Rabbit's Warren

Over the last four or five years, I’ve put in many hours looking at the details of Sterling Seagrave’s 1985 book, The Soong Dynasty. The book describes the rise and fall of China’s influential Soong family, and its connections with Chiang Kai-shek, the politician and general who played a central role in China’s government from the 1920s until 1949, when the Nationalist government he led was defeated by the Communists and moved to Taiwan.

The Soong Dynasty spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been surprisingly influential on later writers, something which I will go into if I ever finish my critical review.

The notes in Seagrave’s book give the impression of great detail, and the bibliography, listing over 200 books, is massive. But a closer look shows something quite different: the notes are riddled with errors, over half the books in the bibliography are never used in the text, and large chunks of the book are either unsourced or incorrectly sourced.

Trying to track down these references and sources has given me some entertaining hours. I doubt I will finish my critical review any time in the near future, but I’m going to post some of the more interesting results of the search here over the next couple of months to at least get some use out of all this; perhaps it will stir me enough to eventually finish my review.

The first of these posts is on one of the main themes of Seagrave’s book: the role that Shanghai’s Green Gang played in the rise of the Soong family, and Chiang Kai-shek. Seagrave lays out his theme at the beginning of the book:

A recent flurry of scholarship on China has brought to light the stories of a number of Chiang’s early intimates, which I have included in the bibliography. By carefully piecing these elements together and showing how these cronies interacted with Chiang in the early 1920s I have been able to reconstruct enough of the basic outlines of a major political conspiracy to show how it worked and who were the principals involved. (12)

This major political conspiracy is no less than a “pact” between Chiang Kai-shek and the Green Gang to take over the government of China. As Seagrave says:

Chiang’s direct connection with the notorious Shanghai Green Gang after the winter of 1926-27 has been known for many years, but there has been only a vague understanding that those links went back much earlier, and of how they affected his career. It is now possible for the first time to see the “Divine Skein” linking them all the way back to his youth, before 1910, and the manner in which the Green Gang leaders used Chiang decisively (and were used by him) to snatch the revolution from the hands of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s coalition. (12)

Seagrave’s description of how Chiang and the Green Gang pursued the ends of their conspiracy, aided and abetted by the Soongs, is full of lurid details, but the sources of these details are sometimes utterly obscure. Tracking these details down is sometimes amazingly difficult, and there are many points that I’ll probably never figure out, but there are some points I can now resolve.

The post for today is on just one small item: a brothel that Seagrave claims the Green Gang owned or controlled, called the Blue Villa. The Blue Villa appears only twice in Seagrave’s book, but it can illustrate both Seagrave’s writing style and the problems involved in tracing his sources.

The Villa’s first appearance is on page 152, where Seagrave is describing the different social positions of the Soong family and Chiang. The Soong family, whose daughter Mei-ling eventually married Chiang, is at the high end;

At the opposite end of the Shanghai social scale, Big-eared Tu enjoyed visiting the famous Blue Villa and cruising the other Green Gang brothels in the Blue Chamber district with a young, ill-tempered bravo by the name of Chiang Kai-shek.

Big-eared Tu is Seagrave’s favored designation for Tu Yueh-sheng, one of the main figures in the Green Gang from the 1920s up until war broke out between China and Japan in 1937. This anecdote of Tu and Chiang in the red-light district (Blue Chamber district) is Seagrave’s attempt to put some detail on his claim that Chiang had links to the Green Gang “all the way back to his youth, before 1910.”

The second appearance of the Blue Villa is on page 158, where Seagrave gives a description of Shanghai’s decadent nightlife:

It is estimated that one out of every twelve Chinese houses in Shanghai was a brothel, which put the total number at 668 brothels for the International Settlement alone. One out of every 130 residents of the city was a prostitute. Of this number, more than half were owned by the Green Gang or owed allegiance to it. There were 121 prostitutes in the Blue Villa alone.

This style of writing is typical of much of the book. Specific details such as the location (the International Settlement, a district of Shanghai under international control, and not subject to Chinese law), and the number of prostitutes (121) are essential to Seagrave’s evocation of time and place, and give a strong impression of both realism and accuracy.

