Sinking into Shanghai

Nearly nineteen-year-old Justin Barkley lay there, naked, moaning low, and drawing on an opium pipe, on the couch in headmaster Father Phillipe’s office in Shanghai’s St. Ignatius Catholic school. Justin had started in the college division, but, as a residential student, he lived in the high school complex, where the French priest, Father Phillipe, held sway. Cooing to him and assessing how much under the influence of the opium the young man was, the priest sat close to the side of the couch. The opium was to mellow the student and relax him for his first taking; it wasn’t to fool him about anything. Justin had been begging for this even after the priest had fully discussed the significance of what the young man wanted.

The priest moved a pillow under the student’s waist at the back, lifting and rolling up the curly sunny-blond-haired English student’s pelvis. Justin was holding the pipe in one hand and was shuffling through penny postcard photographs fanned out over his chest with the other. Justin himself had acquired some of the postcards showing sexual positions of older men covering young men, but the priest had given him more to look at. Justin had expressed interest in going with a man in these positions.

The student wasn’t being forced. He had been caught looking at these penny photographs in his last year at the St. Ignatius High School and the seduction had built from there. Father Phillipe hadn’t punished the boy, who had resided at the school since his parents, a hydraulic engineer and his recordkeeping wife, left him there the previous year, 1928, and were working on Yangtze River flood control and irrigation system projects above the city of Nanjing. Discerning and latching onto the older teen’s already-indicated sexual interests, the French priest had cultivated and channeled Justin’s interests rather than punished and attempted to suppress them.

The school and Father Phillipe had been ejected from the city years earlier when the communists had been active there, but it had been permitted back two years before, after the nationalist government’s bloody purge of the communists in the city, and with the help of the Chinese Triad active in Shanghai—the family-based gang controlling thievery, gambling, drugs, and prostitution in key cities in China. One of the chiefs of the Shanghai Triad, Tian je, was sitting across the room and watching the priest prepare the young man.

It was Tian je who would be privileged to take Justin’s virginity to a man’s penetration.

Justin hadn’t been with a man before, although Father Phillipe had been preparing him for that event over the previous weeks with penny postcard photographs, cajoling words, the use of opium, his massaging and stroking hands, some mutual fellatio, and the insertion of an ivory dildo. Justin, the perfectly formed, blond English nearly nineteen-year-old, was going to lose his anal penetration virginity to a man under a chieftain of the Shanghai Triad tonight—and he was going to do so willingly. The opium was being employed to smoothen the process and to keep Justin relaxed and open to the penetration.

Father Phillipe reached over and positioned Justin’s legs, bending and spreading them and placing the student’s feet flat on the couch. Justin gave no resistance to the manipulation of his body. He turned his face to the priest, smiled at him, and blew a bubble of opium smoke at him. The young man’s pelvis was raised and rolled up. With his thighs spread as they were, his puckering anal entrance was highlighted. The priest stroked the stretch between the base of the young man’s ball sac and his anal entrance briefly with a thumb before positioning the digit at the entrance and pressing it inside the puckering hole, which dilated to receive the thumb.

Justin sighed, his cock moving to an erection and Justin’s free hand going to gripping and slow stroke his shaft. The priest leaned down and kissed the young man on the lips, and Justin opened his lips to him. The thumb worked its way in and out of the anal passage and Justin began to rock his hips on the penetrating thumb. He was panting shallowly and moaning softly, audibly responding to the attention with murmurings of “Yes, yes, like that.”

The two had been here before. Justin was fine with this. Father Phillipe moved his other hand under the hem of his black cassock and moved it up his leg to his crotch and stroked himself as he worked the young man’s passage entrance with his thumb.

Across the room, the Triad chief, Tian Je, his eyes slitted with lust, unbuttoned his robe at the crotch, pulled out his cock, and stroked himself as he watched the blond English teen being prepared for him. The school was going to gather quite a bit of good will with the Shanghai Triad this night. They needed the patronage of one of the gangs controlling the city.

The thumb came out and Father Phillipe reached for the ivory dildo he’d been using with Justin for two weeks. He greased it up. Justin gave a little cry and arched his back, as the priest worked the dildo inside him. Justin stroked himself with increased pacer.

“Take another pull at the pipe, Justin,” the priest whispered to him, and then when Justin did, the priest said, “and another one. We have discussed this, Justin. You want to be with a man—with men. You will be tonight.”

“I want to be with you—under you,” Justin murmured.

