A wealthy heiress, a charismatic bandit revolutionary, and a military father trying to save his family might sound like the cast of your next Netflix binge. However, The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China written by James Zimmerman is not the product of a screenwriter’s imagination, unlike the 1932 classic film Shanghai Express which is loosely based on the incident. Published by PublicAffairs, Zimmerman’s nonfiction book recounts the true story of the 1923 “Lincheng Train Incident,” in which warlord Sun Meiyao and his henchmen stopped the supposedly unstoppable Peking Express, Asia’s first all-steel train, and took over 300 hostages.
Zimmerman follows the experiences of various foreign passengers, including American oil heiress Lucy Aldrich, journalist John Benjamin Powell, vacationing US Army officers Roland Pinger and Robert Allen, and a full cast of shady figures, wealthy expatriates, and the obligatory character with a secret or two.
Blood on the Tracks: The Story of China’s Greatest Train Robbery