The Underworld Podcast - The Rise of China’s Biggest Mob Boss EVER

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Born into a peasant family on the outskirts of Shanghai, Du Yuesheng grew up an inveterate gambler and opium addict. But as he forged alliances in the growing metropolis’ underworld, members of a secret society-turned-cartel saw promise. Before long, ‘Big Ears Du’ was running gambling dens, opium divans and brothels. And as Shanghai, cleaved into foreign concessions and wildly unequal, became a global megacity, Du knew just who to befriend, best or kill to get his way. And by the mid-1920s, when China’s nationalists and communists were ready to throw down in Shanghai, Du stood ready to carve his name into Chinese history forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever and emissions are rising.

On this season of drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle. You've got to get Bruce of the guy's credit. They're Republican kids. They don't get a bit of money. It's now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts. It's May 5th, 1923, and the Blue Express train is rattling through the Chinese countryside on route from Shanghai to Beijing.

This is no ordinary rolling stock. The Blue's 14 cars include sleeping quarters, electric lighting, a dining car serving western-style meals and an observation deck. It's China's answer to the Orient Express, an engineering marvel, a flagship of the country's emergence from Imperial rule. No wonder it's packed therefore to the guilds with celebs and high society. On board are an Italian mob lawyer, a French war hero, a Mexican business mogul, a top Chinese professor, a sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr.,

the US ambassador to China, and playboys from Shanghai's Jewish merchant scene. Each passenger, a symbol of Shanghai's status, as a Asia's swaggering commercial hub, a tangle of banks, docks, high-rise towers and high-rolling casinos. It's a pot of gold for the continent's biggest companies and a den of iniquity for anybody hunting down sex, drugs and free living east of India and north of Singapore. Two million people live in Shanghai, double what it had been in 1912 when revolutionaries had toppled China's long-ruling Qing dynasty.

but is also a wildly unequal place, cleaved by shotgun diplomacy into three separate divisions. There is the international settlement run jointly by Britain and the United States, where 30,000 foreigners live among 800,000 Chinese. There is the French concession. No prizes for guessing who runs that, home to another 200,000, and there are the vast Chinese-administered areas outside their walls. their slums bursting with arrivals from nearby rural hinterlands.

No foreign residents of Shanghai are subject to Chinese law. They build their own western homes, send their kids to Western schools, and erect vast factories, none of which pay tax to a Chinese state buckling under lack of revenue. Cops and courts are defang and the opium trade is roaring louder than a Chinese dragon. This all helps to fuel. the rise of a new breed of Chinese gangster. Some have come out of centuries old secret societies, flush with ideas of folk religion and ultra-nationalism. Others have risen through merchant guilds and trade unions, especially on the canals that serve Shanghai's lust for material wealth.

In the case of the Green Gang, it's both. Formed by 18th century Buddhists, it went underground among grain boatsmen before switching to salt smuggling and, more recently, opium. By 1923, it commands vast swathes of Shanghai's drug, sex and gambling markets. Politicians are in its pockets, and in many cases, it is the city's police. No green gang leader has brokered more deals or sent more enemies scattering than Du Wei Sheng, tall and thin, mid-30s, with a shaved head that at its head that at accentuates the features that have earned him his not-so-subbed nickname, Big-eared Do. Do is a powerhouse, a one-man battering ram who throws giant parties in his own honor

and sends coffins to the doors of those who upset him. By 1923, the whole of the French concession is considered his turf. But Shanghai, king of the world's unequal cities, is also home to armies of would-be kingpins. bandits desperate to win their own payday from the city's Gatsby-esque foreign inhabitants. One of them is Sun Mia Yao, leader of a band of ex-soldiers who roamed the land between Shanghai and Beijing. He has no desire to be a robber, he says. But, Sun adds, in this troubled era of unreliable government, we find ourselves compelled to take risks in order to obtain redress for our grievances.

On May 5, 1923 then, Sun is poised to take the biggest risk of his life. 1,200 of his men are gathered beside the railroad tracks in a village of Lin Cheng. It's around halfway along the Blue Express's nocturnal route. Most, if not all of its passengers, should, Sun reckons, be fast asleep, or at least enough cocktails deep not to pose a problem. In the early hours of the following day, the bandits strike, rushing the engine and grabbing its driver. The Great Blue Express dry ends to a halt.

Its cars derail. Dignitaries are hurled out of bed and pistol whipped. Several Chinese passengers are killed on the spot. The bandits shoot dead of British National, Joseph Rothman, when he refuses to hand over his valuables. Everybody else, French, Italian, German, Danish, American, is kidnapped and sent out on a 10-day march to the bandits' hideout in a distant village.

