vanished period.’ The Sino–Japanese war had begun with an atrocity that was to be repeated time and again, although on a smaller scale, throughout the conflict.
The Japanese did not take the international settlements in Shanghai until after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Old Shanghai had gone, but until hostilities between Tokyo and the Allied powers were formalised, life in the international settlement staggered on. The bar of the Cathay Hotel, the hub of all gossip and intrigue, nightly entertained the usual cast of spies, philanderers and fraudsters, sometimes all three in one. This is where Richard Sorge, one of Stalin’s most successful double agents, who certainly recruited agents within the press corps, spent his time. For four years, from 1937 to 1941, when he was arrested, he kept the Kremlin informed of Japanese and German moves in the Far East. He was hanged in Tokyo in 1944.
With the Chinese retreat from Shanghai and the massacre at Nanjing, the war entered a new phase. George Hogg had realised, as had Auden, Isherwood and every other journalist in the city, that there was no point staying in Shanghai. A new and supposedly final battlefront had formed. Chiang Kai-shek had moved his government to a new capital, and the Japanese were once again rolling their armoured and infantry columns westwards. The Chinese government prepared to defend the next major city in the line of attack, and pledged not to give it up as lightly as they had Nanjing.
The new Chinese capital, and the place every journalist wanted to be, was Hankow.
‘Hankow is the most interesting place on earth.’
Hankow was one of three cities at the confluence of the Yangtse and the Han, 450 miles from the coast. It was here, halfway down the Yangtse on its journey from the Himalayas to the sea, that Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government retreated after the loss of Shanghai and Nanjing. The new seat of government, together with Wuchang and Hanyang, was part of a three-city complex known today as Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.
The only way to get to Hankow from Shanghai in 1938 was by steamer to the British colony of Hong Kong, and then by plane or train. George Hogg left Shanghai aboard the Japanese steamer Suwe Maru on 9 March. On arrival in Hong Kong he immediately took the train to Hankow. On the two-day, five-hundredmile journey he talked his way from his highly uncomfortable third-class berth into the first-class compartments. There he met a smartly dressed Chinese businessman who sold newsprint for a Dutch firm with a branch in Shanghai. Learning that his new English acquaintance was looking for a job, the man made him an immediate offer. It would greatly impress his clients, he explained, if he took an English secretary to meetings. Thus George Hogg’s first letter home from Hankow was written on the grand stationery of Van Reekum Bros Ltd, and enabled him to describe himself as a businessman.
With equal good luck, Aunt Muriel had again used her contacts to find a rented room for him in a city where the hotels were turning away even celebrity guests. The room was in the Lutheran mission, which was run by an American bishop and Oxford graduate, Logan Roots: ‘your utter charmer, a very good fellow’, Hogg called him. The mission owed nothing to the Christian ethic of frugality, and a great deal to the large funds the Church had raised in the US. Standing on several acres on the edge of the city, it was surrounded by a moat-like canal and large red-brick walls. Within the enclosure lay flower and vegetable gardens, tree-lined walks and tennis courts. Several buildings contained classrooms and dormitories for students. The mission ran an elementary school in English and a seminary for the graduates of Chinese high schools.
The Bishop, who was within a few weeks of retirement after a lifetime in China, had good political contacts with Chiang Kai-shek’s circle. In the spirit of Christian liberalism, and perhaps political opportunism, he also entertained senior communists and rented rooms to known communist sympathisers. Chou En-lai, then leading the communist delegation in Hankow, would drop in for tea, as would the government’s Premier, H.H. Kung. Chou spoke good English, and made a point of seeking out journalists staying at the mission.
Hogg had certainly landed on his feet. Within days of arriving he wrote home to say that the city was ‘the most interesting place on earth’. And he was right. Hankow’s history as a concession port, its neoclassical European architecture and its teeming Chinese slums had plenty to interest an enquiring journalist.
The provisional capital was one of the Yangtse River cities opened up to foreign trade by the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. The treaty had been imposed upon the Emperor in Beijing after the British inflated a minor incident into a major diplomatic confrontation. Not to be left out, the French seized on the murder of a missionary in a part of China not yet opened to the West, and joined the negotiations. Germany and the United States followed suit. Ten new ports were opened to the Western powers along the Yangtse River. In each a number of concessions were granted, allowing the British, French, Germans and Russians to create foreign enclaves with wholly independent powers of policing and taxation. The enforced granting of extra-territorial concessions was humiliation enough for the Emperor. The affront was sharpened with a clause in the treaty which opened all of China to foreign missionaries, Catholic and Protestant alike.
The Bund, or river embankment, at Hankow was a metaphor for the imperial diktat that Europe had imposed upon China. The elegant buildings that lined the river not only reflected Western tastes in architecture, but as far as possible were made off-limits to Chinese. The banks, offices, government buildings and the great homes of the wealthy merchants were all lovingly created to mirror the taste and style of home. The heart of the city, with its high-rise buildings, theatres, cinemas, cafés, broad boulevards and bustling riverfront was wholly European in style and layout, even though surrounded by China. Horse-racing at an elegant track on the city outskirts was a focal point of the social scene, and the club buildings, the stands and the surrounding parkland had been designed to lead the spectator to believe that he was in the heart of Surrey.
George Hogg’s lifestyle at the Lutheran mission compound may not have been up to the expatriate standards of comfort, but there were servants to look after him, good food at the Bishop’s table and a laundry service. In his first letter home he described other foreigners who had also taken advantage of the Bishop’s hospitality. Among them were Peg Snow, wife of the American correspondent and author Edgar Snow, famous for his book Red Star Over China (1936), and, as Hogg put it, ‘an American woman authoress who at one time rode all over the place with Mao’s Eighth Route Army’.* The woman was Agnes Smedley, and she was to play a crucial role in the next few months of Hogg’s life. A self-proclaimed communist supporter, and author of the bestselling autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929), Smedley had become a leading member of the fast-growing Hankow press corps.
Hankow was the wartime capital of China for the first ten months of 1938. It was a Mecca for foreign correspondents, diplomats, hangers-on and spies, and therefore a natural destination for any young journalist looking to make his name and earn some money. Franco’s victory in Spain that year had left famous correspondents, small-time stringers and a host of photographers all looking for the next war. While Hankow remained in Chinese hands it became another Madrid, another beleaguered capital making a final and, as it turned out, doomed stand against the forces of fascism. Many of the journalists who arrived were battlehardened veterans of the Spanish Civil War. They needed a new war, preferably one that offered their readers moral certainties.
When George Hogg arrived the front line was still several hundred miles distant. The fighting would remain far from the new capital for months thanks to an important, and rare, Chinese victory over the Japanese army at a small town called T’aierhchuang, which meant the nationalist government was able to delay the final assault on the city until the autumn.
After their conquest of Nanjing, the Japanese had pushed north in an effort to take the important railway centre of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province, which would give them control of the north– south rail links through the heart of China. The ancient brickwalled settlement of T’aierhchuang, on the banks of the Grand Canal, stood in their way. After two weeks of street fighting, which destroyed much of the town, the Chinese appeared to retreat.