“I know you do, but I am a priest. I cannot be first. Master Tian here will take care of you first.” The headmaster priest didn’t say why he couldn’t be first. He didn’t want to tell Justin that it was all economics and politics—that Justin’s virginity to men, especially as he was a handsome young European, was worth more than the priest could intercede in. The school and, indeed, the priest himself, needed the patronage of the Shanghai Triads. “Take the ivory shaft in your hand, Justin. Work yourself. I’ll hold the postcards for you. Continue to draw on the pipe.” Phillipe adjusted the hand Justin had been stroking himself with to be working the dildo, and Justin complied without objection.

The student, his body rising and falling in a rocking motion with the rhythm of stroking, manipulated the dildo himself. He sighed and smiled at the priest and over to the Chinese man, tall, slender, hard-bodied, with wiry muscles, who now, drawn by the view of the young man making love to himself, was standing near the couch, naked, a long, thin erection in his hand. He was stroking himself to the rhythm Justin set on moving the dildo inside his passage. The man’s breathing was ragged and hoarse. He looked to the priest for a signal, which Father Phillipe provided.

“The young man is ready for you,” Father Phillipe said to the Triad chief as he withdrew the dildo from Justin’s passage. “I suggest that you make him familiar with your touch before mounting him. He knows little of Chinese men. He may be frightened of you at first. Take another pull on the pipe, Justin. This man is going to provide what you have long said you wanted.” The young blond did and Father Phillipe took the pipe from him.

Tian came over to the side of the bed. He took one of Justin’s hands in his and wrapped it around his erection, showing the young man how to slow stroke him. On the other side the couch, Father Phillipe also stood, unbuttoned his cassock at his crotch and produced his own erection. He moved Justin’s other hand to that, and Justin was stroking off both cocks. The two men, in turn, were running their hands over Justin’s trembling body, arrived together at the older teen’s own cock and balls and stroked him. He came quickly in their hands, moaning and groaning softly. This was not new. The student had been here before with the priest.

The older teen’s virginity to a hand job was not the virginity the Triad chieftain was here to take.

“Very good, Justin,” Father Phillipe murmured. “Now the pipe again.” Justin took a hit and the priest took the pipe and checked on the ivory dildo in the young man’s passage, moved it around a bit, and then slid it out. He looked across his body at the Chinese Triad chieftain. “You can mount him now. He is opened for you.” The priest rimmed Justin’s exposed hole with two fingers, penetrating him with both digits and spreading the hole open to show that the passage was dilated and yielding. Justin groaned.

Tian Je climbed up on the couch, hovering over Justin, kneeling between the placid young man’s spread thighs. He put the bulb of his erection in position. Justin whimpered, arched his back, and began to pant, but he remained docile. He did not struggle against the inevitable—the desired. He turned his face toward the priest, his eyes wide, the pupils dilated. Father Phillipe smiled encouragingly at him and patted him on the arm.

“It’s what you want, son,” he said. “After Master Tian, we can meld, you and I. It’s what you want.”

Tian Je grasped the teen’s wrists and forced his arms over his head. Justin gave a suppressed exclamation of “this is it” realization and arched his back again, babbling as the Triad chieftain penetrated him with his cock. The exclamation was a muffled, barely suppressed, expression of pained passion with each inch Tien Je gained in the quest to bottom before he started to stroke.

“Jìingzhĭ bù dòng. Fàngsŏng!” Tian commanded.

“He’s telling you to hold still and relax,” Father Phillipe murmured to Justin, stroking the young man’s brow to calm him down. “You want this. Keep telling yourself that. Think of yourself in those photographs you love and of you being in one of those positions.”

“A. Rúcĭ tiān ni. Tă í xīnxiānle,” Tian muttered, now, inside the young man deep, he clearly was pleased.

“He likes you,” the priest whispered. “He says you are sweet and fresh. He is enjoying you, Justin. Feel free to enjoy him.”

The priest gave Justin another pull on the opium pipe, as Justin held still and the Chinese man settled into position over his body. He wasn’t a particularly thick man, not as thick as the ivory dildo was, and both he and Justin’s passage were well greased, so he went in without much difficulty and, once fully saddled, stroked inside Justin with ease, although with a marveled utterance of “Tieshēn dàn Nánshùn—A close fit, but supple.” Tian clearly was pleased with the sheathing and delighted with having a comely, young and virginal European under him.

Most of Justin’s difficulty was in this being the first time and by a stranger—a Chinese man. Father Phillipe was French, another European. Although in Shanghai, Justin had been held more or less in isolation in the school. Chinese men were a mystery to him.

