China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined 9781107013155, 1107013151

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction Topsy-turvy Britain and China
Imagined possibilities
Empires entwined
Overview: Why China and the Chinese?
Why China matters
Albion’s East: disciplinary and historical concerns and Britain’s imagined view of China
Chinese boxes, or China contained
Chapter 1 The manners and customs of the modern Chinese Narrating China through the treaty ports
The literary littoral
Concessions: a history
The conventions of late Victorian culture on the China Coast
Excursions in the interior
Chapter 2 Projecting from Possession Point James Dalziel’s Chronicles of Hong Kong
Theorizing from the fringes of Asia
Hugging China
Onshore/offshore: tampering with identikit models of empire
Whither the white lords of the island?
Hybridity in Hong Kong: “despised alike of East and West”
Uncommon trysts: the unbearable morality of immoral relations
Chapter 3 Peking plots Narrating the Boxer Rebellion of 1900
A state of siege
The power of disguise
Misguided motives: narrating the Chinese point of view
Chapter 4 Britain “knit and nationalised” Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898–1914
War of the world
Insidious insiders
Technologies of takeover
Chapter 5 Staging the Celestial
Chin-chin-chinaman: Chinese stage types
China on a plate
Blackface, yellowface, and loss of face
Bloodthirsty Buddhas
Spectacular politics and dramatic moralities
East of opium: dramas of morality, politics, and empathy
Chapter 6 A Cockney Chinatown The literature of Limehouse, London
“A Chinaman’s chance”
A paw thing but mine own
Dens of iniquity
Conclusion No rest for the West
Notes
Introduction: Topsy-turvy Britain and China
Chapter 1: The manners and customs of the modern Chinese Narrating China through the treaty ports
Chapter 2: Projecting from Possession Point James Dalziel’s Chronicles of Hong Kong
Chapter 3: Peking plots Narrating the Boxer Rebellion of 1900
Chapter 4: Britain “knit and nationalised” Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898–1914
Chapter 5: Staging the Celestial
Chapter 6: A Cockney Chinatown The literature of Limehouse, London
Conclusion: No rest for the West
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

more information – www.cambridge.org/9781107013155

CHINA AND THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

What happens to our understanding of “Orientalism” and imperialism when we consider British–Chinese relations during the nineteenth century, rather than focusing on India, Africa, or the Caribbean? This book explores China’s centrality to British imperial aspirations and literary production, underscoring the heterogeneous, interconnected nature of Britain’s formal and informal empire. To British eyes, China promised unlimited economic possibilities, but also posed an ominous threat to global hegemony. Surveying Anglophone literary production about China across high and low cultures, as well as across time, space, and genres, this book demonstrates how important location was to the production, circulation, and reception of received ideas about China and the Chinese. In this account, treaty ports matter more than opium. Ross G. Forman challenges our preconceptions about British imperialism, reconceptualizes Anglophone literary production in global and local contexts, and excavates the little-known Victorian history so germane to contemporary debates about China’s “rise.” ross g. forman is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as “background,” feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

CHINA AND THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION Empires Entwined

ROSS G. FORMAN

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107013155 © Ross G. Forman 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Forman, Ross G. China and the Victorian imagination : empires entwined / Ross G. Forman. pages cm. – (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-01315-5 1. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. English literature – Chinese influences. 3. Great Britain – Civilization – Chinese influences. 4. China – In literature. I. Title. pr129.c6f67 2013 820.90 3251–dc23 2012050600 isbn 978-1-107-01315-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Richard Forman, with sky hooks

Contents

page viii

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix x

Introduction: Topsy-turvy Britain and China

1

1

The manners and customs of the modern Chinese: Narrating China through the treaty ports

30

2

Projecting from Possession Point: James Dalziel’s Chronicles of Hong Kong

64

3

Peking plots: Narrating the Boxer Rebellion of 1900

98

4

Britain “knit and nationalised”: Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898–1914

130

5

Staging the Celestial

161

6

A Cockney Chinatown: The literature of Limehouse, London

193

Conclusion: No rest for the West

224 237 267 289

Notes Bibliography Index

vii

Illustrations

1 Map of the treaty ports page 20 2 Map showing the development of Hong Kong, before and after the leasing of the New Territories. Arnold Wright, ed., Twentieth-century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China: Their History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources. London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company, 1908. 191. © The British Library Board, J/10056.v7 65 3 Frederick Sadleir Brereton, The Dragon of Pekin. London: Blackie and Son, 1902 124 4 Cover, M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Danger, 1898. © The British Library Board, 012463.c.26 139 5 Cover, Harry Hunter, “The Nigger Chinee, or His Pigtail Wouldn’t Grow.” London: J. A. Turner, 1877. © The British Library Board, H.1257.a.(3) 177

viii

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dinshaw M. Burjorjee, in memoriam, and Thomas K. Richards for starting me on this intellectual journey so long ago. Seth Koven has given me extraordinary guidance and support for over twenty years. This book began as a PhD dissertation at Stanford University, with support from the Whiting Foundation and Stanford’s Center for European Studies. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Regenia Gagnier, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Joss Marsh, and Mary Louise Pratt. I later benefitted from a semester’s research leave from the National University of Singapore. Colleagues and friends who offered advice, feedback, and support include Robert Aguirre, Brenda Assael, Aaron Balick, Elizabeth Chang, Joseph Childers, Nir Cohen, Suzanne Daly, Gillian Gane, Pamela Gilbert, Robbie Goh, Arvind Gopinath, Philip Holden, Neil Hultgren, Kali Israel, Stephanie Jones, Julia Kuehn, Chuen-yen Lau, Kittiya Lee, Pericles Lewis, Ian MacDonald, Diana Maltz, Wen-chin Ouyang, David Porter, Ranka Primorac, Tania Roy, Chitra Sankaran, Cannon Schmitt, Marci Shore, James Stone, Christopher Waters, John Whalen-Bridge, and Sarah Willburn. Special thanks to Jesus Fernandez Garrido and Judith Calica, and to Gail Forman for, among other things, reading Victorian novels to me as a child and proofreading several chapters of this book. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 19–48, while a previous version of Chapter 2 appeared in Criticism 46.4 (2004): 533–574. My thanks to Wayne State University Press for permission to reprint this material.

ix

Abbreviations

HO LCP

Home Office Papers, National Archives, Kew Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection, British Library

x

Introduction Topsy-turvy Britain and China

This 19th century has been almost as pregnant in change and prophesy for China as for Europe. It had seen the steadfast encroachment of Western innovations on a civilization which had endured without change for over 2,000 years. . . In fact, solid and impenetrable as was the bulk of native conservatism, no observant Chinaman could leave his inland home without realizing that an irresistible encroachment had taken place and could never be pushed back save by the extermination of every foreigner, and every convert to foreignism, within the limits of the Empire.

Julian Croskey, “The S. G.”: A Romance of Peking (1900)1

If the Chinaman can thus compete with our artizans and working men in his native country, notwithstanding the many disadvantages which must attend the exercise there of his intelligence and strength, what will he not be able to accomplish when encouraged and taught to rival a foreign antagonist on his own ground, and at a more moderate rate of remuneration than the latter can afford to demand? Should matters go on as they are now doing in England, the labouring and manufacturing classes must not wonder if they find themselves ere very long displaced and distanced by the hitherto despised, but none the less practical, useful, and labour-loving Chinaman. Walter Henry Medhurst, The Foreigner in Far Cathay (1872)2

Imagined possibilities Scenario 1. The year is 1905. The place is Hong Kong, Britain’s outpost on the edge of China. The pseudonymous “Betty” publishes a book with Anglo-Asian press giant Kelly & Walsh entitled Intercepted Letters: A Mild Satire on Hongkong Society. The author is a British woman living in Hong Kong whose Letters first appeared in the local English-language daily, the China Mail. She ends her collection of missives with a blast from the future: her granddaughter “Betty III” writes back from the vantage of 1960 to 1

2

China and the Victorian Imagination

record her impressions of the place where her “grandmamma” spent her youth. Like Thomas Macaulay’s New Zealander surveying a London that never came to be, Betty III conjures up a Hong Kong that is a far cry from the world of Suzie Wong or the colony that fashioned itself as the financial hub for another global power. Her Hong Kong – as she explains in her “coney,” or telegraph – is “conducted for the benefit of Britishers, and might, but for the palm-trees, be mistaken for a well governed county of England.”3 Betty III has arrived in Hong Kong, thanks to the London– Kowloon Monorail. Fifty hours has taken her from Charing Cross through the Channel Tunnel on a train that travels more than 200 miles an hour and joins together the metropole and its easternmost crown colony. Betty got it wrong. Hong Kong was never destined to become Britain on the Pearl River Delta. Although she badly misread the future of Hong Kong and Anglo-Chinese relations, she is an invaluable guide to recovering how the Victorians imagined China and their place in it. Her book highlights the Victorian view that China would become and remain, in some way, integrally tied to the future and success of global imperialism. It hints at an empire constructed as a worldwide network in which China, India, Japan, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas all form part of a differentiated but entwined system. And it extends empire far beyond India; Kowloon, not Calcutta, serves as the terminus for this monorail. Betty’s book itself is the product of a China-based British publishing firm (with offices in Shanghai, Yokohama, and Singapore, among other places) and a daily newspaper tailored to meet the needs of colonists far from home. This points to the complexity of literary production in and about empire: its many and diffuse circuits of publication and distribution; its potential for site-specific, regional, and Empire-wide circulation; and its ability to foreground local concerns and to connect them together with the larger structures of governance which imperialism entailed. Scenario 2. The year is 1898. China is the fulcrum for Western debates about the future of empire: Will it expand or contract? Is it morally justified or bankrupt? Will the balance of power between Britain and her rivals remain stable, or will it shift away from Britain’s favor in response to new realities in Asia and Africa? In specific, Britain’s trade and naval supremacy in the East is under threat because of the failure of the “Open Door” policy in and around China. Japan has invaded Korea, Russia has secured Port Arthur, the Americans are fighting for control of the Philippines, and Germany is militarizing its base in Tsingtao (Qingdao). The Yangtze River basin is potentially up for grabs; China’s possible partition looms large and captures the British public’s imagination.4

Introduction: Topsy-turvy Britain and China

3

Under the auspices of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of Great Britain, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, an aide to Queen Victoria and a sitting MP, travels to China.5 He prepares a report, which appears in book form in 1899 as The Break-up of China. Amid myriad calls for the “carve-up” of China and the competing claims for attention posed by events in South Africa, where a war is underway, Beresford concludes that “the maintenance of the Chinese Empire is essential to the honour as well as the interests of the Anglo-Saxon race.”6 This is the British government’s view, too. The Chinese Empire cannot be allowed to fall apart. Britain’s aim should be to shore up the Qing dynasty and, in so doing, protect Victoria’s political and economic interests in the region, but more direct interference is best avoided. The “last thing that the British commercial communities, and indeed the whole British people, desired,” Beresford tells Chinese officials, “was any addition being made to the British Empire, either in the nature of dominion, sphere of influence, or protectorate” (13). Beresford further predicts that any collapse of China threatens to bring on a world war. Unlike Betty, Beresford was mostly right. The carve-up of China would never happen, nor would Britain actively expand her role in administering Chinese affairs. The event that might have made a difference was the Boxer Rebellion – a loosely organized, anti-foreign uprising that took place in the summer of 1900. During the conflict, much of the Western population of the Chinese capital was holed up in the British Legation for that summer, before a military force arrived to relieve them. The relief involved an invasion in Northern China and a foreign intervention sufficiently profound to make the Chinese leadership flee the palace in Beijing. But the invasion force was an international one, including US and Japanese troops, while relative newcomers like Germany, Italy, and Russia failed to capitalize on the uprising to expand their power base in the region. The upshot? A stronger AngloAmerican alliance was forged; the Qing dynasty limped along, in the view of Western observers, until 1911, when the Republic of China replaced it. In these respective scenarios, Betty and Beresford address different potentialities for the future of Britain’s relationship with China. Their different views underscore Thomas Richards’s point that the British Empire in the long nineteenth century was “something of a collective improvisation.”7 Desperate to maintain the status quo in the midst of internal Chinese instability, Beresford urges caution. He rejects the notion of direct territorial acquisition in favor of military assistance to protect Britain’s control over 64 percent of the “whole foreign trade of China” (13). Betty, meanwhile, envisages a future in which Britain turns its Chinese population into yellowskinned Englishmen. She foresees a world in which the colonial is essentially

4

China and the Victorian Imagination

absorbed into the metropole. Both of these writers help us to recover the great sense of importance and possibility that China held for the Victorians, as well as the feeling, as late as the turn of the century, that China’s relevance to British imperialism on the whole remained undetermined.

Empires entwined Through their texts and arguments, Betty and Beresford also show us something that everyone in Victorian Britain took for granted: the realization that their empire was interconnected with other empires, that modern empires stood not alone, but were intricately entwined with each other. It was commonsense in the late nineteenth century that Britain’s empire was not a vast and geographically disparate set of locations that defined themselves by their affiliation to a putative motherland. Instead, the Victorians and their interlocutors knew that the British Empire emerged out of geopolitical rivalries, out of the competition and cooperation between various European powers as well as numerous nonEuropean ones, and out of the conjunction of different kinds of civilizations and systems of knowledge in different parts of the world. They knew, for instance, that what made the relatively obscure Crimean Peninsula important was its focalization of tensions between the Russian, Ottoman, and British Empires. And they had learned by bitter experience not to underestimate the ambitions of groups like the Zulus in Southern Africa. They knew, too, that building and running the infrastructure of other sovereign nations – as they did in Brazil, itself an “empire” until 1889 – exerted a powerful symbolic, ideological, and even cultural force both at home and abroad. I have given this book the subtitle Empires Entwined because the word “entwined” emphasizes three fundamental aspects of the way in which I use British textual production about China and the Chinese as a case study of larger patterns of Britain’s interaction with other parts of the world. First, the term conjures up images of plants that twine or twist together – like the rose and the briar – with all the associated implications of symbiosis and potential parasitism. This is an accurate definition of the way in which empires engage with and conceive of each other; interaction is both necessary for survival and potentially damaging. It is also an apt description of the two faces of empire represented by British communities abroad and at home, a set of interconnections that this book also traces. Second, “to entwine” means to enfold or to embrace, again like the rose and the briar. Transcultural intimacy and its depiction form a major part of my study. “Entwined” is therefore an

Introduction: Topsy-turvy Britain and China

5

appropriate metaphor to underscore the imbrication of the proverbial personal and political across cultures and geographic spaces. Third and finally, the word “entwined” recalls its etymological origins in the sense of “twin” or “two.” It points to multiple, interrelated, and mutually constitutive notions of agency. This usage underscores my contention that China and the Chinese appear as imagined figures within British literature and as textual objects precisely because they were important social actors across the British Empire – from the mines of the Transvaal to the infamous opium dens of London’s Limehouse to the International Settlement of Shanghai. “Entwining” therefore implies a notion of partnership – however unequal or elliptical – and of interdependence that is crucial to expanding our vision of empire beyond the traditional paradigms of colonizer and colonized, Self and Other. “Entwining” thus breaks away from a top-down or centralized theory of imperialism and its literary production and instead emphasizes the idea that imperial discourse is engaged in a dialogue with players both internal and external to itself. Suggesting that Britain and China were in some way doubled or twinned is, I acknowledge, potentially problematic. First, it might lead some readers to believe that this book will juxtapose British and Chinese texts, whereas China and the Victorian Imagination is patently a work about British literature and culture. Second, it might suggest that Britain and China are two monolithic structures at odds with each other, whereas my emphasis is primarily on interlacing, on the multiple tendrils each one sent out into the other. However, the real intervention of this book is to pluralize imperialisms and to demonstrate how British versions of these imperialisms were tempered by an exchange with the geographical space called “China” and the people identified with that space.8 What does it actually mean to consider Britain and China as “empires entwined”? What happens to our understanding of imperial literary production when we see “entwined empires”? The answer to these questions involves redirecting the study of the literature of imperialism in several ways: 1. It requires an expansion of, or change in, the way in which we understand nineteenth-century British imperialism. Once we embrace the notion of “empires entwined,” we can return to older arguments about the myriad varieties of imperialism – chiefly, those about “informal” imperialism, business imperialism, and extra-imperialism – but with fresh eyes. Two things differentiate this usage of informal imperialism from the dependency debates of the 1950s and 1960s. The first is that my lens is literary and cultural studies, meaning that my emphasis is on discourse and rhetoric, not economic fundamentals. The second is that

6

China and the Victorian Imagination

this study employs current methodological tools for thinking about globalization and historiography, so that informal imperialism forms part of a geopolitical spectrum that emphasizes the diversity of the way in which cultures and societies engage with each other. Revisiting informal imperialism in this way also allows me to reclaim the idea of “Greater Britain,” which offered the Victorians a meaningful heading under which to group the kinds of affiliations and influences that exceeded the grasp of formal imperialism. 2. One of this study’s key interventions into current critical debates about imperialism and literary production is the direct comparison it offers of literary production in the colonial sphere and related production in Britain. By charting the surprisingly vibrant publishing scene for books in English in East Asia, this study argues that there are significant differences in the way in which Britons publishing abroad understood their relationship to their “host” environments and to the future of imperialism, as well as significant differences in publishing patterns that point to the intensely local nature of imperialism’s operations and the unevenness of the application of imperial policy about such topics as miscegenation. The study also investigates how local production was more self-aware than metropolitan production or, more cogently, the sorts of circumstances that sparked the kind of self-awareness and ethical dilemmas later evident in works such as George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” (1936).9 Miscegenation is openly pronounced in the colonies, especially by men, even if the voices of Eurasians and other groups of multiple heritages are not particularly prominent. In the metropole, it is obscured, as the example of “Yellow Peril” writer M. P. Shiel shows. Being of West Indian origin and mixed race was no barrier to creating archetypal imperial heroes and recycling unsettling stereotypes about Asians. 3. This study repositions Orientalism not just by extending it to China, but by reconstituting East and West as a complicated network of entwined imperial projects. Building on the work of scholars such as Lydia H. Liu, it asks fundamental questions about how the British defined sovereignty in Asian arenas and how they inserted themselves within a society in which they, and not their interlocutors, were sometimes framed as the barbarians – a fact of which they were acutely aware.10 More importantly, this study looks to literary production in and about China to understand how China functioned in a continuum of “Oriental” spaces that, like Betty’s monorail, linked together the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia – that defined points

Introduction: Topsy-turvy Britain and China

7

of comparability and allegiance – but without defining them as equivalent. China, in particular, is useful for breaking down the assumption that imperial discourse simply projected itself onto another space. For instance, British writers’ consciousness of their liminal position in China provides a corrective to the idea that Orientalism merely proffered a fantasy image that preconditioned their responses to the landscape, people, and cultural systems they encountered. Moreover, the evidently “civilized” nature of much of what they encountered – the built environment, the examination system, etc. – rendered simple hierarchical classifications impossible. 4. Above all, studying “empires entwined” emphasizes the need to disaggregate a unified notion of “the East.” Doing this allows me to pinpoint the similarities and differences in the way that imperial literature treated spaces of formal and informal empire. It allows me to isolate the way in which these writers themselves drew comparisons across the colonial spaces they had experienced (often India and China, but Africa too). And it allows me to locate the way in which such literature may have emphasized issues of contingency as much as – if not more than – mastery. Restoring China’s place in Britain’s imagined sense of its own imperium therefore insists on seeing Orientalism as the Victorians saw it – as an evolving, unstable, and sometimes ideologically inconsistent means to grapple with their changing position in Asia and beyond. This project has had a long gestation. When I began working on this material as a doctoral student in the 1990s, there were almost no published studies about China and the Victorians from a literary and cultural point of view. In the last five years alone, there has been an explosion of interest. For obvious reasons, many of the most recent publications on the subject do not appear here, but I hope the book gives a sense of the lively conversation now being carried on. The advent of World Literature and its proposals for recalibrating notions of reading across cultures and time is another development that deserves mention. My methodological interests are more historical than those of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and others, but there are important synergies between my approach and theirs in terms of the emphasis on circulation and the way that location changes literature and literary reception.

Overview: Why China and the Chinese? As the largest territory in the world not to fall under direct European control during the nineteenth century, China sparked tremendous interest in

8

China and the Victorian Imagination

Britain and among Britons abroad. China and its people were, commentators insisted (in a rhetoric that would not seem out of place today), an untapped and potentially vast market for the exchange of goods, ideas, religion, and labor. Shortly after the Opium Wars, the China trade accounted for approximately one-third of the export economy of British India. By the end of the century, Friedrich Engels was citing China as a potential bulwark against capitalism’s collapse. “The last new market which could bring on a temporary revival of prosperity by its being thrown open to English commerce, is China.”11 China was figured as a site of almost infinite possibility; her much-vaunted air of isolationism, elevated to a Victorian commonplace, simply fueled speculation about what lay behind the “bamboo curtain.” China and the Chinese inspired a vast array of literary production, an archival base as potentially large and limitless as the Victorians themselves perceived China to be. Ranging from novels, short stories, and adventure fiction to poetry, travelogues, and missionary tracts to periodicals produced in enclaves across “foreign China,” this production is noteworthy both for its sheer volume – itself an index of the aspirational tendencies of the imperial archive – and for the diversity of its producers. From bored wives and customs officials stuck in lonely “outports” to sailors like James Dalziel to well-known adventure writers like G. A. Henty, everyone who came into contact with China seemed to have an opinion about it, an opinion which they felt compelled to set to paper. It is no accident, then, that, at the start of Intercepted Letters, Betty describes Hong Kong as “the most prolific literary workshop for its size in the whole world” (26), and her observation rings true for the other focal points of the region, particularly Shanghai, which was the center of the European presence in China. The six chapters that make up this book are not primarily a survey of what the Victorians thought about China and the Chinese. Instead, I focus on three often overlapping areas of British representations of all things Chinese: narratives about China and the Chinese set in China; works expressing anxieties about the sexual or physical threat posed by the presence of or potential invasion of British and colonial spaces by the Chinese; and texts about the spectacle of Chinese people, objects, and food in Britain, most notably in London. The first section of the book covers literature produced in and about the treaty ports and Hong Kong. Its two chapters provide case studies of the forms of Anglophone literary production taking place on the China Coast and of the way in which Britons described China’s material culture to readers back home. The second section discusses how literary production about the Chinese narrativized political events

Introduction: Topsy-turvy Britain and China

9

surrounding Britain’s relationship to the “Middle Kingdom.” Its two chapters analyze respectively fiction written in response to the Boxer Rebellion and novels thematizing Asiatic invasion of Britain and the Empire. The book’s final section describes metropolitan impressions of China and the Chinese in the form of literature about the Chinese community in Britain and in representations of China and the Chinese on the Victorian stage. There are two types of narratives studied in China and the Victorian Imagination. One set hails from the imperial center and was published principally by major houses in London or Edinburgh. The second set comes from China itself and was published by locally based British houses, such as Kelly & Walsh, the offices of English-language daily newspapers, and the Oriental Press. One goal of the book is to showcase Englishlanguage literary production in China and to contrast the literary and material conditions of its production and circulation with that of literature produced in the metropole (and, to a lesser extent, in other colonial locations, such as Australia). Studying the wealth of texts not only written by Britons “out in China” but also published there reveals patterns of production that differ markedly from those disseminated in or by the metropole, including a greater prominence of women writers and the rejection of the identikit model of empire espoused by adventure writers like Henty. It also exposes different modes of consumption, namely a thriving and competitive trade in works about the local, marketed with a defined local audience in mind. Consumption and distribution of this literature might also be regional – with works circulating between India and “foreign” China, for instance – thus emphasizing the importance of seeing beyond the center–periphery model to audience groups joined together by steamship routes or by their common experience of being “in empire” – and thus unified by their distance from the metropole of origin. The small size of the foreign presence in China and the fact that there could be practically no indigenous Chinese readership (unlike the situation in India) gave British authors certain latitude to describe the local populations. For one thing, it meant they could write with relative impunity. The sort of counter-reaction by emancipated blacks that Catherine Hall discusses with regards to James Mursell Phillippo and his book Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843) seems never to have occurred.12 Nevertheless, narratives written by British men and women who lived “way out East” highlight the particularities of Britain’s engagement with China on the ground, treating issues such as miscegenation, “going native,” and extreme cultural difference with much greater sympathy and nuance than metropolitan authors, who more commonly sought to fit China into their grander

10

China and the Victorian Imagination

schemes of empire, and thus to efface or flatten out local particularities or to create “types” of Chinamen, such as the pirate, the inscrutable servant, or nefarious evildoer. China-based authors, too, often evinced much more doubt than their metropolitan counterparts about the benefits of a late Victorian “scramble for China,” which intensified as competition between European powers grew, as American influence in the region increased in 1898 (following the annexation of Hawaii and the transfer of Spain’s colonies in the region to the US after the latter’s victory in the Spanish American War), and as Japan developed its colonization projects in Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea.

Why China matters Far from being eclipsed as Britain consolidated its hold over the Indian subcontinent and Africa, China remained in the public eye throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What Robert Markley has noted about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained equally true in the late nineteenth century: “No literate man or woman in western Europe could plead ignorance of the relative size, wealth, and natural resources of, say, England and China. . . China had become a crucial site of contention and speculation in a variety of fields.”13 Naturally, the discourses associated with China during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changed as a result of the shifting imperial situation: opium now rivaled porcelain as a symbol of “Chineseness.” But its fundamental importance only intensified. Even the most blatantly positivist method – counting the number of articles about some aspect of China appearing in elite and popular magazines – casts doubt on Bernard Porter’s recent assertions that domestic culture during Victoria’s reign was little affected by Britain’s new global aspirations.14 This book invites us to return to a Victorian worldview in which India, although crucial, is not the sole focus of Britons’ self-conception of their global role. It restores the commonsense need to think about South Africa, India, the West Indies, and other sites of formal activity within the context of Britain’s broader commercial empire. By expanding the scope of our investigation of what constituted nineteenth-century imperialism, it encourages us to see what other types of imperialism flourished – and what other forms of narrativity they engendered. A comparative, “entwined” perspective also replaces a potentially anachronistic reading of empire seen from its aftermath with one that recovers the sense of potential and desire motivating a variety of Britons over the course of the long

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nineteenth century – from traders and manufacturers to missionaries and bureaucrats. I am not unaware of the methodological dangers of plunging the reader into a Victorian frame of mind so as to better understand Victorian thought. Such an approach could promote the sort of Eurocentric historiography that Andre Gunder Frank has critiqued, rather than highlighting how Europe “profit[ed] from the predominant position of Asia in the world economy” and “climbed up on the back of Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders – temporarily.”15 However, the nineteenth-century archive yields numerous examples where the Victorians also recognize Asia and China’s significance to the world economy – sometimes as threat, sometimes as opportunity – and the contingency of their own operations there. The “trade imbalances” that were so central to the tea and opium trades and that sparked Britain’s initial military interventions in China call attention to this dynamic. So, too, does the rhetorical emphasis on China’s isolationism, relying as it does on a willful rejection of the vast regional trade networks that flourished in the interstices of European imperialisms, as well as China’s historical role in Southeast Asia, where British, French, Dutch, and American imperialisms and mercantilism were all active during this period. Frank contends that Marx’s deliberations about China – with their emphasis on Oriental decadence and a static, Asiatic Mode of Production – “were no more than a figment of his and other Eurocentric thinkers’ imagination anyway, and had no foundation in historical reality whatsoever” (15). Yet from a different angle, they actually derive historical legitimacy from their suppression of what Britons in Asia, if not at home, were saying about the region’s economy, trade, agricultural policies, educational systems, and so on. On another level, I employ certain contemporary language from the period. I refer to China as the “Celestial Empire” – so called because the Chinese monarch was supposedly the “son of Heaven” – and the Chinese as “Celestials.” I also use the phrase “Middle Kingdom,” a translation of Zhongguo (中國) that had currency during the long nineteenth century, and, more rarely, “the Flowery Land.” In using these terms, I could be accused of replicating the Orientalisms I seek to decipher. Yet avoiding them raises its own issue, not the least because it eliminates from consciousness the associations that China’s very name could have for the Victorians. Equally, I only use the term “Chinaman” when it arises from the diegetic environment. My intent is to balance the need not to perform acts of erasure on this historical material with the demands of appropriate critical distance. Empire’s reach, as Robert D. Aguirre has noted, always exceeded its grasp,16 but the example of China shows that only a retrospective reading of

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the past makes this point clear. The Victorians themselves were uncertain as to what the eventual limits of that grasp would be. That China never became a formal part of the British Empire establishes our amnesia towards it. That China has not contributed to the rich crop of Anglophone writers and scholars that India, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and other locations of nineteenth-century British interest have in our own period has also encouraged us to overlook its relevance to Victorian society. But recovering the history of China’s place in that nineteenth-century worldview necessarily improves our understanding of the areas where postcolonial critics have concentrated their efforts to date because it forces us to juxtapose our current conceptions of hegemonic discourses with alternatives to it. China is certainly a missing piece in the imperial jigsaw, but like a puzzle piece, its significance lies in helping us to complete the whole. Or to use a different metaphor, studying China helps us to identify the ties that bound together Britain and her scattered outposts of empire. As a result, this study repositions India as part of a broader map in which formal and informal empire are interlinked and perceived as coeval and mutually constitutive phenomena. It reconstructs the Victorian version of “Chindia” and BRIC, entities created by today’s economists to underscore allegiances between parts of the “developing” world.17 It also reminds us that the history of China’s non-incorporation into the British Empire contrasts with India’s eventual incorporation: The British were able to annex successive portions of the subcontinent throughout the nineteenth century, but were unable to similarly build on the toeholds they gained in China through Hong Kong and the treaty ports. The British successfully reeled in local leaders – the Indian princes – in one place but failed so spectacularly to do the same thing further east. How different things might have been had the ships sent to the Second Opium War not been diverted to fight the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857.18 Even after the “Sepoy Rebellion,” the Daily Telegraph could still comment on the Opium Wars, “We might retain Canton as we held Calcutta, make it the centre of our ultra Eastern trade, compensate ourselves for the influence of Russia on the Tartar frontiers of the Empire, and lay the basis of a new dominion.”19 Why was this promise of an empire further east never properly achieved? To answer this question, I employ the useful concept of “Greater Britain,” theorized in mid-century by Charles Wentworth Dilke and widely (and differently) applied throughout the period. In using this term, sometimes associated with high imperialism and a racist philosophy of expansionism, I am by no means endorsing the imperialist views of its progenitors. I am not proposing its virtues as an imperial system, nor am I offering another

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version of Niall Ferguson’s colossus or “Anglobalization.” Rather, I am reconstituting the intellectual usefulness that Victorians like Dilke saw in the phrase: as a way to describe loosely imperial formations without implicating them in formal processes of colonization. For Dilke, the notion of Greater Britain was “a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands”; the British “race” formed a girdle around the globe that, much like Betty’s monorail, spread the bounty of English institutions and customs.20 As a concept, “Greater Britain” therefore looks to affiliations and affinities, rather than to formal structures of power; it helps explain both the need for China to be incorporated into the colonial imaginary and one reason why that imaginary came to be refashioned as an Anglo-American or “Anglo-Saxon” alliance by the end of the century. Above all, it invests imperialism with the necessary elasticity to cover the various, sometimes contradictory discourses that the Victorians produced about China and to comprehend how a rhetoric of leadership could seem more important than one of domination and territorial control. I have been arguing that “empires entwined” allows us to see the variegated nature of Britain’s engagement with the “Orient,” while simultaneously tracing the connections between the different imperial outposts situated under the umbrella of “Greater Britain” – despite their vast differences in language and culture. One practical example of these processes at work is pidgin, the language of maritime empire produced out of Britain’s encounter with China. At first a bridge language between Westerners and Chinese, pidgin gradually took on a transnational life of its own, to the extent that British commentators claimed speakers from different regions of China even used it to communicate with each other.21 “This remarkable dialect, owing to the ease with which it is acquired, is now spreading so rapidly all over the East that Sir Richard Burton thinks it may at no distant date become the linguafranca of the whole world,” claimed the 1889 A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant Embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian Slang, Pidgin English, Tinkers’ Jargon and Other Irregular Phraseology.22 Said to be a corruption of the English word “business,” pidgin defines networks of communication and exchange that defy the typical ethnic and linguistic boundaries of nations and that reiterate the syncretic quality of British and imperial activity in Asia. Pidgin underscores the point that economy was one of the drivers of language, culture, and literary production. One of this book’s aims is also to demonstrate how and why the idea of China provided an important sounding board for a variety of broader imperial concerns. The most obvious way in which China performed this function for the British was in the notion of antithesis – that China was

