Shady Shanghai: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Shanghai Grand (2017)

“In her salon, Bernardine Szold-Fritz brought together characters as diverse as Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, the scholarly dilettante Harold Acton, and the triple agent Trebitsch Lincoln. The latter had particularly intrigued Sir Victor Sassoon. Bernardine introduced him as a Buddhist abbot, but this was only the latest of the man’s many identities. Born Trebitsch Ignácz, the son of a Hungarian rabbi, he had, at various times, been a Presbyterian missionary among the Jews of Montreal, a Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, the organizer of a right-wing putsch in Weimar Germany, and an arms dealer to some of the most vicious warlords in northern China. In a nasal Mitteleuropean drone, Chao Kung, as Trebitsch now called himself, held forth about how the twelve stars tattooed on his forehead represented ‘spokes on the Wheel of Becoming.’ He was rumoured to be selling secrets to the Germans. In his diary, Sir Victor underlined the unusual name in red–his code for a new acquaintance, a blue underline indicating somebody he already knew–noting: ‘Trebitsch gives impression of being a charlatan.’ . . .

Holding forth in a bastard Cockney–Canuck brogue, Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen recounted how, after being caught stealing a pocket watch in a tough part of London’s East End, he’d been sent into exile on the Canadian prairies. There, he’d knocked the gun out of the hands of a thug trying to hold up a Chinese restaurant he frequented. One thing led to another, explained Cohen, and he’d been enrolled in a secret society sworn to the overthrow of the Manchus. In China, he became an aide-de-camp to Dr. Sun and then an arms dealer, before becoming the first foreigner to be made a general in the nationalist army. For Cohen, it made perfect sense that the Chinese got along with the Jews: they had a lot in common. ‘We are good friends but damned bad enemies,’ he confided to Sir Victor. ‘We don’t want trouble, but if someone picks on us, we like to be on top at the end and we don’t mind how long it takes.’”—Taras Grescoe, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, and Decadence in Old China (2017)