Welcome to Fluentide True Crime. A real case from Chinese history, in English. Learn Chinese without trying.
I handle the Chinese. You follow the story.
Here is what the paper looked like.
A single sheet, cheap tan-colored pulp, folded twice. The top line gave the sender and the date. The middle gave the rank and the unit.
The bottom gave the few words a military courier was permitted to spend on ordinary news.
"[Shi Congbin] arrived Shandong 4 June. Health 好. Brigade intact. Wire if needed."
For the first 十 年 of her life, this is how Shi Gulan knew her 爸爸.
十. Ten. 十 年 is ten years. You'll hear 十 a lot this season.
Not as a man who came home for dinner. Not as a man who sat at the head of the table. As a folded piece of paper arriving at the front gate of the 家 in Shazigang every few weeks. Carried by a boy on a bicycle.
Signed for by her mother or, later, by the small girl who had learned to read before she had learned to ride a horse.
The boy on the bicycle brought the telegrams because Shazigang was too small to have its own telegraph office. The nearest was in Tongcheng, the county seat, a half day's ride on a decent animal.
A telegraph operator in Tongcheng would receive Shi Congbin's wire from wherever he was posted that month, and pass it down the chain to one of the courier boys who carried military correspondence out to the surrounding villages.
This was the 1910s. The Qing dynasty had collapsed in 1912. The republic that followed 是 a republic in name only.
What China actually had, in those 年, 是 an archipelago of warlord armies, each holding a region by force, each paying for loyalty in salaries, opium, borrowed men,and the promise of more territory.
Shi Congbin served in several of them over the course of a decade. That was not unusual. Warlord officers changed armies the way civil servants change ministries.
What was unusual about Shi Congbin 是 that he won.
He rose from foot soldier to platoon leader by 1910. From platoon leader to company commander by 1913. From company commander to brigade staff officer by 1916.
From brigade staff officer to brigade commander by 1920.
By the time Shi Gulan was old enough to read the telegrams herself, her 爸爸 有 four thousand men under his command.
有. To have. He 有 four thousand men means he had four thousand men. In Chinese, past or present, 有 covers both.
The 家 in Shazigang followed this rise from inside a growing stack of folded paper. Each telegram was dated, read aloud at the evening meal, and stored in a wooden box under the table in the study.
Shi Gulan's job, from the age of seven, was to file each new telegram in chronological order.
The box 不 是 a record of a father. It 是 a record of a career.
Some of the telegrams were short and routine. "Arrived. Health 好." Some were longer. "Brigade action near Xuzhou. Three companies engaged. One officer killed.
Casualties attached." The longest telegrams were the ones that announced a promotion, and those her mother would fold back up and place on the altar in front of the ancestor tablets before filing.
There 没有 telegram that said "Missed you at 新年." There 没有 telegram that said "Thinking of the children." Telegrams cost money by the character. Warlord armies did not pay for sentiment.
没有. "Does not have," or "there is no." 没有 telegram said means there was no telegram that said. 没 and 有 almost always travel together. You just heard 没有 twice.
But Shi Gulan, who read the telegrams in chronological order for roughly 十 年 of her childhood, developed an ability to read between the characters.She could tell from the length of a telegram how the campaign had gone.
She could tell from the rank attached whether her 爸爸 had gained or lost men.
She could tell, by 1924, that something had changed.
The telegrams were coming more frequently and were longer.The rank line had grown to specify not just her 爸爸's command but the command he was attached to: first Zhang Zongchang's army, and later a composite command with names that changed every few months.
What she could not have known, at eighteen years old, reading her 爸爸's wires by lamplight in Shazigang, 是 that the armies her 爸爸 had thrown his lot in with were about to run into a warlord named Sun Chuanfang.
Sun Chuanfang was thirty-nine years old in 1924.
He controlled the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, and Jiangxi, which 是 why he was called the Commander of the Five-Province Allied Armies.
He 有 more men and more territory than any warlord in eastern China.
Shi Congbin's armies and Sun Chuanfang's armies were, by the autumn of 1925, on a collision course in a small town in Anhui province.
The last telegram Shi Gulan ever received from her 爸爸 was dated October 1925. It said he was crossing the Yangzi and expected to be home in time for the fall harvest. It said his brigade was in 好 order.
None of those things turned out to be true.
In Episode Five, we walk with him into the town of Guzhen.
That is where we start Episode Five.