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Britain’s topsy-turvy, that it was the “opposite” side of the globe from Britain, that digging all the way through the earth would take one there. More often, though, these discourses were subtler. China was one place where the British were forced to recognize – and sometimes contest – the agency of a people and culture that they were actively trying to control, classify, or otherwise contain. Through contact with China, the British confronted limits and tested systems of governance (such as that symbolized by the British-established Imperial Maritime Customs Service).23 Race was one of these limits, especially as it came to be conceptualized in the late nineteenth century. As a scholar who also studies Brazil, my thinking is informed by scholarship on Latin America, where intermediate identities between the camps of black and white have historically been more significant than the poles. I use these insights to demonstrate that race as a category for the British remained more fluid during the Victorian era than studies of other areas of empire suggest. British versions of métissage/ mestizaje/mestizagem persisted far longer and with greater frequency than the Indian example might lead us to suspect. My research on China yields several important conclusions regarding understandings of race and ethnicity: First, hybridity can only be a strategy to resist or co-opt white authority if both sides credit that authority with legitimacy. Fictions about the Chinese demonstrate that the British were aware that local populations in no way absorbed their sense of racial hierarchies (and their place at the top of the ladder). The Chinese disdain for foreigners forms a staple of this literature, highlighting an instability surrounding British beliefs in their own state of civilization. Moreover, traits like a relative lack of body hair – often used to feminize the Chinese as non-normative individuals – were also the very traits seen by the Chinese themselves to constitute their own superiority in contradistinction to the “hairy barbarians.” Second, narratives about China continue to discuss concubinage and other sorts of relationships between British men and local women in positive ways long after these relationships had been officially banned in British India. Perhaps the fact that the Imperial Maritime Customs was officially a Chinese, rather than European, organization accounts for this distinction. In any case, fiction abounds with examples, such as Alicia Bewicke’s (Mrs. Archibald Little’s) 1896 novel A Marriage in China, that take these relationships as given, without harping on about the moral status of the practice, as similar tales from India or Africa did. In this novel, protagonist Claude Fortescue’s illegitimate Eurasian children are adopted by his English wife and eventually sent to Cambridge.24

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Third, narratives about China frequently develop a concept of mutual xenophobia, which depends on the belief that the Chinese also repudiated the foreign – a belief bolstered by the Yellow Peril, as well as by the Great Wall, seen as symbolic of China’s longstanding anti-foreignness. The mirroring of ostensibly Chinese terms for the British like “hairy barbarian” and “foreign devil” (fan-kwei) and British terms for the Chinese like “yellow devil” is an index of this sentiment that opposites do not attract. Thus hybrids were “despised alike of East and West.”25 The Eurasians in India had a similar status, but narratives about this community usually focus on their desire to be accepted among the colonizers, rather than the animosities they inspired in Indians. While mutual xenophobia can, on the one hand, be said to reinforce a conception of the irreconcilable differences between East and West, on the other hand, it also suggests a powerful form of resistance to European incursions, and it imposes limits on contact that are not of the Europeans’ own making. Finally, these narratives indicate a remarkable difference in the way the Chinese were treated when discussed in their own country – as a semi-civilized race, as susceptible to improvement (in contradistinction to, say, Africans), as a commercial race akin to the “nation of shopkeepers,” as an enduring race for labor exportation, etc. – and when discussed in terms of immigration to Britain and the settler colonies. In the latter case, fiction writers in particular employ tropes of degeneration, of the instability of intra-Asian hybrids, of animalistic over-breeding, and so on, to demonize the Chinese as economically and racially threatening. In short, they see only the threat implicit in Medhurst’s comments in the epigraph above, but not its potentiality. Race was hardly the only issue in which interaction with China and the Chinese encouraged British writers to rethink imperial assumptions. The Chinese authorities’ steadfast resistance to Albion’s politics of “free trade” – even in the face of strident gunboat diplomacy – intrigued the British, as did their lack of interest in Western commodities, and, as the nineteenth century unfolded, their skepticism towards Western modernity, in the form of railroads, for instance. The popular image of a China that was backward both in time and space could not answer the question of why tactics that worked in other parts of the world never succeeded in China, or why China was able to assert a will that other non-European societies seemed unable to muster. In addition, resistance to the foreign presence in China – especially to missionaries and later to diplomats with the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion – prompted an evaluation of the Christianizing message of empire, the notions of diplomatic protection and extraterritoriality, and the conception of trade as a civilizing enterprise.

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At the same time, engagement with China, refracted through conceptions of the Yellow Peril, gave the British Empire a mechanism by which to externalize such internal threats as sedition in India, immigration by East European Jews, and the loss of face caused by the Anglo-Boer War – threats which were explicitly sexualized and which introduced familiar tropes of imperial prowess as masculine authority. Thus, China provided an imperial antagonist that was simultaneously susceptible to British manipulation (especially in economic terms) and evaded British influence (especially in social terms). A further aim is to direct our understanding of Victorian perceptions of China and the Chinese beyond the issue of opium. If one of my key goals in this book is to pluralize imperialism, that also means pluralizing China and the way its citizens were represented. It means attending to Britons’ material, actual exchanges with China and the Chinese alongside literary renderings of these interactions. As the long nineteenth century progressed, opium became increasingly less important to the economy of the British Empire – and the migration of Chinese labor increasingly more important to it. Yet opium has dominated literary scholarship on China and the Victorians. Why? One reason is that the topic has drawn critics’ attention because of a number of more or less canonical texts like Thomas De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822; 1856), Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1892).26 The iconicity of these representations of London’s tiny number of opium dens hints at a metropolitan preoccupation both in the source material and in the criticism that demands interrogation. A case in point is Shanyn Fiske’s article “Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth-century Literature and Victorian Studies” (2011).27 Her overview of this “important subfield in Victorian and Orientalist studies” (215) begins with a discussion of Drood. Literary scholarship on the anxieties opium enshrined is important, but I want to ask what focusing on opium obscures. My broad survey of primary materials shows that opium is not necessarily the central concern of British writers about China, even though their presence in Asia was, in many cases, a consequence of the opium trade and the conflicts it engendered. When they do discuss opium, China-based writers are more likely to comment on the evils of the trade than to harp on about “Oriental infection.”28 In fact, the post Second World War obsession with drugs partly accounts for opium discourse’s dominance in representations of China and the Chinese during the long nineteenth century. Opium is an issue that skews Victorian perceptions of China and the Chinese towards derogatory tropes of fiendishness and degeneration. In contrast, I want to recover concurrent conceptions of China as a place of

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possibility, not just negative association. By giving due attention to the large body of late-century adventure fiction about China, Chinese rebellion, and Chinese pirates, I offer a more complete picture of the variety of ways that cultural contact between the two empires and their peoples filtered into British consciousness.

Albion’s East: disciplinary and historical concerns and Britain’s imagined view of China The core of this study is fiction.29 Fiction was one of the most varied and widely disseminated vehicles of cultural and anthropological commentary about China and the Chinese, as well as a central medium for discussing imperialism across the British Empire. Fiction is also the genre that most throws into contrast some of the tensions between metropolitan and local views of the East. Moreover, fiction elucidates these tensions by making it possible to trace important histories of republication across imperial and extra-imperial spaces. Fiction produced in China was more likely to be repackaged and reprinted in Britain at a later time than other types of literary output. British poetry about China and the Chinese, by contrast, tended to appear in English-language newspapers produced in China and rarely received a metropolitan airing. However, poetry is an area in which women writers were particularly prominent. Poetry was also a prominent feature in satirical works like the China Punch, a comic magazine published in the 1860s and 1870s by the China Mail newspaper in Hong Kong. Such poetry provided topical, incisive commentary on current events in “foreign China,” as in “The Yarn of the ‘Broker Swell,’” which satirized the practices of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.30 Studying the changes made by authors and publishers to cater to these different audiences clarifies what was meaningful on local, regional, and metropolitan levels, as well as across the Anglo-American spectrum of “Greater Britain.” Of course, my analysis of these narratives does depend on a wider survey of materials, including poetry, travel literature, journalism, and official documents (as well as my sense of how these different sources engage in a dialogue with each other), and some chapters focus on these types of materials directly.31 It also builds on the emerging scholarship about Britain’s literary and cultural interactions with China. Most notable is Elizabeth Chang’s studies on aesthetics, which, like my own work, read cultural discourses against those of political economy.32 My study also relies on a review of secondary sources based on nineteenth-century materials in Chinese. These

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sources have helped me to gauge whether the willful ignorance of Chinese language and culture that many of these Victorian narratives proclaim was bluster and why so many writers were invested in a repudiation of Sinophilia.33 However, China and the Victorian Imagination is not a book about how China or the Chinese responded to British discourses or wrote back to British texts; I leave that important task to others. I have largely excluded missionary materials, including fiction, from this study.34 Despite its frequently explicit ethnographic content, missionary writing about the Chinese was not always different in scope or function than missionary writing about other parts of the non-European world. The archive of missionary work about China is, moreover, immense and worthy of separate study in its own right. In addition, issues of religion – the interaction between European and Chinese religions, the attitudes of the Chinese populace to missionaries, the stereotype of the “heathen Chinee,” the religious lives of the expatriate communities, and so on – represent a set of problematics that largely fall outside of the scope of this study. My decision not to focus on this material explains my scant discussion of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which caused such massive upheaval in China but received moderate attention in Europe. I remain attentive to the international nature of the foreign community in China and the sometimes arbitrary divides of national boundaries, as well as to the transatlantic circulation of literature produced about China.35 Nor do I treat China as a monolithic entity, but rather (as one Victorian commentator described it) as a “convenient expression to connote a certain vast portion of the earth’s surface” that constitutes “a number of districts often separated from each other and from the centre by immense distances, differing widely in climate, resources and configuration, inhabited by people of largely varying race, temperament, habit, religion and language.”36 It hardly needs adding that the notion of the “West” and of “Britain” itself are equally artificial and constructed terms. Methodologically, my work proceeds from a given of cultural studies, that textual practice is a privileged location from which to assess British attitudes towards China and the Chinese and their cultural ramifications. A study of this nature is by definition interdisciplinary. It must incorporate recent shifts in the study of imperialism, notably the recognition that imperialism was neither exclusively nor primarily a “from the top down” phenomenon; the return to the archive to enhance the understanding of imperialism by literally accessing new materialities through the study of a wider range of documents and social texts; the embrace of a “cultural turn” that has led scholars away from an emphasis on the purely political and

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economic in favor of the social and affective; and the interest in the uneven development and application of imperial policies, such as the interdiction of miscegenation. Consequently, China and the Victorian Imagination offers analyses that are grounded in historical methodologies in order to emphasize this literature’s role in presenting and interpreting specific events such as the Boxer Rebellion and more generalized matters such as Britain’s maritime affairs in East and Southeast Asia to swaths of the British public, from children to the working classes.37 The concept of a “Greater Britain” defies strict definitions of nationalism, especially because it proposes a joint Anglo-American project of globalization. This realization has encouraged me to draw on the insights of scholars working on American expansion in Asia, most notably the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as Asian American Studies. Such comparison elucidates how imperial patterns were replicated across colonial lines and clarifies how Britons and Americans responded to similar historical factors, such as Chinese migration, and shared their opinions about China and the Chinese. This comparative framework makes it possible to explain a work like Harry Hunter’s comic song “The Nigger Chinee, or His Pigtail Wouldn’t Grow” (1877), performed by the Manhattan Minstrels in London and the provinces and telling the story of an African American who goes to China only to be executed for failing to conform to sartorial standards. My hope is that this comparative framework will also make what is essentially a book about British materials interesting to students of American culture, as well. A key factor in studying foreign relations in/with China is the jockeying of the British, French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, and others in East and Southeast Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because I consider how imperial discourse was produced and disseminated at a local and regional level by Britons in China, I therefore pay particular attention to the intensely competitive nature of imperialism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon and the links between different colonies, including those ruled over by different imperial powers. This sense of the comparative context in which imperialism unfolded is also crucial to understanding the construction of Europe itself, which, as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler have noted, was “made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself.”38 In addition, by placing stress on the notion of imperial hegemony, China and the Victorian Imagination participates in the growing scholarship, such as that of Dipesh Chakrabarty, about the tension surrounding the concept of the nation state.39

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Boundary of the Manchu Empire in 1850

R U S S I A N

Area of the Boxer Uprising 1900–1901 Colonial possessions Russian Japanese French British Dutch Spanish/American Areas of influence Russian Japanese French

THIBET/TIBETu

British

Br a

German Delhi

Treaty ports/colonial territories

Ga

Original ports opened in 1842–1844 Ports opened by 1865

hm a

NE PA ng

p t ra R.

L

es R .

Calcutta

I N D I A

Ports opened by 1900 Ports opened by 1920 Other major cities

Bombay

This map uses nineteenth-century spellings of towns, cities, and regions. Part of Kowloon was ceded to the British in 1860; in 1898, Britain expanded the colony after China granted a ninety-nineyear lease on the New Territories on Kowloon Peninsula.

Goa

(Portuguese)

Madras Pondicherry (French)

CEYLON Colombo

I N D I A N

0 0

500 250

1000 500

1500 750

O C E A N

2000 km

1000 miles

Figure 1. The treaty ports.

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ur R

.

Aigun

E M P I R E

JAPAN

o o Is l an d s

Yell ow

C H I N A

Tokyo

R.

MONGOLIA

OUTER MANCHURIA Suifenho Manchouli Tsitsihar Vladivostok Harbin INNER Kirin Hunchun Changchun Sea of MANCHURIA Japan Mukden Antung Tatungkow Newchwang KOREA Chinwangtao Seoul Port Arthur Dairen (Russian) Peking Weihaiwei (British) Tientsin Taku forts Lungkow Cheefoo Kiachow Tsinan Taiyuan Yellow Haichow Sea

Chinkiang Woosung Shanghai Nanking n Soochow Wuhu Ningpo Hangchow Hankow Kuikiang Ichang Wenchow Shasi Nanchang Wanhsien Santuao P A C I Yochow Changteh Chengtu Tamsui Foochow Changsha Keelung Chungking East Taipei Salw FORMOSA/ een R Amoy O C E R. TAIWAN C h i n a ze Lhasa Pearl Tainan Kweiyang River Swatow Sea Canton Wuchow Kowloon Kunming BHUTAN Hong Kong (British) Samshui Nanning Tengyueh Macao (Portuguese) Lungchow Mengtze Kwang-Chou-Wan Pakhoi (French) Szemao PHILIPPINES Kiungchow Hanoi BURMA HAINAN Manila R EN Bay CH of IN Ya ng t

.

Lo

o-c h

Sian

F

I NA CH

Bangkok

South

O

SIAM

ko ng R. Me

Rangoon

D

Bengal

China Sea

Saigon

Penang

MALAYA BORNEO

Malacca Singapore SUMATRA

DUTCH EAST INDIES Batavia JAVA

F I C A N

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China and the Victorian Imagination

Similarly, I explore how many of the narratives I discuss show a lived experience based on the interaction of different European and American populations in empire, rather than patterns of work and socialization following purely national or linguistic lines. It is said that during its peak years, more British subjects lived in the French Concession in Shanghai than in the British sectors. China may or may not be an extreme example of this pattern, but Stoler’s work on British planters in Borneo suggests that these narratives are indicative of a broader phenomenon. Such a phenomenon asks us to see beyond monolithic notions of how Britons behaved when “in empire.” It invites us to see friendships and communalities among Westerners that did not always reflect the political relations of their respective communities. It also allows us to record the importance of “peripheral” Europeans – Swedes and Danes, for instance – to these communities, despite the relative irrelevance of their countries as colonizing powers. The period covered by this book extends slightly beyond the years during which Victoria reigned. Its scope roughly coincides with the beginning and end of a particular form of British cultural encounter with China. Its historical starting point is the First Opium War (1840–1842), which marked the beginning of Britain’s expansion into China, concluding in the establishment of the colony of Hong Kong and the concession wrung from the Celestial government to open up areas of China to Western trade.40 Since these areas were established under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing, 1842) and subsequent so-called unequal treaties throughout the century, they became known as treaty ports, and they were the primary contact zone for interchange, both cultural and commercial, between Britain and China (Figure 1). The historical endpoint for the book is 1911, which marks the fall of the Manchu (or Tartar) government and thus the end of the Qing dynasty and the inauguration of the republican and warlord period that preceded the communist takeover of Mainland China in the 1940s. Yet a number of narratives discussed in this work, principally in the chapter on fiction about the Chinese in London, were written and published after 1911. I include them because they constitute a continuation of earlier modes of portraying the Chinese, especially since many of their readers would not have been cognizant of the cultural ramifications of the political changes occurring in China. After the Qing dynasty’s demise, representations of the Chinese changed slowly, if at all. In literature, Chinamen continued to wear pigtails long after the custom had died out. The rise of Fu Manchu, especially on movie screens, postdates the fall of the Manchus, but it cannot be understood without them. Indeed, many nineteenth-century stereotypes about the Chinese persist as cultural shorthand, as the 2010 “The Blind Banker” episode of the BBC series

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Sherlock shows, with its focus on tea, antiquities, Chinese gangs roaming London, suicide, and, above all, a vision of a financially interconnected Britain and China. This theme is one I take up at the book’s end.

Chinese boxes, or China contained China and the Victorian Imagination begins with a survey of the treaty port system and the fictions it birthed. Given the relatively small number of Britons actually resident in China, it is remarkable not only how much literature they produced, but also the extensive mechanisms they created in China for publishing and disseminating their work. In common with other sites of formal and informal empire, China’s exoticism and mystic appeal to the British imagination were among the reasons that these Britons were so prolix. Boredom and isolation were another. Without a doubt, such factors were also instrumental in inciting writing in other colonial and semi-colonial settings. However, the treaty port system and the foreign-led and staffed Imperial Maritime Customs organization made these factors even more pronounced in China by creating more and more “outports,” where only a handful of Westerners resided, many of them young and energetic. Only the larger settlements had clubs, parks, and other gathering points for the foreign community. The rapid expansion in the number of treaty ports in the late nineteenth century (with the “opening up” of the Yangtze River basin and other areas of the Chinese interior to foreign trade) also expanded the presence of isolated women – wives, sisters, daughters – who lived far from the relatively busy social scene of Shanghai. Although Nigel Cameron’s opinion that these women wrote because “none of them had anything better to do in the long Chinese days while their merchant and diplomat husbands were attending to the affairs of men” is offensive, nonetheless, his suggestion that loneliness and spare time encouraged women to record their impressions remains just as accurate for women as it is for men.41 What is perhaps more surprising is that women did not write more in the way of novels and short fiction, and that men wrote so much. Also challenging typical ideas about the gendered division of Victorian writing is the prominence of women’s travel writing in this archive, especially given the difficulties these women faced in going off the beaten track. These and other elements of the experience of Britain’s “China hands” form the basis of the first two chapters of China and the Victorian Imagination. Chapter 1, “The manners and customs of the modern Chinese: narrating China through the treaty ports,” provides an historical overview of the treaty port system and its development, as well as an overview of the vast body of writing emanating from these settlements and especially from Shanghai. The

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chapter focuses explicitly on the writers’ understanding, through their experience of “Greater Britain,” that empire was contingent on such factors as the interdependence of different colonial sites (India and Shanghai, in particular), competition between different powers, and negotiation with other cultures and systems of governance. These treaty ports inspired the writers publishing as Julian Croskey, Lise Boehm, William A. Rivers, and Dolly, among others, to pen an array of social fictions. These authors typically focus on the marginality of the space inhabited by the British in China, making it the locus for the occult and the horrible, for murder and betrayal by Englishman and Chinaman alike. The marks of these tales are cruelty, revenge, the effects of substance abuse, evil, and perverted high-class Chinese officials, who threaten the efficient operations of European commerce and profit. Often, the scenarios generally revolve around concealment on the part of the supposedly inscrutable Chinese and discovery on the part of the European agents, who paradoxically are oftentimes civil servants in the employment of the Celestial Empire’s customs or police forces. Croskey’s The Chest of Opium, in which the twenty-one-year-old, opium-smoking civil servant protagonist unravels the murder committed by a high official, or Shen, of his superior the taotai, is typical of these narratives. With its boyhero and Bildungsroman qualities, the novel also underscores the typical dialectic set up in fictions of Anglo-Chinese life between the British Empire as a youthful and sharp instrument for the advancement of trade and consequent civilization and the Chinese Empire as an ageless, cunning, and intriguing force resistant to incorporation in the market economy. Chapter 2 makes the point that where and how a work of imperial fiction was published really mattered. “Projecting from Possession Point: James Dalziel’s Chronicles of Hong Kong” offers a case study of what being “out in China” meant through two anthologies of stories penned by this unknown “Joseph Conrad,” a ship’s engineer turned writer. The chapter focuses on his representations of sexual interactions between Cantonese and Britons, which, for instance, champion the sort of concubinage explicitly repressed in colonies such as India. By looking at the publication history of the stories, the chapter also explores how very different textual and marketing strategies were used to present the same core of stories when his Chronicles of a Crown Colony (1907) was republished in London in 1909 as High Life in the Far East. Originally a Hong Kong-produced collection about the local focusing mainly on miscegenation within the bounds of the colony, when republished in the metropole, Dalziel’s narratives were made to inhere to the genre of imperial maritime fiction, partly through the addition of seaborne tales.

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I then move on to explicitly political topics in two chapters that consider the representation of conflict between China and the West (and specifically Britain and her colonies), the first examining fictional accounts of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the second surveying novels envisaging Asiatic invasions and reverse colonization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These narratives are primarily metropolitan in origin, though they may have been distributed among British communities across and beyond the Empire. The first group of narratives deals with British conflict with China in Asia, while the second imagines British conflict with China on her own soil. Both, however, reflect anxieties about the potential rebound of Western-induced modernization in Japan and China and about the future of British imperialism in light of the new global dynamics that were emerging late in the nineteenth century. The Chinese move from the position of possibility that Medhurst claims for them in The Foreigner in Far Cathay to one of threat. Invasion novels and fictions about the Boxers were the culmination of this perception of the potentially (if not inevitably) conflictual relationship between China and Britain at the fin de siècle and of the Far East as the likely ground for contesting the future of empire worldwide. But they drew on short stories and other narratives from the 1870s onwards, such as Robert S. Winn’s “A Chinese Adventure” (1901), in which British writers record a Chinese mob’s reactions to British military and civil servants, who launch into China “proper” from the settlements in the pursuit of leisure, generally fishing or hunting. Through a characteristic insensitivity towards local customs and because they are generally the first white people the villagers in these tales have ever seen, these pleasure-seekers arouse angry popular sentiment and escape death only through the use of hallmark British ingenuity.42 While many of these narratives stress that it is ignorance on both sides that leads to the violent confrontations which ensue, nevertheless, the protagonists’ escapes assert an overarching sense of British superiority. More importantly, they set the stage for the focus, in the Boxer and invasion narratives, on the Chinese masses as ignorant and easily manipulated, as well as unruly, uncontrollable, chaotic, and amorphous. In a related vein, the mass of late nineteenth-century fictions detailing Chinese methods of torture, including the infamous cangue, also paved the way for the narrative explosion around the Boxer Rebellion by highlighting irrational and inhumane violence as the predominant characteristic of the Chinese populace. Intriguingly, Boxer narratives were also complemented by contemporaneous tales about earlier instances of violent encounter between Britons and Chinamen, such as the Taiping Rebellion, a regional civil war between 1851 and 1864. Girls’ adventure writer Bessie Marchant’s Among Hostile Hordes: A Story of the Tai-ping Rebellion (1901)

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is an example of this phenomenon; readers automatically would have associated Marchant’s title phrase “hostile hordes” with the Boxers.43 In exploring the immense narrative energy surrounding the Boxer Uprising, Chapter 3, “Peking plots: narrating the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,” concentrates on novels and short fiction, but also brings in cinema. The abundance of novels and stories produced in the wake of the Rebellion helps us understand how imperial values were redefined and renegotiated not only with respect to the scramble for Africa, but also with respect to the concurrent scramble for China. Literature about the Rebellion underscores the Victorians’ awareness of China’s significance to their global position. In addition, these narratives frequently amalgamate the British and American communities in China in an important fictional parallel to the political concept of Greater Britain. The chapter reads the rebellion as linked to two other colonial conflicts: the Indian Mutiny and the Anglo-Boer, or South African, War. The Boxer Uprising was seen as a reprise of the “Sepoy Rebellion” and the decisive shift after 1857 to direct rule. It was also seen as a vindication of Britain’s imperial might in contradistinction to the “failure” in South Africa. The siege of the British Legation in particular became a metaphor for Britain’s renewed role in saving the world for “free market imperialism.” The persistent vilification of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was widely assumed to have been supportive of the Boxers and an impediment to modernizing forces within the Qing government, fed into the model of China as in a generalized state of chaos; Cixi provided an object on which to collapse class differences and recreate China as simply and overwhelmingly a place of entropy. Moving on from the real conflict with the Boxers to the imagined conflict of the Asiatic invasion novels produced from 1898 to the outbreak of the First World War, Chapter 4, “Britain ‘knit and nationalised’: Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898–1914,” considers how the Yellow Peril generalized and inflated Chinese aggression as a response not only to new global power relations, but also to new patterns of migration. The chapter therefore contextualizes Asiatic invasion novels in terms of contemporaneous works from Australia and North America and in so doing explains how anxieties about immigration originating abroad were imported to Britain. One crucial element of this exploration involves the way in which the Asiatic invasion novels channeled wider social fears about the instability of Britain’s empire into a new sense of nationalism. Fiction by Shiel and William Carlton Dawe provide a case in point. Through works like Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and Dawe’s The Yellow Man (1900), this fiction figures the rise of Asia as a direct political and social threat to British prosperity and liberty and views small-scale immigration to the metropole as the advance

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guard for radically destabilizing population shifts. Crucially, this new nationalism was conceptualized in relation to questions of technology and the prediction of new forms of speeded-up communication and transport, such as the airplane, that would constitute Britain and the West’s response to the possible threat of an industrialized Asia. The chapter also investigates how these texts propose notions of imperial, Anglophone, and Western federation in order to rebalance Britain’s tenuous hold over imperial power and global hegemony, translating into fictional form prevalent political concepts about confederation as empire’s way forward in the twentieth century. This invocation of compromise and cooperation is integrally tied to the international relief force against the Boxers and to Britain’s self-representation as a leader, rather than the sole provider, of the forces of imperial expansion. However, what is also important is how these novels also seek to restore a balance of power by amalgamating China and Japan. Such an amalgamation is a move that essentially sutures over the Japanese role in the relief of the Legations and converts the potential of cooperation with Japan as a burgeoning imperial power in its own right to a conception of Japan as simply part of the larger threat the Far East posed to British interests internationally. In this imagery, the smaller Japan becomes the head which will lead the larger masses of China against Europe. Not infrequently featuring half-Japanese, half-Chinese protagonists, these narratives therefore envisage the unified forces of China and Japan as both the mirror and the dialectical opposite of the unified forces of the West. They also depict Asia’s desire to modernize as inherently problematic and threatening – and inherently tied to an imperialist drive that again mirrors Britain’s own. And they individuate this threat through characters who are educationally hybrid, such as public-school-educated mandarins and degree-wielding Asian masterminds. Not only are these characters capable of using Britain’s intellectual advantages against her through the skills that Britain has taught them, but their behavior is particularly egregious because they have taken Britain’s technical and technological lessons to heart without concurrently absorbing British ideas about individual rights and liberties. They therefore use the tools of modernity to promote the outdated and destabilizing conditions of despotism and slavery and menace Britain with a highly anachronistic form of social reorganization. The final two chapters of China and the Victorian Imagination leave colonial and semi-colonial settings behind to focus on the reception of people and things Chinese back in Britain. These chapters cover, respectively, stage representations of China and the Chinese, and fictional discussions of

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London’s small Chinese community. They chart a plethora of sometimes paradoxical attitudes towards the Far East, all of which share the ideology that China’s alterity is stimulating, but which extol the difference and distance between Britain and China as frightening, exciting, pleasurable, frivolous, entertaining, or any combination of these. Chapter 5, “Staging the Celestial,” surveys representations of the Chinese on the Victorian and Edwardian stage – including pantomimes and “pyrotechnic displays” – which often were produced in relation to political events, such as the First Opium War, the Arrow incident, and the Boxer Rebellion. The chapter also provides an in-depth comparison of “yellowface” and the more traditional practices of “blackface” used to represent Africans and African Americans on stage during this period. In addition, it considers how turn-of-the-century music hall numbers contributed to jingoism and calls for continued imperial expansion. The chapter also focuses on Dr. Tanner’s 1857 work The Chinese Mother, in which an Irish nurse escaping the Potato Famine winds up in Hong Kong and is soon rescuing abandoned babies for the nunnery’s orphanage. The play offers both a fascinating commentary on the dynamics of infanticide in China versus India, as well as on broader imperial politics through the parallels it draws between Irish peasant life and that of the impoverished rural Chinese. Taken collectively, these dramatic works all have one thing in common: whether they depict the Chinese as Christians in waiting or “queer” creatures who inhabit the orbit of plates, farces, musical extravaganzas, and “pyro-spectacular” dramas, they all conceive of the Middle Kingdom as a site on which to project fantasies about Britain’s role in the world. In so doing, they present a dramatic tableau of how the spectator at home got swept up in the theater of empire. My final chapter turns to China’s own expatriates in Britain, focusing on fiction about the Chinese community in Limehouse. Although relatively small in number, this community became the scapegoat for a variety of social and racial anxieties, including the vilification of Jewish immigration to the East End and the fears of reverse colonization and miscegenation that the wider genres of “Yellow Peril” and invasion fiction exploited. In fact, one tension that this chapter explores is the disjunction between the symbiotic relationship between the Chinese population and their working-class English and Irish neighbors and middle-class narrativizations of Limehouse Chinamen as a dangerous, polluting, and sexually degenerative force – images that hark back to the fictions of the Yellow Peril and the Boxer Rebellion described in Chapters 3 and 4. Although grounded in a wide reading of popular fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth

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centuries, the chapter itself provides detailed analysis of three exemplary texts: “Li Ting of London” (1905) by George Sims, a writer best known for his slum tracts How the Poor Live and Horrible London (1889); stories from Thomas Burke’s anthology Limehouse Nights (1916); and the novel The Yellow Claw (1915) by the pseudonymous Sax Rohmer, inventor of Fu Manchu. With varying levels of empathy for their Chinese characters and various modes of incorporating stereotypical scenes of opium dens, crosscultural desire, and Chinese-inflected decadence, these fictions nevertheless foreground the way in which the rise of “Oriental London” was a phenomenon of modernity that cemented the capital’s position as the world’s paramount imperial, cosmopolitan city – with all the dangers and pleasures contained therein. However spectacular and sensationalized these narratives about the Limehouse Chinese might have been, the fact that these fictions existed at all signaled one important aspect of the changed relationship between Britain and China as it emerged during the long nineteenth century: the notion that the two empires were now essentially and irrevocably interconnected. Anticipating much more recent historical and literary work on British imperialism during the period, one commentator on Victorian literature, J. A. R. Marriott, put it this way in 1900: There has taken place in these last years a real shrinkage of the world. The great scientific discoveries have, in a real sense, annihilated time and space. People seem suddenly to have awoken to the fact that the planet on which they live is exceedingly small, and they seem literally afraid that if they fail to add some hundreds of thousands of square miles every year to their own particular territory, they may get pushed over the edge.44

This statement offers a brilliant encapsulation of the paradox of Britain’s Empire: it effected a global “annihilation” of time and space but continued to employ a rhetoric grounded in older notions that the world is flat; meanwhile, the fear of marginalization becomes an implicit rationale for “the expansion of England.” Unconsciously echoing ubiquitous exhortations that China must wake up from its protracted social, political, and economic slumber, Marriott argues that Britain itself had finally snapped out of its “trance” of absent-minded imperialism and realized “the goal towards which for more than three centuries we had half unconsciously been tending” (242). How and why China was an integral part of this goal is what this book elucidates.

chapter 1

The manners and customs of the modern Chinese Narrating China through the treaty ports

I rejoice to believe that the civilised Mongolian of futurity may find something to admire in the mind and manners of our Treaty Ports.