Seagrave’s annotation does sometimes give sources for some of these details, and following these sources can often give interesting results. Other times, however, Seagrave gives no source at all for his vivid details. The Blue Villa is one of many such cases.

Without help from Seagrave, such trivia is difficult indeed to track down, and I looked for the Blue Villa’s source for some time. Eventually I had a chance to look at most of the works listed in Seagrave’s bibliography. I believe it is in none of them. Not even the name Blue Villa, much less a count of how many prostitutes worked there.

I’ve also looked through a fair number of the various books that have been published on “Shanghai, city of adventurers” over the last 100 years or so. There are surprisingly many of these, and I can’t swear I’ve gone over everything that is out there, but I have read close to a dozen books on the subject, and as far as I can tell, the Blue Villa, far from being famous, is not mentioned in one of them.

The closest I came to a nibble was a book by Eric Chou, a Chinese journalist. In addition to co-writing a biography of Chiang Kai-shek with Brian Crozier, Chou also wrote a book called The Dragon and the Phoenix: Love, Sex and the Chinese. This book has a chapter called “Shanghai–the Paradise of Sinners” that has some interesting details. According to Chou,

The best-known club in Shanghai at that time was run by Tu Yueh-sheng, the all-powerful leader of the Blue Gang. It was at 181 Rue Giraud, with a rear gate opening on to Rue Foche. The huge three-storey French-style house was surrounded by an enormous garden of several acres. With armed guards posted at both front and rear gates, the club could pass as the residence of some V.I.P. …On the ground floor, thirty-six roulette wheels kept spinning… The second floor was a different world, and only the very select guests had access to it. (109)

This passage is one of the most vivid description I have found of the “decadent nightlife” of Shanghai. Tu’s club sounds like an interesting place. Unfortunately, it is probably not the right place. The Blue Gang is indeed another name for the Green Gang, but the tantalizingly nameless club was located in the French settlement, not the International Settlement. Rue Foche is probably an error for Avenue Foch, now known as Yan’an Central Road. This road did not exist before 1920, yet Chiang and Tu visited the Blue Villa as customers in Chiang’s youth. And the luxurious club Chou describes certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of place that the then proletarian Chiang and Tu would visit.

Stuck, I gave up on the hunt for a couple of years until I starting thinking about putting together a class in modern fiction and at last stumbled across a Blue Villa. The source is a 1965 novel by the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, called La Maison de Rendez-vous. I actually remember this novel from adolescence because of the paper-back cover, which I will put up if I can find a good picture of it. I had run across the Blue Villa in La Maison earlier while searching on Google, but confused it with a 1995 movie by Robbe-Grillet and mistakenly discarded it.

The “plot” of La Maison, like most of Robbe-Grillet’s works, pretty much defies description, but the Blue Villa is a central location in the story. It is a very vague sort of place, a brothel located in Hong Kong and run by a woman named Lady Ava. Hong Kong is not Shanghai, but it was still intriguing. Could the source of Seagrave’s Blue Villa really be here? French “new novels” are not normally a good source for works on history, to put it mildly. Still, perhaps Robbe-Grillet had learned of the Blue Villa, maybe from the same unknown source Seagrave had, and appropriated it for his own uses.

This seems not to be the case. Roch Smith, in a book called Understanding Robbe-Grillet (a necessary volume for those who want to read him), has a note on the origin of the name. In a 1997 letter to Smith, Robbe-Grillet explained that

The ‘Blue Villa’ of the novel has two sources: on one hand, the house of Victoria Ocampo, gray eminence and patron of Argentine literature … And on the other hand, a house of games (and of other more or less illicit pleasures) that was called ‘The Wide World’ and was in Shanghai. I visited it, but transformed into a conventional Communist house of culture. Edgar Faure told me about what went on there before.

