1930s Shanghai was notoriously populated by characters of dubious political and moral allegiances. Bernard Wasserstein shows how the Japanese used their contacts among the city’s low-life to assist in their invasion and occupation.
In July 1940, a fresh and exotic face enlivened Shanghai expatriate society.
The Princess Sumaire, aged twenty-two, stepped off a boat from India and engaged a suite at the Cathay Hotel. She immediately attracted attention on account of her elegant appearance, her scandalous behaviour and her mysterious origins. Within a short time she had made a wide, multi-national circle of friends. Among them were officers of the local Italian garrison, a number of English and American society girls and a couple of professional dancers who went by the stage names ‘Don and Dolly’.
Sumaire’s circle also included some more sinister figures: an abortionist, brothel-owner and sexual extortionist, Dr Albert von Miorini, a monkey expert, narcotics dealer and unqualified ‘doctor’, Hermann Erben, and a shady Franco-American journalist, aviator and pimp, Hilaire du Berrier.Sumaire settled down in the `Paris of the East', relishing its cosmopolitan night life and lively cafe society. But Shanghai had a darker side. With its lurid vice, endemic violence, and conspiratorial atmosphere, no place on earth in the 1930s and 1940s better exemplified the twilight zone between professional and political criminality.
Shanghai's ever-open door attracted an extraordinary agglomeration of ill-assorted foreign communities: `White' and `Red' Russians imported their fierce mutual animosity from their homeland and perpetuated them in exile; German businessmen dutifully celebrated Hitler's birthday at the German Garden Club but found to their dismay that they were outnumbered in Shanghai by thousands of `non-Aryan' German-speaking refugees from Nazi persecution; upper-crust `Shanghailander' Britons rubbed shoulders with Baghdadi Jewish property tycoons; Korean gangsters, Filipino musicians, low-life cardsharps, pickpockets and assorted con-men plied their various trades. So too did demi-mondaines of various nationalities who preyed on tourists at the Park, the Metropole and the Cathay hotels, as well as on naval and military men of half-a-dozen countries in other, more questionable, haunts.
Even in superficially respectable areas of the city, meretricious glamour and horrific poverty, filth and squalor intertwined symbiotically. At Ciro's night-club, the first in the city to enjoy full air-conditioning, British Saipans and Chinese mobsters tangoed with their wives or mistresses into the small hours. Outside, uniformed Russian doormen -- self-appointed ex-Tsarist `generals' whose spurious medals could be purchased by the dozen in the Hongkong market -- held importuning hordes of deformed Chinese beggars at bay. In less salubrious dance-halls, bars and `joints', lines of Russian `taxi-dancers' and Chinese `sing-song girls' sat waiting for customers. In 1935 one in every thirteen women in Shanghai was reckoned to be a prostitute.
Throughout the city violence was a constant threat, whether in the form of political assassination, gang warfare or lovers' fights. The stained cobbles of `Blood Alley' (rue Chu Paosan) in Frenchtown bore witness to the frequency of brawls along foreign soldiers and sailors. Wood, who allowed Shanghai to endure, owed an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah -- said the American Christian missionaries who strove to combat the devil in his own habitation. A Chinese journalist agreed: Shanghai, he wrote, was `a city of forty-eight-storey skyscrapers built upon twenty-four layers of hell'.
Who was Sumaire? Why had she come to Shanghai? Was she really a princess? Detective Sub-Inspector McKeown, of the British-controlled Shanghai municipal police, whose special beat was Indian affairs, reported that Sumaire claimed to be the daughter of the late Maharajah of Patiala. Her past life, as well as her conduct in Shanghai, rendered her in McKeown's judgement `open to suspicion either on moral or political grounds'. He discovered that she had been married as a child to a senior official of the Indian State Railways but later separated from him. Her family were said to have disowned her `owing to her loose morals'. From an Indian source McKeown ascertained that she was `a follower of the Lesbian cult'. The detective's findings were submitted to his superiors, who placed one copy in the `confidential drawer' and passed another on to Harry Steptoe, the British Secret Intelligence Service representative in Shanghai. Meanwhile, the subject of these prurient observations was kept under continued surveillance.
Sumaire's full name was Rajkumari Sumair Apjit Singh. She was not a princess. She was indeed a member of the princely Patiala family, though the exact nature of her relationship to the Maharajah was never firmly established by the investigating authorities.
In the course of
a piece on the French economic wonder, the lifestyle
des intermittents du spectacle, and (anti-)Americanism, Adam Gopnik writes that when "the country and its joys can be shut down by part-time trombonists ..., something is wrong, or at least ridiculous." Mr Gopnik underestimates the threat posed to global security by trombonists. In
Collaborators and renegades in occupied Shanghai, Bernard Wasserstein writes of Evgeny Mihailovich Kojevnikoff, alias Eugene Pick, alias Hovans, alias Doctor Clige:
Pick's circle of more than forty paid agents, informers and associates constituted a Who's Who of the foreign underworld in Shanghai. They included the hit-man Nathan Rabin, a former member of the 'Purple Gang' in Chicago who had a sideline as a professional trombonist. An American intelligence source described him as 5' 9", strongly built, with a 'Polish face, crude expression' and a swagger. The report stated that Rabin was:
... one of the most notorious Japanese gang members in Shanghai, extortionist and blackmailer. Killer when drunk. His sole aim with the Japanese: obtain as much money as possible by criminal means and hide behind Japanese officials.
That sounds like a trombonist, and probably a part-time trombonist. The predominantly Jewish Purple Gang is usually said to have been Detroit-based, but, strangely, 333 pages of FBI files available
here don't seem to mention a gangster called Rabin. And, although the post-war
Oscar Rabin band is still quite well-known, principally for the sax mouthpiece anecdote, neither am I getting any ghits for a 30s Michigan-based trombonist called Rabin.
Other prominent Shanghai residents in the early 30s:
| Dr Albert von Miorini | Abortionist, brothel-owner, sexual extortionist |
| Hermann Erben | Monkey expert, narcotics dealer, "doctor" |
| Hilaire du Berrier | Shady Franco-American journalist, aviator, pimp |
| Don and Dolly | Dancers |
| Mr Steptoe | "British Secret Intelligence Service representative" |
| Princess Sumaire | Nymphomaniac Indian dwarf model |
| "Captain" "Eugene" "Pick" | Shaven-headed Cossack murderer, blackmailer, vodka drinker, drama student |