J. O. P. Bland, Verse and Worse (1902)1

The literary littoral At the outset of “A Tai-pan of the ’Fifties,” his first tale of life along the China Coast in Anglo-Chinese Sketches (1903), William A. Rivers looks back on the development of the British presence in China, characterizing it as follows: In China, during the ’Forties and ’Fifties, commercial enterprise had quite a romantic and adventurous air! Trade was a word to conjure with, and brought out force to back its ambitions. After hoisting the British flag at Hong-Kong and “opening” Canton, it pressed up the China coast with a miscellaneous escort of soldiers, sailors, and gunboats, to invade the muddy shoals of the Whang-poo. Here it paused, and proceeded – with musketry and cannon – to inform the city of Shanghai that the White Man wanted to buy and sell. At first Shanghai totally misunderstood the message, with rather ghastly consequences. The Manchus, after trying in vain to beat back the intruders, deliberately slaughtered their wives and families and then committed suicide themselves, sooner than fall into the hands of the “foreign devils.” Many of the peaceable Chinese followed this example: and not until after much bloodshed and terror did they begin dimly to comprehend that the Western Barbarians were not bent on cutting Chinese throats simply for the fun of the thing, but on the contrary wished to trade in an amicable manner to the mutual advantage of both races. When this had been made clear, prosperity set in and foreign merchants could reckon on piling up a fortune in a few years. . .2

In this tongue-in-cheek opening, Rivers offers a redacted history of the growth of “foreign China,” the expanding network of spaces where Britons 30

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worked and lived in the region from the 1840s onward. “Foreign China” was composed of Shanghai, the treaty ports, and the small “outports” that arose in strategically significant points along the China Coast, the Yangtze River basin, and other areas of commercial interest as the result of the trade agreements that ended the Opium Wars. Dominated by trade and commerce – literally figured by Rivers as the protagonist of a progressive narrative of the sometimes forcible “opening up” of a begrudging China – these intercultural locations were first and foremost spaces of economic exchange. Yet for the American, British, and other European men and women living in these enclaves, they were also spaces of intense cultural production, much of it textual. Civil servants like Rivers and Bland, merchants, missionaries, and other interested parties proved prolific writers. The system of the treaty ports – which meant that the Foreign Office maintained a large cadre of diplomats in China – and the situation of the British-led Imperial Maritime Customs Service (IMCS) – which employed mainly Europeans and Americans until the twentieth century – were conditions specific to China that fueled this literary drive. Foreigners in China penned travelogues, histories, poems, and fictions that recorded and interpreted their engagement with the Chinese environment, and they developed newspapers and other periodicals detailing their lives in China that circulated locally, regionally, across China, and beyond. For many of these writers, these periodicals were often the first point of publication, and the presses owned by China-based newspapers such as The North China Daily News were also major regional book publishers. Their works often highlighted their sense of tenuousness about their position in China; their sense that British expansion in the region might be less desirable or feasible than those in India or in Britain recognized; and their daily lives dominated, for many, if not by a resistance to things Chinese, then by a banding together of expatriates of different national, cultural, and class backgrounds by virtue of their physical proximity to each other and their distance from the Chinese. Thus, their literature unifies convergence and divergence in order to make intelligible the place of what Walter Medhurst called “the foreigner in far Cathay.” This sense of distance and proximity was also stabilized and destabilized through this literature’s interest in the figure of the Eurasian, whose hybridity (and, in the case of Hong Kong and Macau, diverse European heritage) was a bellwether for the shifting internal dynamics of Western expansion and intra-European competition, as well as for the presumed stasis of China’s hostility towards foreigners and racially compromised citizens alike.

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To a good degree, then, the denizens of “foreign China” actually brought it into geographical being through their writing. “Foreign China” was at best an inchoate concept. It linked together pockets of Western presence that were divergent in size, imperial allegiance, cultural make-up, and purpose; it also tied them to Shanghai, which was by far the largest and most significant Western settlement in China from the 1840s well into the twentieth century. The idea of “foreign China” and the treaty ports offered ways to discursively emphasize the separation between these sites of trade and informal imperialism and the vast and unsettling stretches of sovereign China that lay beyond its walls or borders. By figuring China as “always stolid and impenetrable to the outward eye” (Croskey, “The S. G.”, 112), “foreign China” made a space for writers to look inward, at their own hybrid expatriate community, and beyond China to the British communities in India and “at home” with which they were linked. The ample opportunity for members of the community to publish locally – and to have their works circulate around “foreign China” – also worked to consolidate a regional imperial identity. This chapter examines a selection of late Victorian fictions that, in Lise Boehm’s words, “illustrate life at the various Treaty Ports which have been opened, oyster-like, by the bayonet during the past fifty years.”3 However, although Britons based in and writing about China described their positionality through tropes of observing, illustrating, and recording that gesture towards objectivity and distance from “Anglo-Chinese life” (Rivers, AngloChinese Sketches, 1), these fictions go far beyond the function of representation. Instead they serve as important focalizers for Britain’s presence in China, recalling on one level the Sino-British community’s sense of internal coherence and on another level the prominent role that China played in Britain’s imperial imagination. The focus is on British authors, but the broader context of the foreign population that inhabited the treaty ports and the International Settlement and French Concession in Shanghai is not lost, as my discussion of the story “Little Mertens” demonstrates. The chapter provides an overview of different kinds of treaty port tales, from hagiographies of notable figures like IMCS Inspector General Sir Robert Hart to hunting narratives to the stories of affairs and liaisons that were ubiquitous in most imperial environments. It is followed by a chapter that uses the work of a would-be Joseph Conrad named James Dalziel to explore more intimately how the literature of “foreign China” charts patterns of intercourse that both connect and differentiate China’s place in the Victorian world to other sites of empire, especially India. In both chapters, I focus on fiction not because it was the only genre chosen by the residents of “foreign China” to describe their experiences, but

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for the following reasons: First, fiction was one of the predominant ways in which Britons resident in China described their day-to-day lives and their interaction with a range of Chinese people, from servants to trading partners to mandarins and other Chinese officials. Diaries and autobiographies covered some of this territory as well, but they generally paid less attention to presenting real or imagined Chinese perspectives (as Rivers does above). Second, in fiction, the internal dynamics of expatriate communities were more prominent than in poetry, travelogues, or other forms of literature. Arguably, different forms of fiction reveal different kinds of engagement with both audiences and the context of narration. There are clear distinctions between the novel and the short story, with the framing device of the anthology also being fundamental to the message of the latter. While I discuss both novels and short stories in this chapter, however, these distinctions are reserved for the next chapter so as to keep the focus in this one on “foreign China” as frame of reference. Producing fiction also assumed a sense of commitment to a base in China, in that the authors were more residents than sojourners. Third, fiction emphasizes the fundamental role played by humor, satire, and irony in characterizing Britons’ engagement with China and the Chinese. That these modes of constructing narrative are so prominent in this body of literature suggests a level of self-reflection about the coercion involved in “opening up” China; it also evinces a skepticism about the Western community’s resistance to adapting to or accepting local conditions, such as “native” dress and diet. The sense of unease, chiding, and selfmockery that emerges from the use of humor, irony, and satire is therefore integrally tied to the larger sense of physical and psychological contingency constitutive of British communities in “foreign China” – the idea that they were interlopers in another’s land. Finally, it is in fiction that a large number of women authors make their presence felt. The fiction produced by these women indicates a reconfiguration of domestic narrative as politically and socially constructed and contingent. The narratives eschew a notion of women as distant or isolated from the larger economic and imperial concerns that underlie their presence in “foreign China.” They envisage the spheres of work and home not as separate but as necessarily entwined in a colonial or proto-colonial context. In examining these reflections on the unique culture of the British and other foreign communities that arose after the Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin, 1842) and the institutionalization of the Customs Service, this chapter asks the following questions: What were the historical conditions that gave rise to British writers in China, and how did they conceptualize their roles? How

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does their output follow larger trends in imperial narrative, such as the imperial gothic, and how does it reflect the uniqueness of their situation in East Asia? What are the narrative conceits and conventions of this literature? What specific tensions between locally produced narratives and metropolitan ones come to the fore? Finally, what kind of relationships – sexual or otherwise – between the Chinese and the Europeans do these writers construct?

Concessions: a history Rivers’s opening to Anglo-Chinese Sketches explains some of the forces that drew Britons to China once traders were allowed to leave their bases in Canton (Guangzhou), where they had been restricted to the hongs on Shamian Island, and Portuguese-held Macao (Macau), and to circulate more widely following the conclusion of the First Opium War. But answering the question of who these writers were and how they participated in the West’s encounter with China from the mid nineteenth century requires a short historical overview of the Customs Service and the treaty port system with which it coexisted. Modeled after the Indian Civil Service and consolidated under Hart in the early 1860s, the Customs Service was the primary (and almost the exclusive) source of income for the Chinese state until after the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, although the service itself survived until 1943. It was also responsible for establishing and running the Chinese postal system. By tradition and treaty, the Customs Service was run by an Englishman.4 Under the Inspector Generalship of Hart, an enigmatic and autocratic figure who became a trusted advisor to the Palace, the service was China’s primary instrument of foreign policy, resolving many issues of taxation, shipping, trade, port supervision, access to Chinese waters, and attempts by Germany, Russia, Japan, and other nations to wrest control of various ports. The organization effectively mediated between China and Britain, her main trading partner, but at times was manipulated by the British to promote their own policies. Thus the service raised complex issues of extraterritoriality between the Chinese Empire that its British, American, and European employees served and their own governments – issues which highlighted the problems of authority in China and, with the rise of the Boxer movement, of anti-foreign sentiment. Functioning, according to many contemporary commentators, as something akin to an empire unto itself with Hart as its ruler, the IMCS proved to be one of the most effective organizations of its

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kind the world over, surviving the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and enduring until the final demise of the treaty ports in the 1940s. The historical narrative that surrounds the IMCS, especially during the long nineteenth century itself, stresses its exceptionalism as a foreign-run entity internal to China’s self-governance. It also emphasizes the Customs Service’s crucial role in propping up a supposedly ailing Manchu state unable to modernize its fiscal affairs and overcome corruption without external, European help. Thus informal imperialism was seen to perform a function of Chinese self-preservation, even though the historical and literary sources render this function suspect through their preoccupation with China’s supposed xenophobia and the resistance to development or “modernization” that they believed characterized both the Chinese government and its populace. This framing of the IMCS narrative naturally obviates questions of coercion and, within literary narratives, enhances the position of the Customs agent (as writer or character) by making him central to maintaining the stability and prosperity of the host country. Ironically, maintenance is a key goal for many of these writers, despite their consistent pillorying of the Chinese as antithetical to change. The concerns and contradictions governing this image of the Customs Service were particularized in the figure of its leader. Hart was, according to Julian Croskey’s dedication to “The S. G.”: A Romance of Peking, the man “who for forty years has controlled the destinies of hundreds of Europeans and Americans scattered among the thirty Treaty Ports of the vast littoral of China, and to whom is due most of the real progress that China has made toward commercial civilization.”5 Seen in much treaty port fiction as the perfect civil servant, loyal and disinterested, Hart’s personal history served as an overarching metaphor for British influence in China and an emblem of what differentiated the China Coast from other sites of British aspiration and settlement in the non-European world. Narrative representations of Hart blur the lines between Western paternalism towards China (evidenced in his fatherly presence in “The S. G.”) and Western self-interest. (Hart was, after all, asked by the British government to be its ambassador to China and was also knighted.) Depictions of his essential goodness, his personal integrity, and his unwavering honesty obviate the potential contradictions of his role in China. Similarly, tales of his personal heroism or that of his employees during the Boxer Rebellion circumvent the possibility that multiple allegiances might engender irreconcilable conflict. In “The S. G.” Hart is given the name “Mr Pericord.” It is an apt moniker, since – in literature, if not in fact – Hart is the cord that wraps around the treaty ports and lends “foreign China” unity.

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By the late nineteenth century, official and unofficial British policy in China revolved around two conflicting though not mutually exclusive poles of thought. At one end was the insistence that upholding the integrity of the Chinese state was imperative to maintaining Britain’s predominant position in China. At the other was the belief that the “breakdown” of China yielded an opportunity for direct territorial expansion and commitment. In a marker of how interventionist perspectives gained strength with distance and when situated in terms of broader imperial dynamics, those actually in China rarely espoused the latter claim. The IMCS, discursively figured as the one stable institution of central authority stemming the tide against a Manchu collapse, served the first policy by safeguarding British preeminence in China and by checking the ambitions and aspirations of rival powers. It was, in the words of Lord Beresford, “the only certain available asset they possessed in the whole Empire” (The Break-up of China, 15). It was an especially important asset after China’s defeat in 1898 in the Sino-Japanese War, raising expectations of a carving-up of China between foreign powers. It was also an essentially European asset, staffed at its higher levels almost exclusively by Europeans, replicating international structures of colonial hierarchy, amassing an archive in the best traditions of British imperial bureaucracy, and alienating itself and its workers from the “genuine” China that lay beyond the areas where foreigners lived and conducted their affairs. The service grew hand in hand with the development of the treaty ports, which were originally coastal towns opened up to foreign trade and settlement in the 1840s and 1860s by the Treaties of Nanking and Tientsin but later expanded to include inland areas and territories occupied by foreign powers, such as British Wei-hai-wei, Russian Port Arthur, and Japanese Formosa (Taiwan).6 Each of the treaty ports – which grew to about fifty by the first decade of the twentieth century – contained areas ceded to foreign powers that were known as concessions or settlements. As Jürgen Osterhammel notes, these “micro-colonies” were “areas leased from the Chinese government by a foreign power, which paid a trifling ground rent and sublet plots to its own nationals. The foreign Consul was the highest executive and jurisdictional authority.”7 Nearly all of these areas also had a British consular officer; in fact, Britain’s consular network in China was its largest in the world (Osterhammel, “Britain and China,” 156). Generally, these concessions were located on the periphery of Chinese cities; often, they were the center of non-missionary foreign life in China.8 Individuals were often posted to remote locations where they had both little authority and little work. As scholarship on cities such as Xiamen (Amoy) and Tianjin has shown, many treaty ports had a built environment that

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reflected some colonial aspects of European dominance, architectural elements drawn from urban design in sites of formal empire, such as Bombay and Calcutta, and Western building materials. A degree of transculturation occurred in the use of the buildings and space and their influence on other urban centers in China, as well as in the influence of Chinese diasporic communities located in imperial spaces on their place of origin and/or return.9 However, the treaty ports often embodied a “dual city” model, with different patterns of urban planning and residential architecture.10 The fictional production from these treaty ports, stemming from these historical and social conditions, maintained itself through the construction of a geographic entity analagous to “foreign China” called the “China Coast.” The concept of the “China Coast” redrew the map of China defined by linking together European settlements. It implicitly denied Chinese sovereignty by placing Peking (Beijing), the capital and seat of the Empire, beyond its bounds. Out of the treaty ports, it created a mirror of Britain herself: sovereign islands both connected and disconnected from a continent of strangers. (The symbolism of the island status of Britain’s one crown colony in the region, Hong Kong, reinforces this notion of the China Coast as a simulacrum for Britain itself.) Such a construction serves as a rejoinder to the universally descried parallel discourse on the part of the Chinese, whose efforts to contain foreigners outside the walls of the Chinese cities (and, until the 1850s, outside of Peking) seek to maintain Chinese isolationism and cultural integrity in the face of “gunboat diplomacy” and inevitable technological change. Under Western eyes, the sensational isolationism of the Chinese also serves to convert mainland China into an island space, bounded on one side by the unknown frontiers of Central Asia (historically contained by the Great Wall) and on the other by a coastline peppered with European settlements. This construction of China via “the China Coast” implicitly Orientalizes the country by ideologically reconfiguring the borders of the “Middle Kingdom” to coincide with the areas “opened up” to Western trade and commerce from the Treaty of Nanking forward. In so doing, it establishes a fixed boundary between sites of trade and an impenetrable, unknown market interior that remains “inscrutable,” unreadable, and static.11 And it contributes to the type of worldview that allowed Dilke to extol “the thoroughly English treaty ports of China” in Greater Britain (579). At the same time, within these narratives, the geographic space of the China Coast homogenizes China and the Chinese by erasing the vast regional and ethnic differences often acknowledged by the era’s travel literature and replacing it with a single, maritime culture, inhabited by

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specific Chinese types: on the working-class side by the amah (equivalent to the ayah of British India), the coolie, and the “boy” and on the more socially elevated side by the “native” staff of the hongs and Customs Houses, and above that, the local officials known as taotais and the mandarins and officials of the Tsung-li yamen (Zongli yamen), China’s version of the Foreign Office. The notion of the China Coast also presents the settlements and concessions as progressive, urban space in contradistinction to China “proper,” which is characterized as inert, populous but nebulous space (hence the common appearance in these narratives of the trappings of urban sophistication in the form of balls, races, dinners, gentlemen’s clubs, etc.).12 Chinese resistance to technology such as the telegraph and the railroad, which, when introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely followed this map of the China Coast, encouraged this imagined geography of capitalism versus despotism. British India, the second metropolitan center to which Britons in China were linked, acted as the counterpoint for these discourses, with British attitudes towards the subcontinent’s princely states serving as the analogue for China beyond the treaty ports. Not surprisingly, India often did serve as the mirror for British expectations and conduct in China; as Robert Bickers points out, even the vocabulary of British India (tiffin, lakh, shroff, godown, coolie, etc.) was transported to China.13 Britons also replicated the institutions of British India through a variety of means, including employing Indians in various capacities. Nevertheless, treaty port stories and novels evince a greater awareness of the artificiality of imperial structures and communities, as well as a greater sense of uncertainty about assumptions of cultural and social superiority, than narratives hailing from formal imperial spaces. The explicitly international character of many of the British settlements in China – in Shanghai, for instance, many Britons lived in the French Concession – and the circumscribed nature of British sovereignty also mean that these narratives construct British identities and nationalisms through a more fractured dialectic than the binary one between colonizer and colonized that came to exert such ideological force in India. Although alternative Western identities are often subsumed under British ones – the narrative distinction between the British and Americans being especially blurred and replaced by an Anglo-American alliance reflective of the two nations’ solidarity in support of the Open Door policy – there is no assumption of British preeminence in China as assured or exclusive. “We are here to-day, a few white men uneasily perched on the fringe of the Yellow Man’s Asia,” notes J. O. P. Bland. “All our commercialism, our

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wars, our diplomacy, and our adventurers have made but little mark on the celestial race in fifty years; he were a bold man who should prophecy what the White Man will be doing in China fifty years hence.”14 In fact, an explicit awareness of the contingency of the British presence in China and the uncertainty of its future belies the jingoistic calls for territorial acquisition or the partition of China bruited back in Britain. This notion of contingency militates against Bernard Porter’s view that Britain’s trade with China in the late nineteenth century was of a special kind because it was “something of an anachronism.”15 Porter argues that everywhere else in the world, Britain’s position had changed “almost out of recognition” in the period 1860–1890, with increased inter-European competition, the development of competing empires, restrictions on free trade, and the “slow whittling down of new opportunities.” China, he asserts, “was almost the last place on earth where the old golden conditions still seemed to hold good in the 1890s – where trade was still free and the political apparatus needed to support it was minimal – which in the eyes of many Britons at this time gave China its great importance” (156). Aside from the Orientalist subtext of Asiatic despotism and stasis evident in Porter’s analysis and his mimicking of late Victorian discourse on the blank spaces on the global map all filling up, his viewpoint jars with those of the treaty port writers themselves. These writers locate the end of the “golden age” not in 1898, with the Sino-Japanese War, but in the 1860s or 1870s. They also ascribe much of the change in Britain’s role in China not to developments in Britain’s relationship with other Western governments and their acquisitions, but to changes within China itself, including the Opium Wars, the rise of the Customs Service, and the Taiping Rebellion. Porter’s view, reflective of the China trade as seen from Britain, also shows the breach between center and periphery in the construction of discourses about China. The wealth of recent critical interest in British India should not eclipse China’s central place in the British imagination. As Jürgen Osterhammel points out, “From the mid-nineteenth century, China formed an integral part of the military, economic, and mental history of European and, in particular, of British imperialism” (“Britain and China,” 146). And although not a few of the opinions and discourses embodied in treaty port literature offer reductive, binary-focused visions of what were highly complex social and cultural interactions taking place in the treaty ports, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, they also record a fluidity of subjectivities sometimes excluded from fictions of empire “proper.” In another mark of difference from similar writing produced in India and other formal sites of British imperialism, treaty port narratives acknowledge

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the contingency of the British position through overt criticism of British and foreign influence in China, as well as by acknowledging the tension between the intentions of many Britons living and working in China and their effects on the Chinese state, economy, and people. Such tension is, in fact, bound up with the very notion of the official British presence in China. Rivers, for example, sees the British consular service as situating itself in the unusual position of protecting Chinese interests against British ones. For Rivers and many other Western authors who hailed from the Imperial Maritime Customs or the merchant class, trading and diplomatic interests were often at odds, and members of these constituencies did not necessarily come together to form a cohesive community, despite their sense of numerical and psychological isolation in small outports and their social interaction. These tensions come to the fore in Rivers’s “The Human Form Divine.” This story narrates a tussle between a Shanghai merchant offended by the naked coolies who carry cargo from steamers to the jetty of a small treaty port in northern China and the port’s consul, who defends the practice by bowing to local customs. The plot is trivial, narrating a “purely personal” difference of opinion (in Anglo-Chinese Sketches, 41). The big-city merchant, convinced that it “was the time for those d – d coolies to wear their pants” (55), flexes his muscle with a minor local official. Nevertheless, the story shows how politics necessarily remains in the foreground in treaty port narratives; the personal cannot be separated from the political, and the inter-imperial frame must assert itself. This is not to say that narratives hailing from other imperial locations did not also connect personal narratives and geopolitics, but to suggest that the sense of contingency that marks treaty port literature made such linkages prominent. From the start, “The Human Form Divine” exposes differences of opinion between diplomats and traders as to their role in China. There is no consensus to govern here. Instead, the story quietly mocks idea that diplomacy’s goal is to uncritically back up commercial interests, a commonplace historical assessment at the end of the Victorian era of the Opium Wars and the gunboat diplomacy to which it gave rise. The story also exposes tensions between the consul and the British military, revealing the different philosophies of engagement that were echoed globally in Britain’s handling of unequal foreign relations. In this instance, the merchant characterizes the consul as having a “marked disinclination to show any hospitality to the British Navy” (47) and decides to exploit this fact to get his way. As “The Human Form Divine” progresses, the consul tars the merchant with “arrogance of race” (50) for wanting to interfere with another culture in

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order to alleviate offense to his own sensibility. “Supposing a Chinese merchant planted himself in London, should we allow him for one moment to arrange the costume of, say, our cab-drivers to suit his own tastes, if he happened to think that they looked improper without pigtails, or did not like his wife to see men in a queue-less condition?” (49). The two situations are not parallel, though, because of the patent power differential between the British and the Chinese and because they pit exposure on the one hand against adornment on the other. This power differential is embodied in the fetishization of the Chinese person as either naked or pigtailed and thus semi-civilized in its presentation. Still, the comments are interesting because they ask the reader to acknowledge these power dynamics and related issues of cultural relativity before disavowing them. If the merchant is a bully, then the narrator characterizes the consul as “extraordinarily pro-Chinese, and more inclined to look after native than foreign interests” (45). The narrator continues, “The expressive term ‘Little Englander’ had not been invented in those days; but if it had been in use, it would assuredly have fitted that consul better than his own uniform. According to him, his own country was always in the wrong, and the only reason why he served under such a scandalous government was apparently in order to find opportunities of minimizing the baleful effects of British power” (47). The use of free indirect discourse ostensibly pegs these opinions to the consul himself, but that attribution is simultaneously undercut by its comic nature – and its extremism. In fact, this vision of diplomacy is more of a piece with the farcical characterization of Commissioner Pordage in Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” (1857). It is certainly not an accurate picture of how the story’s consul acts; by the narrative’s end, Rivers shows him to be pragmatic in his resolution of this personal matter and in his future interpersonal behavior. The real target of the spoof is the reader back in Britain, who might sympathize with the unrealistic views of these “Little Englanders” and hold sentiments that are only tenable because of an ignorance of imperialism on the ground. (Unlike many works by treaty port writers, Anglo-Chinese Sketches was published in London.) This point is solidified when the narrator makes ironic – and incredible – reference to the “nice quiet religious Boers,” with “their love of liberty and justice and purity of administration, also their pretty ways towards inferior races, so unlike the unhappy British!” (48). As is so common in treaty port literature, the key to understanding this narrative looping is Rivers’s satiric or humorous tone, which not only questions the veracity of the sentiments being described but turns them into floating signifiers that attach themselves to figures other than the characters themselves.

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The narrative is also typical in that Chinese agency is both obscured and pivotal to the story’s action. The conflict between the merchant and the consul develops not from personal animosity, but from the coolies’ resistance to the merchant’s desire to control their bodies. It arises when the coolies disregard the merchant’s “remonstrances” to cover themselves when they “find that they could so cheaply and easily annoy the ‘foreign devil,’ and save their own clothes at the same time” (42). “The Human Form Divine” is also typical of imperialist narrative more generally in that men’s insistence on protecting European women’s propriety provides the excuse for intervention. The merchant, Rivers explains archly, “was not squeamish on his own account, of course; but for the sake of his wife and the two or three other foreign ladies in the place” (42). However, when the consul refuses to do his bidding, the merchant engineers things with the help of a sympathetic British Navy captain so that the foreign women and children take a pleasure trip to the jetty, where they see the naked coolies in all their glory. The story reports that the women turn away from this display of nudity, but it does not record their reactions to it. This is hardly surprising, since the significance of the nudity lies in its instrumentality in showing the diplomat that it is the merchant and the military who are really in charge. The question of decency is simply a foil so that the consul can be taught a “humiliating lesson” (55) about his place in the hierarchy overseeing Britain’s interests in China. In narratives such as this one, one means of partly reconciling the tension or contradiction between imperial activities and anti-imperial desires involves displacing the blame for the situation onto an earlier period of the nineteenth century, when the “game of grab” was more active and saw invasions of Canton and Peking, as well as the establishment of the colony of Hong Kong. Thus Rivers’s tale starts with the phrase “Many years ago” (41). These words are shorthand for a once-upon-a-time fairy tale of AngloChinese relations that, like the opening to his collection, colorfully depicts the development of “foreign China” from the vantage of a cosmopolitan Shanghai, a micro-Europe that had much in common with the environment of Rivers’s readers in Britain. While this formulation suggests a polity that ties the British writer overseas to a home base, nevertheless the stories also rely on readers’ interest in a more foreign world. Equally common, however, was a local or regional readership instead of or in addition to a metropolitan one. The specificity of these Hong Kong and treaty port narratives also stems, in part, from patterns of consumption and distribution fostered by the publication and sale of these works on the China Coast itself through such firms as Kelly & Walsh and The Oriental

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Press, both of Shanghai, or in English-language newspapers like the China Mail (where “Dolly,” aka Leonard d’Oliver, published his tales of Hong Kong). Recent scholarship has emphasized the limitations of envisaging empire through Manichean systems and has underscored that the centrality of the “mother country” as the hegemonic locus for the discursive formation of notions of imperialism and nationalism has been overstated, arguing for greater diversity of opinion within the metropole itself and a greater degree of both tension and intercourse between “center” and “periphery.” In addition, critical interest in the operation of multiple, overlapping centers and peripheries has provided models of the uneven development of imperial ideologies in different locations and within different sectors of imperial populations. China Coast narratives thus offer an example of imperial ideology being defined far from Britain, as well as far from the supposed regional center of British India. “For places have their influences,” Mrs. Archibald Little (Alicia Bewicke) points out in her 1902 novel Out in China!, “and form people’s lives, however the people may come and go and think themselves free agents. And thus those who live in China all grow somewhat Chinafied, more or less, and mostly more” (181). Little’s notion of “growing Chinafied” is both an expression of the geographically specific and independent identities and cultures developed in the treaty ports themselves and an indication of the way in which the British inhabitants of the China Coast did imagine themselves as affiliated to a distinct and, to a degree, coherent community. In fact, it is not uncommon for China Coast narratives to announce themselves as the products of such a unique geographic and cultural heritage, as Bland does in Verse and Worse when speaking of “the mind and manners of our Treaty Ports” (iii). This formulation echoes the “manners and customs” genre for describing foreign civilizations, renowned in the Orientalist context through Edward Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Produced and consumed primarily within the communities they concern, these narratives foreground local issues and occurrences; the larger ideological issues surrounding their presence in China as servants of business empire or of the imperialism of free trade emerge, but often more obliquely than in Rivers’s Anglo-Chinese Sketches. At the same time, many of these same writers successfully disseminated their work through London-based periodicals and presses. This fact does not suggest that they conceived of metropolitan audiences as their primary base. British-based adventure writers such as G. A. Henty, Harry Collingwood, and William Carlton Dawe evince quite different preoccupations in their narratives set in China (including discussions of piracy,

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hidden treasure, Chinese cunning, and an obsession with Chinese torture). The latter invest much more heavily in assertions of British superiority and masculinity and display greater enthusiasm for the expansion of British interests in the non-European world, and they use China as one of a set of imperial or proto-imperial locations on which to graft relatively generic fictions.16 However, the publication of treaty-port-based writers at “home” paints a picture of the considerable interchange between metropolitan images of China and the Chinese (as represented, for instance, in the body of fiction about the Chinese community in Limehouse) and fantasies emanating from the outposts of empire, just as the cross-pollination of English-language “Yellow Peril” fictions produced in Britain, Australia, China, Japan, and North America suggests the larger cultural context for such speculative fantasies. More importantly, it also suggests that some market existed in Britain for descriptions of the particularities of the day-to-day lives of Britons living in extra-British settings. Stories like Boehm’s “Playing Providence” – about a bored, nosy woman in a small treaty port in Taiwan who ferrets out the mysterious past of her community’s newest and most reticent member – could appeal to readers back home. Aside from imbuing their texts with a sense of authority, in that their authorship by members of the British community in China lends credence to their interpretation of life along the China Coast and their views of the Chinese themselves, the production and distribution of these narratives within British or international China also worked to construct “foreigners in far Cathay” in certain ways: The narratives emphasize the isolation and tedium of life in imperial backwaters, especially for junior civil servants; they stress the deleterious effects of climate on the British constitution, both physical and moral, and thereby underscore and essentialize a difference between Britons and the Chinese; they conceptualize the culture of Britishness on the China Coast as essentially if problematically bourgeois; and they highlight the self-conscious nature of “society” in relatively metropolitan Shanghai and Hong Kong as a replication of life in British India or London. Because of the ladder system of promotion shared by Customs agents, trading operatives, and consular officials, their narratives frequently construct British China outside of Shanghai and Hong Kong as a site of youth and for youthful indiscretion and adventure in its multifarious guises. Narratives by and about men often focus on men in their twenties who find themselves in unfavorable circumstances, of their own or others’ making, and who either extricate themselves heroically or are destroyed,

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while narratives by women often center on young women, not infrequently fresh from England, and their marital and extramarital adventures. (Both often share an ironic attitude towards their subjects, however.) In the women’s case, treaty port tales give them a crucial space to describe their experiences with informal empire, producing domestic narratives much like those produced in Indian cantonments. Because of the overt isolation of their surroundings, the enforced international character of the Customs Service itself, and the (often reluctant) necessity of integrating missionaries and their wives into “society,” these narratives engage closely with the political and social changes of this period in China. Women were prolific writers in the treaty ports in the late Victorian era, and their contribution to the literature of their community was integral to the emerging definitions of what community meant among and across the disparate settlements of “foreign China.” Like the lives of the women themselves, most of their narratives focus on developments within the concessions and settlement areas in which they lived, excluding from their purview discussions of the Chinese countryside and, sometimes, of the Chinese people entirely. As a consequence, the restriction of their female subjects to the interstices of British China unsurprisingly acts to domesticate this space as “home” both in a literal sense and in a figurative sense as an unsullied space of Britishness. At the same time, the dynamics of their location in China entailed an explicit politicization of “home” itself, which functions not so much as a framing device for tales of romance, marital infidelity, and the like, but as an integral part of the redefinition of domestic narrative as politically and socially constructed and contingent. Lise Boehm, for instance, begins “In the Sixties,” the story of two ill-fated lovers who leave their respective spouses and elope together only to be killed by a righteous typhoon, with these words: Long, long ago, in the good old days, before France began to think of Tongking, before Germany began to think of ousting England in the Far East, before Russia dreamt of a Pacific ice-free port; half-way and more through the Sixties, when dollars were worth the getting and bimetallism a fancy topic of conversation; when fortunes could be made in a decade, if at the peril of one’s life, – some thirty years ago, in short, a grand cleaning, scrubbing and dusting had been going on for a fortnight in the house of the Commissioner of Imperial Maritime Customs, Amoy, South China. (China Coast Tales number 3, 1)

It is not so much that these political events have changed the nature of the British presence in China or its culture as that they point out how that

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presence and culture itself is a product of British and imperial politics and of intra-European cooperation and competition. In Out in China!, Little grafts the events of the Boxer Rebellion onto what is primarily a tale of infidelity in an outport. The invocation of the Rebellion – which neatly imposes morality on an otherwise immoral love story by killing off the eloping heroine – suggests the impossibility of separating the home and work environment in a colonial or proto-colonial setting. It also serves as a platform for Little to complain about how indifferent her readers at home are to the reality of life in China and to convey the effects of public sentiment and government policy in Britain on the lives of her citizens many thousands of miles away. Mocking her readers for wanting tales about “some ports rich in scandals, dark tragedies of which no one in China ever knows the real mot de l’enigme, but over which someone in Europe has probably shed bitter tears enough” (39), she then chastises them for their lack of interest in tangible events in China like the Boxer Uprising. For “whatever subject is brought up . . . England’s Imperial interests are so vast no one is ever in a position to prove that any particular point should be attended to, before it forces itself upon public attention, thus all alike can be neglected by Government Officials till – it is too late for any but the Military. The people who had lost those they loved best in China had not the heart to say much, and those, who did not care much, continued not to care much” (170–171). Having drawn her readers in with romance, she envelops them with politics and shows how inseparably linked the two must be “out in China” – whatever they think back “home.”