Tian Je became less of a mystery to Justin as the priest helped him unbutton his robe the rest of the way, pulling it off the Triad chieftains back, revealing a tight-muscled, hard body. The Chinese man’s body had not been fully revealed to Justin before so as not to cause him fear, but now both the man and youth were naked in their copulation.

Tian hovered over Justin, holding the stroking of his cock for the virgin’s passage to fully adjust to the throbbing flexibility, yet hardness of steel, of an actual man’s cock inside him. Justin looked into the man’s black, lust-filled eyes, with his own drugged gaze, panting and whimpering—saying over and over in his mind that he and the padre had agreed that this was what he wanted. He grimaced as the cock started to move inside him—in and out, in and out. He widened the stance of his legs to be as open as possible to the first shaft he was taking inside him.

The Triad chieftain set up a rhythm of the fuck. Justin relaxed, realizing the penetration was no more taxing than the ivory dildo had been—it was just different and, in many ways, more arousing and satisfying. As he relaxed, Tian released his wrists, set his hands into the couch on either side of the teen’s chest, and raised on his toes, his slender, hard body in a straight incline above the young man’s body, and methodically pumped the tender, yielding, virginal anal passage. Moaning and groaning in low tones, Justin hooked his knees on the man’s hips, closing the passage on the stroking cock now, dug his fingernails into Tian’s shoulder blades, and rocked with the fuck. He whimpered and sobbed but it was more of a celebration of a long-anticipated release than from pain that surpassed the passion. Ignoring the young man’s slight writhing and sobs, Tian fucked him to a breeding ejaculation.

Tian tensed, jerked, and came. Justin sighed and collapse fully under him, open, totally vulnerable, just a vessel for the Chinese man’s seed. Tian tensed, jerked, and came again . . . and again, pumping out his hot cum. “Tián, shŏnyi, mĕiwèi. Táo bèi yáole—Sweet, yielding, delicious. The peach is bitten,” the Chinese Triad chieftain murmured, using the Chinese image of a man tearing the virginity out of a young man’s channel. He pulled out of the passage, rubbed the cum that had dribbled out on Justin’s slightly heaving belly, and penetrated him again, holding as his cock went flaccid inside the passage. And he remained inside until he had stiffened again.

The fuck started again. Justin, fully relaxed, vulnerable, yielding, widened his stance even more and ran his hands down the man’s tight, muscular, battle-wound-pocked torso to Tian’s tight buttocks, clutching them in his hands, feeling them contract and expand with the man’s thrusts. Throwing his head back and crying out, Justin came again himself between their bellies and collapsed, mumbling incoherently to himself as Tian completed his second fuck.

At the door to the room afterward, there was a bit of an argument between the Triad chief and the priest, an argument that Father Phillipe lost.

“A sedan chair will arrive to take the young man away in the morning. He will be a very nice addition to the House of the Bèi Yăo de Táozi. You will be paid well.”

“But the boy is not for sale. He is a student here. What would I tell his parents?”

“Tell them whatever you want to tell them. Children die from disease in Shanghai every day. It is easy to disappear without a trace in Shanghai. Have him ready for the sedan chair at early light.”

As they talked, Justin lay, in place, on the couch, trembling, panting, and moaning. It was not fully as he thought it would be, but it was done. He wanted to feel more of a stretch, more testing, than with the dildo. But the man wasn’t as thick as the dildo was. It was satisfying, but surely there was more of taking than this—of being fully commanded and used by a man. Father Phillipe had assured him it would be better and better each time, though, and it was, as the priest said, what he wanted.

He turned his face toward the two men at the door and languidly observed them, his mind hazy from the opium that had mellowed him out and helped the passion, want, and need to overcome the pain. He was still in an open position, his hole gaping and dribbling cum. Tian had remarked and laughed at how open the boy was now and had contemplated a third ride but didn’t feel he had the time now. There always was the next day, though.

Justin was slightly disappointed that the man hadn’t taken that third ride and, in the process, taken Justin higher into the heavens of arousal and satisfaction than he had.

