The End of the Foreign Community of Beijing - Foreign Murder Suspects Detained Together in Shandong

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. Many bystanders were lining the streets watching these former untouchables being escorted to the Qianmen train station. 

Some members of the foreign community had not really realized what was about to happen and had brought their golfclubs along, others like the Philippine musicians of the Beijing Hotel had seen the writing on the wall and brought their most valuable possessions: their musical instruments. The many hundred people were taken with train to the Shandong province, here they were finally installed in an old missionary station in Weixian that had been converted into a Prisoner of War camp.

It had taken quite a while for the Japanese attitude towards the foreign community of Beijing to become this hostile after the occupation in 1937. In the beginning the Japanese occupiers had in fact gone out of their way to try to tone down their presence, as it was far more profitable and manageable if business in Beiping continued as before.

However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Habour in 1941 changed this, and when the U.S subsequently declared war on Japan, the Westerners living in Beiping were now looked upon with suspicion, ultimately making the Japanese occupying power expel all members of the foreign community from the city whose governments were not loyal to them.

The Weixian internment camp brass band

The prisoner of war camp in Shandong was not reminiscent of a Consentration camp. The detainees were in many ways managing themselves. But with more than 1400 foreigners squeezed together on very little space many awkward moments occurred. 

Every morning the interns where called out in front of their dormitories. Everybody had been given a number in Japanese that they would shout out in turn. In this way the number of people where accounted for.

For instance, all the main suspects of the infamous Pamela Werner murder case from 1937 were now living together. Making the father of the murder victim often point to several of the inmates shouting "You killed my daughter". In fact the chief suspect in the murder case was a dentist called Wentworth Prentice. He was able to make an old dentist chair he found at the old missionary station serviceable and attended in this way to the teeth of hundreds of the inmates.

A Japanese soldier in the watch tower. The soldier liked the painting by the intern William Smith so much that he gave him a bottle of Sake.

One former inmate that was a child at the time remembers: "For grown ups, the lack of privacy in Weihsien’s adult dormitories must have been the worst hell. For me, dormitory life was an endless pyjamas party with 13 girls". Many of the children of Weixian emphasize how good the adults were at shielding the children from the reality of war. The children had a structured life where they attended school everyday, classes were organized by teachers among the inmates, and the children had no knowledge of the Japanese atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre. Many of the children even fostered friendships with the Japanese guards during their internment and when the camp was finally liberated in 1945 they worried about what would happen to their Japanese friends:

After the end of the Second World War most inmates of the Weixian internment camp would leave China, but a few people like the main characters in Paul French novel ”Midnight in Peking” Wentworth Prentice and E.T.C Wernder returned to Beijing.

"I remember that we children ached, for the Japanese guards who had become our friends. Hara-kiri, someone told us, was the honorable way for a Japanese soldier to face defeat. Ceremonial suicide. The Chefoo boys who knew about these things demonstrated on their bellies where the cuts of samurai sword would be made - a triangle of self inflicted wounds, followed by a final thrust to the heart. I shuddered. The Japanese guard who gently lifted us girls up into his guard tower and dropped us for delicious moments of freedom into the field beyond the wall – would he commit hara-kiri?"