The China train hijacking and 37-day hostage crisis that brought down a government
- In May 1923, Chinese bandits hijacked a luxury train and took foreign and local passengers hostage, resulting in a diplomatic crisis
- Beijing resident James Zimmerman tells the extraordinary story – the escapes, the shootings, the 37-day siege – in eye-widening detail in his new book
Early on the morning of May 5, 1923, John Benjamin Powell, publisher of Shanghai’s Weekly Review and also the Chicago Tribune’s man in China, boarded the Peking Express – the newest, fastest, safest, most luxurious train in the land.
Among his fellow first-class passengers were an Italian lawyer who had made his fortune as legal representative of the Shanghai Opium Combine; a wealthy car dealer who had been born in Romania; a mysterious gentleman who refused to allow the porters to carry his heavy luggage; and the sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose father, the richest man in the world, had founded Standard Oil.
That night, at 2.40am, near the town of Lincheng (now Xuecheng) in Shandong province, the train was deliberately derailed. Soon, it was filled with a thousand bandits who ran through the carriages, stealing valuables and puzzling over unfamiliar items – spats, hot-water bottles, toothpaste.
Twenty-eight foreigners, some still in their nightclothes, were then forced to march with about 70 Chinese passengers through the dark countryside.
They included a Mexican couple, Manuel and Teresa Verea, who were on their honeymoon. Manuel, at least, had had some practice: he’d been kidnapped in Mexico the previous year.
The mysterious gentleman couldn’t join the throng. He’d been killed in a stand-off in his compartment. He was a British citizen, also born in Romania, with a doubtful past – the sort of shadowy figure attracted to the political chaos of 1920s China.
The bandits, in a fit of squeamishness, declined to step over his body and so they never discovered that his weighty bag was stuffed with money and ammunition.
How Chinese gangsters operate freely in Laos’ Golden Triangle economic zone
What happened next – the escapes, the shootings, the diplomatic crisis and the 37-day siege – is told in eye-widening detail by James Zimmerman in his book, The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China.
The title is not an exaggeration: the government of the day fell as a result and, in December 1926, when a young man called Mao Zedong gave an early public speech in his native Hunan province, he cited the “Lincheng Incident” as a reason for a coherent political strategy to help the peasants overturn the warlords.
It’s an extraordinary story, tingling with memorable characters. Zimmerman, a lawyer and four-time chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who has lived in Beijing for 25 years, tells it with meticulous deftness.
The cast may suggest Agatha Christie; the footnotes, bibliography and index testify to a forensic mind.
Zimmerman had initially come across references to Lincheng while he was researching China’s early-20th-century court system for his 2005 legal guide, China Law Deskbook.
Intrigued, he began searching through archives. But he became active in Hillary Clinton’s US presidential campaign and, by November 2016, he’d only written about 75 pages.
“Then, when she lost, I thought, I’m done with politics, and I shifted my focus to the book,” he says, on a recent morning in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.
He knew there had been extensive media coverage of the Lincheng hijacking at the time, not least because journalists had been on the train.
“But there’s no real book out there that goes into the details,” he says.
“The most important part was being able to trace family records through descendants of hostages and rescuers. I got diaries, photographs, a wealth of information.”
The hostages had been split up – and the foreign government representatives couldn’t always agree on tactics – so stitching the varied experiences together was essential.
Some of those he tracked down included the Friedman family, who were relatives of the wealthy car dealer, Leon, and the Philoons; Major Wallace Philoon had been a US army military attaché, sent to help with release negotiations.
When Zimmerman located the family of Major Roland Pinger, “they basically said they’d been waiting for me to come along – nobody had approached them for years”.
Pinger was an American army engineer who had been based in the Philippines, and had decided to take a trip round China with his wife and two boys, aged nine and three, before they returned to the United States.
Obviously a resourceful man, he’d managed to fashion a sharp implement from the buttonhook his wife used to fasten her corsets.
As the crisis reached its climax, he and two hostages surnamed Solomon and Allen were forced to climb to the top of a distinctive, karst-crowned mountain called Paotzuku, now Baodugu.