The conventions of late Victorian culture on the China Coast At their most conventional, treaty port narratives by both men and women work to extend Victorian moral codes to China, including imperial taboos against cultural contact and miscegenation and more general strictures against gambling and drinking (a not uncommon part of the barracks and club culture prevalent in many treaty ports). These narratives most often are set in Hong Kong or Shanghai, described as microcosms of London or Calcutta, particularly with regard to the perils of pleasure. Dawe, best known for his “Yellow Peril” fiction – all of which was published and disseminated from London, not China – writes in “A Night in Canton” (1897) of the adventures of two Britons having a “look see” at the Chinese city. There, they get in trouble with a mandarin in a saloon, are embroiled in a knife fight, and escape on to a sampan while being pursued by a horde of men shouting, “The barbarians, the barbarians – kill them, kill them!”17

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Outside of the treaty ports, it seems, the Chinese are better left to their own devices. “Yellow and White,” the title story of his 1895 anthology about the East, relates the tale of Gresham, told to the narrator on a steamer heading north from Hong Kong. Gresham has committed the sin of falling for a married woman, and a “half-caste” one at that. This deviation brings retribution in the form of the archetypal vengeful “Chinaman” Quong, who lays various plots against his life – from which Gresham naturally escapes. The fate of the woman, however, is shrouded in obscurity. Here, crossing the “colour line” functions as a symbol of Gresham’s already deviant desire, rather than constituting the problem itself, while the fact that the mixed-race woman’s purely Chinese husband seeks spectacular revenge is attributed more to his innate character as a Celestial than to any sense that he might have an actual grievance. Thus, metropolitan stories such as this one in no way contest strictures against contact between “East” and “West.” Scholars of imperial narratives will recognize the utterly conventional in Dawe’s tales, particularly in their invocation of a colonizing male gaze and their fascination with the exotic, in their complete disinterest in the fate of the not-quite-white female protagonists, and in their ultimate rejection (and conflation) of extramarital and intercultural relationships. However, many treaty port narratives articulate the development of youth in less typical and potentially more transgressive ways, particularly by condoning or sympathizing with acts of cultural hybridism and miscegenation and by depicting the China Coast as a location for the construction of model citizens of the world, rather than for exiling or developing model libertines from Europe and America. This configuration matches certain late-nineteenth-century views described by Stephen Arata, which conceive of the periphery of empire as a source of reinvigorated Britons under a Greater-Britain structure. “In the popular imagination,” he adds, “the colonies were no longer the dumping ground for second sons, social outcasts, and the chronically under-employed. Part of the developing myth of Anglo-India was that the work of empire attracted the sturdiest of domestic stock, leaving only the dregs behind.”18 Julian Croskey’s novels and tales, for instance, turn bored young Customs officers into detectives or political agitators rashly acting out a loyalty to Hart and his enterprise in true, muscular Christian style. These narratives treat China as a palimpsest; British influence and the IMCS have rewritten the surface of Chinese governance. But the British overlay is incomplete. Corruption and malice lie underneath, motivating the plots of detection that serve as a means to recoup or consolidate the salutary

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effects of outside influence on China. The men (or women) work below the surface and do not seek public recognition for their efforts, thereby disabling suggestions of self-interest. In fact, they often act in ways that directly harm their careers (if not their love interests). Typically, their subterfuge is mistaken for treachery, rather than the loyalty, respect, and love for their head, Hart, that it actually indicates. Such plots therefore assert Hart’s image as scrupulously fair and impervious to favoritism, turning the IMCS into a model institution of British colonial administration because it is an instrument of justice and progress. They also emphasize Hart’s position as a cult-like figure who is the benign guardian of two sometimes opposed groups of subjects, the Chinese and his own workforce. Narratively, protecting the interests of the Customs Service, and thus of China as a whole, locks the young protagonists of these tales in a struggle against corrupt local authority. The struggle is both symbolic of British fears about the late-nineteenth-century dissolution of central authority in China and their conviction of the IMCS’s centrality to maintaining just authority through Anglo-American pluck, patience, and diplomatic skill. In The Chest of Opium (1896), twenty-one-year-old Mr. Max is left in charge of the Customs godown in the port of Wookiang after a suspicious murder involving the shen, who lures away his superior, Bühl. At great personal risk, Max uncovers and defeats an opium-smuggling ring, but the cunning shen takes the credit, and Max is almost sacked for disobeying orders during his superior’s absence. His rashness of youth thus gets its natural check through the agency of Chinese cleverness (discursively made possible by Max’s own weakness as an opium smoker), but ultimately serves to safeguard the IMCS behind the scenes. In “The S. G.”: A Romance of Peking (1900), set against the backdrop of the Boxer Rebellion, the young Customs officer Blake undertakes a deed of derring-do when he steals a Russian diplomatic dispatch from the Chinese postal service. His efforts initially win him dismissal from Hart’s service, but they stymie a Russian plot to occupy Peking and control China and, of course, abolish the Customs Service. Like Out in China!, “The S. G.” fuses the personal and political and the domestic and the imperial. Weighty geopolitical events hinge on Blake’s admiration for Pericord (Hart) and his love for the half-Russian, half-Manchu Valda. Valda herself enlists Blake’s support out of her own love for Pericord, who had chivalrously saved her from teasing as a child. Although coupled with her disgust at the horrors the Russians intend, her relationship to Pericord is her primary motivation for repudiating her paternal heritage, a factor made apparent

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when she installs herself in his household disguised as a Chinese boy musician so that she can protect him.19 Croskey’s invention of a Russian plot to control China demonstrates the novel’s emphasis on China’s significance to the Victorian imagination because of its geopolitical location. It follows the contours of the narratives discussed in Chapter 3 by seeing the Boxer Rebellion as a turning point in China’s relationship with foreign powers. Russia’s actions in the novel are also motivated by a fear of a threatening “Yellow Union” that is also typical of the close association between fiction about the Boxers and the Yellow Peril invasion novels discussed in Chapter 4. At the same time, however, this plot twist makes China into a new theater of operations for Kipling’s Great Game, underscoring how significant the interrelatedness of different imperial locations and the intertextuality of imperial narrative was. The novel also participates in the wider pattern of rewriting local and imperial history to cater to expectations about geopolitical sentiments. Thus the fictional narrative of Russian nefariousness undercuts Russia’s true historical role as Britain’s ally in defeating the rebellion, but it accurately reflects British anxieties and suspicions about Russia’s trustworthiness and expansionist ambitions in Asia. “The S. G.” not only emplots the history of Hart’s personal recruitment procedures for the IMCS – which enrolled poor but very apt youths as young as fourteen, giving them social status and money in exchange for unflinching loyalty and hard work – but also credits the Customs Services with constructing China as a land of opportunity and advancement for those from disadvantaged backgrounds and subsequently subsuming them into the bourgeois culture of the concessions. The essential difference, however, is that it suggests a radically different moral code of conduct from the official one of the treaty ports and especially of the major European centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai, a code that neither discourages contact with “natives” nor actively stigmatizes racial fluidity. (Hart himself had relations with Chinese women, which were no secret to the treaty port communities and which are inserted into the plot of novels like “The S. G.”; in formal colonies like India, such relationships on the part of a high official would have been scandalous.) In the best Victorian tradition of concluding imperial narratives by consolidating British identity through marriage, “The S. G.” ends with Blake’s betrothal to Valda. However, Valda is no angel of Englishness, even though she is presented as a paragon of morality, loyalty, good conduct, and social conscience. She is, for most of the novel, the illegitimate daughter of a Russian consul and a Manchu concubine. Like the hero of

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Kipling’s Kim (1901), her political utility stems from her unfixed racial and cultural identity, which allows her to be either Chinese/Manchu or Russian/ British as needed and even to switch gender. Like Kim, she operates between and across languages; she is fluent in Chinese, Russian, French, and English. Unlike Kim, however, she has no originary European subjectivity to render her ultimately legitimate. Her Russian heritage cannot even be said to dominate; although her beauty is predicated on it, the moral and political sentiments that establish her worthiness in Blake’s, Hart’s, and the reader’s eyes are predicated on a refusal to be fully Russian. Her loyalty, instead, is to the British characters, Blake and Pericord, as if she instinctively knows that Pericord is her true father: Towards the end of the novel, Croskey hints that Valda is probably Hart’s illegitimate daughter. This twist both explains her earlier allegiance to him and allows her to transfer her affections from the paternal figure of the S. G., or Superintendent General of Revenues, to Blake. Thus “The S. G.” provides a narrative in which racial hybridity and miscegenation are neither erased under the sign of cultural hybridity (as in Kim) nor punished, as in many India-set narratives. The hybrid is neither a degenerate nor a troublemaker, but a model citizen. She is seemingly not British, but her embodiment of the best of British values trumps her racial characteristics and her illegitimacy to make her the proper object of the British hero’s affections. In fact, her sterling femininity spurs said hero to perform selfless and noble acts. The novel valorizes Valda’s activity and agency as appropriate for a woman, and it admires her New Womanly behavior. Although able to shine in the balls and parties dominating the social calendar of “foreign China,” these are not her element. In contrast to India, Croskey’s China not only allows for a fluidity of identity, but also celebrates it. Progressive as this message appears, though, it is still grounded in conservative class terms. Valda has either a prince or the S. G. for her father and a well-bred Manchu woman – who by the end of the novel is the wife of a high Chinese official – for her mother. In this sense, she is a legitimate bourgeois subject, if not a legitimate racial one. “The S. G.” therefore conforms to a broader pattern in imperial fiction of attributing high-class Chinese origins to female heroines who are the product of miscegenation. Boehm’s “Dobson’s Daughter,” discussed below, and George Sims’s “Li Ting of London,” discussed in Chapter 6, afford other examples. Croskey’s optimistic championing of the hybrid subject and local society’s acceptance of it is typical in sympathetically viewing the hybrid spaces and peoples of the China Coast as productive. His narratives are also characteristic of the overwhelming preponderance, almost banality, of

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figures of racial hybridity in treaty port tales. This preponderance clearly differentiates China from imperial narratives about India or Africa. It is suggestive of the overall smallness of the British community in China that it could so tacitly discount late Victorian strictures against miscegenation, at least in fiction. There is, however, a distinction between actual practice, which produced a substantial number of mixed-race citizens in Hong Kong and the treaty ports, and official or social acceptance of it. Thus a number of China Coast tales articulate their sympathy for hybridity by opening up an ironic sense of difference between the harsh treatment meted out to the mixed-race individuals or relationships that give rise to their plots and a narrative voice that condemns this treatment as tragic and destructive. The writers make their readers fully aware that these hybrids are literally born out of Britain’s encounter with China and see in their illegitimacy a condemnation of the very moral codes that produced them. Boehm’s “Dobson’s Daughter” relates the history of a girl fathered by a rich British merchant with one of his domestic servants. At the start of the story, he brings his daughter Sacha back from small-town England, where she has been living peacefully, to suffer snubs and indignities from the foreign community in Foochow (Fuzhou). The bulk of the narrative, however, concerns the consequences of her father’s death, when the wives of the consul and the local commissioner of customs use her as a pawn among them. The game ends when the consul’s son Harry marries her, leading to the destruction of his family: Harry’s father contracts a nervous illness, resigns, and retires to Bath, where he invents a new history for Sacha: “My daughter-in-law,” he tells a visitor, “is a Princess in her own right, and my grandchildren might all call themselves Serenities, if they chose. Compare this upstart aristocracy of ours in England with the nobility of the East! There is birth, and blue blood, if you like!” (71–72). In fact, the story proves just this: It is the elite of British “society” in China that acts ignobly, and their inability to accept Sacha purely on the grounds of her hybridity destroys them. The narrative also implies that Sacha’s difference is only meaningful in the small-minded community in China; her earlier life in Britain is not blighted by such hypocritical racism. The irony is that the details of the upstairs-downstairs liaison that has produced Sacha are obscured in England, where this history is not known, while in Foochow race trumps class as grounds for ostracism.20 Sympathy for the product of unions between British men and Chinese women, or for the women caught in these relationships, is also bound up with the idea that the treaty ports were stereotypical imperial sites for the

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expression of male sexual license or appropriate places of exile for men whose indiscretions at home necessitated removal to the colonies. (The latter was a male counterpart to the practice of shipping unmarriageable women to the colonies to improve their prospects.) Far from championing such male behavior, however, treaty port narratives obliquely censure it when these Anglo-Chinese relationships are grounded not in affection but in expediency and involve issues of economic or sexual exploitation, physical abuse, and willful cultural ignorance on the man’s part. The censure is oblique, rather than direct, because the narratives initially present the British or European man as the protagonist and thus the object of readerly sympathies. It is also oblique because superstructural issues like the difficulties of exile and gendered economic inequality often motivate the problems that these men face in their interaction with local women. Cross-cultural relationships grounded in affection may also face some of these challenges, even with disastrous consequences, as in Dalziel’s story “The Colour Line” analyzed in the following chapter. However, where the affection is sincere and potentially mutual and where the European man proves a loving father to his Eurasian offspring, the censure is generally lacking or is transferred into a condemnation of the superstructures that derail the relationships. S. E. Brady’s “Little Mertens,” from The Jewel and the Lotus and Other Stories (Shanghai, 1905), exemplifies this spectrum’s more conservative end. Here, the censure emerges out of tensions between the title character’s expression of sexual license and his ignorance of Chinese modes of thought: As every one knows who has been there, China, in any part, is one of the best reformatories in the world. No one ever drinks too much; no one is ever known to gamble; as for taking an undue and illegitimate interest in one’s neighbour’s wife, such a thing is as unknown as a mesalliance. The people at home are inclined to think it is something in the climate, or in the purifying influence of the Confucian doctrine, and with touching confidence, ship out there, persons who have done all these things to excess in Europe, and America, sure that they will be able to work out a reform in China – the Treaty Ports being especially recommended.21

The light and ironic tone that characterizes this passage is typical of the narrative voice of many male writers hailing from the treaty ports, who attempt to portray themselves as blasé and worldly in contradistinction to their naive and often newly arrived characters. Such a tone is fitting for one social element of this type of tale, relationships outside of wedlock. Indeed, the irony is produced partly out of the discordance between male protagonists who sow wild oats, but who are in no way sophisticates, despite their dalliances. This conjunction of innocence and experience under the aegis of

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sex outside of marriage featured prominently in British metropolitan fiction (in the literature of Bohemianism, for instance) and on the stage in dramas by writers such as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. By initially stripping such relationships of their cultural or ethnic components, the treaty port variant of these stories taps in to generic ideas about the conduct of young European men, whether at home or in empire. However, once questions of ethnicity, race, and culture start to intervene, the meaning of the generic story of a young man indulging his fancies alters: First, the stories operate by granting varying degrees of omniscience to the authors or narrators, but this omniscience is contingent on their stated or unstated position as “old China hands.” The author or narrator’s ability to “read” China better than characters like Mertens is what enables the plot. In this case, Mertens takes a Chinese mistress. She appears loving and faithful, but unbeknownst to him, she poisons him with chopped bamboo in a successful bid to inherit his wealth. Various other European characters also signal the difference between Mertens’s naive belief in his mistress and the narrator’s ability to see, at a distance, that she actually reverts to type (by being the cunning, grasping, greedy Chinese woman). These characters initially view Mertens’s mistress with suspicion. They include Mertens’s friend Leland, “a longer resident of China, and a not so credulous acceptor of the point of view presented by the wily celestial” (66), and his brother, who asks the doctor, “But do you think he is properly looked after? The young ass has got himself tangled up with that little Chinese beast, and living as he does, so secludedly, one doesn’t know what happens” (70). Although the narrator’s guise of worldliness makes the story seem to fit the trope of innocence abused, in reality, it masks a message of moral censure for sex outside marriage. Mertens’s death demonstrates that uncontrolled and inappropriate desire across the “colour line” is subject to “natural” moral laws and must be punished. In so doing, it also exposes the economic problems inherent to hierarchical intercultural relationships that make it to the mistress’s advantage to bump off a man who is, in actuality, concerned about her welfare. Had Mertens not provided for the mistress in the event of his death, she would have had no cause to kill him. In addition, the story reiterates a commonplace of treaty port literature and perhaps imperial literature more widely, the idea that an interest in China and things Chinese is potentially dangerous. Thus the harbinger of Mertens’s doom is not his sexual behavior, but his decision to hire a tutor to teach him Chinese and to interest himself in his host culture. It is this tutor who takes him around the Chinese parts of Shanghai, where he eventually meets his mistress, Little Plum. The tutor also acts as a middleman when

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Mertens decides to “purchase” the woman. More importantly, though, Sinology has broader implications for the idea of cultural knowledge exchange. Mertens begins to fancy himself a “sinologue” (70), and Brady makes it clear that his community is surprised by his aptitude for the Chinese language. In fact, the sicker he becomes, the more he applies himself to “his Chinese studies” (70). Thus there is an immediate and direct relationship between an investment in the local, be it intellectual or sexual, and the decline of Europeanness, symbolized in this example by health. A further irony is that the story is literally framed by the fact that Mertens is led to study “things Chinese” by an “old resident, who’d been through it all, and knew the only salvation for an exile in Peking” (46). Despite Mertens’s death, Brady ends the story by having this same resident still instructing “young men going the pace from ennui” to “go in for ‘things Chinese,’ giving little Mertens as an instance of the success attendant upon following his advice” (79). In sum, the narrative confounds the distinction between the knowledge of old China hands and the naivety of young newcomers, but it makes this old resident an unnamed, potentially malevolent presence playing with other people’s fates. The story also draws a distinction between the issue of Mertens’s lack of experience as a man and his scholarly pursuits. The old China hands know that he should really be studying the Chinese character – and keeping it at bay. Had he been less trusting, for instance, he might have discovered that his mistress was having an affair with the proprietor of a Chinese teashop and that the child she bears is not his, but the fruit of that union. Yet Mertens is oblivious to the fact that she has powerful personal and economic motives for deceiving and eliminating him, whereas he provides her with no good motives for her to remain in a relationship with a foreigner who disgusts her. He is doubly foolish in making arrangements for an allowance to be paid to her and for her to keep his house, should he die. Perhaps the most interesting element of the story is the fact that it conveys these conventional ideas about Chinese behavior through the narrator, who gives insight into the thoughts and motivations of Mertens’s mistress. Readers are privy not just to her actions – her visits with her lover, for instance – but to her worldview. This mode of writing demonstrates the old China hand’s ability to correctly assess the Chinese character, in contradistinction to Mertens’s misreading of his situation. It also bolsters the idea of European, male superiority by allowing the narrator to enter into Little Plum’s subjective mind – to, as it were, fathom enough of the unscrutable nature of the Chinese character to make the woman’s actions intelligible. A subsequent plot twist further enhances this sense of

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superiority. After Mertens’s death, his mistress is confronted by her maid, who knows that Little Plum has murdered Mertens. Indeed, the maid’s attempt to blackmail her mistress is how readers actually learn that Mertens has not died of natural causes. The author’s decision to withhold this information until the end of the story means that readers are effectively put in Mertens’s position of ignorance, making the putative reader someone like Mertens, who has newly arrived in China from the West. Little Plum then tricks the maid and has her killed to silence her. The woman’s transition to ruthless murderer only succeeds diegetically because readers now “understand” that the Chinese nature is wily, calculating, and selfish. Ironically, this concept of the Chinese character is directly at odds with another prominent assessment, that the Chinese are familyoriented and that their society is structured around notions of community allegiance, rather than self-interest. Yet the narrative also provides an answer to this conundrum in several ways. First, Little Plum has had unnatural mothering. Her mother is a prostitute, and before meeting Mertens, she has been raised above her station so her virginity will fetch a higher price. Second, her murderous actions actually serve to protect her new family, consisting of her lover and their child. Finally, her extreme selfishness is predicated on the fact that Mertens is not Chinese; he lies outside the bounds of the social structures of her community, and she has never seen their relationship as constituting a family. Instead, she has gone to great pains to construct an alternative, authentically Asian family while she is with him. Dolly’s occult tale “The Vampire Nemesis,” published in the collection The Vampire Nemesis and Other Weird Stories of the China Coast (1905), figures equally dire consequences for Britons who sexually mistreat Chinese women, but goes one step further by representing this mistreatment as symbolically un-English and antithetical to a British value system. The story concerns two college chums from Cambridge – Ward, the narrator, and Fergusson – who, after globetrotting in Guiana and Malaya, join the IMCS and are “finally stationed at Ningpo [Ningbo], with every prospect of its being a permanency.”22 To make a long story short, Fergusson steals his mistress from the half-caste subordinate Matthews, whom he drives first to opium out of “implacable hatred” and then to suicide, but for whose plight he feels no remorse. He himself becomes increasingly enthralled to the demon drink and increasingly brutal to his loyal and loving mistress. In one drunken stupor, he ties her to the bed and tortures her in terms suggestive of extreme sexual violation. He awakens to find her dead, but ascribes her death not to his own hand but to a mysterious vampire bat that acts as his nemesis.

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Fergusson himself dies at the moment of making his escape from the Imperial police (headed, not coincidentally, by an Englishman). As he walks the tightrope of a wire between his window and the pole that flies the Union Jack outside the British Consul’s gardens, the vampire nemesis grabs his throat and leads him crashing to his death. Here the boundaries between different types of authority and sovereignty are severely compromised. Britons are both the ones who perpetrate crimes against the Chinese and the ones who enforce justice on behalf of the Chinese. Paradoxically, the potential legal sanctuary provided by the space of the consulate nearly allows Fergusson to escape justice, a conclusion only frustrated by the avenging angel of the bat, a creature that, through flight, can literally transcend the borders between British and Chinese space. This final plot twist draws attention to the heightened function of extraterritoriality as a mode of extending British sovereignty over non-British territory. This anomalous position highlights the problematic expansion of authority through processes of abstraction that determine the legal status of the individual not through their location in sovereign space but through their membership of a national community. Such an extension of authority over Britons operating on the outskirts of empire was by no means uncommon, a point that the history of the regulation of the slave trade and of later labor exchange schemes confirms. In these instances, Britons again acted as violators and enforcers of British law in geographical locations beyond British sovereignty. Writing about the South Pacific, Roslyn Jolly notes that “the Victorian vision of empire created and expressed through law” constitutes a significant imperial imaginary.23 Like the Stevenson narratives that Jolly analyzes, “The Vampire Nemesis” “invite[s] us to consider the unstable relations between two types of colonialism, formal and informal, and two kinds of imperial imaginary, the lawful and the outlawed” (170). As in the South Pacific, in China, too, Britain’s potential complicity in metaphorical acts of piracy comes to the narrative foreground, begging the question of how the treaty port system itself stretches the notion of moral legitimacy. However, Dolly’s narrative mostly exonerates the treaty port system by concentrating narrative attention on the flaws of the individual character, Fergusson. As a result, unlike Mertens, Fergusson’s fate seems fully merited. His degeneration and death are directly tied to his unnatural, unmanly, and consequently un-British, conduct. The tale stands in direct contrast to the “The S. G.” ’s more common representation of the IMCS as the home for proper masculine subjects like Blake and Hart himself. Ward and Fergusson join the IMCS out of a sense of aimlessness, not conviction. They perform a kind of elite idleness and degeneracy that, if not

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dandyism, suggests they are out of place as lowly Customs employees in China. Their aimlessness is figured as a misplaced muscular Christianity, which, in Fergusson’s case, turns toxic because the sound body comes at the expense of the sound mind. The two youths wander the world because at university they have paid more attention to cultivating their bodies than their brains. They embark on their travels once they find that “seasoned” arms are of little use in the real world (9) in the hopes that their athleticism will be needed in an imperial setting. Although the tale does not go so far as to suggest that Fergusson’s desire for his mistress is misplaced because it replaces his homosocial bond with the aptly named Ward, it does assert that his betrayal of a sporting ethic and his inability to control his bodily desires are to blame. His rampant masculinity, because it remains unchecked in the isolated environment of the outport and gives him free rein to act in excess – against the “half-caste” Matthews, in pursuit of sexual gratification, and in alcoholic abuse – leads him astray. In the final plot twist, it is precisely Fergusson’s muscular failure that kills him: he loses his balance on the wire and tumbles to his death. Joseph Bristow has argued that effeminacy and empire stood at violent opposition in the late nineteenth century.24 It is therefore important that unlike Bram Stoker’s vampire, the bat that acts as Fergusson’s nemesis does not gradually attack and enervate him, thereby feminizing him – although opium has enervated and feminized his victim Matthews. Instead, the vampire, as Matthews’s vengeance incarnate, invokes the failure of Fergusson’s masculinity and visits his own brutality on him. In so doing, it spectacularly reverses the assumed passivity of the “half-caste,” converting him into an active force, which represents justice and fairness. Dolly’s story is thus strikingly different from imperial adventure fiction emanating from Britain, with its assertion of non-European space as an idealized environment for forming British masculinity and, potentially, for reining in male waywardness.25 It shockingly reiterates Brady’s skepticism that China is one of the “best reformatories in the world” for British youth. However, Dolly mitigates what could be seen as the narrative’s radical tendency to award agency and retribution to the Chinese-affiliated characters by giving Fergusson, not his victims, the reader’s sympathy. Dolly has the story narrated by Fergusson’s best friend, Ward, whom readers should see as decent and whose very loyalty to a cad garners further sympathy. Ward characterizes the vampire as a “Thing,” using the words “frightful,” “horrible,” “monster,” “hideous,” and “malignant” (33). This depiction of the bat reveals a conservative racial and ethnic politics that – literally and figuratively – reifies the stereotype of the vengeful half-caste. It simultaneously denies the

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supernatural the power to enact divine justice. The story also validates Ward’s desire to help Fergusson escape so that he “can get another chance of freedom” (30). This statement establishes Fergusson’s entitlement to multiple opportunities for reform and minimizes his role in enslaving and murdering Matthews and his wife.

