19 September 2024
Perched atop a gatehouse of China’s Weihsien Internment Camp in 1943, electrified wires buzzing angrily along gray brick walls, Helen Burton dreamed like she did as a child growing up on the prairie in North Dakota, first near Grand Forks and later near Bismarck.
Instead of longing for adventures she never had, however, she wished for the life she once led, of being the shopkeeper of what newspapers called the “legendary” Camel Bell at the Grand Hotel de Pekin, a stone’s throw from the golden-roofed Forbidden City in Beijing, written as Peking, Peiping or Pekin in the early 20th century.
It was there, inside the crenelated walls of the ancient city of Kublai Khan in 1921, a city that had been off limits to Westerners for centuries, that Burton embarked on a new adventure, one that started off with a candy shop, with sugary fudge and Scandinavian divinity.
“The charm of that city cured my restlessness,” Burton told the Indianapolis Star.
At first, her treats didn’t sell well. Lovers of Chinese art and trinkets wanted camel bells from the Silk Road caravans, so she rebranded the store into a curio shop, and soon, dignitaries and playwrights, philosophers and opera singers like Lily Pons or writers like Pearl Buck became her best customers.
For Burton, business came naturally. “Making a lifelong friend is much more fun and much better business than making one sale,” Burton told the Indianapolis Star in 1940.
She became “Helen Burton of Peking,” the “famed woman merchant of China,” the “Pekin’s lady in jade,” making newspaper headlines around the world. But in the summer of 1943, she was imprisoned as an enemy of invading Imperial Japan, one of 2,008 red prison-badge-number-wearing captives at Weihsien Internment Camp, the same prison featured decades later in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie “Empire of the Sun” starring a young Christian Bale.
The prison began as a Presbyterian mission known as the Courtyard of the Happy Way, built with money from indemnities China paid after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, according to the China Christian Daily.
“The good times came to an end when the Japanese invaded,” Burton wrote in a 1948 letter made available by Weihsien Paintings, a website dedicated to former internees and their families.
It was only a short drop down to the outside of the prison, but with her sparkling blue eyes, brown hair and soft spoken voice, there was nowhere for her to hide in China. While her lavish lifestyle, her friends, her four adopted Chinese daughters and her freedom were lost, she began planning her “I Shall Return” campaign. One day, she would be back in Beijing.
For the time being, however, she had to screw her courage to the sticking-place, as her fellow British internees liked to say. Over the electrified wall in the “out of bounds” area, wheat fields, a cemetery and a Chinese village, where some who were desperate for black market trade lived. Inside the prison, past hastily-built row houses, the guard towers, the 18 Chinese-styled “squatty potties” and 40 western toilets built near cesspools, a small shack surrounded by trees caught her attention.
A perfect place to start a new business. She named it the White Elephant exchange shop.
White Elephant
Burton’s new shop inside the prison lacked her jewels, the ivory, her famous North Dakota coffee and treats, and the “forbidden stitch,” embroidery so fine that the work cost many Chinese women their eyesight. But it became an essential part of prison life, according to former internees who wrote about their memories in Weihsien Paintings.
All of the internees, from global dignitaries to business tycoons to smugglers and Olympic athletes like Eric Liddell, the “Flying Scotsman” featured in the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire,” were reduced to their bare selves, wrote Bernice Archer in her book “The Internment of Western Civilians Under the Japanese.”
“We no longer had about us the aura of our offices, our clerks… our cars and comfortable homes and servants. All the trappings of our Western civilization had been ruthlessly shorn from us. We were prisoners and nothing more,” Archer wrote.
Food was scarce. Accustomed to sugary sweet-sour pork and rich
wonton
soup, Burton had little to eat but
kaoliang
, or sorghum porridge and thin turnip soups. Starvation was staved off by George Wallis and a kitchen crew that mysteriously found ways to bake bread.
Water was drawn from wells within spitting distance of cesspools. Weevils and crushed eggshells became important sources of protein and calcium. All eggshells were saved for children to chew as medicine.
And the White Elephant helped them all to survive. Internees swapped cigarettes, soap, peanut oil, even jewelry and false teeth for books, clothes, sugar, rice, eggs and fruit. At the White Elephant, sugar could be traded for shoes, a mink fur coat for a tin of jam.
When the Japanese authorities allowed Red Cross packages from Switzerland in, IOU chits were used, to be settled after the war. A former internee described Burton’s business at the prison, saying the service was invaluable to camp life.
“One enterprising woman widely known and experienced in the management of a shop in Peking, took the initiative in establishing… the White Elephant Exchange, where, besides some buying and selling, people could exchange their own useless things for things useless to other people — a process of transformation which rendered all things useful,” wrote a former internee on Weihsien Paintings.