News reaches media and embassy shortly after. The Lin-Seng outrage, as it will be known, is an overnight sensation, a scandalous emblem of China's dissent into gang-ravaged lawlessness. It will not end quickly. As diplomats and Chinese officials race to secure the lives of the hostages, politicians in Shanghai realize they really just have one option. Only one man truly straddles the city's legitimate and illegitimate worlds. A man who does soon be seen hobnobbing with Sun Mier Yao

as he would win generalissimo Chang Kai Czech, China's nationalist future leader. The politicians reach inevitably for do Yue Sheng. And as always, Shanghai's most feared gangster is all ears. This is the underworld podcast. Hello and welcome to another edition of the weekly podcast that shines an iPhone torch into the glove compartment of global organized crime. I am your host, Sean Williams, an investigative long-form journalist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I am joined by investigative filmmaker Danny Golden-Yaw city.

Not that. We are not two guys in their basement. discussing true crime. We are two guys in their living rooms discussing organized crime, and those things are incredibly different. Actually, as we record this, I am going to be in Cuba for the next few weeks, which is quite exciting. Will I see a U.S. invasion, or will I just get mugged amid piles of burning trash?

Either way, it's a great story. I thought you were going to save that until you got back, and not mention that, just in. case. I mean, either way, A, international incidents are great for podcast marketing. And B, I can just pretend that I can't send you money all of a sudden because your bank account's got closed down or whatever. And then I can gamble that money, which I'm sure to win on World Cup bets, double my money and then pay you eventually later on once your banking gets resolved. That's how it's always gone for you, isn't it? You just get a bunch of money and you double it overnight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think

That's how all the betting works. Yeah, yeah. Just to shift gear quickly, I just want to dedicate this episode to my old friend James Barker. Actually passed away a couple of weeks ago at the age of 40. James got me my first job in New York City back in 2012

and he was nonstop fun to be around to my thoughts with his family, friends and partner. Terrell lost so young. Yeah, and anyway, yeah, never really done anything like that. But yeah, yeah, it was real sad. I've just been speaking to a lot of friends about James and how cool he was. Anyway, let's move on to the show. We, in case you don't know, we've got a Patreon where we post bonus shows, interviews, notes, and reading lists.

Yes, Patreon.com slash an oral podcast. Shout out to Bob Morley, who is a class act. Or sign up on Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube. Yeah, yeah, all of those ones. We are also contributing to the downfall of human attention spans on all the social media platform. So follow us there. Check out underworldpod.com for merch if you want to get some envious looks at World Cup Watch parties. And if you want to tell us about your life of crime, tip us about some news or just tell us how damn good looking we both are, especially me in my sort of second edition of this hostage room that I'm in.

Drop us an email. It's going to get, well, it's going to get worse actually, potentially. in the next few days. Drop us at an email at, yes, the underworld podcast at gmail.com. Tell me your deepest desires, Danny,

the ones that keep you up at night, the ones you've never told to your loved ones. Right now, go. You're segueing, like, out of control the past five minutes.

I don't even know what's going on here. I know. I'm a simple man these days, Sean, all I really desire is one of those luxury apartments that have new appliances

and amenities and a wolf dog, and that's really it when it comes down to it. Are you one of those guys? I mean, like me, who basically just wants a bare flat with a TV and a single chair. And that's it. No. No, I want an incredibly, I know, I'm past, I want like an incredibly fancy place where I don't have to talk to anyone.

And everything's new and, like, shiny and soulless. That's what I want. That's my new sort of thing. Okay. Well, let's hope this episode is really, really banging. So, on to the Shanghai Green Gang. It's something we've had on the schedule for what feels like forever now, but it's such a sweeping topic with both steer clear until now. Well, I steered clear because you were like, I really want to do this, and that was 2024, I think.

So I was going to like, Sean, are you going to do it? You're going to do it? And you did it. So, so congrats on that. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to take that and run with it. Because, yeah, because of that immensity of the whole topic,

today's show is going to give you the load down on Shanghai's incredible transformation in 1910s and 20s. It's a criminal scene, the rise of the green gang and big ear do, do you a swang, a man considered to be the blueprint for Asian criminal kingpins until today. We're going to find out why politicians sought him out after the lynching outrage you just heard about, how he grew from some of the worst poverty imaginable, I mean like, prepare yourselves, it's bad, to immeasurable wealth and power, and how divided Shanghai was the perfect petri dish to grow the green gang from this semi-religious boating cult into a multinational criminal empire. Yeah, Shanghai back then really sounds like it would have been a lot of fun.

I honestly did not know much about it, I think, until we started doing some try-at stuff. I read the Monk Eastman episode, not Monk Eastman, the Moshegut-2 Guns Cohen episode, not Monkiesman. But a real, like, libertine place, right? A ton of political intrigue, all sorts of shadiness going on. Casablanca on the 40s, Cuba. the 50s sort of atmosphere, maybe, I don't know, Beirut in the 70s or 80s,

just kind of like a, it's a wild place. It sounds endlessly fascinating. I think I have a book right here. And he is walking to the back of his room. Old Shanghai gangsters in paradise. Oh, yeah,

I came across that one. I'd love to read that. Yeah, it just seems like a fascinating place to be, to be doing stuff, to be living. Yeah, I mean,

there's the opening scene from the Temple of Dune, Indiana Jones, where they're having a gun, fight in a casino, I think, in Shanghai, which actually was filmed in Macau. I think it's supposed to be 35. So we're going to get to that a bit later on. But, you know, Tommy Guns and cocktails and lots of beautiful women.

It looks like a pretty cool place in the movie. And as we're going to find out, it was pretty cool in real life too. So, yes, this is part one. And then we're going to have two more episodes on doing the Green Gang through the 1920s and 30s, through dues years as China's top mob boss, Shanghai's showdown between nationalists and communists, massacres, revolution, civil war, foreign invasion, spies, a mushroom poisoning scandal way before that boring lady in Australia and way more besides. I don't think we've done a three part since the Chechnya stuff years ago maybe, but trust me this is worth it. It is an epic tale of vice,

death and treachery and in many ways the birth of modern China. So, is that a bit of, where you whistle? All right. Let's dive into it. And when I say dive into it, I mean, you know, talk about old stuff, basically. How old? 1888. That's how old. I know like Danny is breathing a sigh of relief that it's not like 1348 or something like that. Anyway, that August, do you-e-shueng is born into an extremely poor family in Giao-Pudong County. I just want to head off any complaints about my Chinese pronunciations here, it can and it's going to get a lot worse. Pudong actually lies on the eastern side of the Huangpu River that separates it from downtown Shanghai. Today, it's a full-fledged metropolis of its own right, home to almost six million

people, and you might recognize its name from Shanghai's international airpool or any of the futuristic buildings of its financial district. But in 1888, it is farmland, scrub, peasant country, The river may as well be a foreign boulder, which, as we'll soon learn, it kind of is. Do's father had once worked checking goods on Shanghai's wolves, and then he opened a rice shop. What's a rice shop like in China in the 1890s? Like you walk in, like, it's just rice, right? Just a whole bunch of rice. There's not like any, there's not like different versions of rice.

It's like a bodega where there's like, oh, let me get this and this. It's just rice, you know? I bet his pals, like every day that, like, played. joke, you know, like, hey, uh, what's, what's the special today? What do you got? He's just rice. I just got rice. And they just kept doing that and he like roll his eyes, but it was like a joke they had. Just a whole bunch of rice. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's like the look that we give advertisers when they ask us if we do any other topics. No, it's just, it's just, it's just gangs. You know, like, when, when Borat's in the supermarket and he's like, what's this? And the guy's

like, it's just cheese and this and cheese. And it's like that, like just with plain rice. Yeah. This is, this is it. I think it's a lot of. Burlap sacks and a sad man. Yeah. Despite all of this hard work and the big old sacks of rice, life in the middle class never materializes for the dues. The rice shop fails. Do's mother is forced to work in a cotton factory to make ends meet.

Young Doe spends only four months at a local school before his parents carnival that either, and it will remain his only experience of formal education. Do's life gets even worse at age 3. when his mother dies and his father, by now eking a pittance as a day laborer, is so poor that he decides to sell Do's baby sister into slavery, which is a shockingly common thing in China at this time. I mean, this would be a rags to riches tale if only the Doe family could afford a rag. Do's father then sends his son to serve as an apprentice carpenter under his uncle,

but Doe hates manual labor and discovers a love for gambling. I should add, is doing this at the age of four. I think it took me to like 34 to realize that I love gambling and hit manual labor. So the kids growing up, he's advanced for his age, you know? He's incredibly advanced and he has one hell of a tough life. According to one source, Do is a dab hand, a dice, fantan, which is a kind of yachtsy thing, and Parjiu, which is a Chinese his version of dominoes, basically, it's so high stakes that the people of Gauchel call it eating dog meat, truly a game for the 1%.

Some of these games do plays in the streets of other kids, some he plays in tea houses and gambling dens, home to Gao Chow's local hoodlums. Writes Brian G. Martin, author of the Shanghai Green Gang. Quick side note, that is the book that I spent about half a year trying to read. I think he's still alive, so I'll just there. I'll leave it there. Quote, it was during this. Honestly, I spent so long finding out if that guy was dead or not so I could talk stuff about

his book, but I think he's alive. Anyway. You're saying it was thorough. Dense. It's granular. Yeah, it's incredibly well researched. It was during these years of childhood and early adolescence that do develop a taste for gambling that never left him.

The demands of the gaming table, however, instilled him in certain self-discipline that curbed his natural tendency to outbursts of violent temper, and also helped develop the skills necessary to deal effectively with others. I mean, yeah, this guy loves an adverb. Just in case you're beginning to think this kid is beginning to have it too easy, at age five, Do's father dies too, and his care is entrusted to his stepmother. But at age eight, Doe's uncle boots him out of the carpentry gift for being lazy and stealing on his cash, and a year later, local triads kidnapped Do's widow's stepmother and sell her to one of Shanghai's many brothels.

So, just in case you're listening to this and you think your life sucks, I mean, maybe you're thinking that right now, listening to me talk about that. By the age of nine, Du Yuey Shuiang has lost both his parents. He's been kicked out of his uncle's workshop. His stepmother has been disappeared into sex slavery. He's in with small-time gangsters, destitute, and he's got a gambling problem. Doe carries on with this Dickensian life until the age of 14 in 1902 when he swaps Pudong for Shanghai proper, bagging a role at a fruit company for a bookkeeper uncle.

Doe spends the next few years bobbing from low paid job to low paid job in the fruit sector. I should have made a joke about bobbing for apples and stuff. Until in 1906, he moves to Da Yu Fruit Hong, a company whose stalls lined the walls of old Shanghai. You think he saves his cash? of course not almost every penny he earns do plows back into the gambling dens spending nights and oftentimes mornings

playing the kinds of ridiculous game Shanghai's gambling addicts are throwing down on dice dominoes sticks stones if there are drops of water on a window do we'll bet on how fast they'll fall now would it be a great time to plug

one of those incredibly shady crypto gambling exchanges that are always paying people like eight million dollars to gamble on them but we just don't have Our advertising salespeople just aren't doing their jobs and getting us involved with what are clearly illegal rackets that we would be involved with if we could. Absolutely. Let's just see if they listen to the show like they claim they do. Definitely not.

They don't, no. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman.

Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Overwhelmed by investing? If you're anything like us, the hardest part is getting started. That's why we created the Investing for Beginers podcast. Our goal is to help simplify money so it can work for you. We invite guests to demystify investing. At least like the minimum 10% into the 401k. I'm Dave Ahern and I'm Andrew Sather.

And we hope you join us on the Investing for Beginners podcast. On the Investing for Beginners podcast. Anyway, this all sounds like a fast track to ruin. That is not the tagline for one of those companies. And in 1911, Dar-U Fruit fires do too for stealing its funds. to fuel his out-of-control gambling had it. But it's not all bad news. A life-leding gambling dens has earned Do's friends

among old Shanghai's underworld figures, not least a pimp known as lot drawer, as in somebody who draws lots. Lot-drawer takes Do under his wing and introduces him to a group called the Green Gang. Soon afterwards, lot-drawer sponsors Do's initiation into the Green Gang, and do taste to these guys like a duck to water.

Which is fitting, because, well, peaking. duck and because Walter is the lifeblood of the Green Gang. Now, if you've listened to this show over the years or even just last weeks by Danny, you'll know plenty about the so-called triads, criminal gangs that emerge from secret societies called Hongs, which continually battle for control of legal and illegal economies during the Qing dynasty and were continually forced out of mainland China by the Qing to Hong Kong, Macau and other peripheries where they have thrived to this day. The Green Gang has a similar origin story, albeit one rooted firmly in Shanghai. One historian admitted that the Green Gang's background is a, quote, blend of facts

and fiction, often more fiction than fact, which is partly why this show has taken so long to put together. Like Danny said in last week's episode about Chinese American King Ping Shrimp Boy, one of a gangster's favorite pastimes is telling tall tales about himself. So I'm going to do my best to parse reality from nonsense here. The Green Gang arguably begins back in the 17th, perhaps even the 16th century, when a Buddhist sect called the White Lotus spawned its own subsect called Patriarch Luo. These were to Buddhism what I guess seventh-day activists are to Christianity. They're millinarian, i.e. they believe the end times are just around the corner, and they're ultra-nationalistic, believing in a pure Buddhist land, cleansed of other religions, throwing in a bunch of other local

belief systems, Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese folk religion, which actually when you think about it is a little bit oxymoronic. Besides that, this is just your commonal garden, get off my land, Jesus is coming, watch your back kind of stuff. Only in the case of the Patriarch Luo sect, it takes off in the 18th century among boatmen, especially in the city of Hangzhou, around 100 miles west of Shanghai at the time, home to a million people and therefore one of the biggest cities on earth. Little tiny monastery hostels would pop up along the canal routes of boatmen shifting grain throughout the Qing dynasty. The boatman sleeps at one, gets his blessings, passes the sect onto his fellow boatman, the sect spreads, becomes a kind of religious trade union, everybody

happy. Everybody happy. Everybody happy. That is until the Qing dynasty fears that the patriarch Luo sect is getting too big for its boats. They ban it, raise its temples in Hangzhou and confiscate its land. This, of course, pushes the sect underground. And instead of temples, they designates certain boats to be floating, constantly moving places of worship. Now working in the shadows, the sect christens its own structure and law. Members refer to it as the family. Similar to the Japanese yakuza, there is a strict master pupil. hierarchy with teachers or Shifu and disciples or Tudi running the show. There is an initial ceremony, I should say, yeah, I know, God Almighty. It involves the swearing of oaths and the burning

of incense. Green gang members refer to this process as quote, entering the monastery, nodding to their origin story as a Buddhist sect. And this is a lot tamer than the triad ceremony, which involves drinking a mixture of the participants and chicken blood. But the effect is the same. Now green gang members can be official, just like the sake drinking ceremony Yakuza go through, or making an Italian mafioso, which gives them a mechanism for cozying up to business elites, politicians, cops, and so on. Think Freemasons, or way better, the stone cutters from the Simpsons, which I still think is my favorite episode. The No Homers Club, Sean. It's the No Homers Club. I mean, I think like 20 5% of my brain is still

Simpsons quotes from the 90s. It's sad how kids these days won't know the joy of syndication, you know, of just like watching the same 30 episodes of Seinfeld and the Simpsons for two hours every Monday through Friday. Because that's just what you had.

Yeah, I mean, I had that series on VHS and I just watched it about a million times. It was the same one where he got the was it the gummy Venus de Milo? Oh, that's a good one too. And the Japan one around the same area. Yes. Yes. In Australia. In Australia.

In Australia. One of the best. Yeah. My God, the Simpsons, man. Maybe that should be our watch along. Screw all these organized crime films. It's just two Simpsons. Old episodes. Anyway, Green Gang members often wear robes and adhere to their own Ten Commandments. The breaking of which could be punishable by death. Obey your teacher. Deal fairly with other members.

Okay, fairly down the middle. But also adultery and theft, which, if you're found, what is basically a giant smuggling ring with some pimping on the side, it's maybe not the most realistic rules to lay down. Because of all this pageantry, aka male silliness, Green Gang members come to regard themselves as Hao Jia, told you the Chinese would get worse, literally, quote, men of honor and courage. They're true patriots, heroes, locked in ceaseless battle against injustice, not only for themselves but on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed. They use the imagery of ancient warring horsemen, exactly like Japan's yakuza.

I think at this point we might have to sound the Robin Hood claxon here too sadly, but because this isn't in China, the Green Gang does its feed the poor schick in poetic fashion. Leaders commissioned special calligraphy promising to provide, quote, 1,000 years of morality and justice, which of course in Chinese, as you all know, is Dao Yi Jiangchou. Eventually, the Green Gang splits into its own subtext. That's so bad. Do the accent. Do it.

You were doing it before that camera turned on. I might lean in even harder. Yeah, it's probably going to do us better on the numbers. There is infighting and even at one point a civil war. But in 1848, bigger issues come to the forefront. China's grain market takes a nosedive, putting up to 50,000 boatmen out of work almost overnight. Some join anti-Ching dynasty rebel groups. Others become smugglers of salt, which is officially a government monopoly, but, well, have you eaten Chinese food?

Demand drives a massive black market. Luo Boatmen smuggles salt all the way along the Yangtze River from Shanghai at its mouth to massive cities like Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing. To do so, they work with existing salt cartels known as Qingpi or green skins. Yeah, people, I feel like, I mean, probably a lot of people do, but a lot of people don't recognize just how important salt was for so long in terms of like preserving food, taste, everything like that. I tried to read that book, actually, the one about tracing the history of the world through salt, but kind of got bored of it, didn't finish it. Great idea for a book, though. You know what I'm talking about? Very good.

No, but it is quite a good idea. There's a book just called like salt about the history of like salt. And because all the trading thousands of years, like salt was such a big facet of the economy of like how to survive, you know, salting meat. You couldn't preserve whatever. I can't. You should know these things. So, yeah, you use it for a lot. Just listen to the podcast doesn't he tell us.

You should know these things. You're a man of the world. Wasn't like, wasn't, um, wasn't, um, oh my God. Literally. I was going to say. Soutford door, darling. It's so late. by the way and I'm so jet-leg, what am I thinking?

Isn't a load of the Indian stuff about independence? That was to do with salt monopolies and stuff like this. I think that the first non-violent resistance was to do with salt. But can you, I mean, what the hell is Chinese food before salt? I don't even get it. What was all food before salt? Yeah, fair point. You have to make it factual.

Anyway, these green skins, the Qingpi, some folks believe, these salt cartels, they are the origin of the name the Green Gang. Others think it's just a simple transcription error. Either way, the Qing Bang or Green Gang emerges as a true group around the 1880s. Around about the time, Du Wei Sheng is being born into poverty. Just as they've done with the assault cartels, it's the Green Gang's ability to make deals, corrupt officials and partner with other organizations that market from other forms of abandoned. tree along the Yangtze River. Because of the vast distances involved here, I mean, Shanghai to Chongqing is over a thousand miles, and this is just post the invention of the telegrams,

so no one's talking to each other. The Green Gang is a diffuse thing, divided up into hundreds of groups and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of men. For the first decade of the century, it maintains a kind of awkward peace with the Qing dynasty, making deals here, fighting there. but in 1911, everything changes for China and the Green Gang, but also for do you a swing. This is the year he gets fired from his job on the fruit stalls, remember, and he immediately takes up the role of street bump, loitering around the walls of old Shanghai that have become one of the most crime-ridden places on the planet. Here's Brian Martin again.

Quote, the passenger and freight traffic through the docks provided an inexhaustible source of larceny for the petty gangsters of the district, and the docks themselves were an important part of the network of trafficking in narcotics and human beings. In the Warren of narrow streets and that he's running back from the docks into the Chinese city, renewable gambling dens, opium divans and brothels, where the local hoodlums and street bums hung out. So Doe is taking up a role of the latter of these, and as an official Shanghai street bump, TM, he makes his money robbing, extorting and running small-time opium deals. He's also getting high off his own supply, very high, by the way, and he's still betting piles of

cash on dice. It's not the likeliest guy to become one of the world's most prominent gangsters, but he's still only 23 years old. I mean, a veteran, but in the real terms, quite young. In April 1911, Doe has his first public running with Shanghai police when he's questioned over his involvement in an extortion ring targeting local opium merchants. He's hardly an auspicious looking guy. I'm going back to Brian Martin here, quote. His physical appearance was striking, although by no means conventionally handsome. He had a lean, impassive face, with hard penetrating eyes, surprisingly large ears,

at a full, sensuous mouth. Brian, stop it. The rather sinister character of these features was given emphasis by a drooping eyelid over his left eye, Oh, yeah, carry on. Prominent eyebrows and close cropped hair. He was above average in height with a strong wiry build that did not yet show the effects of abuse through opium addiction. There were few prospects, however, beyond the rather limited ones

offered as a small-time thug, a member of a local street gang. When you read a description like that, can you actually picture it in your head or are you just like, what is this guy talking about? You picture the mouth, I bet, they're chief. I'm still picturing. I'll be picturing the mouth. For days. How can you have an impassive face with penetrating eyes?

I don't have that. I don't know. I don't do that. Almost all eyes are penetrating. You know, you look at them, they look back at you. They are penetrating. You know what else is penetrating, Danny? That mouth.

Close-cropped hair. Didn't everyone have close-cropped hair? But I don't know, man. I don't know. Was this before the Boxer Rebellion, where they were like the plats coming out of the back? Maybe that was like a big look back then. I don't know. I'm just trying to make conversation.

Aren't we all? That's why we're here, just to pass the time really. However, it's this exact time in 1911 that Doe gets involved with a local Green Gang hoodlum named Chen Chi Chang, nicknamed Lot Draw, as in the guy who draws lots because gambling. And this is where Do Star really begins to rise in the Shanghai Underworld. Lot Drawer introduces Doe to his fellow Green Gang members of the docks and soon afterwards sponsors do as a green gang member himself now as if it weren't already complicated enough the green gang at this point is split among no fewer than 24 classes or casts and do the country bumpkin that he is belongs to the 23rd of those 24 if he'd have joined in

any other fashion do would have been way way down the green gang's peaking sorry pecking order but because he's chosen to glom onto lot drawer he quickly gets introduced to lot drawer's friend who is local king ping Huang Jin Rong and is this meeting between do and Huang which sends the

younger gangster, pimp and gambling addict on the path towards something far far bigger Huang seeing the hunger in do's droopy eyes Wait hold on you saying he's got hungry eyes

yeah I guess I am yeah he's got sensuous mouth, hungry eyes, and they're droopy. And he's passive and he penetrates. But he's got big ears, but he's got little hair. What a guy, man. I just wish I could have met him. Anyway, seeing the hunger in do's droopy eyes,

Huang takes him on as a standover man. Somebody to call on for acts of violence or to get his hands dirty and low-level robberies, extortions, or drug and human trafficking. But Huang's partner, a woman named Miss. Miss Gwee sees more in the young man. His years of card sharking might have made him an inveterate gambler, but there's barely a man in Shanghai who doesn't know the world of illegal gaming better than Do. Miss Gui, that's do run three of Huang's most lucrative tables

at a den near Shanghai's famous Bund Promenade. Do performs well and shows Huang he can be a lot more than a pair of fists. He thinks strategically and he can manage others effectively. Before long, Huang Jin Rong reckons he's not looking just at a street thug but a bona fide criminal mastermind. He should know. Huang is many years, Doo's elder, a man with a rough pass too, who wears it literally on his face. Most folks know him as pockmarked Huang for the smallpox scars that crater him like the moon. He, like Doe, had worked his way from nothing to the top and had got in his own break in 1892 when cops in Shang, Shanghai's French concession had hired him to work as a plain-closed detective, even while he was a local Green Gang leader.

This is not as uncommon as you might think. In fact, for other 1910s and 20s, the Green Gang comes to command huge cuts of Shanghai's illicit markets precisely by working with and even as police in the city's three divisions, the Chinese areas, the international settlement, particularly though the French concession. In many ways, Shanghai is the main character of this three-parter, and we're going to get into its many peculiarities in the next episode, because they are many, and they are wildly interesting. According to a popular saying the city is, quote, a thin layer of heaven on a thick slice of hell. I like that a lot. Make sure that's a really good quote. And do, U.A. Schweng, working beneath Wang Jin Rong, is slipping between them, running gambling dens and brothels and orchestrating ever-bigest shipmen. not just of salt, but China's cash gal. Opium.

He's the Shanghai Green Gang's rising star, and he knows it. He shaves his head so that his prominent ears will be even more visible. This is when he gets the nickname Big Ear Do. Merchants and cops fear him. Gangsters respect him. And podcasters just want to get to know him. And what do gangsters love? Instability.

