From his table inside the lavish, red-enamel interiors of 181 Avenue Foch—surrounded by games of mahjong, pai gow, and cards, and waiters scurrying about with complimentary opium and wine—detective-squad chief Huang “Bigshot” Jinrong looked out at one of the greatest criminal empires the world had ever known. The Big Eight Mob controlled the opium business, gambling, prostitution, the fish market, at least two major banks and the police itself. Three of every hundred Shanghai residents made their living from crime.

To keep the flotsam of drunks, small-time thieves and sex workers from spilling into the city’s upmarket casinos, the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) had hired a small army of men from another world: Men with long beards and bright-red turbans, brought in from small villages in Punjab’s Majha region.

For the most part, the 558 men who served in what was known as the SMP Sikh branch disappeared from history when it was disbanded eighty years ago, in 1943. From the surviving records, though, we know constable Isser Singh was out on the violent streets of Hongkou night after night. The historian Isabella Jackson tells us Isser arrested a drunk American sailor on 19 December 1906 and locked up an unruly Russian who obstructed traffic on Boone Road the next summer.

The Sikh constabulary was also key to putting down riots and political disturbances—leaving behind a legacy of resentment that still colours popular culture in China.

Control of sin city

Few great cities have had a social fabric as closely entwined with organised crime as Shanghai. Through wars fought in the nineteenth century, scholar Julia Lovell writes, the colonial powers prised open China to opium grown in India. In 1839, China confiscated some 1,000 tons of opium from British dealers in Guangzhou. London responded by demanding that the Chinese emperor compensate the traders for the street value of their drugs. The emperor refused, leading Britain to unleash its warships against China and bombard its coastal towns. Shanghai was divided into foreign-controlled enclaves.

To read more: https://theprint.in/opinion/sikhs-trained-in-kung-fu-british-indias-secret-weapon-to-deal-with-shanghais-gangsters/1520718/