History
Shi Pei Pu —The Espionage Story That Will Blow Your Mind Away
The spy even purchased a child to convince the diplomat and to steal information
This is a story of a Chinese spy and a French diplomat — one of the world’s strongest international espionage tales of recent times.
Why is it so famous?
The Chinese spy named Shi Pei Pu was an opera singer born in the Shandong province of China, and died in a French nursing home in Paris, in 2009.
His father was a professor and his mother was a teacher. He had two elder sisters. He studied at Yunnan University, where he learned the French language.
At the age of 17, Shi started practicing acting, and singing and participated in many opera shows. Even Shi wrote the scripts for many plays too!
The strange story of Shi’s life started when he masqueraded as a woman, and had a 20 years long sexual relationship with a French diplomat Bernard Boursicot to steal some intelligence secrets.
Bernard Boursicot was posted as an accountant in the French embassy in Beijing. At this time he was a 20-year young guy.
He was posted just after the French government recognized the Chinese Communist regime. The French embassy was opened in 1964, it was the first western embassy in China since the Korean war that occurred a few years earlier.
On Christmas, Boursicot was invited to a party by Claude Chayet, the second-highest-ranking officer of the French diplomatic headquarters. At this party, he met with then-26-year-old Shi.
They both had conversations and gossiped because Shi was so fluent in the French language. At this party, Shi was dressed as a man but his bright eyes and facial features were as delicate and enchanting as a woman has.
Once Shi also said that he “used to fascinate both men and women”.
Boursicot was not an exception, he fell into the trap of Shi’s beauty.
During the party, Shi explained to Boursicot, that Shi is actually a woman, but to fulfill the desire of her father, She had to dress like a son. Her father always wanted a son. Her mother passed her off as a son. So she has to compulsorily satisfy the desire of her father by wearing a manly dress. Since the time Shi is living a life of a boy.
Boursicot was convinced by Shi’s story, and believed it true, that Shi is a woman.
This was the time when both fell in love, and started their relationship. They often met at private places and developed sexual relationships.
When Chinese officials encountered the relationship between both. They started forcing Shi to pressurize Boursicot into providing the documents from the embassy in Beijing from 1969–72, and later from his posting to the consulate in Ulan Bator, Mongolia from 1977–79.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966–76, made it difficult for Boursicot to meet Shi. Boursicot was later posted in Southeast Asia, which resulted in a long-distance relationship.
When Shi and Boursicot met, Shi, presented a four-year-old “son” named Shi Du Du to Boursicot as he was born in 1966, and fathered by Boursicot.
Boursicot believed it and accepted Shi Du Du as his son.
In 1979, Boursicot returned to France. He asked Shi, and Shi Du Du to come to France on a cultural visa. Boursicot, Shi, and Shi Du Du reunited and started living. Shi even started performing in Beijing opera, and TV shows in France, which granted him a one-year extended visa.
In 1983, when the French intelligence officers encountered this relationship, they questioned them about their secret documents, which were provided to the Chinese Authorities.
In 1986, this resulted in both being found guilty of passing confidential documents to Chinese Authorities.
They both received six-year imprisonment for spying for China.
Shi claimed that he did not know anything about the confidential documents. And stuck to his stance of being a female.
The French Judges were not convinced by Shi’s claim, and they sent him to examine, whether Shi is a male or Female. When the doctor’s team examined him and found him a man. He was sent to a men’s prison in the southern suburbs of Paris.
During the police custody, Shi said, “I never told Bernard I was a woman, I only let it be understood that I could be a woman”.
When police asked Shi Du Du(claimed son), he said that he belonged to China’s Uighur minority. His parents did not have anything to feed him, so they sold him to Shi.
“Not because my parents did not love me, but because everyone was starving, so at least I can get food if I was sold to Shi.”
When the whole matter was explained to Boursicot in another prison cell, he couldn’t digest it, it was the biggest humiliation for him, that the “woman” with whom he had 20 years of sexual relationship, was actually a male.
Then he tried to commit suicide by cutting his through with a razor blade. But somehow he survived. But living in a huge shock.
When this relationship was made public, everyone laughed at Boursicot — he became a laughingstock in France.
The French government found this case humiliating for Boursicot, it was his life’s biggest trauma. So the government pardoned him a year later in 1987. Shi Pei Pu also received a pardon.
Shi Pei Pu after getting released from jail lived in France with his adopted son and never returned to China.
He worked as an opera singer till his death in 2009. Shi enjoyed his life performing in public as an opera singer but did not like to hear the talking of sexual specifics of him with Boursicot.
Shi and Boursicot turned out to be estranged from each other. Rarely they spoke with each other after that.
When Shi died, he told Boursicot that he still loved him.
How come Boursicot couldn’t identify Shi?
When Shi was examined by prison Doctors, they said, Shi had a buried penis, which Shi used to hide to convince Boursicot that he was a woman.
Boursicot also explained later about his sexual life with Shi Pie Pu that it was always fast and secretive, they always carried out clandestinely.
Whenever Boursicot questioned him about the weird sexual behavior, he would tell that this Chinese traditional etiquette.
Bernard Boursicot’s Homosexual Life
Boursicot attended many boarding schools, where he had several homosexual relationships with other students. Boursicot became determined to have sex with a female when he met with Shi. He thought institutionalized homosexuality among college students was just a rite of passage.
When Boursicot was sent to Mongolia, he was romantically involved with many other men.
However, when Bernard Boursicot heard the news of his former lover Shi, he hadn’t shown any sympathy.
“He did so many things against me that he had no pity for, I think it is stupid to play another game now and say I am sad.
The plate is clean now. I am free,”
— Boursicot said to Journalist Joyce Wadler, who wrote a book on Boursicot and Shi’s love affair by the name —
“Liaison: The True Story of the M. Butterfly Affair”, published in 1994.
There is also a movie made on this story called M. Butterfly directed by David Cronenberg in 1993.
This movie was nominated for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for dramaturgy.