Chaos. A state on its knees. Lawless. And would you know it, Danny, that is just what the Green Gang gets. The Qing dynasty has been splattering for decades before 1911. Foreigners of Barge didn't and taking chunks of its territory, the British in Hong Kong, for example, or the Portuguese in Macau. We'll get into those coastal so-called concessions in Part 2, which of course have felt incredibly

keenly in Shanghai. But in 1895, China loses a war with Japan and is forced to hand over Taiwan, parts of Manchurian and North plus its influence in Korea. A war with Russia in 1904 and 1905 then weakens the dynasty even further and calls for a new modern China, a technologically advanced industrial nation that looks beyond its borders grow louder. By the autumn of 1911, revolutionaries led by Hawaii-educated Sun Yat Sen overthrow the Qing. He establishes the Republic of China on January 1, 1912, with its capital in the capital.

ancient city of Nanjing, some 200 miles west of Shanghai. But the revolution is never truly completed. The Republican government fails to unify all of China under its control and power vacuums left by the retreating Qing fuel the rise of gangsters and warlords. In divided Shanghai, the result of this half-finished revolution looks like a weakened state, with laws unable to be upheld by calls, easily corruptible officials and foreign businesses being left to exploit Chinese labor and mineral wealth with almost no official oversight. Little wonder that the city is known not only as the Paris of the East, but as the whore of the Orient.

Writes the website Damn Interesting, quote, besides wealth, the vacuum left by the debone Chinese legal authorities meant the city offered a limitless supply of sex, drugs, gambling and practically any other vice imaginable. With no unified immigration system, Shanghai was the only only one. city in the world without any bothersome need for visas or official resident permits, and free from anything like vigorous law enforcement outside of the well-prane streets inhabited by the world to do. For the Green Gang, particularly Huang Jin Rong and do Yue Shuiang, this is all manner from heaven. They are the most powerful gangsters in a city

whose lust for wealth and vice is unmatched almost anywhere else on earth. They are also, for reasons we'll get into next week, sitting on an opium gold mine worth millions upon millions of dollars, and which is supercharged by a 1912 prohibition that has a similar effect on Shanghai's criminal scene as alcohol prohibition does in the US. So huge is the leap in price of the drug that by 1917, according to one historian,

opium is worth, quote, seven times its weight in silver. And the Green Gang is beginning to rake in a lot of that. cash. Just to repeat, part two of this Green Gang trilogy will dive into the history of Chinese opium and the history of Shanghai itself. But to close out today's show, let's head all the way up to 1920. By this point, Huang and Do's branch of the Green Gang is playing second fiddle to a branch called the Big Eighth Mob, itself a consolidation of smallest Green Gang factions. The Big Eighth Mob controls the majority of opium coming in and out of Shanghai. having made its name pulling off a series of daring heists on opium merchants throughout the previous two decades.

It's also arguably the first Green Gang branch to go global, pairing with traffickers in Japan and Taiwan to get hundreds of tons of opium in and out of mainland China through Shanghai's ports. So where is any of that opium being exported? You said in and out. So is it like, is it going anywhere else in the world? I think from what I've read it's eventually going everywhere. I mean, anywhere there's an opium demand, this stuff is going there. That's what I mean. Where was there like a big demand for opium?

I think it was a big deal in Europe back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was in the US, but it was also big in London, Paris, other cities all over Europe as well. And I think a lot of it then was coming from China because of the illicit and illicit routes. I mean, we're going to get into this a lot, but the opium wars could be another like 10. 10 episodes.

I know. It could be. Did you ever smoke opium? I did. Yeah. We used to get it in college, but I swear it wasn't because you would smoke it and be like this, like I don't, I don't get it. I want to be hanging out one of those basements in the 1920s and just like giving up

on life. Like I wanted to be that good and it just wasn't that good. And it just wasn't like real sort of, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like wearing one of those cool outfits lounging on your back and smoking out of like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like not a care of the world for like three weeks while I just sit there and smoke opio. Just didn't.

I get that feeling. I had the same thing and I got caught smoking it outside one of my teacher's offices. But I also think it was just like a bit of weed. Yeah, we got a bunch of these like opium joints and smoked it outside the back of the school. But it went through the vent and went into one of our teachers. Or like woods in your, when you were growing up? Yeah, yeah. That would have been the intelligent things do.

More Sean Williams' lore, man. Just smoking opium in school and your teacher's office. I mean, well, I mean, there was the stuff that we did in Myanmar that was actually,

that was legit, uh, yeah, I had that in, like, in, in, in,

in Lows too, but it also wasn't the same. Like, it didn't, there was no on the tea, but there was no, like, uh,

I wasn't wowed. Mm. You know, I, I don't know about that. I think back then there was wow about like,

like, all drugs. Like anything. They have like too much caffeine. I'd be like, this is, this is insane. This is crazy.

You know? Someone's, We'll get him the highest that he used to experience. What? 10 years ago? No? Yeah. Anyway.

Anyway. All of this, what are we talking about? What's this? Oh yeah, it's the the Kring Gang run by Huang Jin Rong and do you a shrink. It's behind the big eight mob. That don't bother Huang much. He is old school, a cool head, but he's not much of a strategic thinker.

