Shantung Compound

When two thousand civilians are interned behind barbed wire, survival depends less on their captors than on human nature under pressure.

The memoir records the daily logistics of an internment center at Weihsien, where businessmen, professors, and clergy had to build a community from scratch. The camp administration soon faced bitter disputes over crowded dormitory rooms, overburdened kitchens, and the hoarding of supplies.

Gilkey chronicles the quiet breakdowns in common decency that followed, tracking how respectable internees justified self-interest, resisted authority, and guarded their private privileges.

This vivid diary of life in a Japanese internment camp during World War II examines the moral challenges encountered in conditions of confinement and deprivation.

• Social Psychology: Former colonial executives, bankers, and scholars found their social standing erased overnight, working alongside seamen and waiters to stoke boilers and slice rations.
• Leadership Frameworks: Left largely to manage their own affairs by Japanese consular authorities, the inmates formed nine administrative committees to organize sanitation, makeshift hospitals, and schooling.
• Behavioral Psychology: A thriving illicit black market developed along the compound perimeter as internees and Trappist monks bartered with local Chinese farmers for eggs, sugar, and news.
• Survival Ethics: The unexpected delivery of fifteen hundred American Red Cross parcels provoked fierce disputes over whether emergency food belonged to the entire camp or solely to United States nationals.
• Against the Odds: Unskilled volunteers rapidly improvised essential public utilities, from engineers designing manual latrine-flushing systems to novice bakers turning out four hundred daily loaves of bread.

Langdon Gilkey was a young American teacher at Yenching University near Peking, China, when the Japanese military under wartime pressure rounded up all foreigners into an internment camp. Two and a half years later they were released. Shantung Compound is based on a journal Dr. Gilkey kept during his imprisonment.