By day the fox spirits of Peking lie hidden and still. But at
night they roam restlessly through the cemeteries and burial
grounds of the long dead, exhuming bodies and balancing the
skulls upon their heads. They must then bow reverentially to
Tou Mu, the Goddess of the North Star, who controls the
books of life and death that contain the ancient celestial mysteries
of longevity and immortality. If the skulls do not topple
and fall, then the fox spirits—or huli jing, ......— will
live for ten centuries and must seek victims to nourish themselves,
replenishing their energy through trickery and connivance,
preying upon innocent mortals. Having lured their
chosen victims, they simply love them to death. They then
strike their tails to the ground to produce fi re and disap pear,
leaving only a corpse behind them . . .
• 3 •
The Approaching Storm
The eastern section of old Peking has been dominated since the
fi fteenth century by a looming watchtower, built as part of the Tartar
Wall to protect the city from invaders. Known as the Fox Tower, it
was believed to be haunted by fox spirits, a superstition that meant the
place was deserted at night.
After dark the area became the preserve of thousands of bats,
which lived in the eaves of the Fox Tower and fl itted across the
moonlight like giant shadows. The only other living presence was the
wild dogs, whose howling kept the locals awake. On winter morn -
ings the wind stung exposed hands and eyes, carrying dust from the
nearby Gobi Desert. Few people ventured out early at this time of
year, opting instead for the warmth of their beds.
But just before dawn on 8 January 1937, rickshaw pullers passing
along the top of the Tartar Wall, which was wide enough to walk or
cycle on, noticed lantern lights near the base of the Fox Tower, and
indistinct fi gures moving about. With neither the time nor the inclination
to stop, they went about their business, heads down, one foot
in front of the other, avoiding the fox spirits.
Midnight in Peking
• 4 •
When daylight broke on another freezing day, the tower was deserted
once more. The colony of bats circled one last time before the
creeping sun sent them back to their eaves. But in the icy wasteland
between the road and the tower, the wild dogs— the huang gou—were
prowling curiously, sniffi ng at something alongside a ditch.
It was the body of a young woman, lying at an odd angle and covered
by a layer of frost. Her clothing was dishevelled, her body badly
mutilated. On her wrist was an expensive watch that had stopped just
after midnight.
It was the morning after the Russian Christmas, thirteen days
after the Western Christmas by the old Julian calendar.
Peking at that time had a population of some one and a half million,
of which only two thousand, perhaps three, were foreigners. They
were a disparate group, ranging from stiff - backed consuls and their diplomatic
staff to destitute White Russians. The latter, having fl ed their
homeland to escape the Bolsheviks and revolution, were now offi cially
stateless. In between were journalists, a few businessmen, some old
China hands who’d lived in Peking since the days of the Qing dynasty
and felt they could never leave. There was the odd world traveller taking
a prolonged sojourn from a grand tour of the Orient, who’d come
for a fortnight and lingered on for years, as well as refugees from the
Great Depression in Europe and America, seeking opportunity and adventure.
And there was no shortage of foreign criminals, dope fi ends
and prostitutes who’d somehow washed up in northern China.
Peking’s foreigners clustered in and around a small enclave known
as the Legation Quarter, where the great powers of Europe, America
and Japan had their embassies and consulates— institutions that were
always referred to as legations. Just two square acres in size, the strictly
demarcated Legation Quarter was guarded by imposing gates and
armed sentries, with signs ordering rickshaw pullers to slow down for
inspection as they passed through. Inside was a haven of Western architecture,
commerce and entertainment— a profusion of clubs, hotels and
bars that could just as easily have been in London, Paris or Washington.
Both the Chinese and foreigners of Peking had been living with
• 5 •
The Approaching Storm
chaos and uncertainty for a long time. Ever since the downfall of the
Qing dynasty in 1911, the city had been at the mercy of one marauding
warlord after another. Nominally China was ruled by the Kuomintang,
or Nationalist Party, under the leadership of Chiang Kai- shek, but the
government competed for power with the warlords and their private
armies, who controlled swathes of territory as large as western Europe.
Peking and most of northern China was a region in fl ux.
Between 1916 and 1928 alone, no fewer than seven warlord rulers
came and went in Peking. On conquering the city, each sought to
outdo the last, with more elaborate uniforms, more ermine and braid.
All fancied themselves emperors, founders of new dynasties, and all
commanded substantial private armies. One of them, Cao Kun, had
bribed his way to supremacy, paying offi cials large amounts in stolen
silver dollars, since no offi cial in China at that time trusted paper
money. Another, Feng Kuo- chang, had been a violin player in brothels
before illegally declaring himself president of all China. They and
their ilk terrorised the city as they bled it dry.
