There was no mistaking the splashy flowered dresses, the flashy painted faces of the "first class" girls from Peiping's red light district. More than 300 of them ("tripping daintily by like so many pretty birds " one newspaper reported) flocked into the Great Continent Theater. Why this concentration of purchasable beauty, onlookers asked each other, and so early in the morning, too?
"Stand by Your Posts." One enterprising reporter discovered why. In a grim moment of Chinese history, Peiping's staid Municipal Council had had a grimly amusing idea: a whole battalion of potential
Mata Haris was available to fight the Communists....
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