When Tian Je was gone, Father Phillipe turned and looked at Justin. It would be a way, he had to admit—to pretend the student had died. There was so much disease swirling around in the city that it always was a believable explanation for someone no longer being there. He wouldn’t be able to prevent putting Justin in the sedan chair the next day, and he knew exactly where the young man was going and what would happen to him, how he would be used and then tossed aside when he had lost his allure. The House of the Bèi Yăo de Táozi was a male brothel on Fuzhou Road, in the Huangpu District, the European Bund section on the river. The English translation for the brothel’s name was “Bitten Peach,” which was the term used for young male prostitutes who had been initiated into sex by men. What the Triad chieftain had just done in taking the student’s virginity was to have taken the first bite of the peach.

The first bite was always the most delicious—for the taker—and it could only happen once for a peach. Justin was no longer a whole, unblemished peach. That first bite was rarely the most delicious for the peach, however. Justin looked forward to more satisfaction and riding on the clouds of passion from men.

The priest sighed and started unbuttoning his black cassock. He had held off taking that bite of the peach himself for too long. The handsome young blond English student was perfectly formed and was willing. Casting the cassock off, Phillipe strode over to the couch, climbed on top of Justin, ran an arm under the teen’s waist to lift his pelvis higher, positioned the erection that had been throbbing all of the time the Chinese man had been fucking the young man, thrust inside him, and began to pump. The priest was slightly larger in girth than the Chinese Triad chieftain had been, and Justin was slightly more taxed by this new shaft working inside him, but, in this, his expectations were met to a greater degree. It was all to the good, as far as he was concerned. He was quickly learning of the needs and demands of a man and of satisfying his own. He welcomed the variety in men. And he wanted them thicker and more demanding.

Moaning and groaning, Justin lay back in the arms of the priest, opened fully to him, every bit of his attention going to the thicker cock working inside him, and took what he’d been begging the man for for weeks. Justin reclined his shoulder blades on the couch, his torso streaming away from the priest’s clutching body, and stretched his arms out from his sides in a sacrificial position. Huffing and snorting, the priest fucked him and fucked him and fucked him. If it was to be his only time with the young man he had cultivated, he would make the most use he could of that opportunity.

If Justin was destined for the stable of the Bitten Peach brothel, he would need all of the experience and conditioning he could get, Father Phillipe reasoned, as he rutted through the night on the tender, nearly nineteen-year-old, nearly virginal body, replicating the many positions depicted in the older teen’s deck of pornographic postcards.

* * * *

Small suitcase in hand, including his collection of pornographic postcard photos, Justin climbed into the close-curtained sedan chair, borne by four muscular men, outside the back door of the St. Ignatius Catholic school dormitory the next morning. He was sore, but he was more educated than he’d been the previous day at this time, and he was fearful, but curious about where his life would be going from here. Although he had been taken, first by the frightening Chinese man and then, slightly more satisfyingly, by Father Phillipe, he was not unaware of the power of want and lust he and his supple, nearly nineteen-year-old body had commanded over the two. He’d never enjoyed such power before in his life. He was energized by the prospects of exercising it.

Tian Je was sitting to one side of the bench in the closed-curtained sedan chair. He had his robe parted at his lap and he was holding an erection in his hand. Justin was pushed up and into the sedan chair beside the Chinese Triad chieftain, and, as the chair bearers picked up the rails of the sedan chair and started trotting off, Justin’s face was pulled down into Tian’s lap and his mouth onto the erection. The young man had done this with the priest before, both in giving head and taking it, and he knew what a man would like in that department. He gave Tian Je what any man would like in that department. Tian Je reclined back into the cushions, enjoying the exotic young European’s soft mouth on his ling—his dick—and contemplating what he could receive in recompense from the Bitten Peach brothel for bringing them this tasty morsel—eventually.

The sedan chair didn’t go to the Bitten Peach brothel. Rather, it headed off to the west and into the lake area, where Tian Je had a hidden residence complex on the shore of the Dianshan Hu.

Justin was escorted to a pavilion with a wooden deck terrace hanging over the water of the lake. Prominent in the room was a large four-poster bed covered in colorful silk coverlets and pillows. Tian bent Justin over the end of the bed on his belly and mounted and fucked him from behind. Then he turned the youth on his back there, spread-eagled his legs, worked his knees in between Justin’s thighs, and fucked him facing and hovering over him. When Tian was tired of fucking the young man, he brought in a muscle-bound, big-boned northern Chinese thug, whose most prominent bone was the one between his legs, and the giant bound Justin’s wrists to the two posts at the head of the bed and for two days fucked him in every position the late teen had seen in postcard photographs depicting how a young man could be taken by a man.