Excursions in the interior “The Vampire Nemesis” treats issues of authority and responsibility in a contact zone of hybrid sovereignty with appropriate ambivalence and ambiguity. Like other narratives set within the concessions of the treaty ports or Hong Kong, it presents if not sympathetic, at least complex, renderings of hybrid types; moreover, it never succeeds in absolving its Britons of responsibility for their interactions with Chinese or Eurasian characters. Narratives which stray onto the more fully Chinese terrain outside the settlements and concessions, however, engage in much more frank discussions of xenophobia and the way in which British and Chinese distrust of the Other serve to mirror each other. Many of these narratives concern shooting parties or other pleasure excursions in the space surrounding the treaty ports themselves. Again, a distinction surfaces between adventure tales written and published in London by writers more invested in metropolitan imperial ideology, who focus on British bravery in evading bloodthirsty barbarians, and the more ironic representations of British blundering and culture clash flowing from the pens of writers familiar with China. Such narratives serve as a focal point for the double-edged sword of xenophobia by contrasting the overt xenophobia of the Chinese and rural Chinese communities, stirred up by their own governments and by missionary blunders against the presence of “foreign devils” in the Middle Kingdom, with the more unconscious xenophobia of the Britons, who themselves often incite violence by treating China as an imperial site like any other, or especially as one like India. “English officers in particular, who have been accustomed to the natives of India,” James Payn writes on the first page of the novel By Proxy (1878), “are apt to get into trouble with those of China; the character of ‘Pandy’ being very different from that of John Chinaman, and especially of John Chinaman on his own dunghill.”26 Britain’s claims for extraterritoriality for its citizens in China and the anomalous position of the foreign settlements and concessions as being outside of Chinese authority bolstered this dialectic of xenophobia and spawned a distinct sub-genre of treaty port literature, the hunt/recreation

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narrative. This sub-genre was a distinctly masculine affair, like its counterpart in other points of empire. The authors were frequently older men in the employ of the IMCS writing about the foibles of griffins or other young men who get into trouble by misunderstanding where foreign China ends and sovereign China begins. The narratives are light in nature, and they often involve a conceit in which the young protagonists narrate their comical or embarrassing encounters with the Chinese for a reading public in Britain. However, instead of growing through these experiences, these protagonists typically recast the events in heroic terms that are then undercut by the ironic voice of the authors themselves. This breach highlights the distinction between imperial landscape as a fantasized site for masculine derring-do and an actual site for humiliation, for the humbling of pride, and for the recognition of alternative worldviews in which the recognition of Britain’s global authority is sidelined or overlooked. In a series of such narratives written in the years surrounding the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, British writers based outside of China concentrate on the Chinese mob’s reactions to more or less innocent British military and civil servants, who stray from the settlements in the pursuit of leisure, generally fishing or hunting, but who through a characteristic ignorance of cultural customs, and because they are generally the first white people the villagers have even seen, arouse popular sentiment – escaping death only through the use of hallmark British ingenuity. Such narratives play into stereotypical notions of Chinese barbarity, of what C. Mary Turnbull calls “the troubled hinterland, which most Englishmen at the time regarded as a benighted continent of cruelty and misery, where corrupt mandarins meted out barbaric punishments, and heathens drowned girl babies at birth.”27 However, they uneasily refer to these images by relating them to internal anxieties about working-class mass movements at home, suggesting a gap between the narrative conceptions of the uncivilized that they intend to demonstrate and the way that these conceptions rebound onto the Britons themselves. Typical of these “outsider” hunting narratives is Robert S. Winn’s “A Chinese Adventure,” published in Fifty-two Stories of Greater Britain (1901). A hunting expedition by a Shanghai doctor and a visiting ship-surgeon goes awry, resulting in the blinding of a local “Chinaman,” after which the taotai attempts – unsuccessfully, of course – to extort money and kill the Englishmen. The ostensible cause of the trouble is the English shipsurgeon’s decision not to have his sport interrupted despite the closeness of a crowd of Chinese curious to glimpse “foreign devils.” However, the underlying cause is the main characters’ presumption of China as somehow

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part of the British Empire, or at least part of a British network of affiliation and control held together loosely under the rubric “Greater Britain,” that should allow them to behave with such impunity. Moreover, the protagonists’ callous refiguring of the rural Chinese as forming a part of the hunting landscape tacitly ignores the fact that their hunting grounds are within Chinese settlements. The gathering of more than 500 Chinese at the riverside “threatened to bring the sport to an end,” and when they refuse to move away to allow the hunters to shoot pheasant, “They seemed at once careless of their safety and insolent, as though they were only seeking for some good excuse for active hostility” (412–413). Thus the narrative transfers the actual aggression from the young Britons to the Chinese, and evokes the stereotyped notion that the Chinese populace is not only naturally anti-foreign, but also ever ready to attack foreigners even when they are a novelty and completely alien to their daily experience. The protagonists keep them at bay, while the surgeon who has shot the Chinese man removes twenty pellets from his eye, bandages him up, and offers “adequate” compensation. The greedy and bloodthirsty taotai shows the perversion of Chinese selfgovernance, British pluck saves the situation, and ship-surgeon Oswald “joined his ship with a sense that up-country shooting in China was more hazardous sport than tigers in India ever afforded him” (420). Given that tigers were commonly used to describe the savage Indian character, these words strongly condemn China as an even more inherently violent place than that imperial location with which it is most commonly juxtaposed. If Winn’s narrative opens up a breach between British violence as accidental and without a defined target and Chinese violence as purposeful and directed at outsiders, it nonetheless evades the erasure of the Chinese presence “up-country” that it seeks to assert. The utter disregard for human life and suffering attributed to the Celestials here is displaced on to the Britons through the initial actions of the ship-surgeon, although the story still reifies the perception of the Chinese as inherently violent. In other words, Chinese barbarism may be a projection of British hostility, but “A Chinese Adventure” does not emphasize this possibility, in part because it is written in a minor key, rather than in the heroic mode that marks other examples of adventure fiction, such as the work of H. Rider Haggard. Thus the violence done to the Chinese villager is literally incidental, even though the local reaction to it is taken to signify a larger truth about Chinese hostility to the ostensibly innocent presence of foreigners in their midst. At the same time, there is a double denial of difference on the part of the two doctors while engaged in hunting – that is, the denial of the difference between man and beast that allows the ship-surgeon to shoot at pheasant

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while surrounded by peasants and the denial of the difference between the Chinese and Indian situation that forms the premise of the shooting party in the first place. This layered denial serves to undermine, rather than uphold, universal notions of imperial space even while arguing for China’s inclusion in Britain’s map of empire because of the seeming lawlessness of the Chinese countryside. In fact, the local official’s entire disregard for the consequences of murdering these Britons at a time when similar acts of violence served as catalysts for European expansion in China – the killing of two missionaries in 1897, for instance, had secured for the Germans a colonial port (Kiachow/ Jiaozhou) – is historically untenable. Yet it does mirror turn-of-the-century metropolitan sentiments about the breakdown of Chinese central authority as the justification for interventionist policies. Narratives such as these describe China as like India in terms of race, culture, poverty, and depravity, but as unlike it in being always in or near a daunting state of rebellion against the British presence analogous to the 1857 Mutiny but more threatening because never suppressed. Moreover, they define China outside of the concessions and treaty ports as a space for adolescent male development (given the young age at which many people entered the hongs or Customs Service). Consequently, adolescent rebellion brings trouble because these hunting trips often were technically illegal and expressly forbidden by their employers; the Treaty of Tientsin authorized European travel in the interior only in pursuance of trade and made travelers subject to the authority of the local taotai if they committed an offense.28 Yet this behavior fosters the bravery later needed in contests with the Boxers, pirates, or corrupt Chinese. Stories by “China hands” themselves, such as Croskey’s “A Shooting Trip in the Grand Canal,” anthologized in The Shen’s Pigtail, paint a different picture, and one in which foolish Britons get no more than they deserve. These narratives make explicit the uncivilized behavior of British youth in an alien environment and go so far as to suggest that British naivety invokes the violence it causes as a reaction to what the Chinese rightly perceive as imperialistic incursion on their sovereign space. They also satirize the view from Britain. Rivers’s “‘Twopence Coloured,’” for instance, opens by juxtaposing home and away to assert that stories about China can only appeal to British readers when exaggerated and inflated; as such, China must always be imagined and never realized: “It is apparently much easier to get people at Home to believe statements regarding China that are not strictly true than to inspire them with a gentle interest in cold facts!” (in Anglo-Chinese Sketches, 115). The “thrilling adventures” that make protagonist Joseph Hawkins “a great hero

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of, and authority upon, Anglo-Chinese life” (115) belie the mundane and sometimes humiliating realities of life in empire as it actually was lived. In fact, Hawkins’s pompous story, which is remarkably like Winn’s, conceals his idiotic behavior in almost getting himself killed during an excursion “up country.” In his actual trip on a holiday boat, he causes a riot in a village by playing a cornet while drunk and thereby attracting the attention of curious and increasingly hostile Chinese villagers. He runs away but is captured and tied to a bamboo pole, but is saved from further harm by the village headman, who wants to avoid trouble with the local magistrate. In the story he devises for the British public and publishes after his return to Shanghai in “quite a good magazine at Home” (130), however, the cornet becomes a revolver, and the mob are turned into agitators involved in a secret plot of revolution. He is rescued not by a village elder, but by a beautiful mandarin’s daughter. He later claims she is a “Manchu-Boxer Princess,” who is waiting to marry him, in another assertion of how narratives legitimate miscegenation by refracting them through class dynamics. Hawkins’s story is illogical and patently absurd – at least to Rivers’s sophisticated readers, who can define themselves in opposition to the audience for Hawkins’s magazine article. British boy-heroism is revealed for what it really is, drunken shenanigans. Hawkins signally fails to attract the support of high-bred local girls with the dash and courage that are figments of his own imagination, while the girl princess herself is similarly imaginary – not to mention an improbable (if fictionally common) union of Manchu and Boxer. “‘Twopence Coloured’” is the final tale in Anglo-Chinese Sketches. Like “A Tai-pan of the ’Fifties,” it encapsulates many of the characteristics that make narratives about foreign China and the treaty ports a distinct subgenre of imperial literature: foregrounding the impact of history and geopolitics on the personal narratives of the characters; elucidating distinctions in perspectives on China that stem from particularities of location; exposing the contradictions between China as a place of fantasy and imperial projection and as a site for economic or territorial aspiration; and using humor as a mode of criticism to chide readers and characters alike for their misunderstandings about Britons’ lives in China. Yet whereas Anglo-Chinese Sketches begins in “Far Cathay” – the collection opens with the words “In China” – it ends up in England.29 Encouraged by the success of his embroidered “effusion” (130), Hawkins returns to Britain, where, as a journalist, he does “pretty well” (130). Whereas in the 1840s and 1850s China was a place for European men to make their name by getting rich, at the turn of the century they make their name there by lying and exaggerating. Thus

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a lowly employee fired from a Shanghai shop parlays the embarrassing events of his holiday upcountry – which he “kept very quiet in Shanghai for fear of ridicule” (129) – into expertise on the late trouble in Peking. Anglo-Chinese Sketches, with its 1903 release date and its London publisher, has and has not come full circle. The collection charts the chronological sweep of Britain’s expansion in China from the birth of the treaty port system to the writer’s present, putting the history of Sino-British relations at the heart of the narrative process. Yet what starts as a celebration of life in foreign China, based on thirty years of personal observation, ends with skepticism as to whether the story of Anglo-China actually can be told. Beneath the humor and the color lies a more authentic story but also one that is far less interesting to those who have not lived it, namely the banality of empire.

chapter 2

Projecting from Possession Point James Dalziel’s Chronicles of Hong Kong

“The population of Hongkong as far as I am concerned,” according to Betty in Intercepted Letters, “consists of [my husband] William and about three hundred more, none of whom are Chinese” (25). Echoing notions of Asia as static and atemporal and asserting not only that history begins with the moment of colonization but also that it is contained within it, Betty’s image of blankness and her alienation from the civilization that surrounded her on all sides reiterated in social terms what the 1898 edition of The Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, The Philippines, & C asserted in geographical terms: “Before the British ensign was hoisted on Possession Point the island can hardly be said to have had any history, and what little attaches to it is very obscure.”1 (See map: Figure 2.) In different ways, both Betty and the authors of The Chronicle and Directory imagine Hong Kong through British presence and Chinese absence.2 Their vision of Hong Kong as a palpable and unimagined community of a few hundred British residents typifies the attitude of many, if not most, of the expatriates who made the “fragrant harbour” their home at this time. It also closely follows the contours of the unilateral racial divide that postcolonial critics of the British context have often identified in studies of India and Africa. The erasure of the Portuguese, Chinese, Eurasians, Indians, and other Asian peoples from the Hong Kong of imperial accounts – alongside the erasure of the dramatic flux, mobility, and transience of the port city’s population that is implied in the fixity of Betty’s figure of “about three hundred” – paints a familiar tableau of a colonial subjectivity grounded in isolation. So too does the institutionalization of colonial boundaries as instantiations of an East–West divide.3 It is a picture copied in cantonments across the British Empire, but it is patently not one reflective of social 64

James Dalziel’s Chronicles of Hong Kong

Figure 2. Map showing the development of Hong Kong, before and after the leasing of the New Territories.

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conditions on the ground. It is, in fact, a willful attempt to envisage colonial society according to a utopian model of integrity and, as such, part of a forceful strategy to impose sameness on a landscape of difference, as well as to figure diverse colonial canvases across a broad geographical spectrum as equally empty surfaces. Erasure is necessarily an ideological act, aimed at making something problematic disappear. Yet, as Ackbar Abbas points out, disappearance is not just about loss, but also engenders opportunity. “The moment of asignification when models of identity disappear,” he comments, “is also the moment when a postcolonial subject is invented.”4 This chapter examines the fiction of James Dalziel, one of a number of British writers based in East Asia who, at the turn of the century, conjured up alternative models of free-trade imperialism (and thus alternative subjectivities) by making heterogeneity the signifier of the colonial landscape in Hong Kong. Whereas Chapter 1 mapped the field of British writing from China during the period 1840–1911, this chapter offers a detailed case study of a single author in order to probe some of the subtler ways in which these writers handled issues of cultural interchange. Because it concerns an author based in and writing about Hong Kong, it also questions what differences there might be in literary production from the one actual British colony in the region, as compared to the more aspirational spaces of the treaty ports. A Scottish engineer on ships plying the South China Sea, Dalziel authored three collections of short stories. Chronicles of a Crown Colony, his first anthology, was a small volume published in Hong Kong in 1907 by the leading daily, the South China Morning Post. That same year, London publisher T. Fisher Unwin released In the First Watch and Other EngineRoom Stories. This collection was followed in 1909 by High Life in the Far East, also published by Unwin and containing a core of stories from Chronicles of a Crown Colony.5 Little is known about what inspired Dalziel to pen these tragic and sometimes bizarre sketches of Hong Kong, but his history exemplifies the incredible range of literary production undertaken by people of widely diverse social and class standing within the European and American communities in China. It also is indicative of a wider phenomenon of British imperialism – that it encouraged a large number of people who otherwise did not conceive of themselves as writers to narrate their experiences, and it provided greater outlets for these scribblers to see their work printed in local, English-language daily newspapers (such as the South China Morning Post and the North China Daily News) and by regional publishing houses. Dalziel’s case lends credence to this idea: his anthologies appeared in a three-year span not long after

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he left China, but he seems to have ended his literary career as his colonial one receded.6 Like Conrad, Dalziel gathered the material for his work from his experiences both on- and offshore in Far Eastern waters. He arrived in the region sometime in the late 1890s; in 1898, he was listed as the chief engineer of the China Navigation Company’s Hankow, a 2,235-ton steamer affiliated with the firm of Butterfield and Swire.7 He was a member of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders of Hongkong, as well as the author of the pamphlet A Paper on Light Draught Steamers for River Service (1898).8 Upon leaving the colony after the turn of the century, he returned to Britain.9 He lived in East Tinwald in Scotland in the 1920s and 1930s, where he was buried on his death in 1934.10 Reviews of his London collections were largely positive. The Bookman noted that “writers are rare with so highly developed a power of description and so virile a dramatic force as Mr. Dalziel.”11 The Athenæum called In the First Watch “excellent work.” “Probably the man whose experience enables him to seize fully the great technical interest of a ship’s engine-room,” it added, “is seldom gifted with the qualities of sympathy and insight which go to the making of good stories. Mr. Dalziel displays both qualifications to notable advantage in this book, and we hope he will go on writing.”12 A review in the Pall Mall Gazette of In the First Watch reprinted on the frontispiece of High Life in the Far East stated, “only genius could better the style in which these stories are told.”

Theorizing from the fringes of Asia Whatever his literary talent, my purpose is neither to canonize Dalziel on aesthetic or thematic grounds, nor to recruit him to a progressive interpretative project that uncritically embraces postcolonial theory’s principle of the politicization of literature. Nor is my goal to treat Dalziel’s slim opus as a body of writing to be rescued from the proverbial dustbin of history because it represents a unique voice. Rather, it is to proffer his stories as an example of a variegated literature about imperialism east of India. Indeed, Dalziel’s similarities to Conrad – especially to the representations of cross-cultural love and inter-European cooperation in Conrad’s Malay fiction, such as Almayer’s Folly (1895) and Victory (1915) – demonstrate that elements of this diversity manifest themselves even in the most canonized of writers, but are obscured by selective reading of certain texts, often read out of context.13 Thus through Dalziel, I articulate some limitations of historical approaches to literature that broadly generalize from particular geographic positions

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and that subsume a plurality of viewpoints and expressive modes under the umbrella of a unitary ideology of imperial practice. The point is not that Dalziel is, consequently, a postcolonial writer in a colonial era. Instead, I argue that the plurality of viewpoints about empire that can be found in his fiction constitutes a noteworthy characteristic of imperialism itself. Dalziel’s ephemeral and shifting location within Hong Kong society and his work in depicting Hong Kong’s inhabitants as a multifarious bunch highlight an elasticity of imperial formations that belies the rhetorical clarity of adventure fiction emanating from metropolitan sources. Chronicles of a Crown Colony, in particular, emphasizes that continuity, rather than rupture, characterizes the interchange between colonial and postcolonial literary practices. In specific, this chapter challenges the India-centric character of much recent work on the literature of imperialism in the following five ways: First, I ask whether, in taking India as the symptom and synecdoche for British imperialism as a whole, postcolonial criticism reproduces aspects of the logic of imperialism itself. Second, I reassess models of center and periphery from the vantage of China, rather than India or Africa, in order to break down the logic of unidirectional flows of power and cultural exchange. Third, I take Hong Kong and Shanghai as focal points for probing glocal patterns for the production, editing, and distribution of texts, revealing the complexities of a literary marketplace diffused across geographically disparate networks and of textual production intended for multiple readerships. Fourth, I investigate, through Dalziel, how differences in the ways that writers in different imperial or extra-imperial locations treat miscegenation underscore not simply distinctions between official rhetoric and “real” practice in empire, but also elucidate behaviors of cultural and sexual engagement that were not – and never could be – standardized. Finally, by concentrating on a writer whose formal choice of genre is the short story, the chapter reevaluates the hegemonic position of the novel in studies of imperial narrative. As a form of sustained narration, I suggest, the novel reflects a scholarly desire for coherence that tidies up rather messy imperial relations. Over the next few pages, I clarify the shape of this intervention and then introduce specific readings of Dalziel’s fiction in order to underscore its significance to current understandings of the place of literature and culture to the global Victorians. In his celebratory comments about J. R. Seeley’s 1883 work, The Expansion of England, which appeared in The Literature of the British Empire (1924), part of a twelve-volume series to accompany the British Empire Exhibition, Edward Salmon writes:

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The Expansion of England gave the British people the opportunity of seizing essentials in the story of the Empire, of looking at it whole, and of appreciating its elements, both of weakness and of strength. In one sentence, he disposed of the theory of inevitableness: “The English Empire is, on the whole, free from that weakness which has brought down most Empires, the weakness of being a mere mechanical forced union of alien nationalities.”14

Yet are there essentials to be extracted from the story of empire – is empire, in fact, a narrative at all – and if so, is India the right place from which to extract them? Is the simple contrast between the ideal of healthy union professed by Seeley and the realities of actual coercion and epistemic violence exposed by scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak a sufficient model to explain the active and multiple levels of cooperation and collaboration that allowed British imperialism to flourish? Or does further attention to other sites of imperial ambition like China – by way of historical theories of informal imperialism stretching from Robinson and Gallagher to Osterhammel – reveal much less defined concepts of agency? More broadly, does the dominance of the British context in postcolonial literary theory fall into the same trap of inevitableness that Salmon does by taking that context as an exemplary model? Dalziel’s stories implicitly recall the importance of the Crown colony to the greater imperial polity, since they configure Hong Kong as a multicultural hub, a “mart of many nations,” rather than more typically as a Cantonese city loosely tied to British imperialism. Thus, they prefigure claims by certain writers in contemporary Hong Kong, such as Xu Xi, who position themselves in an Anglophone context because they believe it better reflects Hong Kong’s multi-ethnic, multilingual environment; is preferable to “scrambling for a place in the hierarchy of Chinese literature”; or functions as an act of resistance to China’s internal colonization.15 Dalziel’s fiction also points to the alliance between formal and informal imperialism and the looseness of the transition between them. As Osterhammel points out, in Hong Kong, as in Shanghai, power, status, and color “correlated in ways characteristic of colonialism all over the world. While informal empire was hardly perceptible for ordinary Chinese, apart from patriotically alerted members of the élite, formal Empire in Hong Kong and Shanghai was an experience shared by hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects” (“Britain and China,” 164). Recent work on Anglo-Chinese relations in the fields of history and cultural studies has uncovered some revealing strands of the grand narrative of imperial discourse and proposed some noteworthy challenges to postcolonialism’s grand narrative of subalternity. Some of this work enlarges

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critical understandings of British imperialism by reading previously overlooked elements of the imperial archive – such as Thurin’s study of travel writing – or by analyzing China’s historical and economic place within the construct of the British Empire – such as Osterhammel’s work on “semicolonialism.”16 “British rule over the Chinese, as in Hong Kong, in central Shanghai, and also Singapore,” Osterhammel notes, “was confined to fluid, comparatively modern urban environments that had largely been created by the European invasion itself: frontier cities in zones of inter-cultural compromise” (“Britain and China,” 149). Philippa Levine, meanwhile, has teased out the nuances in the regulation of sexual behavior in different Asian colonies, elucidating both differences between metropole and colony and the different interpretive strategies adopted by different colonial governments.17 Robert A. Bickers’s analyses of the specific forms of governance, especially policing, that arose in Shanghai clarify both the uniqueness of Britain’s informal imperialism in China and its connectedness to other sites of empire, such as India (from which policemen were drawn).18 And, in Anglo-Chinese Encounters, Wang Gungwu punctures some of the grandiose notions that Britons had about their grasp over China – and, by extension, their imperial power writ large – by focusing primarily on Chinese experiences of the Sino-English relationship. Work by other scholars jettisons the paradigm of imperialism itself. In Shanghai Modern, Leo Ou-Fan Lee looks beyond the colonial and semicolonial matrix entirely, arguing that the limited impact of English and the fact that the elite expressed itself almost exclusively in Chinese mean a postcolonial model for Shanghai is inadequate. He proposes Zhang Zhidong’s famous motto – “Chinese learning as essence, Western learning as utility” – as a model for China’s intellectual and technical exploitation of the West. Such a model allows Shanghai to embody the modern and cosmopolitan without its needing to be subservient or submissive to the West – the condition, Lee claims, from which Bhabha articulates his theory of mimicry and which arises out of a situation of “total colonization.”19 Bringing such diverse scholarship to bear on my discussion of James Dalziel demonstrates how the texture of imperial sentiment varied from patch to patch, even when the quilt of empire was joined by the same stitching. It also underscores the degree to which representing Hong Kong and the treaty ports as Western enclaves fails to reflect Chinese perceptions, even the perceptions of those Chinese inhabiting these ostensibly Western spaces. So is the history of the British Empire actually a story in which Britain holds pride of place? Does the centrality of India in such histories of imperialism therefore serve to suppress empire’s inherent multiplicity by

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upholding a pattern and a model for imperialism that encourages the erasure of local cultures and the arrangements between global/local elites that allowed it to operate? For so long, Ronald Robinson’s critique of the pre-war historiography of imperialism has remained valid. Robinson avers that the focus on what imperialism said about Europe in that historiography concentrated imperialism on one continent, rather than the intercontinental process, “and so far as the rest of the world entered into the picture it appeared as an extension of Europe. On assumptions taken from an obsolete cosmography, the process came to be defined almost entirely in terms of metropolitan drives projecting on passive peripheries.”20 Many historians are now engaged in rethinking this position. At the economic end of the discipline, Andre Gunder Frank, among others, has argued that the notion of Europe as the center and Asia as the periphery is historically flawed in the long view: “If any regions were predominant in the world economy before 1800, they were in Asia. If any economy had a ‘central’ position and role in the world economy and its possible hierarchy ‘centers,’ it was China” (5). Kenneth Pomeranz has rebutted the idea of Asian decay and stasis, arguing that until the nineteenth century, the Chinese population’s living standards were roughly equivalent to those in Europe.21 Pomeranz also notes that “the Chinese empire was not generally ‘xenophobic’ and hostile to foreign trade, as is sometimes claimed – and Chinese society in general was still less so – but the regime did have an enduring set of priorities, rooted in their orientation towards reproducing empire, that made them indifferent or even hostile to overseas colonization and mercantilism.”22 Similarly, Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden argue: Substantial literatures pivoting on concepts of incorporation, colonialism, modernization and “response to the West” tend to imply a more or less complete displacement of the East Asian historical heritage of this earlier period. We disagree and see instead process of hybridization and crossfertilization accompanying the emergence of Western economic and military power as significant forces in the region from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and continuing in new ways throughout and subsequent to the era of imperialism and revolution in East Asia.23

In literature, the increasing prominence of scholarship to “globalize” Victorian Studies and the emergence of the field of World Literature as the new form of comparativism call attention to how “Victorian empire was an interrelational process . . . the conceptual presence of modern and contemporary imperialism as a globally entrenched but uneven system has been

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growing in stature.”24 Priya Joshi’s work on the consumption of literature by Indians uses the tools of book history to uncover networks and patterns of circulation that expose how Indians indigenized the novel.25 From the context of Hong Kong – a colony where Britain was never fully sovereign and where connections to the international treaty ports and to China were definitional – Victorian Studies’ global turn prompts several observations. First, it reinforces a reconsideration of postcolonialism’s use of India as a synecdoche for the entirety of the imperial paradigm. It follows Robinson, Gallagher, Bickers, and others in emphasizing that not only was imperialism not a coherent ideological force, but also that this lack of coherence was its modus operandi. Second, the manifest imbrication of the British presence in India and in China – including the exchange of goods and personnel, the relationship between regional Asian economies without mediation through a Western metropole, and the high level of European and American interaction – underscores the limitations of a paradigm that treats imperial ideologies as top-down processes and that isolates formal empire, because of its “direct” connection to a single core, from its associations with the diverse phenomena of informal imperialism. In addition, “informal imperialism” suggests that the metropole may never have possessed the authority often ascribed to it. “The imperial effort of Europe was insufficient in itself to have generated the immense extension of empire and international economy that occurred,” contends Robinson. If the bulk of the power required for oriental empire was drawn from Asia, and but a fraction of the capital developing the Western world was exported from the European bourses, perhaps the metropolis of imperialism was not altogether where Eurocentric theorists found it? If its true position could be fixed, the ultimate enigma of how imperialism tended to metropolize peripheries and peripheralize metropolises might fade away.26

Part of allowing for this recasting of the center–periphery dynamic, as Osterhammel has shown, lies in paying as much attention to the actors “on the spot” as to superstructures.27 Dalziel’s work is embedded in the particular dynamics of a specific place at a specific moment and was initially published in Hong Kong rather than in London; studying it yields a sharper understanding of where the rhetoric of empire aspired to uniformity and how distance from a primary center – as well as from regional centers like India – produced different inflections of that rhetoric. The concept of “distance” remains useful once the focus shifts from measuring “distance from” to considering what “distance” allows to emerge.

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In fact, by contrasting the internal, expatriate literary marketplace in spots such as Hong Kong and Shanghai with metropolitan patterns of production, editing, and distribution, this chapter proposes that imperial texts performed different functions that were contingent on their location and circulation. Moreover, I insist that authors, editors, and publishers were aware of these tensions; fashioned works that spoke to different constituents in different ways; and manipulated existing texts according to the expectations of readerships divided by or joined across geographic space through their global, local, imperial, and class affiliations. Not only did these different glocal markets exist, but they also were qualitatively different: In Britain, readership for literature was diverse and potentially segregated by genre, gender, and class. “Out in China,” however, even writers as different as Dalziel and Betty would have shared much the same constituency. The broad-brush character of local publishers’ lists (Kelly & Walsh released everything from Chinese grammar handbooks to cookbooks to novels) and the thriving interest in materials produced by other members of the community assured a small but potentially heterogeneous reading public comprised largely of Europeans, often Britons, based in Hong Kong and in the foreign concessions. In addition, as Thurin’s analysis of Bewicke’s 1896 novel A Marriage in China shows, this community was actually small enough for readers to be able to identify the model for an author’s characters.28 The specificity of this readership also meant that writers had the freedom to discuss local imperial issues without the need to explain them to a generalized imperial audience. The Opinions of Mr. Briggs (1904) provides an example.29 Reprinted from the columns of the South China Morning Post, this anthology consists of a set of satiric dialogues between Mr. Briggs, a Hong Kong policeman turned publican, and his wife. The stories are emphatically local in subject: “Mr. Briggs on the New Tramway” satirizes the delay and wrangling involved in getting a tram line running to replace rickshaws; “Mr. Briggs Is Doubtful of the ‘New Diplomacy’ in the Police Force” comments on bribery and corruption in that wing of the colony’s government. At the same time, metropolitan production itself may have been marketed differently in places like Hong Kong than in London. While publishers’ lists at the back of works by adventure writers such as G. A. Henty often had extended catalogues of other books of potential interest to readers, these listings not infrequently crossed genre into naturalist works, the broader category of boys’ and girls’ novels, and travelogues.30 And Henty’s works, although mainly about issues of imperialism and national identity, were typically classified and sold as “historical tales.” By contrast, an advertisement for the Mutual Stores on Des Vœux Road in Hong Kong marketed

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itself under the banner “Colonial Novels”: “We have just received a stock of the latest Colonial Novels published by the well known London firm, Messrs. FISHER UNWIN & CO.”31 The specificity of this advertising suggests a defined and segregated marketplace and marketing strategy for fiction about imperialism, a classification that perhaps had different appeal in the London market from which the works themselves emanated. In his study of Hong Kong, Abbas warns that critics need to be aware of the “lure of the marginal”: “Marginality does not necessarily shake up the center or initiate a process of decentering. It merely exercises the center and in so doing strengthens it, by providing a form of political isometrics” (13). Yet decentering may not be the only work to perform in paying attention to literary phenomena in empire and beyond. Understanding the functioning of multiple, interlocking centers (such as the relationship between Calcutta and Shanghai) and of centers within centers (such as the European Hong Kong that “Betty” describes) is crucial to understanding how imperial and “home” polities were constituted, as well as the limits of their reach. It also draws attention to the impact of the interchanges between different cultures, each with its own center, as evidenced in the symbiosis between Britain and Portugal in Asia. To give an example: The Portuguese Noronha family set up a press in Hong Kong in 1844, shortly after the colony was founded and foreign merchants moved there from Macau; Noronha & Co. would become one of the most important publishers of official papers and other materials. A scion of the family, José Pedro Braga – educated in India, not Coimbra or Britain – later managed the Hong Kong Telegraph.32 Or, as David Porter argues, the canon of Chinese literature in contemporary China constituted itself partly around a canon of works translated into European languages and reappropriated by early-twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals.33 By calling attention to sites of formal and informal imperialism as literary workshops in their own right, this chapter also points out vast areas of potential investigation that would contest the configuration of imperialism as a coherent ideological force and would contribute to the recent critical shift of interest to the complex interrelationship between the local and the global. These areas for further study include the English-language press that arose wherever Britain had interests, such as the newspapers published from India to South America and beyond. Examples include the Anglo-Brazilian Times, the Bangkok Times, and the Foochow Daily Echo. They embrace publications from places where Britain’s own colonies extended themselves, such as Anglophone periodicals like the Lourenço Marques Guardian, which arose in Portuguese East Africa because the port of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) shipped the produce of the Transvaal mining boom. British

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colonies also fostered non-Anglophone titles, such as the Portugueselanguage press in Hong Kong. This press needs analyzing not only for its valuable independent content, but also for its procedures for selecting materials from other regional and metropolitan newspapers (a common practice at the time), its gloss on metropolitan representations of these regions through book reviews and editorials, and its sometimes strident criticism of the behavior of Western consuls. More fundamentally these areas of investigation embrace the related production in indigenous languages that flourished in colonial and semicolonial spaces. In the case of China, as Lee has noted, treaty port journalism in Mandarin in the early twentieth century offered a mechanism for reform intellectuals to become “the radical spokesmen for Chinese society”; fiction (understood in broader terms than in the English usage of the word) played a prominent role in this process.34 Lee specifically notes: The emergence of late Ch’ing literature – particularly fiction – was a byproduct of journalism, which evolved out of a societal reaction to a series of deepening political crises. China’s humiliating defeat in the first SinoJapanese war of 1894–5 finally shocked the intellectual elite into action. But their demands for change culminated only in the unsuccessful reform movement in 1898. Disillusioned with the prospect of change from above, the reform-minded of the literati turned away from the ineffectual state to become the radical spokesmen for Chinese society. Their efforts were concentrated on generating “public opinion” with which to bring pressure to bear on the central government. And they found in treaty-port journalism a useful medium for their purposes. (143–144)

