Murder of Wang Lianying

Twenty-year-old Lianying had worked in Shanghai, known as the "Brothel of Asia", since 1916, gaining recognition as the "Prime Minister of Flower Country" during the 1917 courtesan election.

Five theatre troupes staged performances based on the murder by the end of 1921, with a Pathé Orient pressing of arias from one Peking opera finding great commercial success.

[25] Seeking to escape his debt, Yan borrowed a diamond ring from Ti Hongguan (題紅館; 题红馆), his favourite courtesan.

[e] Having arranged to pick Lianying up at the home of Xiao Lin Daiyu (小林黛玉), another courtesan, Yan subsequently asked to borrow Zhu's car.

After dismissing Zhu's chauffeur by giving him money for a shave and haircut, Yan met Wu and a third man, Fang Rishan (方日珊), at a teahouse.

As Yan drove, Wu and Fang divided the stolen goods, distracting him long enough to hit a tree and damage the vehicle.

[32] On 12 June, the supplemental Little Eastern Times and the tabloid The Crystal published notices that Lianying had disappeared,[34] and the following day her father posted a 500 yuan (equivalent to ¥49,000 in 2019) reward for her safe return.

[35] Lianying's badly decomposed body was discovered, alongside the murder weapon, by farmers in a wheat field in Hui Township on 15 June.

[36] Initial coverage, carried in such newspapers as the Shen Bao and the Min Kuo Jih Pao, incorrectly reported that the body belonged to a forty-year-old woman.

Yan was promptly arrested, and during interrogation he named his accomplices;[32] Wu was located in Zhabei and detained several days later, while Fang escaped.

[46] Although the defence challenged the admissibility, both men confessed to the crimes;[45] Yan indicated that the idea had come from American cinema, but insisted that he had not meant to kill Lianying.

[50] Likewise, in an interview with The Paper, the historian Tang Weijie mentioned that more ten thousand people attended the execution – including Yan's favoured courtesan, Ti Hongguan.

The Shen Bao, for instance, published more than seventy articles on the court trial, with another hundred related to the case, in six months.

[l][13] Chen linked this widespread interest and coverage with the instability of the Warlord Era, suggesting that the trial provided a distraction from other issues.

Prior to the identification of Lianying's body, The Crystal publicized baseless claims that she had fled a life of debt, that she was continuing her career in northern China, and that her parents were aware of her location.

[59] Ten years after the murder, The Crystal published a retrospective;[50] it narrated that Lianying's family had not buried her until 1929, and that her parents were raising her young daughter.

[60] By mid-July there was a tendency for coverage to focus on the killer, who was framed not as a common criminal but as a "new man" who had been corrupted;[61] the filmmaker Cheng Bugao later recalled that, due to Yan's background, the murder had been seen as "modern" and "fresh".

[62] Discussing the case, a writer for the Shen Bao proclaimed that the darkness within the human heart had reached its peak, with savagery hidden behind a cultural veneer of modernity.

Major newspapers such as Shen Bao, following the New Culture Movement and Li Dazhao's arguments for abolishing prostitution, voiced concerns about the practice and its place in Chinese society.

Four days later, it published The Tragic History of Lianying (蓮英慘史), advertised as delivering an illustrated and comprehensive recount of her life and career.

[65] This fifty-eight page booklet presented her as staying in prostitution only to support her family, and attributed her death to Yan feeling unrecognized for his contributions to her 1917 election.

Surveying the newspaper coverage of the case, Jiang Xingpeng of Central China Normal University notes that one story had Lianying return to haunt a debtor, while another depicted her spirit in conversation with the deceased courtesan Lu Baoshen.

It interspersed depictions of the murder and hunt with dream sequences in which Lianying's ghost visits her lover before confronting her killers at Senluo Temple.

[70] Stages were decorated to simulate the wheat field, courtroom, and railway station where key events occurred, and cast members spoke different dialects depending on their characters' place of origin.

For this run, which starred Zhang Wenyan and Lin Shusen,[73] it advertised "rich and colourful" settings that included foreign mansions, brothels, and the courtroom.

Such works often retold the lives of Lianying and Yan, using a combination of narrative and lyrical elements to present themselves as coming from the persons involved in the case.

[84] Collectively titled Awakening from a Dream (惊梦),[17] these were immensely popular, such that entertainers were often asked to give live acapella performances.

[84] One of the arias, sung by Lianying in a dream sequence, became so pervasive that the essayist Miu Chongqun described it as representing "the very sound of Shanghai as both an attractive and an evil city.

[92] The film, in which Jiang starred alongside Ge You and Shu Qi, followed a mafioso in 1920s China who arranged to launder money by staging a beauty pageant.

[93] Viewer reviews were generally negative, with particular focus on its slow pacing and loose narrative;[94] in The Paper, Shi Jianfeng wrote that the film was not as exciting as the events that inspired it.