Pepperland

One of the more notorious was Chang Zongchang, the “Dog-Meat General.”  A famous journalist described him as having “the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig, and the temperament of a tiger.”  As a measure of the man, it is said that Zhang had his “‘three don’t knows’: he did not know how much money he had, how many troops he had, or how many owmen he had in his harem.”  His Shandong military troops, which included four thousand White Russians (dubbed “soldiers of misfortune”) and a unit of several thousand boys whose average age was ten, were notorious for their practice of “opening melons,” that is, splitting skulls, and for hanging strings of human heads on telegraph poles to elicit respect for their power.

Let the chinaposts begin…