Broken in the Badlands

In the 1930s, the Badlands was a tight-knit and incestuous rookery of vice located in Peking's eastern Tartar district. It had sprouted up in the late 20s on an area of open land that had been used for drilling foreign soldiers and exercising horses. Into the new, hastily thrown up constructions spilled a mix of stateless White Russians, other poor itinerants and petty foreign criminals who created a lightly policed nocturnal playground. Located between the grand European-style Legation Quarter and the colossal wall that circled the old Imperial City, it comprised little more than half a dozen hutongs filled with brothels, bars, dope dens, cheap restaurants and flophouses. It would never rival the scale or the status of the Shanghai Badlands, but it was bad to the bone all the same.

The various ways that the men and women who were to become the denizens of its Badlands reached Peking were legion. Tatiana Korovina had been raised in Shanghai by a White Russian family but became one of the leading dancers in the district's small and shady cabarets. Joe Knauf, the Badlands' major drug dealer, dropped out of the United States Marines in China to ply his sordid trade. Brothel madams such as Brana Shazker and Rosie Gerbert first arrived as trafficked girls from the poverty-stricken Russian Bessarabia, while countless prostitutes came from broken homes resulting from the White Russian exodus and the life of poverty that ensued in China.

Others were simply criminals on the run looking for a bolt-hole far from the beaten path, demobbed or permanently AWOL soldiers, or foreign sojourners who had arrived in Peking to see the Orient and lost themselves to the opium pipe, the bottle or just the sheer wickedness of the area. Together they formed a community of sorts, a colony of the sinful, the lost and the forgotten. Some survived the Badlands while others sunk into its depraved depths, never to resurface. A few left traces or told their stories, while others only live on in mouldering, seldom-seen police archives. Their lives rarely offer much hope, but they do tell the story of the mostly forgotten underbelly of foreign society in China between the wars.

My journey into the Peking Badlands began with research I conducted into the unsolved murder of a 19-year-old English woman named Pamela Werner, in January 1937. Right from the start, despite Werner being from an otherwise upstanding family, all the signs pointed to the heart of the Badlands. The answers to why she had been murdered and then brutally mutilated lay within this rabbit warren of alleyways which respectable foreigners were told to avoid and young girls forbidden from entering. In writing my book about that murder, Midnight in Peking - an attempt to finally bring resolution to the case - I discovered a lost world.

Travelling and talking about the book after it was published, I found that at event after event and in e-mail after e-mail I was asked for more on the people who had lived, struggled and died in the Badlands. Miraculously, more information - in the form of snippets, half-remembered anecdotes and rumours - appeared from former Peking residents, or their children, around the world, in Melbourne, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo.

It was all like a badly tuned television - the unintelligible screen would occasionally clear and an image would flicker through momentarily, only to dissolve again into confusion and obfuscation. Still, I steadily built up pictures of some of the Badlands' denizens, several of whom had appeared as minor characters in Midnight in Peking - the cabaret dancer Korovina, the madams, two prostitutes who lived unbearably tragic lives, their brutal pimp and a violent drug dealer. Most satisfyingly, I discovered a fund of stories regarding the greatest enigma of all - Shura Giraldi, a Russian hermaphrodite who some saw as nothing more than an effeminate teller of tall tales and who others (the police included) believed was the secret "king" of the Badlands. If the latter are to be believed, Giraldi's interests in the area included everything from running bordellos and bars to pulling off the largest bank robbery in Peking's history, in 1937, from which not a red cent was ever recovered. I wrote those stories up for a small collection entitled The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking.