WORLD ORDERS AND DECORATIONS 972


A rare group of Chinese and Shanghai Orders & Medals awarded to Chief Inspector R. C. Aiers, Director of the Criminal Intelligence Department, Shanghai Municipal Police


CHINA, ORDER OF THE GOLDEN GRAIN, 7th Class breast badge, silver and enamel; MEDAL OF THE NAVY, ARMY AND AIR FORCE, 1st Class, silver-gilt and enamel, stamped, ‘13’ on reverse, with additional Chinese stamp mark and other Chinese markings; NATIONAL FAMINE RELIEF COMMISSION MEDAL OF MERIT, silver-gilt and enamel, reverse stamped, ‘18’ and with an additional Chinese stamp mark; SHANGHAI MUNICIPAL COUNCIL EMERGENCY MEDAL 1937, bronze, unnamed; SHANGHAI MUNICIPAL POLICE LONG SERVICE MEDAL, 3 clasps, 1921-1925, 1926-1930, 1931-1935 (Chief Inspector R. C. Aiers), mounted as worn, together with two uniform riband bars, the whole contained in a Luang Seng, Jewellers, Shanghai, velvet case, enamel work chipped in places but generally very fine or better (5)


£2500-3000


An image taken from a family photograph album


Richard Charles Aiers, who was born in Aston, Warwickshire in 1882, originally worked for the Post Office in Birmingham, but around 1904 he departed for Shanghai, where he enlisted in the Municipal Police Force.


Of his subsequent Chinese Honours & Awards, Foreign Office files in the National Archives reveal that his Order of the Golden Grain was issued in respect of ‘services rendered in connection with the repatriation of German and Austrian subjects’ in the aftermath of the Great War (FO 372/1788 refers; also see the London Gazette of 1 August 1922); and his First Class “A” Medal of the Army, Navy and Air Force on account of ‘efficient detection and pursuit of criminals’ and the ‘discovery and arrest of the highest organ of the communist brigands in the East’ (FO 372/2793 of 1932 refers).


A revealing account of crime in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s appears in Sin City, by Ralph Shaw, a British journalist, from which the following extract has been taken:


‘The risk of sudden death was omnipresent in Shanghai - as it was, indeed, everywhere else in China then. Violence was commonplace. There were more gangsters in Shanghai than Chicago ever saw in the heyday of Capone. It was common to see a rich Chinese in his private rickshaw being protected by an armed bodyguard, often Russian, loping at the side of the two-wheeled vehicle pulled by its ‘human horse’ .... Chinese gangsters, too, inflicted their own reign of terror on a population constantly assailed by violence. They were well-armed, ruthless desperadoes, whose contempt for life often involved them in suicidal gun-fights with the police in street battles in which they fought to the end and, more often than not, in which they wreaked a heavy toll of the forces of law and order and of innocent victims caught in the cross-fire.’


Aiers, who no doubt witnessed many such street battles, retired in 1938, and settled in Exeter, Devon, where he died in 1940; sold with a file of research, including extensive copied Foreign Office records.


www.dnw.co.uk


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