The foreign hostages were, mostly, considered too valuable to mistreat. This was not the case with the Chinese hostages, some of whom were randomly executed
Zimmerman, of course, has been to Paotzuku several times. He has climbed it with Candace Pinger Smith, who is both daughter and granddaughter of hostages. Her father was the nine-year-old Roland Jr.
The Temple of the Clouds lower down the slope, with its Taoist frescoes and its 900-year-old ginkgo tree, is still there. But the stench the men endured from the bodies of 47 kidnapped Chinese children, flung from its top by the bandits in the months preceding the train’s hijack, has long dissipated.
Horror, and the possibility of death, were ever-present. Yet Zimmerman also conveys the human relationship that sprang up between hostages and captors.
The bandit leader was called Sun Mei-yao. “Awfully nice-looking young man,” thought Lucy Truman Aldrich, the Rockefeller sister-in-law, who was held captive for three days and wrote a piece about it for the November 1923 issue of The Atlantic Monthly headlined “A Week-end With Chinese Bandits”.
(She noted the bound feet of the village women but was herself severely hobbled by the diamond and emerald rings she’d hidden in her bed slippers.)
Father Wilhelm Lenfers, a German Catholic priest who acted as mediator, thought the young, bespectacled Sun looked like a university student. He had charisma; his gang, called the Self-Governed Army for the Establishment of the Country, would eventually have about 2,700 members.
One of his conditions for the hostages’ release was that he should have his own brigade within the Chinese military. But he had teamed up with a more barbarous individual named Po-po Liu. “He was the underbelly, the bad guy,” Zimmerman says.
You’ll need to read the book to find out what happens next. What is relentlessly conveyed is China’s turmoil. The army was corrupt – soldiers sold arms to the bandits – the warlords were corrupt, the government was inept. The hostages, trudging through devastated villages, saw how the landscape had become ground zero.
Six months earlier, Giuseppe Musso, the Italian opium lawyer – and shareholder of the South China Morning Post – had met Italy’s new fascist leader Benito Mussolini. He told the other hostages that China needed a similar strongman.
The fact that the chief negotiator on behalf of the local warlord was an American fixer provides a glimpse into a different era. He was Roy Scott Anderson, the son of missionaries, fluent in Chinese, trusted by both sides, and, like many of the Lincheng characters, he deserves a book in his own right.
The foreign hostages were, mostly, considered too valuable to mistreat. This was not the case with the Chinese hostages, some of whom were randomly executed.
How one poem dealt an unprecedented body blow to Chinese in America
Zimmerman agrees that he provides little information about them. He believes collective memory shifted because of subsequent events. What the current station master at Lincheng wants to discuss with him is not the train, but the war with Japan, which began 14 years later.
“Also, for the Chinese, what happened reflected very negatively on the country, they were ashamed. Maybe now, people will come forward and say, ‘My grandmother talked about it…’”
In fact, the week before this interview, local party cadres had unexpectedly contacted Zimmerman to state they had found four of Sun Mei-yao’s surviving grandchildren. Zimmerman is reserving judgment about this development.
With the impending publication of the book, the tourism possibilities – and the movie possibilities – are becoming evident.
Chinese students pay for ‘guaranteed acceptance’ into elite US universities
On the May 6 centenary, Zimmerman will be back in Shandong. After this interview, however, he has a more immediate task. Two of the hostages – Shanghai-born stockbroker brothers Eddie and Freddie Elias – are buried in Hong Kong’s Jewish Cemetery.
On the cool spring afternoon, map in hand, he seeks them among the quiet headstones of those born in Odesa, Warsaw, Alexandria, who now rest in Happy Valley.
The brothers’ graves, the inscriptions blurred with time, lie end to end, close to those of their parents. For a while, Zimmerman, usually voluble about his passion project, stands there, silent. Later, he sends an email: “Amazing feeling to be close to their souls.”
As it happens, Powell – the journalist who’d blithely leapt onto the Peking Express that May morning – encountered Eddie Elias in Shanghai in 1941, while they were both prisoners of the Japanese. Powell was so badly treated that eventually his feet would have to be amputated.
When the men met, he remarked, “I prefer Chinese bandits to these scoundrels.”
The Peking Express – The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China will be published on April 4.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong will host Zimmerman for a lunch and book talk on May 25. Details to be announced.
