Huang Jinrong

Huang Jinrong (黄金荣, Huáng Jīnróng) was a French Concession police detective who became one of the three best-known Green Gang leaders in Shanghai, alongside Du Yuesheng and Zhang Xiaolin.

Born in Suzhou to a family from Yuyao, he moved to Shanghai as a boy in 1880 and worked in a mounting shop before joining the French Concession police in 1900. Over the following decades he rose from detective to chief inspector. He retired in 1925 but was kept on as an adviser, and the Beijing government gave him a decoration and a colonel’s rank.

Outside the police he built a business network. With Du Yuesheng and Zhang Xiaolin he formed the Sanxin Company, which the gazetteer describes as an opium-trading firm, and he owned bathhouses and theatres. In April 1927 the three helped the Nationalist side suppress Shanghai’s workers’ pickets. Huang died in Shanghai in 1953.