Burton’s business had competition. Former gangsters and greedy guards tried to fleece the internees. “Notorious fraudster” Jacob Goyas, swapped a pound of sugar for a silver tea set and melted it down into ingots. Described by internees as a “fat, sleazy buy-sell man who, by claiming a weak heart, never did a stroke of work in the camp,” Goyas always came out on top of any deal, forcing trades like eggs for jewelry or an heirloom gold watch.
Any Chinese smuggler caught trading was killed by the Japanese guards. Han Xiang, a young Chinese was caught and guards left his electrocuted corpse dangling from the wires around the camp as a warning, according to a report by Jonathan Henshaw.
Burton ran the White Elephant exchange shop for about a year, until internees had nothing else to barter. And then, her dreams took a small step torward realization: she was released during the Teia Maru and the Gripsholm ships prisoner exchange.
When she left, cigarettes became the camp’s currency, and whenever the guards allowed Red Cross packages inside, the White Elephant would “swing back into action again,” according to former internees.
Prison life
The prison commandant, Mister Izu, nicknamed “King Kong” by internees, passed on most of his duties to “Gold Tooth,” his top aide, but prisoners staffed their own hospital, implemented their own rules; they policed themselves, and created few problems for their captors.
Suicide, however, was rampant.
“Looking back on all the attempted suicides, there seemed to be a common denominator: each person had, at some time, been a ‘somebody’ in a once exciting world,” wrote survivor Pamela Masters in her book “The Mushroom Years,” admitting she entertained the thought of grabbing the electric wire that surrounded the camp.
Once the toasts of nightlife in cosmopolitan lives, some younger women couldn’t stand the anonymity of being a lost soul in the prison camp, and ate match heads or slashed their wrists, Masters wrote.
Others rose to the challenge, like Burton, Laurance Tipton and Liddell, the Olympian. Months before liberation, Liddell died of a brain tumor inside the prison, but while he lived he rose before dawn to collect coal, chop wood, cook and teach science to children every day until the 10 p.m. curfew.
Tipton, a former cigarette distributor by camel caravan, was a kitchen fire stoker during imprisonment, and helped develop the black market with Catholic priests.
They traded with gangs outside the camp — the Hans, the Chaos, the Wangs — who would grease their near-naked bodies and slip through the swampy wheat fields to take orders through a drainage hole in the wall.
On June 8, 1943, Tipton and another inmate scaled a guard tower, dropped over the side, and escaped, joining Chinese guerrillas in fighting the Japanese until the war’s end.
Eleven days after the atomic “Little Boy” bomb devastated Japanese cities, the Office of Strategic Services — precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency — sent the “Duck Team” to Weihsien Internment Camp. The paratroopers landed on Aug. 17, 1945 and “with wild jubilation, internees stormed the gateway to the Courtyard of the Happy Way,” according to recollections within Weihsien Paintings.
Japanese soldiers made no effort to resist.
Broken dream
Burton made one last trip to Beijing, to her old shop and to see her four adopted daughters for the last time in 1948, leaving about one month before her home away from home was sacked by the People’s Liberation Army.
Her oldest daughter, Mei Yu-kuei, was adopted in 1923, and helped Burton design jewelry boxes, according to the Bismarck Tribune. Helen’s second daughter Chang Tzu Ju, was a sword dancer, and her sister — an aspiring teacher — Chang Tzu Yi, were both from a Manchu family, the ruling minority of China during the last dynasty that ended in 1911.
The youngest daughter was Pu Mei-Li, adopted from the Lucheifu Christian Hospital of Anhui Province, “where girl babies are still drowned at birth because the parents feel they are too poor to feed them,” newspapers reported at the time.
Burton braved the dangers of the ongoing Chinese civil war at that time, depicting her growing excitement about passing through the crenelated walls of the ancient city of Kublai Khan once again.
“Some part of me which had remained frozen to all the sounds, sights and even the smells of China now began to thaw, and deep currents of excitement stepped up my slow tempo almost to the bursting point. Long had I dreamed of this day; first as a prisoner perched on the gatehouse roof of my Weihsien prison as I gazed out over the grain fields of Shantung; then beside the violet green waters of Hawaii; always one dream of reunion in Peking. This moment would soon be mine,” Burton wrote.
Inside and outside the prison, Burton left an impression on everyone she met, according to multiple news stories.
“Her Camel Bell shop is known to art lovers all over the world who travel thousands of miles for a single piece of jewel jade, cradled in a typical Burton setting,” the Bismarck Tribune reported.
And she never let people forget where she was from.
“I’m a native North Dakotan and I’m proud of it,” but China was her adopted country, said Burton in the Bismark Tribune. Her father, Clark Ashton Burton, represented District 5, which included Grand Forks, during the second assembly of the North Dakota House of Representatives in 1891.
Burton’s eldest daughter was killed months after her last visit during a wave of political executions, and she never again heard from the other three, according to former internees who knew Burton. “Pekin’s lady in jade,” who never married, died in July 1971 in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the age of 81.
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