Tian explained the process by telling Justin if he was going to be a high-ranking courtesan in a male brothel, he needed to know all that could befall him and he needed to be able to take cocks as large as they came. Tian didn’t have to tell Justin he enjoyed watching the small, young man being bully fucked by a big bruiser. Justin could see that for himself.

Justin endured and sought to revel in it all as a necessary education to a world he wanted to float in. The shaft met his expectations of the stretch required to sheath it, and the Chinese thug took him higher into the heavens of passion and satiation than he had experienced before. He, indeed, found he melted to the attentions of a ling of gigantic proportions and a touch of cruelty in the taking.

Although he was being trained to be a courtesan in the Bitten Peach brothel down on the island of Hong Kong, though, he never made it there.

Tian Je decided to make the services of Justin, the delectable nearly nineteen-year-old, alabaster bodied, golden-yellowed hair English youth, a negotiating tool in a Triad territory stand-off parley he held in his lakeside hideaway with one of the chieftains of a Hangzhou Triad, Lung Mao.

They met in Tian’s dining pavilion, surrounded by their wary henchmen, and Justin helped serve them at table as they talked grievances and business. He was paraded, in a near-transparent robe, before Lung Mao, a large-boned, ruggedly handsome, muscular northern Chinese thug. Lung Mao obviously was entranced by the young man and the desired agreement on the boundaries of the Triad empires on this region of the China seacoast was reached, whereupon Justin, eyes downcast, guided Lung Mao to Tian’s master bedroom.

Before Tian’s men who escorted the two there left the chamber, they stripped and suspended Justin by his wrists from a beam in the ceiling of the chamber, his feet barely touching the floor. When the men had withdrawn, Lung Mao stripped, presenting himself in magnificent erection—even thicker and longer than Tian’s man who had prepared Justin, and walked around the young man, touching and fondling and stroking Justin’s still-tender body, here and there, and everywhere, grunting his approval and arousal.

“Zhèyàng dì mĕlì yŭ chŭnjié. Wŏ huĭ hĕ lèyì jíeshòu nĭ de yíqiè,” the fierce Hangzhou Triad chieftain murmured as he ran his hands over Justin’s flanks. Justin shuddered in anticipation without realizing that the man hadn’t just spoken of how beautiful and pure the young man’s body was but also about how Lung Mao intended to take that away from Justin. As he fondled the young man, Lung Mao was stroking his own huge erection.

“Zhăngwò zuò nĭ xiăng zuò de shì. Wŏ shì nĭ yòng de—Do what you will with me, master. I am yours to use,” Justin murmured, using the Chinese phrase he had been made to memorize for the occasion.

“Shì de, wŏ dāngrám huĭ. Nĭ huĭ shòukŭ de. Wŏ huĭ jìnqíng xiăngshòu nĭ—Yes, I most certainly will. You will suffer. I will enjoy you to the fullest,” the huge Hangzhou Triad chieftain said with a laugh and a snort. “Báixĭ yòu jĭnfă bìyăn. Rúcĭ róushàn he chúngjìng—So white and blond. So supple and pure,” Lung Mao whispered as he ran his hands all over Justin’s body. He leaned in and took the young man’s lips with his in a tender kiss. Then he grasped the curly golden hair at the back of Justin’s head, arched the head back cruelly, bit the youth on one of his nipples, and growled, “Wŏ haì yòng nĭ zhídào nĭ jían jíao—I will use you until you scream.” Justin had given a little cry when the cruel man had bitten his nipple.

Lung Mao slapped the young man across the face, one way and then the other, and reached down, grasped Justin’s cock, laced his fingers through the young man’s balls and squeezed them. Justin did scream then in surprise and pain. But he also ejaculated. Lung Mao leaned into the young man and took him in a brutal kiss on the lips. Justin opened to the kiss and returned it enthusiastically.

Lung Mao laughed. “Nĭ xiăng yào tā. Wŏ zhīdào. Háo. Wŏmen jiăng bĭcĭ. Yúkuài—You want it. I can see that. Good. We will have pleasure from each other.”

Justin began to hyperventilate and to build to another erection. This. This was what he thought he’d been waiting for—the exhilaration of being taken totally by a big-cocked man. He was going to be taken, bound, brutally, so he might as well get whatever pleasure he could get out of it. He was surprised and a little embarrassed that the treatment did arouse him.

