Paul French - The Badlands: More Stories from Midnight in Peking

My thanks go primarily to Sylvia Walker, the daughter of Tatiana Korovina and Roy Tchoo, for sharing her memories of her remarkable parents and her childhood around the Badlands. Sadly, Sylvia passed away shortly after we began our correspondence in late 2011, but her husband Adrian was kind enough to continue the conversation with me. He also provided me with photos from Sylvias family albums, those that survived the turmoil and chaos of war, revolution and relocation. As well as her own familys story, Sylvia told me the tale about Joe Knauf and other Badlands characters taking day trips to the Tien Chao execution grounds to see the killings there.

Sylvia also kindly contacted her network of old Peking White Russians for information on Shura. It flooded in. I know that many of the old China Hands who came out of that White Russian community didnt believe then, and many still dont believe now, that Shura Giraldi was involved in anything criminal whatsoever. But Im afraid I have to beg to differ, as did the police of both Peking and Shanghai. The arguments around the true history and nature of Shura Giraldi will, Im sure, continue as long as the old White Russian community of Peking is alive. The only indisputable fact is that Shura was a conundrum.

Many of the details used in these stories come from E.T.C. Werners papers at the UK National Archives in Kew. Anyone wanting to consult them would be best advised to start at Document F3453/1510/10 (Far Eastern) and work from there. The years between autumn 1937 and the summer of 1940 that Werner spent trawling the dens and back streets of the Badlands in the hunt for the murderers of his daughter Pamela provide perhaps the best vignettes we have on record of the brief life and workings of the district.

Langdon Gilkeys memoir Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (Harper & Row, New York, 1968) refers to the European dope addict rousted in the Badlands and sent to Weihsien Internment Camp as Briggs, which was a pseudonym, I believe. The ultimate resource for anyone wanting to track down the history of the internees is Greg Lecks exhaustive history, Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China (19411945) , (Shandy Press, Philadelphia, 2006).

The likely early backgrounds of Brana Shazker and Rosie Gerbert are typical of those outlined in Charles van Onselens revealing and remarkable book The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath (Jonathan Cape, London, 2007). Russian prostitutes such as Marie and Peggy, and madams such as Brana and Rosie, were nothing new in Peking and are referred to in many earlier memoirs, most notably that of the Tsarist diplomat Dmitrii Ivanovich Abrikosov, in Revelations of a Russian Diplomat (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964). Abrikosov recalls performing his diplomatic duties on behalf of Russia and escorting several Russian prostitutes and their madams to safety during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

To the best of my knowledge, Marie and Peggy are only recorded in E.T.C. Werners archive at Kew. The well-known and much-liked Father Paul Shelaeff talked about his years as a Russian Orthodox priest in Harbin during a number of interviews he gave to the California press after his son Andre died. Andre, a gifted boxer who became Welterweight Champion of the Orient, was destined for greater things in America, but he died of a cerebral haemorrhage shortly after a fight in San Franciscos National Hall in December 1938.

Joe Knauf, too, lives on largely in the descriptions of him left by Werner in his archives, though there are also references to him in the documents left by Arthur Ringwalt, the highly respected Third Secretary at the American Legation in Peking in the late 1930s. During the course of monitoring undesirable and problematic Americans in northern China, Ringwalt opened a file on Knauf as a possible collaborator, and noted Michael Consiglio as another American involved in criminal activities in the Badlands. Several people who grew up in the Badlands, among them Sylvia Walker, remember their parents specifically warning them to keep away from Knauf, such was his notoriety.

For the most detailed descriptions of the Kavkaz bar and Shura as a wine merchant in the 1930s, see John Blofelds City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Pekings Exotic Pleasures (Hutchinson, London, 1961), which includes occasional mentions of other White Russians and foreigners who delved into the Badlands, or who sojourned in Peking between the wars. It is also worth mentioning Julia Boyds recently published A Dance With the Dragon: The Vanished World of Pekings Foreign Colony (I.B. Tauris, London, 2012). And when it comes to those Western bohemians who occasionally enjoyed a nights slumming in Peking, Harold Actons Peonies and Ponies (Chatto & Windus, London, 1941) is a must-read for an evocation of the extreme loucheness and grand bitchiness of the era.

The Dancer How Tatiana Korovina
Became Lilian

n the late 1930s it was not uncommon for the landlords of Badlands flophouses to discover a short-term tenant dead in their room, having taken an overdose the night before. Whether accidentally or on purpose it was never clear, but either way, the landlords learnt to frisk the pockets of their tenant for the days rent before calling an ambulance. In the winter months the owners of brothels and bars might open their doors to find the frozen, lifeless body of one or other of the Badlands old Russian beggars aged Tsarist officers with no saleable skills left, or old widows too haggard now for prostitution.

Suicides were commonplace, the penniless giving up the fight against poverty, those who had fallen into prostitution finally deciding that death was preferable to the miserable life they were living. And every so often tempers flared, courtesy of cheap spirits, especially the rot-gut samogon illegally distilled vodka that was cooked up in backyards. Then scores would be settled, and a man might die with a knife in his gut or a bullet in his head. Many who ended up in the Badlands never left; it was the final stop on a downward spiral.

Still, new life also entered the district. The Asbury Church on Hougou Hutong, home to the China Inland Mission, was run by well-meaning American Methodist missionaries, who every week would find an unwanted white baby or three left on the doorstep during the night. Notes in Russian were pinned to them, begging mercy and forgiveness for these infants whom the mothers themselves could not support. The missionaries took the babies in and tried their best, which was why the Asbury came to be known as the Island of Hope.

The Badlands was bad. It was cruel, and life was truly cheap there. But for some it was also exciting, and there was a community, of sorts. One person who thought of it as home was Tatiana Korovina, a pretty White Russian girl born in Shanghai in 1919. Her parents had managed to make a life for themselves in China after fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1917; her maternal grandfather had been a delegate at the Tsarist Prince Kudachevs Russian Legation in Peking, and was stranded there after the Russian Revolution.

Tatiana, known to her family as Tania, got a decent enough education, and she also loved music. Trips with her parents to hear the largely White Russian Shanghai Philharmonic at the Town Hall on Nanking Road were a special treat. In 1922 the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova visited Shanghai on her first Oriental tour, dancing The Dying Swan , and Tatianas mother was swept up in ballet fever, along with many others in the city. She sent her daughter to dancing classes with the Russian migr teacher George Goncharov, who had danced with the Bolshoi in Moscow before the Bolsheviks came. One of Tatianas fellow students and friends was a girl called Margaret Hookham, whom everyone called Peggy.