MCLC: mystery endures in old legation quarter

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: mystery endures in old legation quarter
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (5/2/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/travel/a-mystery-endures-in-beijings-old-
legation-quarter.html

A Mystery Endures in Beijing’s Old Legation Quarter

By JANE PERLEZ

On a freezing January morning in 1937, the mutilated body of a beautiful
19-year-old British woman was found lying at the base of Fox Tower along
old Peking’s Ming dynasty protective wall. Her heart had been ripped out,
her face slashed with a knife. Her head lay to the west, her feet to the
east. Strangely, there was little blood.

The murder of Pamela Werner, the adopted daughter of a retired British
diplomat, shook the high-living expatriates and the seedy gangs of Peking,
as Beijing was then known, in the era before World War II. Although the
murder was never definitively solved, her father believed that it was the
work of a prominent American expatriate who traveled in the circles of
Beijing’s high society and its underworld, too.

For those of us who live in Beijing, and for visitors curious about the
city’s past, the mystery of Pamela’s death conjures the jittery period
just before the Japanese invasion, when the Communists were a band of
guerrillas in faraway mountains, and the foreigners indulged in a fin de
siècle existence of booze-infused parties and squadrons of servants.

About 700 Americans lived in the city, including the journalist Edgar Snow
who introduced Mao Zedong to the world with his 1937 book, “Red Star Over
China,” and his wife, Helen, also a writer. In her 1984 autobiography, “My
China Years,” Ms. Snow wrote: “Peking is the last stronghold of the good
old tradition of entertaining on the least provocation.” She described “a
paradise for foreigners,” taking special notice of the European women,
with their elaborate evening dresses and ermine fur stoles worn to formal
dinners.

The Snows were neighbors of E.T.C. Werner and his adopted daughter,
Pamela. Both families lived on a narrow street not far from the
15th-century Fox Tower, in Chinese-style houses just outside the sterile
Legation Quarter, where imposing gates kept the Chinese out, and the
privileged foreigners in. In those days it was an easy walk, or bike ride,
between the neighborhood of the Snows and the Werners, and the diplomatic
quarter.

Now, even amid the relentless rebuilding of Beijing, you can take a
leisurely 90 minutes to peer into the two worlds of Pamela, who unlike
most European residents spoke fluent Mandarin and glided seamlessly
between the Chinese and the Europeans.

An excellent account of the crime, the places and the characters is at the
center of “Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman
Haunted the Last Days of Old China” (Penguin Books, 2012), by the British
writer Paul French. He has also recorded an audio tour
<http://us.midnightinpeking.com/audio-walk/> in which he delivers a
rollicking commentary that dives back 400 years to the origins of the
walls of Peking, fast-forwards to the 1930s and, for context, gives some
barbed insights into the current state of affairs in Beijing.

Surprisingly, many of the landmarks of Pamela’s life, including the house
she lived in, still exist. The Fox Tower, an imposing fortress with
upturned eaves, still stands. Its interior has been remodeled, the
original pillars brushed with dark red paint. Some of Pamela’s favorite
haunts are now tucked behind high walls. But with imagination, and Mr.
French’s voice in your ear, you can re-create Beijing before the glass and
steel towers.

I was lucky enough to enjoy the author’s enthusiasm during a personal tour
in the summer. But Mr. French says he is no longer a guide, so as winter
approached I retraced our steps with a Chinese friend, using the audio
tour. The walk is prettier in summer with trees in full green, but more
authentic in the steely gray of winter, the season when Pamela died.

The directions on the audio are immensely helpful in sorting out Beijing’s
confusing street names. But be warned: Beijing changes so fast that from
my first walk with Mr. French to my second, a building central to Pamela’s
last hours had been knocked down. And one of Beijing’s best restaurants,
Maison Boulud, housed in the old American Embassy in the Legation Quarter,
was our destination in the summer. It closed in December. More on that
later.

Here are some high points from the audio and the book:

After following Mr. French’s directions from the Beijing Rail Station to
the narrow street called Armor Factory Alley, you will come across the
red-painted door of No. 1, where Pamela and her father lived. The number
of the house stands out on a chipped iron sign above the entryway. The
door is imposing, although the grandeur of the house is difficult to
judge. A recent, roughshod one-room addition juts onto the street, a
perfect example of the haphazard planning in what is left of Beijing’s old
alleyways, commonly known as hutongs. On the other side of the street, the
Snows lived at No. 6 (although in her book, Ms. Snow says their house was
No. 13). Here, too, it is difficult to gauge the vast scale of their home;
according to Ms. Snow’s account, Edgar sat in the study near the gate for
six months and wrote “Red Star Over China.”

About a 10-minute walk from Armor Factory Alley — down a set of stairs and
under a bridge — the base of the Fox Tower, now known as the Dongbianmen,
a mammoth gray brick wall with a watchtower on top, looms in front of you.
This is where Pamela’s body was found in the early morning of Jan. 8,
1937, by an old man walking his songbird. The ditch where she was dumped
is now near one of the city’s main ring roads.

