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.
