Interesting People of the 1920s: Brilliant Chang
The tragic downfall of a wealthy Chinese playboy and alleged "dope king"
Brilliant Chang was a member of a wealthy Chinese merchant family. He immigrated to England in 1913 to handle his uncle’s business affairs. What Chang liked most, however, was parties, drugs, and women—especially women, and the women liked him too. His popularity, and the moral panic about Chinese men having sex with and giving drugs to white women, would prove his undoing.
One author of the period describes him:
"Let me describe him as I saw him a few months ago. It was at a night club. A dance had just finished, and the little tables were crowded. Suddenly the curtain covering the door was pushed aside, and ‘Brilliant’ Chang stood at the entrance. He paused a moment, silhouetted against the dark curtain, while his eyes searched the room. A murmur ran round the tables. ‘There’s the rich young [ch-word]!’ Half a dozen girls rose to greet him. Nodding slightly, he advanced and spoke to one of them. The others, shrugging their shoulders, sat down again."
Another author:
[Brilliant Chang] was not the ‘[ch-word]’ of popular fiction, a cringing yellow man hiding his clasped hands in the wide sleeves of his embroidered gown. This man’s evening clothes had been made up not far from Savile-Row. His long, thin hands were manicured, his manners were too perfect to be described as good. The picture he made as he stood there framed against the dark stairway, smiling round the room with that fixed Oriental smile which seems devoid of warmth and humanity, was so typical of the novelist’s ideas of dopedom that he seemed like a vision conjured up by the surroundings.
‘Everything going strong!’ he laughed, as he stepped down. A young girl ran up to him, held her arms out, he clasped her closely to him, and they danced. Not only did he dance in perfect style, but he also revolved in an atmosphere of general approbation.
Who are these smiling yellow men? They are to be met wherever men and girls dance when the normal night owls of London have gone home to bed. Are they students out for a rag? Are they wealthy Chinese businessmen? …[W]hat and who are they, and why are they so popular with frail white women?
The plural was to avoid libel laws. In fact there was one of this guy and his name was Brilliant Chang.
The police claimed that Chang was the “dope king” of England who controlled all of the drug traffic in London. Brilliant Chang did sell drugs occasionally, but it’s unclear whether he sold them in any quantity. The historical evidence is totally consistent with him being a small-time dealer who occasionally sold them out of his restaurant or to his girlfriends. At the time, cocaine and morphine, the two most popular drugs among white users, were both legal with a prescription, and there were a lot of sketchy pharmacists that would give you both without asking too many questions. There really wasn’t much of a market for the extensive drug trafficking we are used to today. However, the police mostly tended to assume that a wealthy Chinese man who used drugs and had white girlfriends was definitely a Fu Manchu type.
Eventually, police raids drove Chang to Limehouse, the Chinese community in London. Chang was very out of place. He was a wealthy, sophisticated, and Westernized playboy, and all the Chinese men in Limehouse were sailors. In Limehouse, he recreated his luxurious home in the West End: rich carpets, a blue-and-silver color scheme, and dragons on the wallpaper.
Chang continued his interest in women. He gave handwritten letters to women he saw on the street and found attractive:
Dear Unknown –
Please do not regard this as a liberty that I write to you, as I am really unable to resist the temptation after having seen you so many times. I should extremely like to know you better, and should be glad if you would do me the honour of meeting me one evening where we could have a little dinner and a quiet chat together. I do hope you will consent to this, as it will give me great pleasure, and in any case do not be cross with me for having written to you.
Yours hopefully, Chang.
P.S. – If you reply, please address it to me at the Shanghai Restaurant, Limehouse-causeway, E14.
The police once came to raid his house while he was having a threesome with two chorus girls.
Eventually, the police managed to find some evidence that they could trump up to claim that he was the dope king of England. One detective turned the fact that Chang mostly sold drugs to his girlfriends into further evidence of Chang’s depravity: “This man would sell drugs to a white girl only if she gave herself to him as well as paying him. He has carried on the traffic with real Oriental craft and cunning.”
After Chang was arrested, there was a permanent fall in opium and cocaine prosecutions. The police attributed the fall to their successful arrest of the dope king, but Chang was arrested in 1923 during a major crackdown on all sorts of drug use; it’s more likely that the police just harassed the drug scene out of existence.
Chang was sentenced to fourteen months in jail, followed by deportation. After his deportation, there is no more information about him in the historical record.
The lack of any evidence whatsoever did not stop the newspapers. Newspapers theorized that Chang had escaped from the deportation ship, or that he was planning to spread drugs in the UK from his secret base in Zurich, or that he was the Drug Emperor of Europe, or that he was blind and impoverished and insane in China, or that he had hired a double to be blind and impoverished and insane in China but secretly he was the Dope Emperor of Europe. Eventually, even the newspapers had to accept the fact that Brilliant Chang had never showed up to be the dope emperor of anywhere. It was agreed that Chang had died broken and blind and cut off by his own brother, teaching everyone an important lesson about why white women and Chinese men shouldn’t have sex.
Brilliant Chang’s legacy lived on for decades as an inspiration for various villains in Yellow Peril novels who corrupted innocent white women with drugs and decadent sex. Chang is perhaps best known today for being a main character in series five of the drama Peaky Blinders.
Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, by Marek Kohn. Published 1992. 203 pages.