All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Aahh, what to say of the poem “Impression” by the prolific pulp and serialised fiction writer of the 1930s John Richard Finch. It hits all the Orientalist and Chinoiserie high notes and so you’ll either love it or hate it – naturally it is loved over in the China Rhyming corner…
The three classics of Asian-set espionage writing are, in my humble opinion, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) about Indo-China and set largely in Saigon; John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) starting in Hong Kong and featuring Vientiane and; Eric Ambler’s, the great espionage writer of the 1930s, later dip into Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia in Passage of Arms (1959).
Interestingly the British Library has chosen Passage of Arms as one of its “Classics Thrillers” in its reprint series. And they’ve given it a nice cover too – so if you’ve never read Passage of Arms then now is a good excuse….
Some men take to gun-running because they have a longing for danger and adventure. Girija Krishnan, an Indian clerk, is not one of them. Deep in the Malayan jungle, Girija stumbles on a cache of arms hidden during the communist insurgency. Selling the arms will help Girija achieve his lifelong dream of founding a transport company. Two American tourists in the Far East find more adventure than they bargained for when they get entangled in Girija’s plans. Greg and Dorothy Nilsen had wanted to go on an adventurous trip, to see some out-of-the-way places. So when Mr Tan in Hong Kong asks Greg to travel to Singapore and help with a business deal, Greg is surprisingly receptive. All he has to do is sign some papers and collect a handsome fee – but this is Greg’s first step into the dangerous world of post-colonial rebellions, Chinese gun smugglers and Islamic revolutionaries.This classic thriller won the Crime Writers’ Association gold dagger in 1959.
Yesterday I relayed the case of 22-year-old Merchant Marine sailor Edward P. Werda from Alpena, Michigan who was sent down by a Chinese court for two and half years in Ward Road Gaol for manslaughter of a fellow American sailor in a knife fight outside a Shanghai brothel in 1946. He claimed he deserved an appeal as his lawyer was incompetent and there was no translator in the courtroom and he was forced to wear a jacket still obviously slashed from the knife wielded by the dead man Steward’s Mate A.B. Spruce, a black sailor.
The American press considered Werda had been served a hard sentence and should get an appeal; many in the Shanghai press (including John Powell, now editing his father’s old China Weekly Review) figured whatever the appeal, Werda did the crime and so should do some time. The American papers reported that Werda’s cell was ‘dingy’ and ‘disease ridden’, 9×12 feet and shared with other prisoners, one of whom had to sleep on the floor though Werda got a bunk. Werda claimed the Chinese inmates lived in far worse conditions. He was allowed no tobacco or newspapers. They recorded that he was living no a diet of bread, water and potatoes and only surviving because old shipmates brought him food parcels. Werda’s shipmate Joens B. Cooney was a regular visitor with food parcels and visited daily until his ship left port.
The American papers were especially concerned that nobody from the US Consulate in Shanghai had visited Werda or bothered to attend the trial. A Republican Congressman from Michigan, Fred Bradley, supported his demand for an appeal and suggested all the staff at the US Consulate in Shanghai should be recalled for incompetence. The American newspapers also suggested that Werda was just one of a number of American sailors fighting that night and that there was no clear consensus that he had delivered the fatal stab wound to the back of Steward’s Mate A.B. Spruce. Werda claimed he got involved in the fight after Spruce had stabbed one of his shipmates.
After two days in jail Werda got a visitor, William M. Olive from the US Consulate. Olive hadn’t been in Shanghai long himself. Olive reportedly told Werda he didn’t have the financial or social standing to retain a decent attorney and would have to rely on a court-appointed one – Olive denied he ever said any such thing. He met with a court appointed attorney who misled him on his possible sentence, took no notes and left quickly. The Shanghai court denied he had been short changed by his lawyer and that he had US$500 on deposit with the US Consulate, funds he could have used to secure a lawyer. The American Consul General, Monnett B. Davis, said he would look into the matter. He later claimed the Consulate had done nothing wrong.