Peking was certainly a prize. It was China’s richest city after
Shanghai and Tientsin. Unlike those two, however, Peking was not a
treaty port— those places seized from the Qing dynasty by European
powers in the nineteenth century. There foreigners governed themselves,
and built trading empires backed by their own police forces,
armies and navies. Peking was, at least for now, Chinese territory.
But it was no longer the capital, and had not been since 1927. In that
year, Generalissimo Chiang Kai- shek, unable to pacify the northern
warlords and struggling to cement his fragile leadership of the
Kuomintang, had moved the seat of government to Nanking, some
seven hundred miles south. From there he launched the Northern Expedition,
a military campaign that attempted to wipe out both the warlords
and the nascent but troublesome Communist Party, and unite
China under his rule. He was only partially successful. Peking was run
by the Hopei- Chahar Political Council, led by General Sung Chehyuan,
commander of the Kuomintang’s Twenty- Ninth Route Army.
General Sung, who had a formidable reputation for soldiering, remained
Midnight in Peking
• 6 •
loyal to the Nanking government even after the arrival of a new player
in the struggle to control China: Japan.
In 1931, under the guise of their long- dreamt-of Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, in China’s
northeast. They then set about bolstering the region with troops in
preparation for an advance south to capture the whole country. But
there were constant skirmishes with Chinese peasants, who were resisting
the theft of their lands. Even farther north, Japanese agents
provocateurs were stirring up anti- Chinese feeling in Mongolia.
General Sung paid lip service to the Japanese while resisting their
demands to cede the city, but his council was too weak and corrupt to
stave off the encroachment of enemy troops. These steadily encircled
Peking, and by the start of 1937 had established their base camp a matter
of miles from the Forbidden City. Acts of provocation occurred
daily, and the roads and train lines into and out of the city were disrupted.
Japanese thugs for hire, known as ronin, openly brought opium
and heroin into Peking through Manchuria. This was done with
Tokyo’s connivance and was part of an eff ort to sap Peking’s will to
fi ght. The ronin, their agents and Korean collaborators peddled the
subsidized narcotics in Peking’s Badlands, a cluster of dive bars, brothels
and opium dens a stone’s throw from the base of the foreign powers
in the Legation Quarter.
Whatever the ferocity of the storm building outside— in Chinese
Peking, in the Japanese- occupied north, across China and its 400 million
people to the south— the privileged foreigners in the Legation
Quarter sought to maintain their European face at all costs. Offi cially,
Chinese could not take up residence in the Quarter, although in 1911
many rich eunuchs— former servants to the emperors and empresses
who had been thrown out of the Forbidden City after the collapse of
the Qing dynasty— had moved in. They were followed by warlords
in the 1920s.
More than a few foreign residents of the Legation Quarter in its
heyday described themselves as inmates, but if this gated and guarded
section was indeed a cage, then it was a gilded one, with endless games
• 7 •
The Approaching Storm
of bridge to pass the time. Sandwiched between the legations were
exclusive clubs, grand hotels and department stores. There was a
French post offi ce, and the great buildings of the Yokohama Specie
Bank, the Banque de l’Indochine, the Russo- Asiatic Bank, and the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
It was Europe in miniature, with European road names and electric
streetlights. St Michael’s Catholic Church dominated the corner
of rue Marco Polo and Legation Street, and the latter was also home
to the German hospital, where the nurses, Lazarene nuns, served kaffee
und kuchen to their privileged patients. Residents of Europeanstyle
apartment buildings went shopping at Kierulff ’s general store,
which sold perfume, canned foods and coff ee. Sennet Frères had a
reputation as the best jewelers in northern China, and Hartung’s was
the leading photography studio and the fi rst to have been established
in Peking, while a Frenchman ran a bookshop and another a bakery.
On Morrison Street (named after George Morrison—‘Morrison of
Peking,’ the thundering voice of the Times of London in China) there
was an English tailor and an Italian who sold wine and confectionery.
White Russian beauticians staff ed La Violette, the quarter’s premier
beauty parlour. There was also a foreign police force, and garrisons
for the fi ve hundred or so foreign troops stationed in Peking.
Eight gateways, each with massive iron gates, marked the entrances
to the Quarter and were manned by armed guards day and
night. Chinese needed a special pass or a letter of introduction to
enter this inner sanctum. Rickshaw pullers had their license numbers
taken and had to leave immediately after they’d dropped off their
fare. At the fi rst sign of trouble in Chinese Peking, the gates to the
Quarter were slammed shut— there would be no repeat of the deadly
siege that had occurred during the Boxer uprising.
The memory of the Boxers still loomed large over the Legation
Quarter. In 1900 the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists,
dubbed the Boxers, had swarmed down on the Quarter, intending to
massacre all the yang guizi—foreign devils— in the capital, and show that
China could fi ght back against Western encroachment and gunships.