Argentina is not what we’re looking for of course, but it seems that Robbe-Grillet’s Blue Villa did indeed have at least part of its source in a real Shanghai location. “The Wide World” is Roch Smith’s translation, but he gave the French original, “Le Grand Monde.” This is a familiar name. The English version is the “Great World” and there is an article on it in the English Wikipedia. It was restored to its original function as an amusement hall plus theater for Chinese opera after the Cultural Revolution and is still a popular location today. (160)

It was not, and is not, a house of ill-repute, as Robbe-Grillet was led to believe, but there is an interesting, if distant, Tu Yueh-sheng tie that is explained in Brian Martin’s book The Shanghai Green Gang (pp. 192-194). Distant here means that it was not Tu, but Tu’s older patron, Huang Chin-jung (Seagrave calls him Pock-marked Huang), who eventually acquired control of the “Great World” in 1931 (through quite shady means, apparently).

Unfortunately again, the “Great World” was established in 1916, which is probably still too late for the Chiang-Tu cruising that Seagrave describes. And again, “Great World” was more like a modern pachinko parlor than an exotic brothel with 121 prostitutes waiting on customers.

So while the Great World may have supplied some of the inspiration for Robbe-Grillet’s Blue Villa in La Maison, it doesn’t fit most of the details in Seagrave’s account.

Why then did both authors have a place with the same name? Now very suspicious that Seagrave had found one of his sources in Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, I still had to admit that there was always the (remote) possibility that there really was a Blue Villa that Seagrave found somewhere that I failed to look, and that the Robbe-Grillet connection was simply a random coincidence.

But browsing through Robbe-Grillet’s works, I found one more reference to the Blue Villa, in a 1977 novel called Topology of a Phantom City. (I read the Grove edition translated by J. A. Underwood) The strangely appropriate passage is as follows:

Pretending

If one is alone one must pretend to be two. With two, one must pretend to be three. Anything more than that is too difficult, even with several windows and several mirrors of different shapes. With more than three people it is best to pretend to be alone.

Doubtful Identity

Otherwise one has to resort to subterfuges such as wigs or cosmetics for painting the mouth and eyes, or wear a cloche hat with lace and flowers, the kind known as a “funny hat,” and assume an inspired, dreamy look (it is difficult not to laugh), imitating the drifting expression of the girl who has just had a letter from far away, from the Indies or the Andes or the Endies, from some country that does not exist, a blue letter recounting incredible things: the story of the three girls living at the bottom of a well, the story of the seven adolescents wed by Gille de Retz, the story of the twenty-four captives shut up in the underground prison of Vanadium, the one about the hundred and twenty-one underage prostitute of the Blue Villa in Shanghai, or the nine hundred and ninety-nine nocturnal companions of King Solomon, son of David; or it might be the story of the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne, or lastly that of an indeterminate number of girls who do not exist, as pretty as pictures and whose pictures multiply from page to page of a book one pretends to be seeing for the first time. (95-96)

Here at last we have the Blue Villa in Shanghai, occupied by 121 prostitutes. Now I don’t have a funny hat, but it really is difficult not to laugh. If this is not the source of Seagrave’s details, it’s one of the most goddamn remarkable coincidences I’ve ever heard of. If it is the source … well, he should at least have listed it in his bibliography. Or perhaps Seagrave’s publisher should have listed the book as fiction, which doesn’t require annotation for little homages like this.

[first posted Feb 21, 2015; revised Feb 23]

Anecdotes are the opium of popular history. They are the easiest things to add into any historical narrative or description, need few or no connections with the general subject, and are seldom subjected to a hard look by picky reviewers. They are one of the rewards of reading stacks of dusty books, otherwise so often sadly lacking in useful data, and can be conveniently stored on file cards allowing easy retrieval.

Such anecdotes play an essential role in popular accounts of 20th century Chinese history, and are part of the traditional wisdom passed on from one sloppy writer to another, even when they are obvious errors, exaggerations, or lies. It is a hopeless task to try and get rid of all these anecdotes, but tilting at windmills is one of the fun parts of research and scholarship, and it never hurts to add a footnote to such stories, even if no one reads it.