These texts also provide important counter-examples (albeit similarly stereotyped ones) to the images of Westernized indigenes that were so prevalent in literature from the European perspective, from the babu and brownskinned Englishman in India to the pidgin-prattling comprador of the China Coast. My analysis of Dalziel also questions the validity of recent critical emphasis on the centrality of the interdiction of miscegenation to Britain’s strategy of rule. Historical work has increasingly shown this interdiction to be more putative than real, more official than actual. Moreover, both the Victorians and those studying them overstate the contrast between imperial Britain’s rejection of hybridity and France, Spain, and Portugal’s greater tolerance of it. Concubinage was a fact of life, as the China Mail’s 1902 coverage of a British bluejacket charged with murdering a Maltese resident in Bangkok suggests in its bland reporting of such a relationship: “A Siamese woman who was living with Palmieri

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said ‘Do hoo’ had ‘done something’ to Palmieri. She could not say ‘O’Donaghue.’”35 Yet even in rhetorical terms, the interdiction of miscegenation seems less influential than extrapolation from the Indian context – where, at least in theory, the prevailing racial context was securely binary – suggests.36 Eurasians, Anglo-Indians, and other groups with multiple “racial” affiliations were not invisible to British authorities, even when these authorities classed them as problems.37 Research on Indochina shows the flexible definition of “whiteness” by the French state, a pattern no doubt widely replicated across Asia.38 Some British literature also treated hybrids as essentially white heroes with added cultural value, as in adventure writer and onetime Daily Telegraph editor William Dalton’s 1864 novel The Wasps of the Ocean. Herbert, the work’s boy hero, is half English, half Chinese, while his best friend Dick is an equally hybrid, equally heroic union of American and British background. Their mixed origins give them unique opportunities to express their prowess, and the narrative ends with Herbert, unremarkably, settling in London and penning his biography, just as any fully British adventure hero might. “My father being an Englishman and my mother a Chinese,” Herbert announces at the novel’s start, “I am of both nations; and as the first half of my life was spent under the tutelage of Chinese scholars, and the latter under that of an English missionary, I may fairly lay claim to be considered worthy of both, or at least no disgrace to either.”39 This fluidity of racial identity had by no means been lost by the end of the Victorian era. If the romanticization of the South Sea Islanders has long been seen as the exception to the injunction against crossing the “colour line,” Dalziel’s Hong Kong tales, by contrast, suggest that the rule itself might have been more honored in the breach than in the observance. They alternately present miscegenation as a mere fact of life or champion it as natural and healthy, and Eurasian characters are treated with narrative favor. However, such a presentation of miscegenation should not be taken to imply more than an oblique challenge to official policy, nor does it offer a provocative anticolonial stance. As Boehmer notes of a slightly earlier period, broad antiimperialist sentiment “would have meant resisting the very self-perceptions on which mid to late nineteenth-century society grounded itself. In a society steeped in imperial ideologies, however, such a move was unlikely.”40 Thus liminality may not equal radical transgression; the way in which miscegenation persisted in the interstices of interdiction and constituted itself in literature suggests not so much the tensions of empire as it does the inherent flexibility of its implementation across an array of

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geographic and cultural spectra. This reading emphasizes that there need be no contradiction between attention to hybridity, geographically and historically embedded particularity, micro-history, and the like and larger theoretical evaluations of empire. Chronicles of a Crown Colony is peopled with a variety of individual Eurasians of various mixes and class positions (ranging from Anglo-Chinese to Macanese to Irish-Pacific Islander) or “lesser” and racially suspect Europeans (the Portuguese) whose character proves them superior to individual Britons. For men, this superiority manifests itself in the world of business despite their frequent difficulty in “striving to support the status of a European on the wages of an Asiatic” (“Da Sarto’s Sister,” Chronicles, 122). For women, it manifests itself through their superior embodiment of metropolitan domestic ideals. In “A Marriage of No Importance,” the Eurasian “orphan” from the Italian convent whom poor pilot Tim O’Calligan marries on a drunken whim turns out to be the perfect loving wife, in sharp contrast to the white woman who has traveled from Australia to marry him. This presumed paragon of femininity spurns him on first sight. To undertake such a celebration of miscegenation, Dalziel fashions himself both as a literary insider – through references to Henri Murger and the tradition of Bohemian poverty – and a social outsider, whose vantage point allows him to explore and sympathize with acts of miscegenation and spaces of hybridity. The touch of the macabre that unifies his chronicles emanates from this “outcast” subjectivity, allowing Dalziel to condemn the morality of conventional colonial society by repeatedly mooring the failure of potentially successful intercultural relationships in external circumstances (such as disease, social exclusion, or the loss of a child). In insisting that there is no fundamental failure to “connect” in affective unions across the color bar, the chronicles reject the metaphor of sexual violence that scholars such as Jenny Sharpe (herself of mixed heritage) have shown to be a central motif for literature about British India after the watershed of 1857, when the model of corporate colonialism that persisted to some degree in China was replaced in India by burgeoning state intervention into local rule and increased regulation over the private sphere.41 Dalziel’s decision to explore different aspects of miscegenation as they play out in the micro-colony of Hong Kong through the short-story anthology, rather than the novel, is no accident. Like other short-story writers of his era, including Kipling, the fact that he uses the confined remit of the tale and the dynamic tensions that emerge from the juxtaposition of different narratives within a single anthology to tease out the contradictions and implications of miscegenation in the micro-colony of Hong Kong is no

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accident. His oeuvre therefore also shows why the hegemonic position of the novel in studies of imperial narrative is problematic, given the novel’s drive for coherence, its implication in the export of bourgeois values, and its marked dissimilarity to indigenous habits of storytelling in the places where Britons expatriated. In fact, postcolonial criticism’s investment in the novel is particularly surprising, given the truth-claims inherent to traveler’s tales but not necessarily to fiction – truth-claims that, as Andrea White notes, novels themselves relied on to enforce suspension of disbelief.42 Nevertheless, as Erin O’Connor has argued, following from the assumption that it was the fundamental nineteenth-century form and integrally tied to the rise of capitalism, the novel has emerged as the key genre for literary studies of nineteenth-century imperialism. According to O’Connor, work by Spivak and Edward Said “established a paradigm for treating the Victorian novel as a local instance of widespread imperialist sentiment. . . The nineteenth-century British novel has been taken as both a prime example of the ‘imperialist narrativization of history’ (Spivak 263) and as an originary moment in the production of that narration.”43 Works such as Dalziel’s underscore the fallacy inherent in assuming the existence of widespread imperialist sentiment in the first place. At the same time, they reveal the inadequacies of taking one broad genre – that is, fiction – and one specific manifestation of that genre – that is, the novel – as what O’Connor calls the “guiding analytical structure” of postcolonial literary theory (220). O’Connor goes on to elucidate the process by which critics have treated two texts in specific, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898), as synecdochal of nineteenth-century imperialism; “it is a vulgar cartography indeed,” she adds, “that plots a single Victorian novel as imperialism’s heart of darkness, that makes its well-known pages into a guide whose consoling presence in the ‘empty immensity’ of the past licenses an entire interpretive practice” (239). O’Connor’s discussion of the selective privileging not only of the novel as a form but of particular novels as exemplar texts raises the question of what scholarship might gain from paying less attention to Kipling’s Kim (1901) and more to his volumes of stories; less attention to Heart of Darkness and more to Conrad’s shorter works, such as Typhoon (1902) and the never-serialized Falk (1903); more attention to writers such as Stevenson, for whom the short story was the dominant mode of expression; and more attention to unknown works like The Opinions of Mr. Briggs, whose provincialism asks whether writers “in empire” must address or respond to imperialism. Like drama, the form discussed in Chapter 5, the short story proposes some very different but equally significant means to narrativize history, in

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part because of the potential speed of its response to current events, in part because of the opportunity for a wider range of authors to gain access to publication – and on a wider range of topics – through media such as the local press, and, consequently, in part because these wider forums for publication covered a wider geographical span than that of novel-publishing. Moreover, the form of the anthology allows for some important distinctions from the novel’s methodology for narrativizing imperialism. These include the juxtaposition of multiple narrators and points of view; the development of a contextual relationship between different narratives in the same volume; the heightened attention given to framing devices; and the diminished importance of allegory as a principle of narrative organization. Unlike the novel, the anthology is inherently multi-faceted; it coheres, but contains many different angles and flashpoints. Examining a corpus of short stories that collectively accrete multiple and sometimes paradoxical positions about colonial society – and that map out the lives of many different segments of Hong Kong’s population – suggests that the act of chronicling a colony demands the kind of non-linear, heterogeneous approach that an anthology of short stories invites readers to develop. The heterogeneity of the anthology, then, parallels the heterogeneity of the colonial and/or British subject. By allowing for the presentation of the colonial subject as plural and unbounded, and by presenting the local as a set of identities and options, rather than a shared body of attributes, then, the sort of anthology exemplified by Dalziel’s work proposes a number of ways to narrativize imperialism that only in their collectivity suggest any notion of history at all. This potential for heterogeneity also resists the project of literary colonization that Thurin describes as “when writers attempt to explain and interpret Chinese customs and beliefs by reconstructing Chinese reality in relation to Western values and perspectives” (19), and that she claims the novel most inculcates. In sum, these different aspects of analysis offer a glimpse into areas of the imperial archive situated beyond the limelight of critical engagement’s customary arena of India, the novel, and the separation of races. The blinkers of India-centrism have put the cart of postcolonial theory before the horse of the imperial archive’s myriad output. In the face of decolonization and the potential disappearance of Britain’s legacy in southern China, Hong Kong may seem an obscure vantage point from which to challenge India’s dominance in empire studies. Yet turn-of-the-century thinkers and writers thought differently (whatever Hong Kong’s economic relevance). The discussion of Dalziel that follows elucidates why, for them, this “insular

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possession” was not so isolated after all. As John Thomson wrote of Hong Kong in his 1898 book Through China with a Camera: This spot, moored to our little island by an electric cable that sweeps half round the globe, rises like a political beacon out of the China Sea, and has by no means been without its influence in preventing the Tartar dynasty from foundering, in maintaining peace and casting the light of a higher civilisation over some dark corners of the Flowery Land. It stands alone on the fringe of the great continent of Asia, with its mixed population, its British rule, its noble European edifices and Chinese streets, its Christian Churches and Buddhist Temples, a Crown Colony of which we have no reason to be ashamed.44

Hugging China The foundations of Thomson’s pride in Hong Kong, which in so many ways echo Dalziel’s, illustrate precisely the importance of a model of imperialism vastly different from that of formal acquisition. Hong Kong’s marginality – both on the fringes of Asia and of the British Empire – here transforms itself into strength. The colony is, in fact, a mirror of Europe’s own, hardly an insignificant “little island.” Envisaging Britain as the anchor that connects itself to Hong Kong by a chain of communication, not space, Thomson also privileges intellectual interests over economic, commercial, or territorial ones – Britain’s engagement with China is literally, as well as metaphorically, a project of enlightenment. Moreover, the colony’s mixed population, reflected in the physical embodiment of hybridity (or at least the principle of contiguity) in architecture and religion, is the very opposite of shameful; as in Dalziel’s narratives, the mixture is magical. The rhetoric behind such descriptions of Hong Kong can be said to replace a utopia of imperial similitude (i.e., one that ignores the presence of non-Europeans and lesser Europeans, such as the Portuguese) with one of imperial difference (i.e., one that champions “structural heterogeneity”). Moreover, Thomson’s inflated sense of the importance of Britain’s endeavor in China runs counter to historical fact. Wang Gungwu, among others, has shown Britain’s lack of significant impact on Chinese governance, as well as its limited influence even over populations directly under British authority. “Even for those Chinese people who chose to live under their informal or partial jurisdiction,” he notes, “direct contact with British systems of law and administration were rare.”45 Far from administering tonic to the sick man of Asia and preventing the carve-up of China by

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shoring up the Qing dynasty, Britain and her Hong Kong outpost had a marginal effect on Chinese culture and society. Nevertheless, from the colonizer’s perspective, this rhetoric of heterogeneity represents a significant alternative to the more pervasive and totalizing notion of imperialism as a force of conformity. It underlies the awareness of the artificiality of imperial structures and the uncertainty about ideologies of superiority than those produced or set in larger, less self-contained areas of empire, such as India, or those meant for metropolitan audiences. Treaty port narratives (in which category I include those about Hong Kong) ground themselves in the political and social particularities of Europe’s and America’s imperial aspirations in the region. At the same time, as Chapter 1 shows, treaty port texts understand that foreigners are in China on sufferance, subject to the unprecedented hostility of even the highest levels of mandarins, who continually supported the sort of anti-Western attitudes that impressed themselves most vividly around the “insurrections” of the mid-century Taiping Uprising and the turn-ofthe-century Boxer Rebellion. These narratives acknowledge that even the colonial toehold of Hong Kong was not viable as an independent entity, but only as part of a network of posts of exchange that mediated carefully between British and Chinese interests. In Dalziel’s case, this general sense of artificiality and uncertainty manifests itself through his description of the intimate lives of his characters. Their affective relations challenge the legitimacy of the white endogamy (Betty’s definition of “society”) that was the presumed standard for imperial conduct through their multiple and overlapping crossings of the “colour line.” Alternately positing that the “colour line” is stronger in Hong Kong than elsewhere in the East and that transgression of it is more intrinsic to the colony, Dalziel’s chronicles collectively subordinate official racism and employment discrimination to the social and sexual regulations that interfere most fundamentally with individual subjectivity and agency. Yet his stories do more than offer examples of what colonial archives amply prove, that “[w]hite-on-white domesticity was framed in opposition to more prevalent sorts of unions on which colonialism thrived.”46 The complicated picture of hybridity and miscegenation the chronicles present offers a variety of pairings beyond the usual male colonizer/female colonized one, thus assuring that the chronicles do not merely depict male sexual license in the imperial arena. Moreover, although many of the relationships depicted do follow the familiar pattern of men taking on local women to service their domestic and sexual needs, these relationships typically involve an emotional component that extends beyond expediency or where the man

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cedes control. For instance, High Life’s “Love for a Year” focuses on a man who passes on his house and concubine to a friend when going home on leave. The plot hinges on his successor’s tragic attachment to the woman; it is she who is indispensable to him, rather than the reverse. By exploring the particularities of intimacy across various colonial divides and connecting the cultivation of this intimacy, through benign neglect, to the welfare of the colonial state, Dalziel’s narratives offer an idealized vision of miscegenation as regeneration. White-on-white relationships, by contrast, are ironically less equal and rely on the overt victimization of women or, more commonly, on misalliance. Although aided by official prescriptions on living arrangements, prostitution, and the like, colonial policies that frustrated cross-cultural intimacy maintained themselves as much through the mechanism of “society” and its false model of propriety as they did through political and legal practice. In Hong Kong, this “society” formulated itself around social relations in the “motherland,” as well as around the interpretation of these relations in the closer colonial context of British India. To the extent that this notion of “society” shifts the blame for the destruction of fertile, intercultural relationships to British women, Dalziel’s foregrounding of social discourses over political ones may seem exculpatory. However, to the extent that it recognizes that “society” desires to safeguard the integrity of British identities in a potentially threatening environment, and to the extent that it shows that men themselves are integral to “society” (not the least because social practices depend on their perception of the necessary conditions for maintaining women in a colonial environment), Chronicles of a Crown Colony resolutely locates the problem in the individual’s inability to publicly defy convention. Moreover, Dalziel’s British protagonists fail to embody the ideals of male and female conduct promoted by late Victorian fiction. Men are neither the archetypal boy-heroes of juvenile fiction set in China, nor are they the quintessential “Jack Tars” of the era’s maritime literature. These characters inhabit multiple and far from uniform positions of class, religion, and geographical origin. Dalziel’s sailors are noteworthy for their “Greennockian” characteristics, their Tyneside talk, their “Glesca” dialect, or even the “distinguished Liverpool-Irish accent” of one captain.47 They are not even resolutely British, if British is taken to mean “English.”48 The protagonist of “A Marriage of No Importance” is Irish, Catholic, and Australian. Peter Schwermans of the High Life tale “Above Normal” has been a “limey” since childhood, but his origins are in Holland and his identity confused: he not only talks but also thinks in a “queer foc’s’le Dutch-English, having spent all his life on board ‘lime-juicers,’ since the day when a good-hearted skipper

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took him, a ragged, hungry urchin of ten, off the quay at Rotterdam.”49 The tales describe sailors from a plethora of middle- and working-class backgrounds, including those with degraded class positions, like the chief engineer in the High Life tale “The Sickness of a Dream,” whose family had for generations been Scottish doctors. They also depict poor whites for whom location within empire has failed to enhance their class positions – like the recurrent character of Dougald M’Guffie, stuck in his job as second engineer solely for want of education. In part by representing these groups, the stories belie the central myth of empire as a bourgeois enterprise and underscore the lack of coherence (both in living standards and in outlook) within the supposedly united body of colonizers. Although relying on the particularities of Hong Kong, Dalziel’s debunking of this central myth of empire suggests that the metropolitan imperial project’s distance from individual colonial contexts sutured over the wounds and fissures visible on the ground. Even when Dalziel’s European characters aspire to emulate the more hegemonic forms of imperial conduct promoted by literary narratives (heroic rescues of sinking ships or selfless sacrifice for the good of the community or of a woman, etc.), the inevitable result is tragedy. And Dalziel differs markedly from other writers of seafaring fiction, such as Conrad – the most famous proponent of the genre in this era and region – in making sensitivity and other typically feminine traits form part of idealized masculine behavior, rather than making the “feminizing of the working classes” a method of undermining working men. This iconoclastic representation of maritime men suggests the widening possibilities of colonial masculinity as a whole at the end of the Victorian era. It also suggests that the processes of canonization have combined to clarify what was really a consistently muddier picture of imperial manhood by marginalizing popular fiction in favor of more aesthetically refined work and by championing fiction produced and distributed in the metropolis in favor of that written and disseminated in individual colonies. Dalziel’s women are not the stereotypical keepers of the hearth, either: They are “odd women” shipped off to relatives in the colonies in a desperate bid for security they cannot find at home. They have affairs out of wedlock and even abandon their husbands. Failing to marry, they take employment, as typists, for instance. Or they flee to the Granite Isle to avoid stultifying, class-degrading labor at home, as Alice Alford does in “The Colour Line,” when she moves to Hong Kong to escape being a governess to “the unruly children of an ironmaster in a smoky Midland town” (31). As is the case with imperial masculinity, these equally iconoclastic portrayals of imperial

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femininity contradict perception that colonial women were bourgeois Victorian female subjects par excellence. However, no moral taint attaches itself to these women as a result of their unconventional behavior. As the narrator of “Love for a Year” states, in words that self-consciously evoke Ibsen’s Ghosts (1882), “The most estimable people of my acquaintance lived entirely unmoral lives, and I forgot to judge them” (High Life, 30).50 Dalziel thus establishes a parallel between a lack of condemnation for European–non-European relationships and a lack of censure for white-on-white relationships that run counter to the thrust of turn-of-the-century melodrama’s interest in fallen women (as well as counter to Victorian and Edwardian culture’s general embrace of empire as a moral enterprise). The point, however, is not to suggest that Hong Kong is a place of immorality or a frontier colony in need of domestication through feminine influence. Instead, it carries forward another strain of Victorian thought – the liberal and not necessarily dominant view that relationships should be based on freewill and love, rather than on economic or social expediency – and thus constructs Hong Kong as a site of modernity. At the same time, because in Hong Kong behavior that would be condemned in either China or Britain “proper” succeeds, it ironically turns Cathay and Albion into anachronistic spaces, spaces that resist modernity by insisting on a nationalistic, coherent sense of self.51 Constructing Hong Kong as modern in contradistinction to an antiquated China and Britain thus involves inverting the normative positions of forward-looking metropole and backwardlooking colony. Such an inversion entails, on the one hand, a rhetorical regression to the dark ages of the colonial and pre-colonial past within the Empire – a harkening to pre-nineteenth-century modes, before the evolution of a Victorian understanding of racial difference, before the intense proscription of hybridity, and before the spectacular burst into prominence of twinned notions of progress and degeneration. On the other hand, it reconfigures metropolitan understandings of linear time and history (which also held sway in China’s progressive fight against multiple “barbarians”) as unsuccessful precisely because they foreclose richer possibilities of a symbiosis between ideas of industrial/economic, post-Enlightenment progress and a return to pre-nineteenth-century social values that deny the validity of scientific racism and its legitimation of cultural superiority. In addition, Dalziel’s tales signally fail to uphold the notion of white superiority so crucial to the rethinking of colonial authority that Stoler identifies as taking place in the early twentieth century. “This rethinking took the form of asserting a distinct colonial morality, explicit in its

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reorientation to the racial and class markers of being European,” she writes. “It emphasized transnational racial commonalities despite national differences. Not least it distilled a notion of Homo europæus for whom superior health, wealth, and education were tied to racial endowments and a White Man’s norm.”52 Stoler acknowledges that boundaries in the Indian context on which Hong Kong so often modeled itself were redrawn much earlier in the wake of the Mutiny (which brought the transition from indirect, East India Company governance to direct rule and an influx of British civil servants and military units). Nevertheless, the “fragrant harbour” colony had a separate history that meant redefinition was indeed occurring in the 1900s, not the least because of Hong Kong’s growing population and its territorial expansion following the 1898 leasing of the New Territories. Whereas the international character of foreign settlement in China and the British-run Imperial Maritime Customs strongly reproduced a notion of Homo europæus that also commonly replicates itself in treaty port narratives, Dalziel’s approach both queries the exclusion of local populations from the boundaries of this transnationalism and questions the veracity of its superior racial endowments. Dalziel’s rejection of presumptions of white paramountcy manifests itself in a number of ways. His stories embrace the model of concubinage that this rethinking sought to sweep away – not because concubinage is actually preferable to marriage, but because corporate promotion (often to the supervisory rank of taipan) stops when men “go native” in too public a fashion. For Dalziel, concubinage based on mutual affection and choice remains preferable to the aura of desperation surrounding relationships with young women imported to the colony solely for the purposes of matrimony; it is also preferable to the relationships forced on men by employers or the community at large when they reached the appropriate age and promotion level to need a social consort. At the same time, his narratives mock ideas both about innate European physical superiority and its consequent deterioration in colonial contexts. European health is not inviolate (Britons also succumb to “Asiatic” diseases), nor is it weakened through miscegenation or prolonged contact with the East.

Onshore/offshore: tampering with identikit models of empire Understanding Dalziel’s intervention into colonial modes of narration means understanding his manipulation of genre conventions, as well.53 Like Conrad, Dalziel’s distinctiveness lies in breaking from the admiring and jingoistic representations of Britannia ruling the waves that

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people the narratives of Frederick Marryat, Henty, R. M. Ballantyne, W. H. G. Kingston, George Manville Fenn, and others, even as he represents the same world of maritime empire.54 In fact, reviewers repeatedly classified Dalziel’s fiction through the interpretive frame of maritime fiction, comparing the author to Kipling in “M’Andrew’s Hymn” (1893) and A Fleet in Being (1898). “Mr. Dalziel is a welcome addition to the company of writers of the sea,” noted the Academy in its appraisal of In the First Watch.55 At first glance, reading Dalziel through this maritime frame appears logical: The narratives that make up In the First Watch are set primarily offshore. Featuring employees of the fictitious Celestial Coasting Company steamship line, they relate shipping lore (such as the collection’s title story, concerning a dipsomaniac who bashes in his skipper’s brains and commits suicide when he is to be dismissed for drinking); comment on political events (such as “Heroes to Order,” a cynical tale about smuggling from Hong Kong during Japan’s blockade of the Russian Port Arthur); or offer morality tales (such as “The Flaw in the Crank-Shaft,” with its plot of heroic and misguided steamship repairs that bring no rewards). These stories seem to work within generic conventions to define empire as a maritime enterprise, one dependent on the real or presumed connections between locations that the shipping trade then concretizes.56 The steamship – as the means to fulfill the propensity to truck, barter, and trade – and its position offshore and in motion cement the idea that empire itself is generic, able to be transported from site to site, unloading its ideological cargo on arrival. Steamship narratives therefore serve to efface the specificities of different contact zones and to fix the onus of representation on the agents of empire themselves. However, on closer examination – and especially in the context of the Hong Kong-published Chronicles of a Crown Colony – these reviewers’ assessment of In the First Watch and High Life in the Far East as part of the genre of maritime, imperial fiction signals a need to impose this genre on the narratives in order to target a readership. At the more popular end of the spectrum, as in the stories published in The Boy’s Own Paper and Pluck, the genre uses local populations as “color,” denying them the level of characterization granted to European protagonists. (These narratives are rather different from work by writers like Conrad and Stevenson, whose “Beach at Falesá” (1892) champions hybridity in quite similar ways to Dalziel, underscoring the need for sensitivity to the different topographies of empire, and from the nineteenth-century sea narratives that Cesare Casarino views as laboratories for modernity and its representation.)57 The popular genre often sets its stories in a retrospective past, in the

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romantic era of sailing ships, something Dalziel mocks Conrad for doing. The sub-genre of the piracy novel was also a staple for the China Seas region, and it mirrored the plot of anti-slaving ship novels set in the South Atlantic, featuring muscular Christian adolescents who help secure the “imperialism of free trade” by making the waters safe for commerce.58 These novels crucially shift the burden for safeguarding empire away from the British squadrons that patrolled southern China and Southeast Asia (partly to combat piracy) and onto the merchant ships: they are both about defining empire primarily through trade (a contentious statement in a geographical region known for gunboat diplomacy) and about demonstrating the superior mettle of ordinary British masculinity. Instead of promulgating this identikit model of the different trading locales where the British presence dominated, Dalziel’s shipping tales inculcate an awareness of the diverse colonial and extra-colonial contexts between which their protagonists move, including Australia, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, and the China Coast. They take intercultural relationships – between coolies and sailors, for instance, or between Peter Schwermans and his Indonesian lover, or the “Anglo-Jap” alliance struck by an engineer in “Maguire’s Trip Home” – as their focus.59 They locate Britons in service on Russian ships; they comment wryly on smuggling and coolie emigration to Latin America; they even glory in the wily exploits of coal-trimmer Pan-Fat, who tricks the Japanese in the port of Moji into paying compensation for his drowning – and then resurfaces alive and well-off when the ship arrives in Swatow.60 And they offer the perspectives of those employed on lowpowered coasters and nine-knot “tramps” to gloss the picture of ease and smooth sailing that “the passenger who patronises the P. & O. or German Mail boat” (ten-thousand horsepower ships able to “laugh at the strength of the monsoon”) gets and takes as idiomatic of modern seafaring.61 In short, the image of commercial, sea-borne imperialism offered is far from celebratory, and the stories counter a “Boy’s Own Paper” style with realism and pessimism. Where the difference between Dalziel’s narratives of Hong Kong and its connection to shipping out East emerges at its strongest, however, is in the textual history of Chronicles of a Crown Colony. First, the London edition published as High Life in the Far East transformed the narrative voice into a straightforward representation of the perspective of the colonizer by removing the conceit that the tales were written by one “Sin-Shang.”62 Second, in keeping with reviewers’ perceptions of Dalziel as a writer in the maritime mold, Unwin’s added to and deleted from the original corpus to include more sea-based tales and to shift the balance of representation away from

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Hong Kong and thus away from the Chinese. This shift, from relating dayto-day life in a single and rather tiny “insular possession” to encapsulating life on the high seas in the broader geography of the Far East, demonstrates one way that metropolitan consumption or publication demanded conformity to a larger imperial framework. The particular character types (if not the individuals on which they were based) and the topical events narrated in Chronicles of a Crown Colony – such as sanitation problems, land speculation, and the development of the Peak tramway – were known to many of the community of readers in Hong Kong. In London, however, they needed to be introduced through conventions of genre that those readers, too, understood. Even the title page of Unwin’s edition reinforces this ideology of genre. Printed opposite is an advertisement for In the First Watch composed of quotations from reviews; five of the six excerpts refer to seafaring.

Whither the white lords of the island? By contrast, the action in Chronicles of a Crown Colony takes place almost exclusively within the bounds of the “Granite Isle” and is defined by it. The chronicles call attention to Hong Kong’s unique and artificial position as the only unilaterally British space on the China Coast – in contradistinction to the larger, more internationalized foreign settlement at Shanghai and the competitive colonial projects by rivals such as Germany and Russia, who waited expectantly for the breakdown of the Chinese Empire (which came in 1911) and the subsequent “carve-up” of China (which never materialized). Here, the sailors of Dalziel’s maritime fiction are replaced by the civil servants who manage their shipping lines and conduct the business of empire. Yet the location of these civil servants themselves is less than fixed, with promotion often involving moving from port to port or even to an imperial site beyond China, thus rendering a univocal understanding of British hegemony over the region inoperative. In Hong Kong, the comforting homosocial frame of the steamship stories – always more a matter of conformity to genre than actual content – becomes unstuck, replaced by a colonial world that foregrounds affective relationships. The transition is one from a mainly European, typically single-sex environment to a space of heterogeneous ethnicity and mixed genders welcomed by Dalziel, in contradistinction to a presentation of British life in Hong Kong as restricted to Europeans and/or to men. Nearly all the stories in the anthology include references to unconventional sexual behavior – be it among Britons or between Britons and other colonial

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populations – and its consequences, which range from the prosaic stymieing of job promotion to the sensational extremities of suicide, death, and prostitution. Many of the stories also take up the rupture of stable, potentially regenerative forms of cross-cultural connection interpolated through sexual relations. This is a remarkable world in which children are rarely present: Either women do not have them, or they die, often as an indirect result of the forces (such as racism) that pull their parents apart. In contrast to many other narratives of colonial encounter, in this corpus, sex is not primarily a dense transfer point for the larger, metonymic problems of colonial society. Instead, Dalziel focuses on the real relations and interactions of the individuals who inhabit spaces of empire. In “Love for a Year,” former “Flower Boat” concubine Lien-fa is convinced that Western women are unchaste and sees their agitation for suffrage as the true immorality: “The unsexed female shrieking for woman’s rights was to her lower than the shameless ones; for this unmoral young lady believed that woman holds her brief to rule the home direct from heaven” (High Life, 43). Lien-fa clearly parrots the prejudices against “man-haters” endorsed by the Britons with whom she has cohabitated, just as she has internalized the notion of separate spheres. Yet her comment is intriguing for two reasons: It suggests that knowledge of the suffrage movement in Britain had (or could have) filtered down to non-English-speaking women in a distant colony. It also implies that the espousal of women’s rights involved a paradoxical “unsexing” that not only articulated itself through a quintessentially misogynist notion of “shrieking” (one that was simultaneously a racist term hurled at Chinese “hordes”), but also entailed a loss of status and face worse than prostitution. Lack of sex and sexuality, rather than inappropriate sex, becomes the hallmark of female misconduct. As a chronicler of what Sara Suleri calls “colonial intimacy,” Dalziel does ask his readers to “recognize that narration occurs to confirm the precariousness of power.”63 However, the goal of his narration is not to disrupt or problematize power itself, nor to expose ways to challenge it. Instead, he demonstrates what certain colonial relations looked like on a micro level and how they influenced people’s lives. Moreover, the mechanisms through which power exerts itself are often neither official nor consistent: in “Da Sarto’s Sister,” a man breaks off his relationship with a Portuguese/ Macanese woman not because of legal restrictions against miscegenation but because, as his taipan lectures him, “the Firm expect their employees to keep clear of all such entanglements as would prevent them from taking their proper position as Head of the House in whatever port they may be appointed to” (High Life, 116). The half-Irish, half-Polynesian girls of “The

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Daughters of the King” are embraced by their white husbands and Hong Kong society, but ostracized when their disreputable father “King Copra” resurfaces and makes himself “again the talk of the waterfront” (Chronicles, 68). Thus the color bar can be raised when convenient – to enable the whitening effect of wealth, for instance – but it also can be lowered again when expedient.

