The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old PekingThrough portraits of eight White Russians, Americans and Europeans who lived and worked in the Badlands in the 1920s and '30s, Paul French brings the area and its era vividly to life. A small warren of narrow hutongs, the Badlands sat just inside the eastern flank of the Tartar Wall, which at that time enclosed the old Imperial City of Peking. Its habitues were a mix of the good, the bad and the poor unfortunates, among them the fiery brothel madams