The great myth of Shenzhen bursting forth from humble fishing village to skyscraping megalopolis has been perpetuated ad nauseam for decades, by earnest politicians, foreign business consultants and lazy journalists alike.
But the truth is more intriguing and, it must be said, far sleazier. Well into the 1930s, Shum Chun, the town that gave Shenzhen its name, was a gangsters’ haven serving risk-hungry Hongkongers pouring across the river that separated the British colony from the mainland into the “Monte Carlo of the East” as they gambled, caroused, cavorted and, perhaps, got rich quick.
Shum Chun welcomed all comers, so long as they spent. In an article dated October 23, 1937 in Canadian newspaper The Leader-Post, Hong Kong journalist and regular visitor George Chow noted at any given roulette table, “Britons, Americans, Frenchmen, Italians, Portuguese, Parsees, Hindus, Mexicans, Spaniards, Swedes, Germans, Japanese, Siamese and Chinese all rubbing shoulders together as they watched the little white ball twirling, each hoping it would fall into the slot bearing their number”.
Gambling was the main lure but there were also dance halls with orchestras and taxi dancers, as well as both Western and Chinese restaurants. Everyone felt safe, the local triads having been told by the powers-that-be that casino punters were off-limits when it came to robbery, kidnapping or extortion.
At first only fan-tan was played, but as more Westerners arrived from less vice-friendly Hong Kong, added to the roster were chemin de fer, dice and slot machines. With the regional gambling centre of Macau going strong on the other side of the Pearl River Delta, Shum Chun’s houses of ill repute competed with free cigarettes, cigars and drinks upon entry to the casinos. For high rollers, they refunded first-class train tickets to and from Hong Kong; even the curious or low spending got a free round trip in third class.
Long before Shum Chun became “East Vegas”, the first Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) set out from Tsim Sha Tsui in 1910. The Chinese section of the line opened in 1911, and soon passengers could travel from Kowloon to Canton in three hours and 40 minutes. From 1913, passengers had to cross the border and the Shum Chun River (now known as the Shenzhen River) to the newly opened Shum Chun (Shen Chuen or Shenzhen) Station.
But by the 20s, the Chinese republic’s political upheavals had led to an economic recession in southern China and a lack of passengers meant few trains ran. Civil disturbances, banditry and skirmishing warlords further interrupted those that did.
Then in 1928, along came a new Guangdong governor – a warlord, though a progressive one – with big plans for modernisation and the future of the province. Tarmacked roads, paved streets, new business opportunities: Chen Jitang could see it all, and for down-and-out Shum Chun, he came along at just the right moment.
Chen was born into a Hakka family in Guangxi in 1890. He went on to join Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance and served in the Guangdong Army, rising through the ranks until, in 1928, he was made commander of the Fourth Army. Then by chance, owing to some political manoeuvring by Chiang Kai-shek, he became governor of Guangdong in 1931 and soon showed himself to be a progressive town planner.
Focusing his efforts on Guangzhou, Chen oversaw the construction of factories, high-rise commercial premises and affordable workers’ housing. He built the iron Haizhu Bridge that still spans the Pearl River. He created a greatly enhanced education infrastructure of primary and secondary schools, as well as technical training colleges and the Sun Yat-sen University.
He was philanthropic, too, expanding the scope of his administration’s social work. Soon he was being referred to as the “Celestial King of the South” or the “King of the Southern Skies”.
Chen’s civic improvements, thousands of kilometres of new roads and a vastly upgraded provincial army did not come cheap. He needed to expand his tax base. So in 1931, he opened several casinos in Shum Chun, immediately rebooting cross-border traffic with the neighbouring British colony of Hong Kong. Little more than large wooden sheds at first, the amount of money filtering from the gaming tables to administrative coffers quickly led to more permanent and far grander structures.
Highly regulated gaming in Hong Kong – combined with gamblers’ preferences for a relatively soporific 35-minute train ride rather than a potentially nauseous four-hour steamer trip to Portuguese-controlled Macau – soon saw Hongkongers taking advantage of one-day and weekend trips by KCR to Shum Chun.
As the casinos and associated activities boosted Shum Chun’s economy, Chen continued his ambitious civic upgrades – as well as buying tanks, machine guns and other warlord toys. His gambling taxes were even termed “defence funds” (chouxiang).
It was claimed that Chen’s administration charged the casino operators about US$1,000 a day to stay open. Despite spending another US$1,000 a day on operating costs, each casino still netted an annual profit of more than US$2 million, or about US$40 million today. Gambling tax revenue shot up from less than two million yuan in 1915 to seven times that by the time the Shum Chun casinos opened, according to the local tax authorities.
Gambling contributions to the Guangdong treasury peaked in 1933 at 17.5 million yuan. Other taxes on salt, tobacco, wine, customs and the “opium suppression” tax (in reality a tax on opium users) were not insignificant but gambling was the single most important source of tax revenue in Guangdong, and Shum Chun accounted for a big part of that. By comparison, land tax income at the time rose steadily from just under three million yuan in 1928 to slightly less than six million by 1931.
Despite boosted income, Chen’s largesse and grand plans remained threatened by the provincial treasury’s massive debt, largely inherited by his administration. So he happily licensed more casinos. The revenues from Shum Chun reduced, if never actually wiped out, the province’s debt, but Chiang, then ruling from Nanjing, became concerned that Chen was not remitting enough tax to the central government.
Indeed he appeared, with his growing army and massive tax base, to be building Guangdong into his own private fiefdom. Having another warlord on its doorstep who might challenge the central government held little appeal for Nanjing. But despite pressure from Chiang, Chen refused to ban gambling, and at a time of precarious government consolidation, there was little the former could do about it. And the KCR had come to rely heavily on related income.