Midnight in Peking
• 8 •
They had already beheaded missionaries working in remote outposts,
and as they approached Peking, their numbers swelled, thanks in part
to the rumours that they possessed magical fi ghting skills, and that
bullets could not harm them.
The Boxers held the foreign community under siege within the
Legation Quarter for fi fty- fi ve days. They lit fi res around the outskirts,
fi red cannons into the legations and tried to starve the inhabitants into
submission. Eventually the siege was lifted by a joint force of eight
foreign armies, including those of Britain, America and Japan. After
liberating the Quarter, these troops went on a horrifi c looting spree,
rampaging throughout the city, terrorizing all Peking. With seized
Chinese money, the Quarter was rebuilt grander than ever and was now
far better protected.
Whereas to most Chinese the Quarter was a second Forbidden
City, to the foreigners living there in the 1930s it was a sanctuary,
even if in their claustrophobic confi nes they sometimes felt, as one
visiting journalist remarked, like ‘fi sh in an aquarium,’ going ‘round
and round . . . serene and glassy- eyed.’
Rumour was the currency of the quarter. Conversations that
started with who had the best chef and who was about to depart for
home on a long- awaited furlough soon degenerated into who had
commenced an aff air with whom at the races, whose wife was a little
too close to a guardsman at the legation. Sometimes darker things
were hinted at, things beyond the normal indiscretions. Some people
lost their moral compass in the East, or so the thinking went.
And there were plenty of places to spread rumours. The exclusive
clubs and bars were hotbeds of intrigue and gossip. In the stuff y and
very British Peking Club, it was black tie only. Whisky sodas were
dispensed on trays by silent servants, the cacophony outside in Chinese
Peking held at bay by windows covered with thick velvet curtains,
and there were two- month- old copies of the Times and the Pall
Mall Gazette on off er. In the swanky bar of the Grand Hôtel de Pékin,
a respectable crowd sipped fancy drinks and twirled to an all- Italian
band playing waltzes.
• 9 •
The Approaching Storm
The more risqué Hôtel du Nord, on the edge of the Badlands, had
a crowded bar that served draught beer, fashionable Horse’s Neck cocktails
and dry gin martinis. Here the patrons were more rambunctious—
the polite word was ‘mixed’—and they foxtrotted to jazz courtesy of
a band of White Russians. And then there was the Grand Hôtel des
Wagons Lits.
The Wagons Lits was a large, French- style hotel just inside the
Quarter at the junction of Legation and Canal streets. Close to the
city’s main railway station, it was a popular meeting spot. The bar was
famous for its diplomatic clientele during the day and bright young
things later at night. A sprinkling of connected Chinese sometimes
joined the crowd, as did the children of wealthy local businessmen
who’d just returned from Paris or London. The Wagons Lits had always
been a place to loosen tongues. There were tables to be had
away from the dance fl oor, away from the band that strummed lightly
for the mix of guests. This was the spot to meet the knowledgeable
and opinionated old China hands.
But lately the once- packed hotels and clubs had been a little somber,
and sometimes they were half empty. In truth, the Wagons Lits
and other night spots were out of date. Shanghai had better bars, had
much better everything. Peking was a relic, a onetime capital that was
now far too close to the Japanese war machine. The city, its foreigners
and their clubs were victims of history and geography.
These days, rickshaw pullers waited outside the exclusive Peking
Club for well- heeled guests who never emerged, having never arrived.
The diplomats and the old China hands stayed on, sticking
their heads in the sand and hoping that both the Nationalist republic
and the Japanese would go away, but the legations operated with reduced
staff . Those foreigners who could were getting out: businessmen
sent their wives and children home, or to the relative calm of
Tientsin or Shanghai. Wealthy Chinese had their families go south to
Canton or the British colony of Hong Kong. Peking was already lost
ground; it was just that the Japanese hadn’t got around to taking it yet.
To make matters worse, rumour had it that Chiang Kai- shek was
Midnight in Peking
• 10 •
about to cut a deal with Tokyo. Chiang had fought a long and bitter
internecine battle to become leader of the Kuomintang, and his position
was still precarious; he had political challengers to stave off as
well as the Japanese, the warlords and the Communists. Many people
believed he would sacrifi ce Peking in order to save his own skin: if
the Japanese were to stop at the Yangtze River and leave him everything
south as far as Hong Kong, Chiang could live with that. Chiang
was fi nished with the north, the Chinese whispered— for you never
knew who was listening— he would sell out Peking, and the Japs
would massacre them all.
The city’s inhabitants felt betrayed, expendable. The mood on the
streets, of both foreign and Chinese Peking— in the crowded hutong
(alleyways), in the teeming markets where prices were rising and
supplies of essentials were dwindling— was one of fear mixed with resignation.
