The Sassoon Files takes place in the world of 1920s Shanghai. There are two parts of this setting: the historical and the Mythos. This blog post series is about the historical settings… the background which the player characters may know about as they begin their investigations.
China’s greatest engineering feat was not the massive (and mostly useless) Great Wall which consistently failed to repel Northern invaders. For more than a millennium, the most important infrastructure project was the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal linked China’s fertile and temperate southern region to the arid north, allowing grain barges from as far south as the resort city of Hangzhou to travel up to Beijing and beyond. It linked the mighty Yangze River with the Yellow River. Millions of boatmen, soldiers, granary managers, accountants, dredgers, lock-workers, and general laborers worked on the Canal.
For many years, Luoists (罗教) preached their heretical Buddhism-Daoism mystical teachings to the boatmen who pulled the great grain shipments along Canal. They preached about the divinity of the “Great Void” that created and binds the universe. They beseeched members to open their eyes to the glory of unified enlightenment and take comfort in the Mother who reveals truth. The Luoists also opened schools, orphanages, hostels, and meeting halls.
In 1768 the Qinglong Emperor banned Luoism. The religion went in hiding. In hiding, it grew, splintered and mutated.
Several times over the course of its rule, there were signs that the Qing had lost their Mandate of Heaven. The Yellow River Flood of 1855 was one such time. The mighty river overflowed from its built-up banks and inundated tens of thousands of square kilometers as it sought a new path to the sea, drowning or starving hundreds of thousands of peasants. This flood broke the Yellow River’s connection with the Grand Canal. As a result, an army of laborers left the Canal, many to join ranks with the Taiping “Kingdom of Heaven”. Many more traveled to the coast to work the salt smuggling trade. Some went to the coastal cities to work the docks, loading grain shipments for the north, while transferring opium imports to river barges headed for China’s interior.
In Shanghai, the remnants of the Luoist reformed into aid societies for salt smugglers, dock hands, and migrant laborers. In the early 1900s, one of these aid societies evolved into the Green Gang; a secret criminal organization that came to control all “vice” in Shanghai.
Shanghai was the perfect environment for a secret criminal organization; multiple jurisdictions (the International Settlement, the French Concession, Old Town) to hide in; a massive influx of desperately poor people looking for work; and a port of entry for opium. Through successive generations of leadership, the Green Gang expanded its control of prostitution, gambling, opium dens, and extortion rackets.
Huang Jinrong (“Pockmarked Huang”) learned his trade in his father’s Shanghai tea house, where he overheard the conversations of schemers, gangsters, con-men, and others on the make. In 1892, and at the age of 24, Huang Jinrong left his father’s tea house to work for the French Concession police as a detective. He was an excellent detective, able to solve many cases because of his connections from his father’s tea house. Pockmarked Huang was also a leader of the Green Gang.
