The case, which actually happened at the time, was subsequently lost to the current of history, forever left unsolved. In the opening of Jiang Wen’s comedy action film Hidden Man, set in 1930s Beijing, police chief Zhu Qianlong tells surgeon Li Tianran of a disturbing case involving the murder of schoolgirl Pamela Warner, the British ambassador’s daughter.
Hopefully that’s in the works though - we’d watch it. Netflix has now denied reports that it will turn Paul French‘s true crime novel Midnight in Peking into its first-ever China-set original series, or that it has tapped legendary Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen to star. Alongside the English language materials that are used in Paul French’s international bestseller Midnight In Peking and the newly published A Death in Peking by Graeme Sheppard, we have been able to dig up Chinese written police reports and articles to provide new insights into this notable incident.Update: Seems someone jumped the gun and got us all excited without due cause. Our project has from the get go sought to bring Chinese sources into the research into the murder. Pamela Werner’s death exposed the workings of this very fragile society. The Japanese were coming ever closer, and the capital had been moved to Nanjing. The bubble where, in the words of Edgar Snow, Americans and Europeans had their own little “Never Never Land” in Beijing was about to burst.
Pamela Werner died at a time when most Westerners in China had lost their extraterritoriality. You could say that Beijing Postcards cares less about who actually killed Pamela Werner than exploring the society she lived in. It captivates people and gives the narrative a clear direction, whilst also revealing much about the world in which the crime took place. The Pamela Werner murder case is no exception.Įxamining a murder investigation is an amazing driver for exploring the past. Suddenly a sharp light is directed against small details, habits and routines, providing you with information that is often difficult to obtain from other historical archives.
Undertaking a police investigation is also a kind of historical research. The murder was never solved and all but forgotten till Paul French opened a box of archival material at the Kew archives in England. On Januthe body of a young foreign girl was found brutally mutilated at the foot of Beijing’s city wall. New clues in the Pamela Werner murder case
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