The Red Gate Gallery <http://www.redgategallery.com/>, which opened in
1991, occupies the first floor of the tower. It is worth visiting for the
contemporary Chinese art, and the Ming dynasty interior. Brian Wallace,
the Australian founder, and one of the most knowledgeable art experts in
the city, is often on hand.

From there, it is a short stroll into the ramshackle area, known in the
1930s as the Badlands, where Pamela was murdered. You must cross a busy
intersection into today’s Chuanban Hutong; you know you are in the right
spot when you see a food shop at the entrance of the street with sacks of
flour on the floor, bamboo containers of steaming fresh buns, and a
smiling woman offering her goodies for less than a dollar apiece.

About 200 yards down the street, past a barber and the National Red Noodle
Shop, stands No. 28 where Mr. French writes that Pamela was murdered. At
the time, the place was a flophouse run by White Russian madams. Mr.
French tells us that Pamela had been lured to the front room on the right
by a longtime resident of the Legation Quarter, an American dentist named
Wentworth Prentice, and some male companions. She was attacked with a
wooden instrument and, based on an investigation conducted by Pamela’s
father, the author concludes that her body was drained of blood and then
taken by rickshaw to the base of the Fox Tower, where it was dismembered.
Descendants of Mr. Prentice dispute Mr. French’s account, and have opened
a website <http://www.pamelawernermurderpeking.com/wbprentice.html>. They
claim that archival evidence contradicts the conclusion of “Midnight in
Peking,” and also question Mr. Werner’s capacity to conduct the
investigation.

Last summer, No. 28 existed in more or less its original form. The grimy,
low-slung building opened into a series of single-room apartments. Old
bicycles leaned against the walls of a passageway strung with laundry. By
December, the building had been demolished, replaced by modern apartments.

From the scene of the murder, walk to the end of the alley and cross
six-lane Chongwenmen Nei Street and, keeping Tongren Hospital on your
left, take the first right into Dongjiaomin Alley (previously Legation
Street). You are entering the Legation Quarter. Toward the end of the
street on the left stands a European-designed red brick gabled apartment
complex with dormer windows and “Romeo and Juliet” balconies. This was the
home of Dr. Prentice; it is now a Chinese government building hidden
behind a high wall.

At the corner stands the pretty Gothic-style St. Michael’s Church, built
by French missionaries at the beginning of the 20th century. The
stained-glass windows and handmade pipe organ were destroyed during the
Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The church was partially restored and
reopened in 1989.

Around the corner, down the main street to the right, lies the old British
Embassy, where the European Community holed up during the 55-day siege of
the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Now, young Chinese guards keep curiosity
seekers at bay. Although not marked as such, this is an outpost of the
Ministry of State Security.

The French embassy, where Pamela used the skating rink hours before her
murder, is a little friendlier. The neo-Classical entrance gates with a
pair of lions at either side of an open archway give way to gardens with
graceful trees. It is fun to imagine Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, the
stalwart friend of China, during his long stay here at the end of his life
in 2012.

Beyond the French Embassy lies the grand edifice of the Chartered Bank of
India, Australia and China, built in 1919. It appears to be in fine shape
though no longer operates as a bank. A wide public stairway beside the
bank takes you down to one of Beijing’s main thoroughfares, and when you
turn left past a row of shops selling shoes and cheap airline tickets, you
come across a large sign — Chi’enmen 23 — carved into a stone wall. Walk
behind the wall and before you stands the handsome chancery of the first
American Embassy in Beijing, built in 1903. Most recently, it was the home
of Maison Boulud, the China anchor of the chef Daniel Boulud’s empire.
Sadly, the restaurant closed in December, the victim of a dispute between
Mr. Boulud and his Chinese partners.

By now, Pamela Werner no longer figures in the walk. But continue to the
American Embassy because it stands out as a piece of Washington
architecture transported to the Chinese capital in 1903, when the Legation
Quarter was rebuilt in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion.

George Kates, an American living in Peking during the 1930s, wrote “the
buildings of each Legation ... looked as if lifted bodily from their own
country to be set down here in China.” The American Embassy was “of a
stately colonial-renaissance style” constructed from lumber imported from
the United States. The bricks were made in Beijing under the supervision
of the United States government architect Sidney H. Nealy, who designed
the building.

To compensate for the demise of Maison Boulud, a delicious meal awaits at
Lost Heaven 
<http://www.lostheaven.com.cn/outlets-restaurant.aspx?type=restaurant-beiji
ng>, a restaurant with the light cuisine from Yunnan Province, in a
building adjacent to the old American Embassy.

At times a visitor yearns for the street vendors, rickshaw pullers, White
Russian gangsters, the intrepid Snows, the opinionated missionaries, the
Peking of Pamela’s time. But wandering the small streets where neighbors
play board games, and along the boulevards of the old Legation Quarter
where a tomblike silence hovers around the state security offices, more
than a whiff of the old period — and of the continuing mystery of Pamela’s
murder — endures.

Jane Perlez is a correspondent for The New York Times based in Beijing.