My footnote for today is on an anecdote from Vincent Sheean’s autobiographical account of his career as a free-lance journalist, Personal History (1935). The book describes how Sheean traveled to China in 1927 and managed to interview several important people, including Michael Borodin, Russian advisor to the KMT and Chinese Communist Party, and Soong Ch’ing-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen.

Coming at a crucial moment for which Chinese accounts have been hard to come by, Sheean’s book has been cited by serious historians such as C. Martin Wilbur, casual writers such as Helen Foster Snow and Jung Chang, and hacks such as Sterling Seagrave. Unfortunately, the casual writers and hacks used the book with less care than they should have, as this post will show.

To understand Sheean’s anecdote, you have to know something of the historical background. The anecdote concerns Li Ta-chao (Li Dazhao), the co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party. Originally a professor at Peking University, Li was deeply involved in revolutionary activities in Peking from 1921 onward. By December 1926, however, Peking fell under the control of Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), a general whose army held large portions of Northern China and who was strongly anti-communist.

The Russian government had earlier been recognized by the northern government and established an embassy in Peking. Beginning in 1924, the Russians had also established an alliance with the government of Sun Yat-sen, whose party, the KMT, had built a foothold in the southern city of Canton. The Russian condition for alliance was that the larger KMT accept individual members of the Communist Party. Sun agreed, and through Canton the Russians poured money, weapons, and advisors into China, in the hope of making China the next victory of Communist revolution.

Sun died in 1925, but his party the Kuomintang (KMT) continued, and in 1926 set out on a Northern Expedition intended to unify all of China, including Peking, under their control. Chang Tso-lin was of course opposed to this, and attempted to capture or kill the KMT and Communist Party activists in Peking. The activists, including Li Ta-chao and his family, took refuge in Russian housing in the Legation Quarter, the section of Peking where all the foreign embassies were located. The quarter enjoyed extraterritorial rights, meaning that it was exempt from Chinese laws and government.

After acquiring evidence that the KMT and Communists were using their refuge in the Quarter for revolutionary activities, the Peking authorities went to the Legation authorities and asked for permission to enter and arrest Chinese citizens in the Russian section of the Quarter. The authorities agreed, and on April 6, 1927, the Peking Police arrested about a hundred people, both Chinese and Russians, including Li Ta-chao, his wife, and two of his daughters. Li was put on trial, and together with 19 other KMT and Communist party members was sentenced to death by garroting (strangulation). They were executed on April 28th.

Sheean’s anecdote concerns “the revolutionary spirit” that Borodin transmitted to the Chinese around him:

There were educated Chinese girls who risked death in the effort to tell the workers and peasants who their real enemies were. One of these girls–we all knew her in Hankow–was disembowelled by Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers on June 21st in Hangchow for saying that the Nanking war lord did not represent the party or principles of Sun Yat-sen. Her intestines were taken out and wrapped around her body while she was still alive. Girls and boys were beheaded for saying what they believed; men were hung up in wooden cages to die of hunger and thirst or were broken on the rack. Little Phyllis Li, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the hero Li Ta-chao, was tortured by Chang Tso-lin’s men for three days and three nights before they mercifully strangled her, and in the whole time she told them nothing. (Sheean, 227)

From a later discussion (Sheean 241-242), it is clear that this long description of the martyrs to the revolution is a quote from Soong Ch’ing-ling, who told Sheean these particular details on July 1st, 1927.

The development of the anecdote in print is not complex. Sheean first mentioned Phyllis Li’s death in a 1927 article in Asia magazine; the section of his 1935 autobiography quoted above was first printed in the Atlantic Monthly in Dec. 1934. The passage has since been quoted or used numerous times, including books by Helen Foster Snow, Sterling Seagrave, Jung Chang, and Gus Lee. Only Snow and Chang manage to trace the anecdote back to Sheean; Seagrave incorrectly attributes it to Harold Isaacs, and Lee simply inserts it into a dialogue without any citation.