Hybridity in Hong Kong: “despised alike of East and West” One of the most essential elements of Dalziel’s articulation of the color bar stems from his understanding that two highly different racist and xenophobic systems – British and Chinese – collide in Hong Kong and tamper with the mutual affection that binds characters in cross-cultural relationships. To a greater or lesser degree, racism persisted in every colonial context because it received support in differing ways from among groups at all different points along the colonizer–colonized continuum. This continuum, which not accidentally recalls the heterosexuality–homosexuality continuum described by Adrienne Rich, suggests not that racial models are fluid; it does not replace an ossified model of race as static with an equally ossified model of it as mutable. Instead, it calls attention to the fact that any one individual might adhere to different racial or sexual positions at different times and in different contexts. Whereas Rich’s continuum primarily seeks to explain how sexual behavior can oscillate between poles of same-sex and opposite-sex desire, this model of the colonizer–colonized continuum concerns itself more with proving the middle – mapping almost to the exclusion of its poles the much larger and ironically less contested middle ground where colonial encounters mainly took place. This model of a continuum partly explains how concubinage could coincide with scientific racism, or how a white woman could fall for, marry, and repudiate a Eurasian man, only to desire him again (as is the case in Dalziel’s “The Colour Line”). It also partly explains why Dalziel rejects the dialectic of attraction–repulsion that scholars have seen as an underlying trope of colonial encounters in literature: the overall narrative voice of Chronicles of a Crown Colony locates repulsion outside the couples themselves and figures it as a force imposed by “society.” Here, attraction is never dialectically bound to its antithesis. Notionally, however, the category of race was indeed dialogic for both the “Middle Kingdom” and Britain. Hong Kong was the point of intersection for two empires that not only viewed themselves as the center of the world but also saw themselves as civilized in contrast to the other’s inclination towards barbarism. Whatever the actual power relations between them,

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each side held to a fiction of supremacy that meant both parties to an intercultural liaison – and their peers – might conceive of crossing the “colour line” as racially degrading. As a central metaphor for cross-cultural relations, the term “colour line” itself relies on a slippage between the word line’s meanings of “lineage” and “border.” It is an attempt to imagine a physical point of division between West and East, colonizer and colonized, one that might seem absurd were it not for the palpable ways in which Hong Kong drew it through neighborhood zoning, employment ceilings, and the like. In theory, therefore, hybridity entailed double ostracism; those engaged in miscegenation in Hong Kong or those who were its product were despised by East and West alike because they signified the rejection of two powerful paradigms of purity. Strategies of “whitening up” over generations (as practiced in the Caribbean and Latin America) did little to secure social, legal, or financial benefits. In practice, however, the situation was more complex. Dalziel’s narratives make it clear that Hong Kong could be a liberatory space for cross-cultural relationships so long as the British and Chinese both remained unconcerned with them and so long as colonial authority avoided (or appeared to avoid) over-regulating the private sphere. This liberatory potential is most available to immigrants to the colony, since they are unrestrained by family ties and can construct their lives within the colony in fundamentally different ways than they would outside of it. Hong Kong’s vaunted sense of transience, then, encourages freedoms that rootedness would forestall. Far from positing hybridity as productive of resistance (as scholars of India have argued), this vision of Hong Kong suggests that individuals engaged with it in ill-defined and inconsistent ways and, more importantly, that hybridity actively sought to evade attention, rather than to use it to promote resistance. The situation of the Eurasian in India was probably similar. As Sharpe has argued, lack of sustained critical attention to groups like the Eurasians, who embodied hybridity and were forced to form separate communities because of it, may have contributed to an overemphasis in postcolonial criticism on hybridity as a strategy of resistance (19–20). The narratives also show, particularly through the tragic twists that conclude them, what happens when recognition for cross-cultural relationships is required or forced on those involved in them. Not surprisingly, repression/suppression occurs at the point of sanction and legitimation. Also not surprisingly, it is at this point that violence – either real or epistemic – enters the picture and demonstrates that authority in various

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guises and in various realms is not the benign phenomenon that Dalziel’s characters have presumed it to be. “The Colour Line” offers a direct instance of the violence of the colonial process visiting itself back on the colonizers and brutalizing them through the history of a young, middle-class couple who are divided and destroyed by the precise racial politics of Hong Kong at the turn of the century. This chronicle concerns the disastrous marriage of Miss Alice Alford with the intelligent, sensitive “half-caste” Stephen Hedley. The tale is a commentary on the ramifications of exporting Britain’s “odd women” to colonies suffering from “the lack of marriagable [sic] maidens” (30) – Miss Alford having come to China to be with her brother, a junior shipping clerk for a firm of China Coast steamers, and to “tempt her fortune in the East” (31). It also represents a departure from more common tales of male sexual license by having the miscegenation be between a woman and a “half-caste” and based on the dictates of poverty on the female side and on adoration and devotion on the male one, factors that probably explain why the tale was not reproduced in High Life in the Far East when it was published in London. Both Alice Alford and Stephen Hedley are types of Britons from Britain. Although born in the colony, Hedley has been educated at “one of England’s historic Public Schools” and is “in appearance, as in outlook, an English Gentleman” (34). Hedley’s racial alterity only manifests itself, and only to others, on his return to Hong Kong, where “they never tire of telling you with an air of quiet self-approval that nowhere East is the colour line so strictly drawn as in Hongkong. Which, of course, is but as it ought to be” (34). It interferes both with his career – “He was now head shipping-clerk for the firm that Alford served and would surely have been ‘Tai-Pan’ but for his ‘touch of colour’” (34) – and opens him up to abuse at work, where “the last-joined stamp-licker out from home learned in a short week to allude to [him] as ‘the nigger’” (35). It also interferes most dramatically with his personal life. He falls in love with, and successfully woos, Alice in his guise as an English gentleman, his public-school education rendering him capable of misunderstanding his true “place” in Hong Kong and his love for the girl clouding his awareness of “the ban he lived under” (35). For her part, she weds him because she faces financial ruin and because, as a newcomer to the colony, she herself does not quite understand “the awful disabilities the half-caste – despised alike of East and West! – labours under” (35). From here on, the plot follows stereotypical lines, but it differs markedly from the generic in its treatment. Alice grows increasingly uneasy as she becomes aware of her exclusion from female society on account of her marriage and becomes prey to unwanted attention from her former friends’

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husbands, who believe that “[t]he half-caste’s wife was fair game” (36). Even then, secure in her husband’s love, the “warm-hearted English girl” continues to enjoy her marriage until she becomes pregnant. Her child turns out to be “of purest Chinese type, such a child as Hedley’s maternal grandmother might have been; let anthropologists explain the mystery!” (37–38). In her eyes the infant is an “olive-skinned, almond-eyed, wide-mouthed, featureless, repulsive, squalling brat, whose exact counterpart was to be found at all times in dozens rolling in the mud without her gates” (38). By interpreting her baby’s physical characteristics through this charged analogy with poor Chinese children frolicking in mud, Alice sees in her child a complete and “repulsive” loss of self (as well as its precise mirror). She also sees in the baby a complete absorption into the “featureless,” anonymous, and overwhelming Chinese masses. Purity, in the context of the “Chinese type,” thereby equates itself with its antitheses of dirt, taint, and poverty; through his progeny, her husband’s impure “Englishness” reverts to its presumed original and now unacceptable type. Purity, then, is more threatening than hybridity. Being not white locates the baby’s subjectivity as the dialogical opposite of being white, which itself is more awful than being between European and Chinese because it entails no middle ground; because it assumes an almost effortless conversion of white to not-white, self to other, via miscegenation; and because it disables what Robert Young calls the “threat of the fecund fertility of the colonial desiring machine, whereby a culture in its colonial operation becomes hybridized, alienated, and potentially threatening to its European original through the production of polymorphously perverse people who are, in Bhabha’s phrase, white, but not quite.”64 Fortunately, like the product of illegitimacy in melodrama that the baby so patently is not, the “brat” dies. While the absence of “fecund fertility” here could be ascribed to the reversal of the usual male colonizer/native female coupling (with its implicit assumptions of the indigenous woman’s fitness for childbearing and her animalistic sexual desires), the rest of the story suggests otherwise by reinvesting the couple with a theoretical fecundity that Hong Kong society’s inculcation of a racist mindset in Alice turns sterile. As a result of their child’s birth and death, Alice suffers what today would be labeled postpartum depression. She grows distant from Stephen, and their marriage founders. He retreats to yachting and his passion for Sinology. These twin pastimes link him to his divided past: the one implicitly marking him as the well-bred Englishman, the other locally considered the most dangerous and suspect hobby for a “China hand,” as well as psychologically paralleling his baby’s native state. She, meanwhile, takes up with a rapacious man of the

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sort she previously shunned: the scoundrel Hugh Chisham, “an abiding pillar of the Presbyterian persuasion, and reported a good-living man, though there were those in the Colony who remembered him when he was not so distinguished” (39). At this point Alice’s sensitive husband disappears: he has committed suicide on his yacht, but not before exacting a written promise from his wife’s suitor to marry Alice “when she is freed of her present encumbrance” (44). With his death and her receipt from her husband’s lawyer of this note as she sits on the deck of the P&O steamer taking her away from the colony, Alice comes to a realization of “what she had flung away” (44). When the foreign country becomes the past (rather than the other way around), she understands how they could have done things differently there. The startling plot and conclusion of “The Colour Line” marks repulsion as an afterthought, a product of Alice’s own mistreatment at the hands of her compatriots, rather than something integral to her attraction to Stephen. Her rejection of her baby and later her husband are far from being legitimate reactions to a “decivilizing” process; instead, they are a betrayal of Alice’s essential English/British goodness. She repudiates the infant when she is “weak, and tender-minded, and impressionable after her illness” (38), and it is her frailty that makes her glimpse “the very bottom of the eternal gulf that God has placed betwixt East and West” (38) and encourages her to mistakenly leap into that gulf. Alice is the “beautiful, refined, and amiable English girl” (31) that she appears to be, but she is alienated from herself by Hong Kong society’s rejection and abuse of her – a rejection she internalizes in her reaction to her offspring. Alice marries Hedley because “her sunny nature fended off many of its [society’s] prejudices, to her undoing” (35), but the “angel of the house” becomes a demon when she succumbs to her prejudices. Idealized domesticity is therefore located internally, within the self, and bourgeois social forces actually destroy it, rather than enhance it, in the colonial context. However, only by leaving colonial ground, only when freed from its pernicious racism, does Alice become conscious of this paradox. The space of Hong Kong embodies the potential for progressive modernity but forestalls its realization. The overarching irony of “The Colour Line” is that Stephen Hedley is the perfect English gentleman, the perfect model for British masculinity, and the perfect embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s principles of manhood not in spite of the “touch of tightness about the eye-lids and the tinges of brown beneath the finger nails that told of his Cantonese mother” (34), but because these marks of racial difference are irrelevant to his character, intelligence, and moral conduct. No “fabricated European,” he is the English gentleman – the

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idealized brown-skinned Englishman – who believes in fair play and treats abuse with the proverbial “stiff upper lip.” He is not the bitter, vengeful halfcaste so familiar in the literature of imperialism. Nor does his suicide fit the common pattern identified with the Chinese by writers and social theorists. In The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), sociology pioneer Edward Westermarck remarks, “Another common form of suicide which is admired as heroic in China is that committed for the purpose of taking revenge upon an enemy who is otherwise out of reach – according to Chinese ideas a most effective mode of revenge, not only because the law throws the responsibility of the deed on him who occasioned it, but also because the disembodied soul is supposed to be better able than the living man to persecute the enemy.”65 This form of revenge suicide is the type seen in “The Vampire Nemesis,” and in certain tales in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, which I discuss in Chapter 6. It also appears in Boehm’s “Peter Wong.” Maggie Brown, the child of missionaries in the small outport of Chingcha, is slated to marry the unpleasant title character, until newcomer Gregory King arrives and steals her away. Wong then revenges himself “in a truly Chinese fashion” by poisoning himself in his rival’s house on his rival’s wedding day.66 By contrast, the ostensible “Chineseness” of Hedley’s demise is really the triumph of the Briton’s much-vaunted sense of self-sacrifice. It is the natural outcome of his possession of a “power of sober application not often allied to uncommon ability” (34). He gives up his life to free his beloved from the “encumbrance” of his affections. Hedley’s repeatedly marked masculine sensitivity is starkly oppositional to the sporting front of figures like Chisham, who hide masculine excess behind their veneer of propriety. It is, in fact, the full realization of the codes of good conduct, of the public-school ethos, being promoted back in Britain and being used by men like Chisham to conceal their disreputable hedonism. Even the natural reserve Hedley falls into when unable to reconcile himself with his wife suggests how truly he reflects idealized conceptions of a tender British masculinity in every way but his immaterial “touch of colour.” And because he is so quintessentially, so perfectly British in character and sentiment, Hedley not only exposes the immorality and un-Britishness of the “colour line,” but also parodies the notion that Britishness is bound to race, rather than culture and education.

Uncommon trysts: the unbearable morality of immoral relations By opening a breach between a narrative voice that appears to represent the opinions of Hong Kong society and an ironic undertone that condemns

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that society, that turns Stephen Hedley into a hero, Dalziel thus forces his readers to question their own complicity in the deplorable activity he depicts. These readers are asked not to overlook the socially unconventional morality behind the kind of relationships that the authorial voice proposes, but to acknowledge them and embrace them. This implicit appeal is for a hybridity that requires legitimation from within but keeps it sub-rosa by not demanding official legal or moral sanction, but it becomes an explicit formulation in the biographically revealing, page-long dedication to the Chronicles. Addressed to “Small Pot,” who may be the author’s child by a Chinese lover or perhaps the woman herself, the dedication laments that he is leaving her for “a country where the children know not the lychee, the loquat, nor the guava, nor the tame chee-cheets.” Meanwhile, she is to return to her “green Lingnam,” part of the rural hinterland internal to the colony but where the inhabitants had little to do with British authority and where lives were not transformed by it. He praises her “child’s heart that knows not creed nor colour, but only kindness” – precisely because it remains ignorant of the prejudices of the Chinese and British alike – and descries an environmentally impoverished and intellectually cruel Britain “where they call you – you, with your elaborate small politenesses, your perfect, respectful obedience, and your little brave dignity – ‘heathen’ and ‘savage.’” Dalziel also figures “Small Pot” as the person who “watched the growth, sheet by sheet, of this sad little book” and gives her possession of it: Know All Men by These Presents This is SMALL POT HER BOOK.

This invocation of Small Pot as the originary reader of the text and as its owner thus encompasses the British reader within the space of the Celestial and the feminine; it unfastens the narratives contained in the book from the position of masculine and colonial authority so often claimed for fictions of empire disseminated in Britain itself. Thus Chronicles of a Crown Colony claims a specific subjectivity for its characters and for Hong Kong itself – one that asserts a distinct if only illusory notion of “home” for that fragrant harbor settlement, despite the transience of its inhabitants. If Dalziel’s stories leave their readers unsettled by their descent into the uncanny, they do so only because more salutary positions of miscegenation are made unviable. If his dedication fixes his tales in retrospective space – consummated, like Alice Alford’s love for her husband, through the act of leaving the colony – it is because the past harbors the possibilities that the present curtails. Hybridity, Dalziel

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concludes, is the hidden treasure that Britain and her Crown colony throw away. It is, in fact, the treasure that the author himself has thrown away by leaving Small Pot behind, by his return to a world that knows her not, and cannot know her. Dalziel’s lament to Small Pot disappears from the collection High Life in the Far East, which addresses itself “To My Most Trusty and Accessible Collaborator in Resolving These Eastern Tangles[,] the ‘High Life’ Cigar.” The change in the dedication is a telling indication of the distinction between fiction at the site of empire and fiction at its seat, and of the greater flexibility the short story and the anthology have to repackage materials for different audiences. With this substitution, the London version of the chronicles signals the impossibility of championing interracial companionship in the metropolitan context, an impossibility reflected in the tragic narratives about relationships between British women and Chinese men discussed in this book’s final chapter. The tales themselves reject this reformulation, just as they reject the possibility of disentangling “East” from “West.” Yet the need to reinvent the homosocial world of Dalziel’s earlier In the Night Watch and to kowtow to the masculinist biases implicit in the overarching genre of imperial fiction ultimately resolves this contradiction. The cigar, as an amanuensis for the pen (and the phallus), proposes a very different form of collaboration than the earlier one between the author and Small Pot: one that is solitary, rather than shared; auto-erotic, rather than intercourse-based; and grounded in “trust,” not affect. The concept of ownership transfers from the book, which can be gifted to the woman and to the reader, to the cigar, a comfort “accessible” only to Dalziel. The cigar is mobile across the geographies of the Far East that the writer and his tales traverse; the woman rooted to the space of the Crown colony. Thus, Small Pot’s claim to the text must vanish because in the metropolitan context, “all men” cannot accept the knowledge of her connection to the author. In the end, Small Pot is and must be dispossessed.

chapter 3

Peking plots Narrating the Boxer Rebellion of 1900

A handful of foreigners have shown China what they can do against murderous thousands, and it only remains for the Powers to stamp the lesson deeper, and exact punishment for the guilty and full compensation for losses sustained. W. Murray Graydon, The Perils of Pekin (1904)

To find something akin in its savage barbarity you must go back to Lucknow, where a mixed multitude shut up in the Residency were holding out against fearful odds in expectation of relief by Havelock’s Highlanders, resolved to perish of starvation rather than surrender, for the fate of Cawnpore stared them in the face. It adds point to this parallel to remember that the Tartar rulers of China are cousin german to the Great Mogul who headed the Sepoy Mutiny. It was some excuse for the King of Delhi that he was seeking to regain his throne. No such apology can be offered for the Empress Dowager of China. She has made war not without provocation, but wholly unjustifiable, on all nations of the civilized world.

W. A. P. Martin, The Siege in Peking (1900)1

Late in 1900, British directors Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon produced a short film entitled “Beheading of a Chinese Boxer.”2 Depicting a scene from the aftermath of the Uprising that had swept across Northern China that summer, the film shows the execution of a “rebel” by Chinese soldiers.3 The soldiers stretch out the man’s pigtail to make his neck taut and lop off his head with a long sword. They then plant the head on a pole, leaving it as a symbol of the strident punishment to be meted out to those who had participated in the anti-foreign Rebellion. Like James Williamson’s betterknown “Attack on a China Mission” (1900), “Beheading of a Chinese Boxer” harnesses the new technology of film to offer a visual impression of events that had been the subject of intense media attention, as news of the Siege of the Legations in Peking in July of that year arrived back in Britain. 98

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Neither film’s interest lies in its verisimilitude (or lack thereof), nor in its informational content; these works are not news footage, but narrative reenactments, made in Britain, that treat their “home audiences” to a spectacle of punitive, imperial triumph. In particular, Mitchell and Kenyon’s short takes that essential symbol of Chineseness, the pigtail, and harnesses it to the cause of “justice.” If not by his own petard, this Boxer is hoist by his own pigtail. Because the pigtail was, for Britons, also a symbol of the Manchu dynasty that ruled China – and that was reviled for having encouraged the anti-foreign feeling of which the Rebellion was a culmination – the film also functions as a political allegory. With its underlying trope of castration, it suggests the neutering of the threat China could pose to the wellbeing of its audience. The “lesson” of which W. Murray Graydon speaks in his novel The Perils of Pekin was stamped deeply, indeed. Unequivocal in its sentiments about the Chinese and the wrongness of their cause against the foreigners, “Beheading of a Chinese Boxer” thus rides the wave of patriotism and imperial pride that followed the rout of the Rebellion and the occupation of the Forbidden City. Unlike the treaty port narratives that preceded it, the film banishes heterophilia and admits no possibility of positive cultural interchange. Moreover, its focus on an act of retribution denies the legitimacy of any sense of grievance on the part of the Chinese population at what Croskey labels the “steadfast encroachment of Western innovations on a civilization which had endured without change for over 2,000 years” (“The S. G.”, 107). Instead, it proposes a stark moral imperative backed up by imperialist might. Read in conjunction with news footage showing European and American forces occupying various Chinese cities, “Beheading of a Chinese Boxer” also taps in to the idea that the relief coalition’s role was to restore order to “the sick man of Asia.” Chinese sovereignty is not wholly supplanted, however – it is ostensibly Chinese soldiers who do the beheading in this instance. Instead, it is made instrumental to Western justice and subject to Western oversight. Mitchell and Kenyon’s film is typical of the large body of literary production sparked by the Boxer Rebellion, which entered a marketplace vexed by the conflicting views of high imperialist jingoists and imperial selfdoubters and troubled by Britain’s contemporaneous failures in the South African War against the “rebellious” Boers. Following on from public discussions in the 1890s about the potential carve-up of China and the reconfiguration of Britain’s imperial map more generally, these narratives replaced doubt about how to deal with China with the certainty that Britain’s military intervention heralded its expanding leadership role in Asia. Narratives about the Boxer Movement were thus inherently historical

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in orientation, in that they sought to explain China’s xenophobia and ineffective governance to the public at large and to see the Rebellion as the endpoint of a teleology of isolationism and resistance to modernity. Unlike the British and French invasion of 1860, the occupation of Peking and Tientsin in 1900 ostensibly signaled that China had finally and irrevocably been opened up. Not surprisingly, the history of the Rebellion as enshrined in most turnof-the-century narratives about it followed a formulaic pattern. A Chinese “secret society,” with the collusion of certain anti-reform Manchu authorities, had carried out a systematic program to annihilate all Westerners and “native Christians” living in China.4 The Boxers, so called because their “superstitious” practices looked like magic boxing, swept across North China from the spring of 1900, eventually throwing much of the imperial capital of Peking into confusion.5 Forced to hole up in the Legations and other barricaded areas, the Westerners of the region joined forces under largely British leadership and fought against incredible odds to protect themselves, holding out until an international resistance force, led by the British, rescued them fifty-five days later, and the Rebellion was quashed.6 The siege was read in almost biblical terms, especially since missionaries and Christian converts were among the Boxers’ main targets. Beyond popular literature, it gave rise to a large body of millenarian texts about China’s Christian future. The fact that it had occurred in the first year of the new century also had enormous resonance in terms of making the Boxer Rebellion a symbolic turning point in the history of imperialism. The fin de siècle had not resulted in the fin du globe, but it was ushering in a new sociopolitical landscape. For the British, the Uprising threw into question noninterventionist trade strategies and underscored the potentially tenuous nature of imperial authority both in formal colonies such as India (where fledgling nationalist movements were evolving) and in areas bordering on these formal colonies.7 Beneath the rhetoric of triumph, doubts also surfaced about the overall future of empire and the dangers of a militarized East Asia. Fiction writers would eventually respond to these doubts by producing invasion novels, which dramatized mass movements of “yellow hordes” and brought to the fore the conflict between the East and West, with predictable results. These novels, which are the subject of Chapter 4, invest the localized events of the Rebellion with broader geopolitical significance. Modern scholarship suggests that such an understanding of the Rebellion and its aftermath owes more to fiction than to fact. For instance, Robert Bickers, in his introduction to the anthology The Boxers, China, and the

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World, sees the Boxer War as “a wholly modern episode and a wholly modern resistance to globalizing power, representing new trends in modern China and in international relations.”8 This chapter, however, concerns itself with imperial mythmaking, which used the Rebellion primarily to promote colonialist ideology (although not necessarily to advocate territorial acquisition).9 It surveys the range of literary production about the Uprising but concentrates on adventure novels, several of them bestsellers, because of these works’ broad appeal, the speed with which they were published, and the wide influence they had in shaping popular perceptions about China and the Chinese at the end of the Victorian era.10 With the notable exception of works such as Constancia Serjeant’s A Tale of Red Pekin (1902) and Bewicke’s Out in China!, male-authored and malecentered texts predominate within this body of fiction.11 Typically, this corpus of Boxer narratives focuses on the events of the Rebellion itself and details the heroic efforts of a boy protagonist, disguised in native dress, to safeguard his family members and the European community at large. It presents a historical discourse about the stability of empire and the ultimate supremacy of the “civilized” over “uncivilized,” of discipline over mobbery. These narratives assert a model for “native” resistance and the reestablishment of order that simultaneously points to the inherent instability of empire, but also to its mode of incorporation, expansion, and extension of authority. Thus China after 1900 becomes an analogue for India after 1857, and these works continually refract the events of the Boxer Rebellion through those of the Indian Mutiny. Prolific adventure writers also grafted the Boxer Rebellion onto the frame they had used in earlier novels about the Mutiny. Henty’s With the Allies to Pekin (1904), for instance, has a plot and structure nearly identical to his 1881 Mutiny tale In Times of Peril. Similarly, Boxer narratives titillate by raising the specter of the humiliating defeat suffered by the British at Cawnpore (Kanpur). Yet their protagonists emerge triumphant from a siege of the British Legation that closely mirrors the siege of the Residency at Lucknow, immortalized for the Victorians by Alfred Tennyson in his poem “The Defence of Lucknow” (1880). As Mitchell and Kenyon’s film makes clear, Boxer narratives also resemble Mutiny ones by participating in what Patrick Brantlinger calls “extropunitive projection, the racist pattern of blaming the victim expressed in terms of an absolute polarization of good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, moral restraint and sexual depravity, civilization and barbarism.”12 The Sepoy Rebellion had led to the conversion of India into a directly controlled Crown Colony; many saw the situation in 1900 as a mirror to

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India’s and anticipated the annexation of parts of China. Novelists in particular predicted the likelihood of this development, essentially arguing, as Robinson and Gallagher later would in 1953, that the breakdown of informal imperialism would spur more direct action by the British government.13 At the same time, the risks of incorporating China, like India, were well recognized: the potential for destabilization, for reverse colonization, and for a dangerous hybridity of structures are clearly marked in these texts. Suleri has argued that acts of appropriation under colonialism are symptoms of the terror and the vulnerability of cultural boundaries. In the narratives of anxiety that arise from such encounters, she claims, aggression functions as a symptom of terror, not possession.14 Even more than in British India, such anxieties of empire are revealed starkly with respect to China and the Boxer Movement precisely because the crisis of authority remains unresolved, with the aggression practiced on cantonments or isolated European quarters being bravely repulsed without the necessary subsequent legitimation of power being achieved. Operating within the interstices of a multiplicity of colonial structures, in which British hegemony is contested not only by the Chinese state and by the Boxers, but also by the Russians and Japanese, these narratives mark the landscape of China as a crucial site for preventing the expansion of Russian and Asian empires over the West and over sovereign space allocated to Europe by China (i.e. the Legations). The conflict between official British policy in the region – largely nonexpansionist and non-interventionist, especially under Lord Salisbury – at odds with public opinion at home in favor of territorial expansion, adds to this crisis of authority instigated by the Uprising. Importantly, and unlike many earlier fictions about China, nearly all fictional narratives about the Boxer Rebellion and Chinese invasions of Europe (the subject of the next chapter) see their publication in the metropolitan center. Although a steady stream of first-hand accounts about the Rebellion were produced and published in China, the literary interest in the Uprising, and its perceived threats, would have been at odds with both missionary and commercial attempts to reestablish themselves in China after the Rebellion. The military background of many of the authors, always announced on the books’ title pages, also explains this metropolitan orientation. China in 1900 was the locus of an intense scramble for control, with British trade supremacy threatened primarily by the Russians in Manchuria and their French allies, but also by the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. France’s aggressive policy in the last decades of the nineteenth century to secure control over southern China and the island of Hainan subsequent to

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its incorporation of what had formerly been the Chinese tributary states of Indochina – in addition to the Russian military presence in Port Arthur and its construction of railroads in the north of China – threatened not only the integrity of the Chinese state and Britain’s trade and control over customs collections, but also the formal colonies of Burma and India. France’s refusal to allow the British to build a railroad from the Burmese frontier into China and Russia’s repeated attempts to gain control over the Imperial Maritime Customs Service were seen by the British press (if not by Lord Salisbury) as direct threats to the balance of power in China and the stability of the Empire. Envisaged by political theorists and the public at the time were a British-controlled Yangtse (Yangtze) Protectorate, the occupation and subsequent annexation of Tibet, and the expansion of the treaty ports and the area around Hong Kong. Russia had plans for the invasion of Manchuria and had already attempted the seizure of ports in Korea. Japan retained Formosa (Taiwan), ceded to it after it defeated China in 1895, and Germany and Italy both sought concessions in the region, the former successfully gaining a port in retaliation for the murder of several missionaries. Britain, meanwhile, sought to consolidate her empire on the subcontinent and protect it from French and Russian incursions. The years leading up to the Rebellion marked a period of intense “Russophobia,” shared by key political figures in China, such as Hart.15 The causes of the Boxer Rebellion need not be detailed here, beyond acknowledging that economic and other factors gave the Chinese laborers who formed the core of the movement significant cause for the xenophobia they subsequently displayed.16 Starting in the province of Shantung (Shandong) and originally anti-Catholic, the Boxer Movement gradually widened to include all of North China, with the professed aims of killing all foreigners and forcing all “native Christians” to either abandon their faith or die. Its adherents held large demonstrations, described as follows by a missionary correspondent for the Shanghai Mercury, a leading English-language daily: “Each band was conducted by a ‘demonized’ leader, who, by the selection of an epileptic or by the patient aid of hypnotism, caused a ‘medium’ to display wild and unnatural symptoms or to utter wild and strange speech, this serving as a basis for the claim of this Society to spiritual power. Every follower was assured of immunity from death or physical injury – their bodies being spiritually protected from sword cuts and bullets.”17 With collusion from various local governments and later the Empress Dowager and her staff, the Uprising resulted in widespread chaos in terms of looting, pillaging, and murdering. The sovereignty of the Legations was immediately violated. When authorities

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from the Tsung-li Yamen offered safe conduct for Europeans out of the city, the Legations were dubious – particularly when the German Minister, Baron von Ketteler, was murdered by soldiers on his way to negotiate with officials on the evacuation of the Europeans from the city. Subsequent historical work has shown that many of the events of the Rebellion, considered incredible both to those Europeans party to the siege and to the novelists who chronicled their plight, derived from severe cultural misunderstandings on both sides, as well as from misinformation. For example, the Empress Dowager declared war on all the Powers after being told that Imperial Troops had forced a European relief force back from the strategic Taku (Dagu) coastal forts, when that force had actually taken control of the forts; a Shanghai correspondent for the Daily Mail threw Europe into blood-thirsty consternation by reporting as fact a rumor that the Legations had fallen and Peking’s foreign residents been exterminated in July 1900, in the middle of the siege. Consolidating their forces in the British Legation and under the leadership of Sir Claude MacDonald, Britain’s plenipotentiary minister in China, the Europeans and several thousand “native Christians” withstood continual siege by Boxers and Imperial soldiers over the summer of 1900 until the international relief force entered Peking in August.18 The Dowager Empress and her entourage were forced to flee the city, which was then divided into sectors by the different Western and Japanese forces involved in the operation. A subsequently negotiated treaty entailed the execution of eleven proBoxer officials, an enormous and crippling indemnity, the destruction of the Taku forts, the stationing of European forces along key approaches to the capital, and the establishment of a permanent Legation guard (Esherick, Origins, 311). The conditions of the treaty contributed significantly to antiManchu sentiment in China, and scholars have concluded that it helped pave the way for the Xinhai Revolution in 1911. The publicity generated by the Uprising within Britain was significant, with many survivors of the siege publishing their accounts in newspapers or books. The siege – entirely unexpected both by the press and British government officials – removed the Anglo-Boer War from its position as leader in British papers.19 The novelists described here took advantage of this publicity and quickly published works about the siege, in which they generally had not been involved. Their knowledge of China often is scant, and the novels recycle material from erroneous news reports published during the Rebellion (when contact with the Legations was practically non-existent), as well as from fanciful accounts by survivors. Reflective of their metropolitan perspective, they perceive the conflict in China not in

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local, but in globalized terms, and see it as antidote to the humiliations of the conflict in South Africa. Many make explicit comparisons to the Anglo-Boer War. In Captain F. S. Brereton’s The Dragon of Pekin, the boy heroes decide to leave the safety of the Legation and play a more integral part in the conflict because they hope to see the action they missed in South Africa. A Chinese opponent’s ferocity later proves “that this Celestial was as cunning as any of the dark-skinned warriors to be met with in South Africa.”20 Just before Bob goes off on his crucial mission to send a message from the Legations to Tientsin, a Japanese official warns, “Remember, though I have no wish to dissuade you, that these poor ignorant Chinese are worse than Boers, and that if you fall into their hands you can expect no mercy – in fact it would be better to shoot yourselves” (154). Britons in China therefore symbolically recoup the losses in Africa; natives, black or Chinese, are also amalgamated.

