In her 1984 classic, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, China-based author Lynn Pan uncovers a shadowy underworld of gangs, guns and greed. As the book is re-released this month, Pan introduces three of the city’s most notorious villains.
Du Yuesheng
Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng, or ‘Big-Eared Du’, is a Shanghai legend. He was described by an American observer as ‘a compound of an Al Capone with social standing, a Lucky Luciano on a Wall Street scale, and a Shanghai Rockefeller badly in need of an Ivy League to put him right with the Chinese public.’
1920s Shanghai was a crime-friendly city. Just crossing a street could put you beyond the reach of one of its three jurisdictions – Chinese, British-American and French. Du was the uncrowned king of the French Concession.
Star ting out as a fruitseller’s apprentice and small-time hood on the Shanghai water front, he was sexually initiated in a cheap dockside bordello, where he may have acquired his opium habit. He went on to trade opium and, after teaming up with his sidekick Huang Jingrong (see below) got into legitimate business - chiefly banking. Politics was next, and Du was soon in bed with Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist Party. In 1927, he used his Green Gang toughs to rid Shanghai of its Communist elements and deliver it safely into Chiang’s hands.
Huang Jinrong
Chief Inspector Huang Jinrong was the top detective in the French Concession as well as being its number-one protection racketeer. Huang ran with the hare and hunted the hounds, you might say.
He was a clever man but not as clever as his wife. She was her husband’s strategist and disposed of the small army of bandits who, at nearly every point in the transit of an opium consignment from the docks to the dens, would heist it and sell it.
For turning a blind eye, the French authorities enjoyed handsome rake-offs from Huang’s rackets. Du’s pay-offs to the French suppor ted – irony of ironies – the French Concession’s cour t of justice.
Dai Li
Chiang Kaishek’s watchdog was Dai Li, head of the Nationalist secret police. Dai has been dubbed ‘China’s combination of Himmler and J Edgar Hoover’. Not strictly a gangster, Dai was par t of the murderous cloak and dagger anti-Japanese underground resistance movement led by Du in war time Shanghai.
Both Chiang Kaishek and Wang Jingwei (the Japanese-sponsored puppet leader) had terrorist rings in Shanghai, one to gun down defectors, the other to retaliate with tor ture or worse. Between them, Du and Dai helped maintain a balance of terror.
Du and Huang died natural deaths in Hong Kong and Shanghai respectively. Dai Li died in a plane crash above Nanjing, his body identified only by the gold bridgework in his teeth.
Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise by Lynn Pan, published by Marshall Cavendish, is available from www.amazon.com (219RMB).
Interview by Clarissa Sebag- Montefiore