Despite Werda saying there was no translator in the court, the court itself argued that his lawyer, appointed by them, was a US-educated Chinese called Kwei Chungshu who spoke English and also that Ralph K Eyster, of America’s War Shipping Administration, had been in attendance in court during the trial.
I believe Werda’s appeal was rejected.
In February 1947, a year after he was jailed, it was reported that Werda, now 24, was still in Ward Road. Despite an amnesty by Chiang Kai-shek for Chinese prisoners, Werda remained on the cell block.
And then I can’t find anything more…if Werda did the full two and half years then he was released in October 1948 and, presumably, deported back to the United States?
Monnett B Davis – American CG in Shanghai at the time of Werda’s trial
With the large number of American soldiers, seamen and airmen in Shanghai in 1946 there was bound to be a bit of trouble. The old foreign concessions were gone – get in trouble now and you faced the Chinese cops and not the old Shanghai Municipal Police. 22-year-old Merchant Marine sailor Edward P. Werda from Alpena, Michigan was awarded the dubious honour of being the first Yank to be tried before a Chinese court after the abolition of extraterritoriality. He got two and a half years for manslaughter (or assault causing death – the maximum sentence the court could award was apparently five years) after knifing fellow American sailor, Steward’s Mate A.S. Spruce, during a barroom brawl (outside a brothel reported the locally connected China Weekly Review). Arrested by the US NAvy Shore Patrol, as a Merchant Marine sailor (aboard the David A. Curry out of San Francisco) he faced the Chinese courts and not a United States Court Martial. In court Werda claimed self defence, though Spruce had been stabbed in the back. Six other crew members of the David A. Curry appeared in court and the ship was delayed leaving harbour.
He went to the old Ward Road Gaol where they now served only Chinese food and he wasn’t allowed to smoke (not sure this is entirely accurate?). Werda claimed his trial was entirely in Chinese, he only met his lawyer (a Chinese defence attorney) 20 minutes before the trial, that the attorney told him to expect a seven year sentence (when the max was five indicating the attorney was useless) and he was not provided with an interpreter – so he appealed to the Shanghai High Court. In the meantime, he went to jail (of which more tomorrow)….
Hangzhou (Hangchow) is not really especially regarded for its towels these days – but it used to be…back when China did quality. Sean You Zoo & Co. Ltd. at 587 Nanking Road (Nanjing West Road) stocked them. The “No.4 Triangle” was apparently the most popular towel in stock but they also stocked “Turkish towels”, bedcovers, cotton cloths and table linen. Sean You Zoo had their own factory out at Hangchow and their showroom on Nanking Road – they must have done well as in the 1920s they moved from North Szechuen Road (Sichuan Road North) to better premises, south of the Creek, on the Nanking Road. Then, in the mid-1930s, they moved their showroom along Nanking Road from 497 (where they’d been since at least the early-1920s) to larger premises at 587. They had retail branches back in Hangchow and Hankow (Hankou) while their factory in Hangchow wove 25,000 piculs of cotton a Shensi (Shaanxi) and American cotton a year, by far the most of any of the Hangchow area cotton mills.
Milk was a good business in old Shanghai as Shanghailanders liked their dairy. I’ve blogged before on the Shanghai Dairy Farms and also on the Clover Milk Company (both sold pasteurized milk from small locally reared herds out to the west of the city. When the Japanese invaded in 1937 these farms were isolated outside the Japanese lines and milk became scarce in the city proper. Guess what? – for those who like then and now stuff – they shipped in powdered milk from Hong Kong.
