Upgraded Tour Reveals New Clues to 1930s Beijing Expat Enclave Murder Mystery

It's Peking of the 1930s. The 19-year-old adopted daughter of a British diplomat is found disemboweled at the base of what is now the Dongbianmen Tower on the southeast Second Ring Road.

The murder is never solved.

That's the set-up for the classic non-fiction tale Midnight in Peking, a must-read for any Beijing expat.

If you haven't read it, go do that now (it's usually in stock at The Bookworm and also available for the Kindle here) -- then be amazed to see how real-life scenes of the crime have miraculously stood the test of time via a new tour that reveals shocking new evidence from this eight-decade old crime.

Co-organized by Bespoke Beijing, Beijing Postcards, and Penguin Books, this new tour is an immersive hike through the real locations featured in Paul French’s retelling of the high-profile unsolved murder of an ambassador’s daughter.

While tours have been offered occasionally since the book was published in 2012, this new tour features recent discoveries from historians Lars Ulrik Thom and Averil Harrison-Thuemmel of Beijing Postcards.

Through painstaking research, the pair has unearthed new information from police reports and news clippings that add extra insights into the murder of Pamela Werner, along with a historical context to the locations that brings the story to life.

“Working with this book has been such a pleasure because so many people have read it," Thom said. "Normally when we do this, you don't have this kind of established framework. This time has been totally different."

The book, penned by Shanghai-based author French and the 2013 recipient of the Edgar Award for non-fiction crime, is based largely on letters filed with British archives that had been written by Pamela's father, E.T.C. Werner, a former consul and sinologist who spent the latter part of his life obsessed with finding his daughter's killer.

Thom and Harrison-Thuemmel have dug into other areas not covered by the book.

"We found a lot of material at the National Library and at the archives that aren’t actually in the book and is a good supplement, making it more interesting,” Thom said.

The gruesome details behind Pamela’s murder unveil a 1930s Beijing full of glamour and debauchery, privilege and political tension. Current expat residents of Beijing might be surprised at how much things have changed -- and how much things have remained the same.

The tour takes amateur sleuths down the hutong where the Werners lived in a Chinese-style courtyard home; the spot where Pamela's body was found; through the Badlands (the Sanlitun of its era, filled with houses of ill repute); and through the former Legation Quarter, where foreigners of the 1930s lived in relative luxury, patrolled by foreign police corps.

The tour is scheduled for four dates: Saturday April 23, Sunday April 24, Saturday April 30 and Sunday May 1. The tour starts at 6.30pm near the east side of the Beijing Railway Station and ends with a cocktail at Capital M, Qianmen. Tickets are RMB 388. Check out our events listing here for other important information regarding this one-of-a-kind walking tour.

If you are busy on those dates, you can do an audio tour on your own time (downloadable here) narrated by author French himself.

Material from Tom Arnstein and Margaux Scheurs was used in this report.

Photos: The New York Times, midnightinpeking

Photo: Wikimedia

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I'm one of those Midnight in Peking obsessives. Interestingly, a website has been set up, apparently by descendents of the people that French concludes were responsible, to refute his claims (spoiler alert: I don't recommend you visit this site until you read the book itself)

pamelawernermurderpeking.com

Books by current and former Beijinger staffers

http://astore.amazon.com/truerunmedia-20