The details of most of Soong’s anecdote are of course impossible to verify. The anonymous martyr in Hangchow doesn’t seem to align with the biographies of any well known figures. I have not found any newspaper reports of such gruesome incidents. Beheading apparently did occur at the time. The New York Times carried a story of street beheadings in Shanghai in Feb. 1927, but the norm of course was shooting. Wooden cages were used to display captured enemies. Fang Chih-min, a prominent Communist in the 1930s, was paraded through the streets of Nanchang in a wooden cage, but following this he was executed, not starved. I don’t know what the word rack is supposed to mean in this context; the western rack was not a common device in China.

The one figure who it is possible to identify is “Phyllis Li.” Although I have not found any other sources for the name Phyllis, the age makes it clear that the girl was Li Hsing-hua (Li Xinghua), Li Ta-chao’s oldest daughter. Li Hsing-hua was born in 1911, thus she was 16 in 1927; the one year discrepancy is due to using the Chinese style of counting age, in which you are one year old (yi-sui) at birth. However, Li Hsing-hua was not strangled in 1927; she died in 1979, at the age of 68. In 1943 she wrote an account of the raid, titled “Remembering 16 Years Ago”, which was later published in a book called “Biographies of Chinese Communist Martyrs.” This is now a very well-known account in China; it is used in the national Chinese language textbook for sixth grade. The essay is a sad tribute to her father’s memory and describes her own experiences during the April 6 raid (she was with Li when he was arrested), but she does not mention being tortured.

Going back to the source of the anecdote, it seems unlikely that Soong Ching-ling actually thought that Li Hsing-hua had been strangled. According to Hsing-hua, she, her sister, and her mother were all released on the 28th, the day of Li’s execution, so while her fate might have been unknown prior to then, her family and friends would have immediately learned of the news. Soong told the story to Sheean two months after this, and Soong’s connections with Peking were good; it seems impossible that she did not know Li’s family had been released.

So why would Soong lie? Soong told the anecdote to both Sheean and Rayna Prohme, an American woman working in Hankow, and Sheean writes that he thought Soong was trying to get Prohme to apply for refuge in the American consulate because of the dangerous situation in the city. This is as good a guess as any.

Sheean seems to have never discovered that the story about Hsing-hua was not true. This is not surprising; he was not an expert on China, read no Chinese, and probably never had occasion to reexamine this particular story, though he did maintain his friendship with Soong up until his death. That Foster-Snow repeats the story (Foster-Snow 140) in 1967 is surprising. Foster-Snow was very familiar with the conditions of the Chinese Communist movement, lived in China for a lengthy period in the 1930s, and continued visiting the country up into the 1980s. One would expect her to be better informed than Sheean. It is even more surprising that Jung Chang’s biography of Soong Ching-ling repeats this anecdote (Chang and Holliday 56) without comment; Chang grew up in China and should have been much more familiar with the story than her account shows.

Sterling Seagrave’s confused account of the anecdote (Seagrave 228, 485n) is typical of his style; Seagrave’s preference is for as gruesome as possible accounts of reactionary atrocities and their truth is secondary for him. Still, it is amusing that he misattributes the anecdote to Harold Isaacs’s book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Isaacs was an important source for Seagrave’s book, The Soong Dynasty, and the fact that Seagrave attributes Sheean’s anecdote to Isaacs shows how careless his research was. Gus Lee’s book (Lee 280) is supposedly a non-fiction biographical account, but it actually incorporates large amounts of fiction, with details of varying authenticity borrowed from various sources; in this case, he is probably using Seagrave.

The distorted versions of Li Hsing-hua’s experiences, repeated again and again for decades, show the hazards of using hoary anecdotes without checking. It also shows the distance that sometimes exists between western accounts and Chinese reality. In this case, it is literally true that these writers’ mistakes could have been corrected by a Chinese sixth grade student.

References

Chang, Jung, and Jon Halliday. Madame Sun Yat-Sen: Soong Ching-Ling. London: Penguin, 1986.

Lee, Gus. Chasing Hepburn: A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood, and a Chinese Family’s Fight for Freedom. New York: Harmony, 2003.

Sheean, Vincent. Personal History. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1935.

Snow, Helen Foster. Women in Modern China. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.

Seagrave, Sterling. The Soong Dynasty. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.