Red Seal (the advert below is from 1936) was the brand of the American-owned Poplar Grove Farms and advertised itself as “tuberculin-free”. Though their head office was on Medhurst Road (Taixing Road), Poplar Grove was in Kiangwan, close to Chapei (Zhabei), in northern Shanghai, outside the limits of the International Settlement. It was established in 1934. The farm, termed a “scientific dairy”, was state of the art for a Chinese dairy farm in the 1930s and reportedly cost a million dollars to establish. It suffered badly in 1937 with almost all of its 400-head of “pedigree American cattle” being killed, during two rounds of bombing by 16 Japanese planes during the fighting around Shanghai in August that year (see picture of the devastated farm below). At the time of the attack the farm’s manager, American J.H. McKinnon (from Houston, Texas), pretended to be dead, lying in a crater covered in cow blood, after the Japanese air force strafed and bombed the facility, waiting until they had passed on to other targets. Sadly many of the Chinese staff (who wore white uniforms to denote the high sanitary standards at the farm) who fled the attack into nearby fields were machine gunned and killed by low flying planes – their uniforms easy to spot from the air. The raid led to a protest by the American Consulate in Shanghai as McKinnon had hoisted several large American flags around the property which should have warned the Japanese planes off. The ornate and well laid out farm (which included immaculate lawns and flower beds) was left a smouldering ruin.
Following the attack the farm was effectively out of action – Mrs Charles Morris Campbell, the sales manager for Red Seal and Poplar Grove, left Shanghai on an evacuation ship and was back in SanFrancisco by the end of August 1937
Japanese bombing wiped out Poplar Grove’s herd of cows in August 1937
Walter Shapiro’s Hustling Hitler is an extraordinary story, with a Shanghai connection….
From acclaimed journalist Walter Shapiro, the true life story of how his great-uncle—a Jewish vaudeville impresario and exuberant con man—managed to cheat Hitler’s agents in the run-up to WWII.
Vaudeville manager, boxing promoter, stock swindler, card shark and self-proclaimed “Jade King of China,” Freeman Bernstein was a master of exuberant excess and no stranger to the hard-hand of the law. But the charges he was arrested for on the evening of February 18, 1937, outside of a Hollywood starlet’s home, were more serious than those he had ever encountered before. The most powerful and feared man in the world–Adolf Hitler–claimed that Bernstein had committed fraud against the German government. While living in Shanghai in 1936, Bernstein had been asked to procure a large quantity of nickel for the Germans. Nickel was essential to make stainless steel for armaments, and impossible at that time for Germany to openly buy on the international markets. When the shipments arrived from Canada, bearing Bernstein’s stamp of approval, the Germans found only huge, useless quantities of scrap metal and tin: a huge blow to their economy and war preparations.
All his life, journalist Walter Shapiro assumed that the outlandish stories about his great uncle Freeman were exaggerated pieces of family lore; a cockamamie Jewish revenge fantasy dreamt up to entertain the kids and venerate their larger-than-life relative. But in recent years, Shapiro decided to search for the truth, and in this fascinating exploration of Bernstein’s life, he investigates the incredible possibility that a New York Jew–born to in 1874 to Polish immigrants–may have been responsible for a critical shortage of Nazi resources in the early years of World War II.
Shapiro’s easy narrative naturally evokes Bernstein’s colorful world: from the smell of the grease paint backstage in a seedy turn-of-the-century vaudeville house in Bayonne, to the roar from the ringside seats of a top-rated 1923 middleweight bout in Mexico City, and the ominous sense of what it must have been like for an American Jew to be arranging shady business dealings in Germany in 1936. A thrilling and page-turning read, Hustling Hitler is the untold story of the larger-than-life, eternal hustler who changed the course of history.
In June 1946 Marion Buchanan, 29, of Springfield, Missouri married Wang Tsung-lo, 26, of Shanghai, at the Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. The service was conducted by the Reverend Otis Beatty. It was reportedly a “simple ceremony”. The brides parents attended and Marion’s brother Robert was Wang’s best man. Wang was a language Professor at Yale; Marion a school teacher. The couple had met in Phoenix, Arizona where Marion was working as a high school teacher and Wang was an interpreter working for the army.
They had planned to marry in Missouri and had applied for a marriage license and made arrangements. However, the marriage was forbidden under a 111-year old law in Missouri making it illegal for a white woman to marry a “Mongolian”! So they drove to Kansas and got married in Columbus.
I’m afraid I have no idea how the marriage turned out – hopefully all went well…
