The Peking Express: A train heist for the ages

This Week in China’s History: May 5-6, 1923

A century ago, in the wee hours of May 6, 1923, one of the world’s most sophisticated railroad engines sped through the night. It was halfway through its route from Shanghai to Beijing, just crossing the boundary between Jiangsu and Shandong, when the engineer became suspicious, his headlights illuminating men hiding near the track. Concerned, he slowed the train.

What he could not see, however, was that the track ahead had been sabotaged. When the train reached the compromised section of rail, it all gave way. “The engine jolted sideways and came to a grinding halt as it slipped from the loosened rails,” James Zimmerman describes it in his new book The Peking Express. Within moments, the train that had been hurtling northward was in disarray, strewn across the Shandong countryside. Unbelievably, none of the 300 people on board — 260 passengers plus crew — were killed when it derailed.

The wreck was just the beginning of the ordeal for the train’s passengers, as bandits — bandits who, per the provocative subtitle of Zimmerman’s book, “stole a train, stunned the West, and broke the Republic of China” — “set upon the Peking Express in waves.” First came thieves, who stole the passengers’ money and jewelry, followed by vandals, who took the train’s fixtures and less valuable luggage. Finally, kidnappers went through looking for the most valuable cargo on board: wealthy hostages. The kidnappers largely ignored the third-class passengers, who fled into the night, but first- and second-class passengers became the focus of “the Lincheng Outrage.” (The name derives from the village of Lincheng that was near the derailment, today part of the city of Zaozhuang.)

It’s an odd thing to be wary of spoilers about an event that took place 100 years ago. Still, with Zimmerman’s book barely a month old, I’ll simply recommend that you read it for the full story of what happened. Even if you know how it turns out, The Peking Express is worth a read, so I’m not too worried about sketching out some of the details and trying to evaluate the claim that the train robbery “shocked the West and broke the Republic of China.”

What makes the attack on the Peking Express such a touchstone is that it brings together many of the prominent strands that made up the fabric of China in the 1920s. Wealthy foreigners living above — often at the expense of — Chinese law and society; technological advances that contrasted with traditional practices in ways that were not always welcome; political fragmentation that jeopardized (some might say illustrated the demise of) the survival of a centralized Chinese state.

The years between 1916 (Yuán Shìkǎi’s 袁世凯 death) and 1927 (Chiang Kai-shek’s [蒋介石 Jiǎng Jièshí] Northern Expedition) are often referred to as the Warlord Era. The label “warlord” is controversial, and is unable to capture the diversity of these regional leaders who ranged from brutal mercenaries to utopian idealists, many of whom retained territory, soldiers, and materiel from previous appointments as Qing generals. But, whatever we call them, they controlled areas ranging from the size of large cities to European countries and jockeyed for power with one another and a revolving door of “presidents” who themselves had little claim to legitimacy beyond occupying Beijing. Lí Yuánhóng 黎元洪 was in power for the second time, determined — though ill-equipped — to stabilize China’s central government and reverse the fragmentation that had seen power devolve for nearly a decade.

Warlordism had wide-ranging consequences on both the local and national levels. Nationally, the regional fragmentation made it difficult, often impossible, to collect revenue, deliver services, or organize society. Establishing nationwide policies was pointless, since those policies could rarely be implemented more than a few hundred miles from the capital, if that. Locally, as regional armies gained, lost, and regained territory, they extracted whatever they could from the people living there. A village might be taxed by one warlord, only to be taxed again when a rival took over, only to be taxed once more when the original ruler reconquered the land, with an even greater need for revenue (this problem was often exacerbated by the practice of collecting taxes years in advance in order to finance increasingly expensive military campaigns).

The bandits — more than a thousand of them — who set upon the Peking Express seemed to embody Li’s concern, but counterintuitively they were motivated by the same sense of China’s instability. They were members of the “Shandong Autonomous Army,” a band that had originated a few years earlier in an attempt to protect the people of that province from the depredations of warlords, but it could be difficult to differentiate the actions of the Autonomous Army — army? outlaws? — from the “warlords” they were seeking protection from.

Historian Phil Billingsley, in his classic Bandits in Republican China, described the ambitions of the Autonomous Army’s leader, Sūn Měiyáo 孙美瑶: “We have no desire to become robbers, but in this troubled era of unreliable government we find ourselves compelled to take risks in order to obtain redress for our grievances.”

Unhappily for the passengers on the “Blue Express” making its way from Shanghai to Beijing, the risks Sun took were to attack China’s most famous train. The bandits killed dozens of people as they ransacked the derailed cars, eventually taking some 300 hostages (all but 25 of them Chinese), whom they held in a mountain stronghold for a month until their ransom demands — around $1.5 million in today’s currency — were met, along with a pardon for the kidnappers. Perhaps predictably, as Billingsley put it, the result was “a sudden rash of bandit assaults on foreigners all over China, as well as a new boom in train-wrecking.”

Only one foreigner died in the incident — Briton Joseph Rothman was shot when he refused to turn over his valuables in the first moments of the attack — but the foreign community saw the attack as proof that the Beijing government was incapable of protecting their interests. “Foreign pressure,” writes Billingsley, “forced the Chinese authorities to draw up new regulations,” including police patrols, armed guards, and scouts to protect the trains, as well as compensation for lost earnings and medical treatment. Sanctions against Chinese officials were threatened. “As in the case of the Boxer Indemnity twenty years before, the foreign powers were obviously determined to make ‘the Chinese’ pay for the indignities heaped upon ‘the whites’ at Lincheng.”

So did the attack on the Blue Express “break the Republic of China”? Li Yuanhong was forced from office the day after the hostages were freed. In the next four years, the presidency changed hands nine times. Only one man lasted a year; three were in office less than a month. Elite politics is only one measure of a country’s stability, but it was no outlier in 1920s China. It would be decades before China was stable.

This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.