well Road to see Way Out West. By May 1938 it’s already been out a year, but Laurel and Hardy just crack Nazedha up. It’s been a rocky romance; Nazedha is disgusted by Jack’s fracas at the Canidrome, and pissed off with his jangly nerves and quick temper courtesy of Doc Borovika’s Benzedrine supplies. But perhaps a new spring will change things. Jack races through the Settlement in his newly imported red MG Brit roadster with Nazedha by his side, mink coat ruffling in the wind. He jumps red lights, fishtails the intersections, and laughs in his rearview mirror at the tall khaki-turbaned Sikh traffic cops waving their bamboo lathis impotently in his wake. Jack loves speed, loves machines, loves scaring Nazedha in the passenger seat. She screams delightedly, gripping his thigh. On the corner of Gordon and Bubbling Well, marines hang about shooting the shit. When they see Jack, they line up and salute. Jack returns their salute with a tip of his hat while Nazedha gives a royal Russian wave to the Slots King’s ever-loyal leathernecks.