By and large, he is happy with his lot. But do, he's different. Do is different. Different do. He wants the Big Eighth Mob's opium millions. To do so, he piles his ill-gotten gains into a series of high-profile businesses, jewelry stores, logistics firms, and so on. He uses these physical locations to embed himself across the city, inviting fellow and rival gangsters in for palais all with the goal of toppling the Big Eighth mob. In fact, so much does he model his Green Gang branch, on the Big Eighth mob that many underworld figures refer to it as the small eight mob. By 1922, Doos tactics are paying off. By the way, this is like 150 pages of that book. Doe has made so many alliances at these various Shanghai front stores that he uses them to reach out to opium merchants, many of whom are upset at the Big Eighth mob's increasingly aggressive operations. He gets them on board.

And then, just like that, he pulls the rug from the Big Eighth mob. almost overnight. Without access to their merchants, without the backing of gangsters who've come over to do side, the Big 8 mob loses its status in the opium gang, ceding it to do and his boss Huang.

So he basically like just unites the freelance gangsters and the dealers like one by one under the nose, out of these shops, out of the nose, under the nose of the Big A mob. Yeah,

I mean, kind of the history of the Green Gang as much as I can determine it is like it starts with thousands of disparate groups, and it just consolidates and consolidates over time until you get these big players like Do and the Big Ate Mob, and it consolidates again, and they take over. And eventually, I mean, you know, spoiler alert,

Do is going to be a pretty big deal. So, yeah, like it started with all those boatmen going along the canals in the Yangtze River, and it ends up in Shanghai and with Du Wei Schweng. By 1923, Du has carved out Shanghai's French concession as his entire turf. This is a 3.5 square mile stretch of central Shanghai

home to almost half a million people. And it belongs to Big Ear Doe, the country boy, the gambling addict, the orphan who rose from literally nothing to become a criminal king. He's got every cop, politician, business leader,

in his back pocket. His men are detectives, port inspectors. He runs hundreds of brothels gambling and opium dens all over the city. And you know what happens next? Well, yeah, I mean, you know what happens next. Yes, Danny, the Lin Cheng outrage is what happens next. You know it well from the cold open. It's the crazy train heist.

Sun Mia Yao, remember him and his 1,200 men. These ex-soldiers left destitute and rudderless by the 19th. 11 Revolution, they attack the Blue Express between Shanghai and Beijing. The train derails. The bandit shoots several passengers and workers dead on the spot. And then they forced the near 300 remaining hostages on a 10-day march to the gang's hideout in a village at the foot of a mountain. Today that would just be like a go-fund-me thing for what men's mental health.

I don't know. Sun then makes his demands. He wants his men reinstated into the Chinese army. and the removal of Republican troops from his home province of Shandong. He explicitly demands that foreign powers, not just China, accept his terms, and he knows full well that because he's got their citizens, he's forcing the fledgling Republican Chinese government's hands. Writes James Zimmerman, author of the 2023 Book the Peking Express,

quote, An attack on an express train by marauding bandits could threaten China's national sovereignty and bring the unstable Republican government to its knees. It would not only strike a blow to China's economically critical rail system, but also put the country in the crosshairs of the foreign powers that increasingly took the view that China couldn't govern itself. A month of negotiations then take place, not just between Sun and the Chinese state,

but also an American guy named Roy Scott Anderson. Anderson is a fluent Chinese speaker and writer, incredibly. he had served as a military general under Sun Yat-Sen and had been advising several American firms in Shanghai when the Lin-Chang outrage had taken place. Anderson, it's got to be said, he is the true hero of this story. He travels all the way to Sun's Mountain Lair and personally cajoles, threatens and bullies the bandits

into releasing every single foreign prisoner they have. He also gets the Chinese to acquiesce the Sun's demands to get his men back into the army. But Sun still has hundreds of Chinese held captive, and he wants a major payday for their release. So who does the Chinese government turn to? Do Yue Shuang, Prince of the Shanghai Green Gang, multi-millionaire gangster, a man transforming himself from mob boss to bigness magnate, philanthropist, political heavyweight. Does he have the cash the officials ask do? Don't sweat it, he tells them. I mean, I'm paraphrasing it. I don't know the Chinese, we don't sweat it.

And on June 12, 1923, Doe ends the hostage crisis with a payment of $85,000 to Sun, which is almost $2 million in today's money. And with that large S, Doe is now a national icon, the quote, man of honor and courage that he promised to be when he joined the Green Gang. But his story won't end there. In fact, it's just a matter of months until Doe gets his next big,

leg up in the wild world of Shanghai crime, when his boss Huang makes a gigantic misstep, paving the way for the Green Gang's big-eared prince to become its king. And then, well, all bets are off. Thanks for listening. Tune into the next part of this three-part for Shanghai history, opium wars, massacres and more revolutions, generalissimoes and chairman, coffins and mushrooms and beatings and live burials and way more. And there's even a little bit of Indiana Jones. Cheers. It's great stuff, bud.

Great stuff.