From the opening of the casinos in 1931, the KCR’s daily receipts show that traffic shot up, peaking along with casino revenues in 1933, with trains departing Kowloon every hour. In that year, KCR estimated the casinos led to an increase in its daily receipts from about HK$200 a day to around HK$1,300.
Chen himself had reservations about the adverse social effects of rampant gambling – the pawn shops, money lenders and bordellos that sprang up in Shum Chun were evidence enough of that. Organised crime was becoming more open; Shum Chun triads were making a name for themselves and would soon become a big problem for all China. Chen’s aim was “To Build a Model New Guangdong” and he was savvy enough to realise that neither gambling nor opium, lucrative as they were, did much to enhance the province’s image. But Chen was hooked on the income.
In the winter of 1933, social pressure finally forced Chen to scale back gambling activities throughout the province, most notably in Guangzhou, causing a drop in both visitor numbers and revenue from Shum Chun. The casino business had certainly boosted the town’s population. By 1933, sources estimate Shum Chun’s population at between 70,000 and 300,000.
Political machinations had never ceased in southern China and, in 1935, Chiang was still unhappy with Guangdong’s seemingly de facto autonomy. Chen fell from power in July 1936 and fled to Hong Kong. The Shum Chun casinos closed that September causing an instant and massive shortfall in the provincial treasury for the last four months of that year. The KCR saw its daily receipts from Shum Chun tumble to HK$200 a day.
In 1937, journalist George Chow revisited Shum Chun. Where once he had seen hundreds of people in the streets surrounding the casinos of the short-lived “Monte Carlo of the East”, now he saw only a few bored-looking soldiers.
Chow remembered the old Shum Chun, whose glory days “only lasted eight years, yet while it lasted it was associated with glamour, excitement, pathos, misery and humour. Millionaires and beggars, the cream of society and the scum of the underworld, ladies and gentlemen and harlots and scoundrels, all mixed together in a common desire and greed for easy money”.
Chow wandered through Shum Chun, returned to its former role as a peaceful market town, but now dotted with a plethora of grand, disused and crumbling buildings left over from its heyday. The casino operators lobbied the new anti-gambling governor to reopen, but he would not budge. Most decamped to Macau, happy to absorb rival gambling operations. There were suggestions the former casinos could be turned into orphanages or trades colleges. But world events ensured this would never happen.
In November 1937, invading Japanese bombers targeted Shum Chun, firebombing the town and attempting to wreck the KCR track while bombing as close to the border with British Hong Kong as possible. The bombers returned in mid-December, after which it was reported that almost the entire population of Shum Chun had evacuated to either Guangzhou or Hong Kong.
All that seemed to be left were the triads, by then collaborators with the Japanese who rewarded them with lucrative drug-trafficking networks and dealing “concessions” that made them fortunes in Guangdong and up the coast as far as Shanghai.
The KCR was cut by Japanese armoured columns a year later, in October 1938, closing the line temporarily. A wave of bombers struck for a third time in February 1939 and Shum Chun was reported to be “in flames”. Following the fall of Hong Kong, on Christmas Day 1941, the Japanese reopened the line in 1942, but owing to coal shortages, throughout the war years only two trains a day were able to make the journey to Guangzhou. After Shum Chun was liberated by communist guerillas in August 1945, train services once more reconnected Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Shum Chun, though, never recovered its pre-war glory. By the late 1940s, it had become a haven for smugglers and, in early 1949, Hong Kong newspapers reported a gun battle between smugglers and Chinese customs officers in Shum Chun that saw two innocent KCR passengers shot dead, two smugglers wounded, and a customs officer left in grave condition.
Shum Chun’s population swelled throughout the 50s as it became the centre for the Bao’an County government, owing to its proximity to the KCR and an economy that was larger than its rival, Nantou. Shum Chun also became a temporary home for refugees attempting to escape to Hong Kong from Mao’s Communist China.
In 1971, as the Cultural Revolution was sweeping across China, New York Times journalist Seymour Topping visited Shum Chun and found it seemingly untouched by the chaos. It was a sleepy backwater market town, much as it had been before the casinos and the KCR arrived, with apartment buildings, paved streets and a bus terminus from Chen’s era still standing.
In his memoir, Journey Between Two Chinas, published a year after his visit, Topping wrote: “A narrow railway bridge over a thin, muddy, desultory river separated Lo Wu from Shum Chun (Shenzhen), the station on the Chinese side. Atop the bare hills about us, British observation posts faced out on China. The British Union Jack hung limply in the humid air matched on the other side by the red flag and yellow stars of the People’s Republic of China.
“Local peasants carrying vegetables and live chickens in straw cages and other farm products on the end of poles across their shoulders seemed to be passing back and forth over the bridge without more than an exchange of nods with the guards.”
Then, in 1978, a central inspection team from the State Council in Beijing arrived, looked around and decided that Bao’an County might make a good foreign trade port and Shum Chun, now commonly called Shenzhen, a good “Trade Cooperation Zone”. The words “sleepy”, “backwater” and “small” may apply to the fishing village of Yumin, in Shenzhen’s Luohu district, but most definitely not to Shum Chun nor, it should be said, to the once walled village of Nantou, now also incorporated into the metropolis.
And so here we are, 40 years later, with Shenzhen home to more than 12 million people. And that trope, so oft repeated, of Shenzhen arising from a humble fishing village, still neglects, perhaps by design, the true history of Shum Chun.