The World of The Dragon Gate Conspiracy

 

If you’ve picked up this novel, you’ve stepped into one of the most turbulent, and least remembered, chapters of modern Chinese history. A brief backgrounder may help orient you before the first shot is fired.

The year is 1926. China is not, in any practical sense, a unified country. The last dynasty, the Ch’ing, collapsed in 1912, and what followed was not a republic so much as a slow-motion catastrophe. Regional military commanders, known as warlords, carved the country into personal fiefdoms, heavily taxed the peasantry, and waged almost constant war on one another for territory and revenue. The nominal government in Peking changed hands so often that foreign diplomats had difficulty keeping track of who their Chinese counterparts were.

Into this disorder stepped Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, or KMT. After Sun’s death in 1925, his young protégé Chiang Kai-shek took command of the party’s National Revolutionary Army. In the summer of 1926, General Chiang launched what history would call the Northern Expedition. It was a military campaign designed to march from the KMT’s base in Canton (present day Guangzhou) and unify China by force under the KMT. It was an audacious undertaking, but in the summer and autumn of 1926, it was working.

The novel is set in and around the Wuhan tri-cities: Hankow, Hanyang, and Wuchang. These three cities, straddling the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers in Hupeh Province (present day Hubei), were the great inland commercial and manufacturing hub of China. The tri-cities were sometimes called the “Pittsburgh of China” for their industrial and commercial importance. Hankow, on the north bank of the Yangtze, was the commercial center. Its famous Bund (a riverfront promenade and docks) was lined with the counting houses, banks, and consulates of the foreign powers. Next to Hankow on the northern bank of the Yangtze, with the Han River flowing between them, lay Hanyang, home to China’s largest arsenal and an iron and steel works. And across the Yangtze on the southern bank, the ancient walled city of Wuchang served as the provincial capital. It was in Wuchang, in October 1911, that the revolution against the Ch’ing dynasty had actually begun.

By 1926, the foreign presence in Hankow had already begun to unravel at the edges. The “concession” system, those self-governing foreign enclaves carved out of Chinese soil in treaties after successive defeats in the nineteenth century, was showing its age. The German concession had been the first to go. China broke diplomatic relations with Germany in March 1917 and reclaimed German-held territory, a position confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Russian concession followed a different path. After the Bolshevik revolution collapsed Czarist authority, China reclaimed the former Russian concession on September 23, 1920. The Soviet Union subsequently ratified the arrangement in its broader negotiations with China in the early 1920s.

So, at the time this novel opens, the Hankow Bund presents a layered picture. The British, French, and Japanese concessions remain active —foreign-administered, garrisoned, flying their respective flags, and operating under their own municipal councils and laws. The former German and Russian concessions, now Chinese-administered “Special Administrative Districts,” flank them on the map but have been under Chinese authority for several years. The great powers are still very much present; they are simply fewer than they once were.

Commanding the defense of the Wuhan tri-cities in August 1926 was General Wu P’ei-fu, one of the most powerful warlords in China, and perhaps the best-known Chinese military figure in the Western press. Educated, cultivated, and militarily capable, Wu was badly overextended by 1926. He represented the old order making its last stand.

Into this world I’ve placed U.S. Marine Corps Second Lieutenant Jack Gaines, assigned to the gunboat USS Patuxent of the Yangtze Patrol. Britain, the United States, France, and Japan all maintained armed river forces in China under treaty rights. Their mission was the protection of nationals and commercial interests. In practice, their presence made them reluctant witnesses to, and occasional actors in, one of the great convulsions of the twentieth century.

That’s the stage for the novel. The curtain goes up on August 28, 1926.

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