When Worlds Collide

Abstract

To the vast majority of readers of the contemporary treaty port press, the banditry accompanying China's early twentieth-century attempts to transform itself into a moder nation confirmed their long-held assumption of the impossibility of such a transformation ever happening. For a tiny minority of them, however, banditry was more than a titillating, sometimes shocking read. These were the men and women whose fate it had been to fall into the hands of one of these gangs and be held as an insurance ticket against whatever it was that that particular gang was demanding. Inseparable as banditry was from the chaotic process of China's rebirth, were it not for the experiences of those foreign tickets, we would know little about its detailed workings, for bandit life stories are hard to come by. Fortunately, many of those who survived their captivity set down their experiences in the form of a memoir. From these memoirs, we learn something of what it meant not only to be a foreign ticket but also to be a bandit in those turbulent years. Through the prism of such accounts, this article explores the nature of Chinese