The Rise of China’s Biggest Mob Boss EVER
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welcome to the i can't sleep podcast with benjamin boster if you're tired of sleepless nights you'll love the i can't sleep podcast i help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention And then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
It's May 5th, 1923, and the Blue Express train is rattling through the Chinese countryside en route from Shanghai to Beijing. This is no ordinary rolling stock. The Blue's 14 cars include sleeping quarters, electric lighting, a dining car serving western-style meals and an observation deck. It's China's answer to the Orient Express, an engineering marvel, a flagship of the country's emergence from imperial rule. No wonder it's packed, therefore, to the gills with celebs and high society. On board are an Italian mob lawyer, a French war hero, a Mexican business mogul, a top Chinese professor, a sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the U.S. ambassador to China, and playboys from Shanghai's Jewish merchant scene.
each passenger a symbol of Shanghai's status as Asia's swaggering commercial hub, a tangle of banks, docks, high-rise towers and high-rolling casinos. It's a pot of gold for the continent's biggest companies and a den of iniquity for anybody hunting down sex, drugs and free living east of India and north of Singapore. Two million people live in Shanghai, double what it had been in 1912 when revolutionaries had toppled China's long-ruling Qing dynasty. But it is also a wildly unequal place, cleaved by shotgun diplomacy into three separate divisions. There is the international settlement, run jointly by Britain and the United States, where 30,000 foreigners live among 800,000 Chinese. There is the French concession,
No prizes for guessing who runs that. Home to another 200,000. And there are the vast Chinese administered areas outside their walls. Their slums bursting with arrivals from nearby rural hinterlands. No foreign residents of Shanghai are subject to Chinese law. They build their own western homes, send their kids to western schools and erect vast factories, none of which pay tax to a Chinese state buckling under lack of revenue. Cops and courts are defanged and the opium trade is roaring louder than a Chinese dragon. This all helps to fuel the rise of a new breed of Chinese gangster. Some have come out of centuries-old secret societies, flush with ideas of folk religion and ultra-nationalism. Others have risen through merchant guilds and trade unions, especially on the canals that serve Shanghai's lust for material wealth.
In the case of the Green Gang, it's both. Formed by 18th century Buddhists, it went underground among grain boatsmen before switching to salt smuggling and, more recently, opium. By 1923 it commands vast swathes of Shanghai's drug, sex and gambling markets. Politicians are in its pockets and in many cases it is the city's police. No Green Gang leader has brokered more deals or sent more enemies scattering than Du Yue Sheng. Tall and thin, mid-thirties, with a shaved head that accentuates the features that have earned him his not-so-subtle nickname, Big Eared Du. Du is a powerhouse, a one-man battering ram who throws giant parties in his own honor and sends coffins to the doors of those who upset him.
By 1923 the whole of the French concession is considered his turf. But Shanghai, king of the world's unequal cities, is also home to armies of would-be kingpins. Bandits desperate to win their own payday from the city's Gatsby-esque foreign inhabitants.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:25
2
What is the shocking Lincheng train hostage crisis that kicks off the episode?
9:25–14:38
3
How was 1920s Shanghai divided and why did that create a crime hotspot?
14:38–20:30
4
What are the origins of the Green Gang and how did a Buddhist sect turn criminal?
20:30–51:59
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Underworld Podcast
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