Beijing-based international lawyer who lived in China for more than 25-years, James Zimmerman’s gripping new book The Peking Express recreates the incident at 2:40am on May 6^th 1923, a short distance from the town of Lincheng in Shandong province, in which bandits kidnapped Peking Express, a luxury train and a first-class sleeper carriage carrying the bejewelled members of the global elite with a pre-dawn clever derailment, using rifle shotes like firecrackers, smashing windows creating chaos, Some of the passengers were shot dead as the bandits stormed the train, while others were injured. Although a few managed to escape by crawling through nearby fields of waist-high gaoliang stalks. The elite were taken hostage while some were still in stocking feet or lingerie are marched the bandit’s mountain lair. World’s wealthiest families thousands of miles away from America tried intercede. Zimmerman’s book has nothing to do with how US-China rivalry is plunging the world into instability whether Beijing is getting too close to Moscow.

When Shanghai publisher and reporter John Benjamin Powell bought a first-class ticket for the Peking Express, he visualized an idyllic overnight journey on a brand-new luxury train. Seeing his fellow passengers, including mysterious Italian lawyer Giuseppe Musso, a confidante of  Italy’s new fascist leader Benito Mussolini and lawyer for the opium trade, and the adventurous American heiress Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law of oil and banking tycoon, John D. Rockefeller Jr, he knew it would be an unforgettable trip. Charismatic bandit leader and populist rabble rouser Sun Mei-yao had also taken notice of the new train from Shanghai to Peking. On the night of Powell’s trip of a lifetime, Sun launched his plan to make a brazen statement: he and a thousand fellow bandits descended on the train, capturing dozens of hostages. Aided by local proxy authorities, the humiliated Peking government soon furiously gave chase as the bandits’ mountain stronghold, a five-week siege began.

The Peking Express tells the incredible true story of a clash that shocked the world and events recounted in The Peking Express that it reads like a fantasy becoming so celebrated it inspired several Hollywood movies – and set  the course for China’s two-decade civil war.

Zimmerman pieced together memoirs of the hostages, diplomatic cables from US and European envoys, sources in Chinese and contemporary western newspaper articles.

The moment at which the bandits swoop in the train travelling from Shanghai to Peking  is described by William Smith, a British tourist and one of the 29 foreigners taken hostage by the bandits. “ I peered through the window, and in the darkness could just discern a crowd of ghastly-looking men with pigtails wound around their heads, in ragged garb and with rifles and bayonets, bounding towards the stationary carriages”.

Lucy Aldrich had been on her way to Beijing to acquire Qing dynasty court coats for her textile collection when the bandits attacked. Too heavy, and too unfit to climb into the mountains unaided, Aldrich was carried to the bandits’ stronghold on shaggy Mongolian pony. The bandits did not know Aldrich’s identity or the size of the potential randsom, that she represented.  She tried to hide her wealth, by concealing her jewellery first in her bra and then in the toes of her shoes so that the gem dug into her feet as she walked. Aladrich however, managed to form a rapport with the bandit chief, Sun Mei-yao who she described as an “ awfully nice looking young man”.

 She eventually drifted apart from the group of hostages in a rainstorm and found herself at the mercy of the villagers  who took her in and nursed her back to health. She eventually made her way back to the US, where she wrote an account of the ordeal, “ a Week-End with Chinese Bandits” for the Atlantic.

 John B Powell, The Chicago Tribune’s reporter in China, boarded the train in a three-piece wool suit, wingtip shoes and a dark-grey Stetson fedora. The lawlessness, corruption and disorder it recounts was typical of China during the decades preceding the communist revolution  in 1949 when Chinese warlords jostled and connived for influence across swaths of the country partially controlled by colonial powers.

The Lincheng incident  was mentioned in one of the first recorded speeches by a young communist leader Mao Zedong in 1926. The incident was an example he said, of “ starving peasants rioting” against imperialists, warlords and feudal classes. Mao, however, admired Sun Me-yao but criticized him for lacking a unifying political strategy and this was a mistake the communists would not repeat.

The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China by James Zimmerman, Public affairs $30/£25, 352 pages.