White Russian refugees in Beijing

In 1943 most of the foreign community of Beijing was expelled from the city by the Japanese occupiers. It was the end of an era where westerners had been treated as outside the jurisdiction of Chinese law.

In Paul French’s book Midnight in Peking, about the unsolved 1937 murder of Pamela Werner, a place called “the badlands” is often referred to. In fact it, was probably here that Pamela was last seen alive. But what was this place of such ill repute? What survives of it today?

In an unlabelled box at the Kew archives in London you can find the Werner Letters. A seemingly ever-flowing cascade of words typed onto hundreds of now yellowed pages, these writings are the main source material used by Paul French for his book “Midnight in Peking”.

Recently, we have discovered Robert Swallow’s Sidelights on Peking Life, a peculiar insider’s guide to Beijing from the year 1927. He dedicates 10 pages to describing the ghosts that haunt the streets of the city, and some of them are quite amazing.

PEIPING, May 4 - Ex-Shanghai dancing girls are striking a rich harvest nowadays in the cabarets of Peiping and Tientsin. Driven North by the necessity tor finding work, both Chinese and Korean hostesses are finding that they can make as much money in one month in Peiping as they were able to make in two months in Shanghai.

A hundred years ago optography a "technique" that could allegedly extract the last image a deceased person had seen before death, was used in murder cases across the world. The infamous Pamela Werner case in Beijing was no exception.

Pamela Werner, daughter of the former British consul in Fuzhou E.T.C. Werner who now lives at No.1 Mapichang Hutong, was murdered on January 8th. The police now have several suspects including a dentist named Wentworth Prentice who is living at Dongjiaominxiang.

On January 8 1937 Pamela Werner was brutally murdered, but where? Paul French and Graeme Sheppard have different ideas on where Pamela’s body was found, one says at the foot of the infamous fox tower, the other inside the old inner city close to the German cemetery.