People said that when the fi nal push to conquer China came,
the Japanese would starve the city into submission. The end was
coming; it was just a question of when. The traditional trade routes into
Peking from China’s vast hinterlands were already being cut off . Chinese
Peking was bursting with peasants who had crowded in from the
surrounding provinces, fl eeing the Japanese, the warlords, poverty and
natural disasters. They wandered aimlessly, wondering what tomorrow
would bring. They went to bed early in crammed houses to escape the
dark and the biting cold, hoping to make it through another day.
When the catastrophe did fi nally hit, China would be thrown
into a struggle for its very survival, in what would be the opening act
of World War II. For now foreign Peking was in an uneasy lull, on
the edge of panic at times, although an alcohol- assisted denial and the
strength of the silver dollar made life more bearable for many. An
American or a European could still live like a king in this city, with a
life of servants, golf, races, champagne- fuelled weekend retreats in
the Western Hills. The storm might be coming, but the last foreign -
ers in Peking had battened down the hatches very comfortably.
The hunt for a young woman’s killer was about to consume, and
in some ways defi ne, the cold and fi nal days of old Peking.
• 11 •
The Body at the Fox Tower
It was an old man named Chang Pao- chen who reported the body.
One of the laobaixing—literally, the ‘old hundred names,’ the working
people of Peking— Chang was now retired and lived in a hutong not
far from the Fox Tower. On that cold morning of Friday 8 January,
he was taking his prized songbird for a walk along the Tartar Wall.
Caged songbirds were an ancient Peking tradition, and every
morning old men like Chang could be seen carrying lacquered
wooden cages draped with blue linen covers. All Pekingers, Chinese
and foreign, recognized the distinctive sound of these swallows,
which were let out of their cages with fl utes attached to their tails to
go whistling through the morning air, soaring across the Forbidden
City and the Fox Tower before faithfully returning to their masters.
Chang came to the Tartar Wall every day to smoke, drink tea and
talk songbirds. The cold didn’t deter him, nor the strong, bonechilling
winds. He was a Pekinger born and bred.
That morning, shortly after eight o’clock, he was following the
Tartar Wall eastwards to the Fox Tower when he noticed two rickshaw
pullers squatting below, pointing across the wasteland towards the
Midnight in Peking
• 12 •
rubbish- strewn moat at the base of the tower. The area was invariably
quiet at that hour, and whatever was down there couldn’t be seen by
the traffi c using the City Road, which ran parallel to the wall from the
Fox Tower down to the Ch’ienmen Gate.
Chang drew closer, wary of the huang gou, but while the scabrous
mutts had a fearsome reputation, the old man knew they rarely attacked
humans. Like many a poor Pekinger, the dogs were hungry,
homeless and desperate, as Tokyo increasingly choked off food supplies
and commerce.
Later, what Chang saw was disputed as the local rumour mill
swung into action, exaggerating the scene with each telling and retelling.
But there was no doubting that the woman he found at the
base of the Fox Tower was dead, and not just any woman, but a foreigner.
A laowai. Moreover she had been terribly mutilated. Even in
the early- morning half- light Chang could see that the woman’s body
had been badly beaten. He could see cut marks on her pale, bare legs;
her face appeared to have been stabbed repeatedly.
Old Chang was shocked, even though dead bodies in the open
weren’t rare that winter. Poverty was one cause, but suicide had become
almost an epidemic, with slashed wrists or opium the most
common routes. Every daybreak the city sent out carts to collect frozen
corpses.
There’d also been a rise in politically motivated murders. The
Kuomintang’s enforcers and secret police clashed with turncoat Chinese,
those who believed that Tokyo would inevitably crush Nanking
as well as Peking, and were keen to be in a position to profi t early
from the occupation. There were also shootouts between rival factions,
and outrages committed by Japanese ronin and their Korean
allies from the north.
Old Chang hadn’t come across such a corpse personally. As a
younger man he’d seen the city ravaged and looted by the foreign
armies that had come to rout the Boxer rebels, and then, in the 1920s,
he’d seen the heads of warlords’ victims on display. Now there was
another war of sorts under way in Peking, between the Nationalists,
• 13 •
The Body at the Fox Tower
the Communists and the Japanese agents— the papers were full of it
every day. But a dead white woman, that was something else. Dead
foreigners were altogether a rarer phenomenon.
Old Chang remembered that on a cold winter’s night in 1935 a
White Russian émigré had walked to the Fox Tower and taken from
his threadbare coat an exquisite, ivory- handled cutthroat razor. He
had rolled up his sleeves and slashed both his wrists, slumping to the
ground by the tower wall as the life slowly drained out of him. He had
been found in the morning by passing rickshaw pullers.
Was this another suicide? It didn’t look like it, and whatever it
was, it wasn’t good. With his caged songbird, old Chang ran back
along the Tartar Wall to the nearest police box, as fast as his aged legs
would carry him.