Lung Mao proceeded to use Justin past the point at which he screamed. Justin screamed as Lung Mao whipped him. Justin had not been whipped before, and it surprised and scared him more than was painful, as the man didn’t lay the whip on lethally. But then the Triad chieftain lifted Justin as he hung from the ceiling beam and put him on the gigantic cock, Justin’s knees hugging the man’s hips, and fucked him in that position. Justin had the leverage to rock back against the cock, letting Lung Mao know he was into the fuck as well. Then Lung Mao went behind Justin, grasped his thighs, and stretched the young man’s legs straight out from his hips, mounted and penetrated him from behind, and fucked him in that position.

After Lung Mao cut Justin down, he pushed his captive onto the floor on all fours, mounted him from behind and on top, and fucked him in that position as well. He left Justin balled up and panting on the floor and strutted around the bed chamber, looking here and there. He pulled a folded silk robe from a shelf, carried it over to where Justin lay, moaning, and dropped the robe on top of the young man.

“Gài zhù zìjĭ, hé wŏ yīqĭ qù—Cover yourself and come with me,” he barked. Justin was able to discern what Lung Mao wanted him to do and did as demanded.

At the last moment, Lung asked Justin in gestures if there was anything he wanted to take with him—that he didn’t want to leave behind—and for the first time Justin knew that he may not be staying with Tian Je in Shanghai or becoming part of the stable of boys and young men at the Bitten Peach brothel. He went to a cabinet and took out the stack of pornographic postcard photos of men fucking youths. When Lung saw them, he laughed, but he permitted Justin to take them. As they left the bed chamber, Justin was clinging to the giant of a man who had such an overpowering cock and mastery of him. Justin hadn’t had as much sexual satisfaction and release with any man before the commanding Lung Mao, and he hoped he was right in thinking the Triad chieftain didn’t intend on leaving Shanghai without him.

They passed the dining pavilion, where Tian Je and his men lay in pools of blood, having been surprised and dispatched while Lung Mao was fucking Justin. They went back to the Hangzhou Triad boats at the river harbor and sailed back to Hangzhou.

Lung Mao was, indeed, taking Justin into a new, more sexually demanding and satisfying world.

* * * *

Having let Justin go had eaten at Father Phillipe for some time. It wasn’t just the problem of what to tell the parents of the student left in his care what had happened to him, but the priest himself hadn’t realized how fond he was of the young man and how rotten it was of him to let Justin be taken away to be used in a male brothel. Within days of the parting, the priest had found where the Bitten Peach brothel was located and had gone there seeking Justin. The madam and prostitutes there had no idea who he was talking about—or said they didn’t. Knowing it was a European youth and they were in a city where the Europeans had special status, they let him search the place to keep him from going to the authorities. No one there claimed to know anything about a handsome, perfectly formed nearly nineteen-year-old golden blond European teen.

He went back to the school and had a fake grave dug in the cemetery of the church attached to the school. He concocted a story about Justin’s illness and last days and had a tombstone erected. But still he worried about the parents and about an empty grave. Even when he received word that both parents had died in a flood on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, he worried. That couldn’t take his own feeling of guilt away—and, being a Catholic priest, guilt weighed heavily on him.

The guilt and the last vestiges of a memory of Justin Barkley went away when a couple of years later Father Phillipe himself succumbed to the sickness he had claimed had taken the life of the beautiful, now parentless young man. He was buried in a grave right next to the false one he had dug for Justin.

Nearly twenty years later, after China had been ravaged for far longer in World War II than Europe had been and during which the Bitten Peach male brothel on Shanghai’s Fuzhou Road had been forcibly emptied out and torn down, a new male brothel appeared on Fuzhou Road. It was named the Jinsè de Gōngdiàn—the Golden Palace—and was reputed to be owned and operated by a handsome golden-blond-haired man named Huáng Tóufă—Yellow Hair—although few other than the most select male patrons ever were able to claim to have met—and enjoyed—him. They just knew that his brothel provided not only the sexiest of young Chinese men and older teens but also an assortment of young European men—and the rumor was that Huáng Tóufă was the premier courtesan of them all.

A feature of the brothel that patrons were to remark on for years to come was that the walls of the reception room were covered with framed pornographic postcard photos depicting the many sexual positions older men could take young men in.

If they had seen Huáng Tóufă on the street, either Father Phillipe or the Shanghai Triad chieftain, Tian Je, might have recognized him. But both of those men were deceased. It only was the Hangzhou Triad chieftain, Lung Mao, the sponsor of the Golden Palace brothel, who knew that Justin Barkley had returned to and now wholly, in the form of Huáng Tóufă, was absorbed into Shanghai—and quite contentedly so.