July 1971

In 1927, the province of Shantung was under the control of the warlord Chang Tsung-chang, a ferocious ex-coolie with a taste for white mercenaries and white women. His forces included a Russian brigade with four armored trains; he himself went to war with a trainload of forty-two concubines, of whom half were also White Russians. Warlord Chang went by the nickname of “Old Eighty-six,” because, so Mrs. Tuchman delicately explains, “the height of a pile of that number of silver dollars reputedly represented the length of the most valued portion of his anatomy in action.”