Between the two world wars, adventurers, gunrunners, criminals, gangsters and opium dealers clustered in the international city that was both part of a warlord-wracked China and yet separate – split into an International Settlement run largely by the British and Americans and a French Concession. “To control Shanghai was to dominate all of China,” said the China Hands of the 1930s, and to control Shanghai was to control the flow of opium.
FROM WHARF RAT TO ZONOSHI
Du Yuesheng was the unchallenged leader of Shanghai's Green Gang, a criminal syndicate whose tentacles extended to the Mafia in America and the criminal gangs of Europe, as well as throughout every Chinatown in Asia. And it was all down to a one-time ‘wharf rat' called Yuesheng – known to everyone as ‘Big-eared Du'.
Shanghai's Green Gang was originally formed of the Yangtze River boatmen who combined to smuggle grain and salt before graduating to piracy and raiding unprotected riverside villages. As they profited, they became attracted to the growing metropolis of Shanghai. There they moved into the opium business. Du was an orphan from the settlement of Gaoqiao, near Shanghai. He soon left the poverty-stricken village and got a job with a greengrocer in the city –