A state of siege Making implicit if not overt references to the earlier imperial history of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion and the plight suffered by the English at Cawnpore and Lucknow, these narratives share with their Indian-based predecessors highly allegorical plots in which tiny numbers of embattled Britons bravely fend off threats from large numbers of “natives”; in so doing, they uphold the principles of British expansion while typing the natives as laboring under misconceptions and acting purely on impulse, rather than reason.21 The small British communities stranded in the compounds of India and China function as metonyms for the community at home. The British denizens of these communities were vastly outnumbered by their imperial subjects, but were able to gain mastery through superior technology, combined with scientific rationalism – but only after a long and uncertain struggle. The typical model of the static Asian state against the dynamic Western power is thus crucially rearticulated at the moment in which it seems most in doubt, that is, at the very site of rebellion and social upheaval. While before the war the mapping of China is given in terms of “spheres of influence,” of huge territorial tracts, the novels of the Boxer Rebellion redefine Chinese space in terms of the urban, specifically in terms of the three urban centers that were the main sites of European resistance to the Uprising: Peking, Tientsin, and the Taku Forts. The carefully constructed delineation of urban space before the war – into European cantonments and native quarters, or in Peking, into the European concessions/Legation Quarter, the Imperial City, the Tartar City, and the native quarters – is

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disrupted by the war, as the available space for the British protagonists decreases: novel after novel includes a scene either on the outskirts of the town or in the countryside in which the boy heroes are threatened before the Rebellion begins, forcing them to constrict their movements to the city itself, then successively to the European concession areas and ultimately to the British Legation in Peking (or, occasionally, Gordon Hall in Tientsin). Here, the historical process of the “opening up of China,” achieved by gunboat diplomacy since the early Victorian period, is implicitly reversed: the British are symbolically stripped of their hard-won access to Chinese land, to trade, and ultimately re-placed in the situation of isolation that had marked the first settlements in China. The threat of the Rebellion’s success, then, becomes an articulation of historical reversal, of returning China to the isolation of a century earlier. Such a narrative of anti-progress cannot be, and is not, allowed to succeed: re-penetration of Chinese space through disguise becomes the harbinger for the military forces that arrive at the eleventh hour to end the siege. Admiral Seymour’s “column” opens up China in a progressive movement from the coast into the empire, and ultimately to its heart, the capital, in a process roughly analogous to the movement from treaty port to extraterritorial rights to diplomatic representation in Peking, which had characterized the historical relationship between China and Europe during the nineteenth century. The reassertion of sovereignty, with the flying of the flags over the Legation and the flight of the Empress Dowager, is itself perceived as a recasting of the results of earlier uprisings and occupations by British and French forces (specifically, that of 1860). The mapping and remapping of imperial history presented in these novels finally asserts the European “right” of presence in the Middle Kingdom (though later invasion novels indicate that anxieties about such reversals were not at all quelled by the outcome of the Boxer Rebellion). As configured by these literary narratives (and also by journalistic accounts of the Uprising and political commentaries on it), the Boxer Rebellion gains significance as a populist-grounded rejection of capitalism and the principles of exchange in favor of a traditional Orientalist model of stasis and despotism. In attempting to reverse British imperial history to return China to an ahistorical past of never-ending isolation, the Rebellion seeks to situate China and the Chinese outside of history. The connection between mob violence and stasis drawn by the novels resonates with one that Marx and Engels, at mid-century, conceptualized for rather different purposes – though with equal disregard for historical realities. Whereas for the Boxer literature the repression of the peasant violence inspired by Oriental despotism fosters a congratulatory evaluation of Britannia’s right

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to rule, for Marx, the combination of Asiatic stasis and inchoate violence heralds the coming of global revolutionary change. Violence in China, he predicts, will inspire working-class insurrection in Europe, by exposing the implicit violence of imperialism. Despite their different conclusions, the echoes of and dissonances with Marx and Engels’s commentaries to be found in the Boxer literature bear exploration because they reveal how early and how long China took center stage in Victorian conceptions of interlinked global systems; how important China was to self-reflective anxieties about the working class and the breakdown of social order; and how embedded popular fiction about imperialism was in these debates. Like the Boxer literature, Marx’s writings on China link it to India. In a series of articles published from the mid to late 1850s, Marx predicts resistance to the foreign presence in Asia and argues that while such upheavals are unlikely to change the structure of the Manchu Empire, the effect that they might have on the British Empire and on Britain’s progression through capitalism might be profound. He cites the Taiping Rebellion, with its hybrid Christian identity and enormous death toll, and the second Anglo-Chinese War, 1856–1858, alongside the 1857 Mutiny, as specific instances, but sees such uprising as part of a continual process of upheaval resulting from imperial encounters.22 (The Second Opium War arose in October 1856 after Ye Mingchen seized a Chinese pirate ship, the Arrow, which was supposedly registered in Hong Kong and flying the British flag. The seizure and subsequent demands for reparations gave the British consul in Canton, Harry Parkes, a pretext to open hostilities.)23 Writes Marx in “Revolution in China and in Europe,” published in June 1853 in the New York Daily Tribune: It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire, – the very opposite of Europe, – than on any other political cause that now exists, – more even than on the menaces of Russia and the consequent likelihood of a general European war. But yet it is no paradox, as all may understand by attentively considering the circumstances of the case. Whatever be the social causes, and whatever religious, dynastic, or national shape they may assume, that have brought about the chronic rebellions subsisting in China for about ten years past, and now gathered together in one formidable revolution, the occasion of this outbreak has unquestionably been afforded by the English cannon forcing upon China that soporific drug called opium. Before the British arms the authority of the Manchu

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Here Marx identifies the dangers of global imperialism that later novelists were so keen to exploit: its potential to destabilize political situations abroad, its connection to related events elsewhere in the imperial structure, its links (metaphoric and real) to emerging working-class consciousness, and so on. In 1858, Marx memorably refers to China as “vegetating in the teeth of time.” Yet he conceives of Britain’s encounter with the Asiatic Mode of Production as an irony that highlights the loss of moral imperative: that such an empire should at last be overtaken by the fate on occasion of a deadly duel, in which the representative of the antiquated world appears prompted by ethical motives, while the representative of overwhelming modern society fights for the privilege of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest markets – this, indeed, is a sort of tragical couplet, stranger than any poet would ever have dared to fancy.25

With Britain and China locked together as a “couplet,” they are truly empires entwined. Engels develops a similar take on China in a set of 1857 articles for the New York Daily Tribune. In “Persia and China,” he contrasts a nation in the process of adopting European military organization with one resistant to it and therefore capable of endless and potentially destabilizing resistance: In Persia, the European system of military organization has been engrafted upon Asiatic barbarity; in China, the rotting semi-civilization of the oldest State in the world meets the Europeans with its own resources. Persia has been signally defeated, while distracted, half-dissolved China has hit upon a system of resistance which, if followed up, will render impossible repetition of the triumphal marches of the first Anglo-Chinese war.26

The “piratical policy of the British Government,” he continues, marks the Chinese outbreak against foreigners as “a war of extermination” (114–115). Wars between unequal civilizations, he concludes, are wars of the lowest common denominator, and the lesser civilization must fight the greater one by the limited means that it has attained. More than Marx, Engels sees the turmoil in southern China as a potential catalyst for change in Asia, too, although he still employs the terminology of decadence: “The very fanaticism

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of the southern Chinese in their struggle against foreigners seems to mark a consciousness of the supreme danger in which old China is placed; and before many years pass away, we shall have to witness the death-struggle of the oldest empire in the world, and the opening day of a new era for all Asia” (116). The emphasis for both Marx and Engels is repeatedly on China’s age and its steadfast retention of what at one time was a progressive form of social organization, but which has now stagnated. The images of decay, of rot, and of the vampiric draining of the Empire’s lifeblood (and whether Marx figures Britain or China as the vampire here is tellingly unclear) are as much symptoms of Britain’s own problems with the laboring classes as they are of China’s: stereotypically, the primitive Other and the working-class Self are interpolated. Ripples of such an interpolation spread through the Boxer Rebellion narratives. The novels establish this interpretive frame by explicitly foregrounding popular fiction’s engagement with the history of China, and Britain’s involvement in this history. Unlike Marx, these works embody a bourgeois perspective that sees a decaying China as responsible for its own decline. “China’s history is of the greatest interest, as any one who has had the patience to study it will admit,” begins the authoritative patriarchal voice in The Dragon of Pekin (1902). “It begins earlier than that of any other nation; it tells of an ancient civilisation greater even than that of Egypt and Rome. And all through it records a curious conservatism – the wish of all Chinese for centuries to remain at the stage of education and refinement to which they had attained and, shutting all their ports, to live on in their present contentment and ease, and have nothing to do with outsiders” (78). This conversation between the father of boy protagonist Bob Duncan who, readers are told, was born at an East India Company opium depot off the China Coast – who is the very voice of mercantilist empire – occurs before the outbreak of the Rebellion and is followed by a programmatic description of the history of China’s interaction with Britain (the Opium Wars, the Arrow War, the Taiping Revolt, and so on) that firmly places the upcoming uprising within Britain’s own historical purview: the history of the East is just another narrative of the history of the West. The narratives then cement this interrelationship between China and the West by employing late Victorian terminology of the mob, the unruly, and the animalistic common to narratives about Britain’s urban working classes. Even when they do not explicitly reference the British working classes, as the invasion novels discussed in the next chapter are more apt to do, the overlap in terminology is striking. Although the majority of the participants in the Rebellion were peasants and not the urban poor – “the countryside in

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arms against the foreigner,” as one soldier described it – the remapping of these novels onto the urban space of Peking and Tientsin collapses representations of the Chinese and working-class British.27 (The invasion novels and narratives of the Chinese community in Limehouse subsequently expand this theme.) Unruly, reckless, and often in a drugged or hypnotic stupor, the Boxers are repeatedly described in ideologically determined vocabulary as “hordes” and considered in amorphous, non-individualistic terms that recall the descriptions of the crowds of laborers on the mean streets of the East End. Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman’s labeling, in From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants (1902), of the poor in terms of “hordes,” “floods,” “streams,” and “torrents,” for instance, de-individualizes them in nearly identical terms to the Boxer narratives. Characterizing the effects of China’s secret societies before the Rebellion breaks out, the narrator of Gilson’s The Lost Column: A Story of the Boxer Rebellion (1909) states: [The secret society adherent] has become a frenzied, shrieking fanatic, that death alone can stop. He has gone mad, with a blind and desperate madness to gain his ends or die. From time immemorial this old same madness has spread across the paddy fields and laid hold upon the people like the plague, spreading infection, until whole provinces are up in arms and crying out for revenge.28

Whether willful or not, this analogy between Chinese peasant and British laborer, who are intuitively linked through the common terminology used to describe them, not only reinforces the image of the working class as the exotic within – the incorporation of the imperial Other into the literal center – but also makes it clear what the battle for sovereignty in China and for the retention of control of the Legations is really about: maintaining the physical boundaries of class against siege from without. With its huge population and decaying empire, China to these British writers “is the question of the future,” as Brereton puts in The Dragon of Pekin. Like the working classes, the Chinese population is large, destitute, and willing to emigrate; like it, it carries the potential to violently assert the superiority of its numbers. The Luddite character of many of the Boxers’ actions – particularly their destruction of railways – signals the force of this comparison. In The Hypothetical Mandarin, Eric Hayot notes than in a prominent discourse from the American context, the Chinese worker’s body, “understood as an outgrowth of his racial and cultural heritage, became the implacable source of the threat he posed to the American worker (and indeed, to the United States in general).”29 This assessment rings true in the

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British and British imperial context and offers a key to the Boxer literature’s investment in the “mobs of savages,” as well as invasion novels’ articulation of what Hayot calls the “machine body” as Asia’s menace to the West and stories of the Chinese presence in London as potentially enervating to the working classes through racial dilution. The novels use the Boxers’ claims that they could not be killed during their attacks on foreigners and the representation of them as rabble-rousing as a way to make an affair situated physically in China have ramifications outside China. By strategically tying the Boxers not only to the working classes, but also to the similarly typed Chinese overseas laborers, the texts magnify and globalize the threat of the “55 days at Peking.” Many novels enhance this sense of an ongoing threat by focusing on the precursors to the Rebellion, rather than the aftermath, often ending their story with the arrival of relief forces, but not extending into the occupation that followed. Characterizing the Chinese male as an urban threat, through the notion of the mob and the crowd, explains the attention these texts give to spatial mapping because it projects the “semi-civilized” architecture of the Chinese city onto their bodies. The novels make Chinese cities analogues to medieval European cities through the attention they give to the city walls and gates that were key to the historical events of the Rebellion: the wall that protects the British Legation, the wall that encompasses the “Forbidden” Imperial City, the walls of the Tartar City that encompass the Legations and the Forbidden City, and the gates that allow entrance and egress to these spaces form a significant element of these works’ plots. The novels further associate the Chinese bodies that operate in this environment with restricted movement. Restriction of movement should be the hallmark of the siege’s imprisonment of foreigners, although as Paul A. Cohen notes, those in the Legation Quarter “began to receive reliable messages from outside shortly after mid-July.”30 However, the plots of many of these novels rewrite history by inventing ways for their British and American boy heroes to become the messengers, moving in and out of different sectors of Peking, as well as the city itself. Their truly global movements within Chinese space invoke the global parameters of events in China and provoke a proleptic sense of the Anglo-American mastery of China that will follow the Rebellion.31 Their employment of a trope of hidden, transgressive movement across foreign, Asian space also ties them to narratives about the Great Game, notably the contemporaneous Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Asian space is thus opaque to Asians themselves but transparent to Westerners, who use it to protect themselves and their community. In one novel, Graydon’s The Perils of Pekin (1904), the two boy heroes actually

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escape detection, torture, and murder at the hands of the Boxers by hiding within the city wall for several weeks. Occupying this liminal space, they are safe both from their Chinese antagonists and from the “friendly fire” which their Chinese-clad bodies might otherwise attract.

The power of disguise Nearly all the novels include a scene in which disguised Britons escape missionary settlements in the interior, arriving at safety in the Legation only after deceiving guards at the walled entrance to the city into thinking they are Chinese. Rather than representing anxiety about miscegenation or the potential crossing of allegiances, however, such disguise enables them to be more authentically Western. Only their exterior selves are changed by this subterfuge. Ethnic Chinese who, through immigration, affiliate with the Westerners are also granted this capacity for disguise and mobility. Gilson’s The Lost Column steps straight out of the pages of Frank Norris when it introduces Wang, the Chinese detective with a “’Frisco accent,” who, in the context of the violent revolution occurring around them, saves boy hero Gerald from the hands of the gangster Jugataï, through his mastery of disguise and an ability to penetrate the “native quarter” of the city.32 At the same time, the Boxer narratives bolster the psychological connections between the working classes and the Chinese with an interesting charting of the physical that reveals anxieties about cultural incorporation and hybridity through the site of the male body. Through disguise, which allows the adolescent boy protagonists to prove themselves heroically as “men of the empire” while assuming exoticized and decidedly feminized characteristics, and through a discussion of body hair, the novels articulate a confusion of masculine codes of conduct. Unlike the missionaries who inflamed sentiment by donning mandarin’s dress, these boys always appropriate the costume of a coolie.33 However, the novels resolve the frisson of gender bending while in Chinese garb when they reveal the boys’ “true” identity and invoke a heterosexual romance plot to tie up loose ends. Disguising oneself as the native opens up a curious articulation of the “not quite/not white” paradigm of mimicry described by Homi K. Bhabha. The desire for a colonial subject that is recognizable, almost the same but not quite (a “brown-skinned Englishman,” to paraphrase Thomas Babington Macaulay) is here transformed into the act of becoming an unrecognizable and decidedly differentiated Other, but not quite. With their skin dyed with berries, their false queues, and their peasant clothing, the middle-class boys of the Boxer narratives contain the transgression that

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threatens “racial extermination” by successfully mimicking the Boxers and rendering their authority incomplete and ultimately inactive. Unlike the natives dressed in the Western clothing of education and science but whose pigtails and pigmentation mark them as essentially Other, the boys of the Boxer narratives convincingly escape detection and mimic only to enable them to formally and physically reject the alien. In fact, their disguise is always too good, and each boy suffers perilous moments either leaving or entering the Legation premises because he is perceived as being the very monster he is trying to defeat. The process of slippage thereby described operates both to open a window into the otherwise concealed activities of the alien (through the observations made and comments reported by the English protagonists while in disguise) and firmly closes that window by reestablishing a hegemonic imperial authority in the end (through the occupation of Peking – and especially the Forbidden City – by the allied forces). This hegemonic order asserts its middle-class status when the protagonists remove their peasant garb and “come out” as bourgeois Britons.34 At the same time, the Boxers, with their superstitions and “barbarism,” form a particularly useful mirror for British society in China and, by extension, elsewhere in the Empire because they are supposed to epitomize difference at its most negative: unadulterated, mass savagery (only partly excused by its somewhat legitimate motivations) opposed to the heroic individuals of the nation of shopkeepers. Representative of these novels’ use of disguise is Henty’s With the Allies to Pekin. As is typical of the adventure genre, the center of the action becomes a family that, in its geographical displacement, models the metropole– periphery structure of the Empire itself. After years of schooling under the protection of his uncle, who heads the family firm’s London house, adolescent Rex Bateman goes “home” to his parents in China on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion. His family incorporates the sweep of the British presence in China, with his father and uncles representing the commercial side through their trading business in Tientsin and his mother and aunt representing the affective or moral side through the aunt’s missionary husband. With a sympathetic understanding of the Chinese (his closest companion being the servant Ah Lo, who has been his tutor and friend since infancy) and their objection to foreigners (based on misrepresentations and hysteria), Rex must fulfill the traditional role of imperialist in protecting the economic and social interests of his nation by rescuing his family. (His young cousins are being held in the yamen of a local official, their missionary parents having been killed.) Rex also must foster a dialogue with the Chinese that

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tends to solidify British authority in the region while mitigating those misunderstandings that caused the upheaval. Henty therefore establishes Rex’s sympathy for the Chinese on the novel’s first page – in which Rex tells his uncle that on beginning school in the London suburbs, his classmates dub him the Heathen Chinee – and on the second page, when readers learn that his closest emotional bond is to Ah Lo, and that he speaks Chinese “like a native.” Though the inscrutable Chinese retain their distance from Henty’s audience, Rex’s qualifications for mediating between the two cultures are quickly established. In one passage, on the steamer that takes him back to China, he literally acts as interpreter after Ah Lo beats up some workingclass toughs who harass him.35 When the time comes for heroism, it is precisely this linguistic competence that enables him to “pass” as Chinese when he disguises himself and sets out with Ah Lo to secretly rescue his aunt and cousins.36 In the letter he writes to his father explaining his disappearance on the rescue mission, he even suggests that the elder Bateman tell his mother he has gone to act as an interpreter for incoming European troops in China. Initiated in the risks of disguise by his actions to bring his family safely into the Legation fold, Rex then offers his services to his nation, conducting a series of missions in disguise that establish him firmly as the hero of the siege. With Ah Lo’s help, he rescues thirteen native Christians from a cellar in Peking. Then he single-handedly dismantles two mortars that threaten the Legation’s defenses. Dressed as a landowner, he worms his way into the presence of the pro-foreign Prince Ching, who regrettably is unable to provide help. Finally, during a ceasefire in the siege, he resolves to go to Tientsin and see to his parents’ safety, while carrying a vital message from Sir Claude MacDonald through Boxer lines to the relief expedition there. In all these exploits, disguise is the enabling mechanism for success; being Chinese allows him to defeat the Chinese. He even acquires the stereotypical Chinese characteristics of stealth and silence. The only palpable danger he faces is a tiger; only in the encounter with the “natural” world does his costuming fail to operate. The resemblance between Henty’s presentation of Rex Bateman and Kipling’s Kimball O’Hara suggested by this reading of disguise shows how clearly the boy adventurer in China fits into an imperialist mode practiced on the outskirts of empire – although Henty’s work lacks the complex attitudes towards Asian space and people that characterize Kim. Both boys are unusual in their linguistic capacities and in their ability to mediate between Eastern and Western cultures.37 Ah Lo’s visits to Rex at school find their counterpart in the lama’s role in helping Kim to attend an elite Indian

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school. And like O’Hara, Bateman must act in disguise in matters of grave national interest. Both boys serve as vital conduits for information, crucially passed on with the aid of their disguises: Kim while acting as a spy in the Great Game and Rex while carrying a message from the besieged of the Legations detailing their plight to the military forces at Tientsin. Ultimately, however, linguistic competence may enhance their disguise, but the key information being passed in these narratives is from one British representative to another. That information concerns military actions to safeguard British interests, clearly delineating the distinction between passing as and communicating with the Other and becoming it. Henty’s use of disguise generates an intriguing discourse on masculinity that manifests itself more generally in novels about the Boxer Rebellion. Importantly, many of these novels are propelled by the heroic actions of a beardless adolescent, who, in disguise, passes messages between the Legation and Admiral Seymour’s relief column. The boys can pass as Chinese because they possess feminine traits often assigned to the Chinese male: lack of body hair, smooth skin, and long hair. Joseph Bristow asserts that effeminacy and empire “stood in violent opposition” by the end of the nineteenth century, and the effeminate figure residing within the metropolitan center was considered as racially regressive.38 These novels pick up on this discourse in their presentation of the Chinese and the heroes’ adoption of effeminate traits as an integral part of their disguise. The boys’ “girlish” appearance, however, is merely a stage in their development; in these representations, the Chinese male seems stuck at the level of adolescent physical development, just as his civilization is supposedly underdeveloped. Here, the novels can be said to link to one strand of the emerging discourses on homosexuality, that male homosexuality was pervasive in “primitive” or “Oriental” societies.39 As in the example of French colonial constructions of Vietnamese males discussed by Frank Proschan, so too were Chinese males seen as “both desexualized (effeminized, emasculated, literally castrated) and hypersexualized (hypervirile, licentious, and eroticized, both heterosexually and homosexually).”40 While the novels follow this contour, the narrative premise of disguise precludes any representation of the common complaint by European men in East and Southeast Asia that they had difficulty telling men and women apart. The Asiatic or the primitive also remains stuck at such an earlier state of psychological development, according to such schema of “arrested development.” “They are very like children,” says the adult voice in With the Allies to Pekin, “they will bear desperate oppression and tyranny with passive submission, and they will then break out furiously at some fancied wrong” (40).

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George Manville Fenn’s Stan Lynn (1902) makes clear the importance of facial hair in distinguishing between Chinese and European capacities vis-àvis masculinity. The action of the opening scene, involving an invasion of the (all-male) family warehouse, causes Uncle Jeffrey’s most prized possession – his beard – to be singed, inspiring the following dialogue: “What! You don’t know, boy. It’s a wonderful climate out here for making your hair grow. Look at the Chinamen’s tails!” “Oh, but a lot of that’s false, isn’t it?” “In some cases, my boy, but generally it is all real; and if it were unplaited it would be longer. But don’t you imitate John Chinaman. You don’t want a long tail. You turn the hair-current from the back of your head on to your chin and let it grow there, so as to make you look big and fierce, ready for dealing with the Chinese merchants.” “But I shall seem boyish for years to come, I’m afraid,” said Stan sadly. “I look very young.” “And a splendid thing, too,” said Uncle Jeff. “Who wouldn’t be you, to look young and feel young? – Eh, Oliver? – Oh, you young masculine geese who are always wishing that you were men, if you only knew what you are treating with contempt, how much better it would be for you!”41

The displacement of the natural growth of facial hair onto the unnatural queue that the Chinaman cultivates makes Chinese gender suspect, as does the fact that the plait is known as a tail, a vestigial feature in the human body. Typically, the pigtail functions as an essential marker of Chinese manhood – China is a “nation of pigtails and bland simple faces” (20), according to The Dragon of Pekin. It is also the means for asserting a British superiority in fight: in many of the novels, a Briton secures the Chinaman’s queue, leaving him with the unpleasant option of humiliation and loss of status within his own cultural system by having it ripped off or of falling into enemy hands. Focusing on this displacement of the Chinaman’s hair from the face to the back of the head also invokes a train of associations about long hair in popular melodrama, linked explicitly to the feminine and to unruly sexuality. By contrast, the British adolescent’s masculinity lies in his eventual ability to grow this beard, once his actions in the narrative have justified his transition from boy to man. He only acts the part of the Chinaman. His “drag,” with all its associations of the deviance, allows him to pass vital information or rescue womenfolk from being butchered and functions while he operates in always, already deviant non-European space. The Bildungsroman style of his transition recalls the reader to the middle-class origins of these narratives – they are about securing a bourgeois imperial class against coded working-class/ native resistance.

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In fact, many Boxer novels conclude by asserting the “natural” endpoint of the boy’s development into a full-fledged man: an infatuation with a woman, made possible by the close quarters in which the Rebellion has forced them to live, is sealed by the clumsy introduction of a marriage plot that ties together the loose ends of the adventures and signals a return to normalcy. Typical of this pattern is the end of Serjeant’s A Tale of Red Pekin, one of the few Boxer novels penned by a woman. Back in England, a group of survivors are gathering for the Christmas holidays and await the arrival of the carriage of one of their party. The novel’s final line goes as follows: “‘Yes, but do you know, Nina,’ Lilian Ross replied archly, and almost in a whisper, ‘I think I hear something else besides, a long way off, perhaps – but still I think I hear besides – the sound of wedding bells’” (105). Such marriage-plot endings also serve to disrupt an earlier homoerotic bond put in place in those novels that feature two boy protagonists. During the Uprising, the boys shared adventures and close quarters outside of the Legation – and thus outside of a Europeanized space open to domestication, which is restored to them when the Rebellion ends. In The Dragon of Pekin, this resolution of homoerotic tensions finds its object of triangulation in Bob and Charlie’s discovery of a “stunner,” Eva Mannering, the daughter of a missionary. In a battle later in the novel in which the normally gentle Bob kills all the Boxers in sight, he exclaims, “That will teach them! … That will persuade them to ill-treat girls in future!” (240). However, desire is not particularly well developed in this text, and neither Bob nor his stepbrother Charlie “get the girl” in the end; instead, they further sublimate same-sex desire and become partners in a business venture.42 Surprisingly, the sexual deviance of the Chinese implied by this discourse on masculinity does not go beyond representations of immaturity. Though the novels detail the ferocity of the Boxers’ bloodlust, they practically avoid the issue of sexual violence towards European women, typically a key metaphor for the anxiety of empire and a staple of the Mutiny narratives that the Boxer novels closely resemble. In Allegories of Empire, Sharpe draws close connections between the emergence of a myth of interracial rape and the Mutiny narratives, so images of rape should be prevalent in the Boxer tales, as well. First-hand accounts of the Uprising do indicate that a myth of violation existed. But it rarely found its way into novelistic depictions. Even the trope of having the besieged plan to kill their wives and children and then themselves, rather than fall into Chinese hands, is related to issues of torture, rather than sexual outrage. However, one place where sexual deviance and women are linked is in depictions of the Empress Dowager

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as an evil vamp, though Edmund Backhouse’s fantasies about her rapacious sex drive would only appear much later. In part, the absence of rape metaphors reflects changes in the conditions on the ground in China versus those in India in 1857. These include the greater accessibility, and perhaps reliability, of eyewitness accounts, thanks to the telegraph and the expanded periodical press. Peter Fleming, in his account of the Rebellion, The Siege at Peking (1959), offers a gloss in keeping with earlier prejudices: “The legend that European women were outraged before being killed is supported by no evidence and is inherently unlikely; to the sexual appetite of the Chinese male the female barbarians – large-footed, long-nosed and white-skinned – made a negligible appeal” (135).43 Perhaps the idea that Chinese men were effeminate and sexuality enervated (in the figures of the homosexual, the eunuch, the harem, and so on) prevented this myth from taking hold. The male authorship and male-centered plots of these narratives, and indeed most Victorian adventure novels, also seems a reason. Indeed, a guarded reference to sexual violence appears in one of the few women-authored novels on the Rebellion and refers, presumably, to women who are Christian converts, not British women. This novel, Bewicke’s Out in China!, is also the only Boxer narrative to concentrate on sexual issues: the Rebellion provides the backdrop for its two principal characters, Forbes, British consul of an “outport” in North China, and Winifred, wife of the port’s principal trader, to contemplate adultery. The adultery never occurs – but only because Winifred sickens and dies because of the hardships of the Rebellion, which finds them stranded at the outbreak of hostilities in the hills surrounding the outpost after an outing to a nearby temple. While evading the Boxers, they come across various atrocities, including a mass grave of native Christians and three women “apparently stripped naked, wounded in every horrible way, and split open, as fish are split open, and hung upon a tree to dry” (134). Later, the body of a child mutilated suggestively by pitchforks invokes in another character a revulsion against all Chinese, even the group’s faithful servants. These suggestions of sexual violence are as exceptional as the novel itself in not being centered around the British Legation in Peking and in being a “domestic” fiction that incorporates the uprising into its plot.

Misguided motives: narrating the Chinese point of view Linked to the issue of disguise for the Western protagonists and the physically marked societal underdevelopment for the Chinese antagonists is the narrative strategy of justifying European intervention in China – and British

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aspirations over the region – through a complex and highly mediated articulation of what the subaltern Chinese supposedly think. Through their British characters’ acts of costuming, the protagonists end up in situations that allow for the “grievances” of the Chinese peasant and laborer to be voiced unwittingly in the presence of the “foreign devil” himself. Bolstering both the authenticity of the mechanisms of disguise (and consequently, a form of supremacy) and the omniscience of the author (and another form of supremacy), the inclusion of these utterances attempts to circumscribe the violence of the Rebellion by designating its causes (superstition, taxation, corruption, gunboat diplomacy, etc.). It also seeks to explain for a British audience the mysterious vehemence and systematic extermination of foreigners that marked the outbreak. Such an explanation is not merely the reductionist impulse to impose an imperialist ideology on racially coded savages, as Brantlinger has suggested is typical of the Mutiny narratives. Instead, it represents a more complex dialogue on fair and free trade that argues for a specific type of capitalist expansion, under the rubric of informal imperialism, and that recognizes the criminal behavior that a previously underregulated state of affairs has permitted certain foreigners to exercise in China. To arrive at this reassertion of a free-trade, fair-trade imperialism, the novels early on (generally prior to the outbreak of violence) speculate on the causes of Chinese discontent with the “foreign devils,” followed by a Chinese perspective on the question overheard by the boy protagonist while disguised as a native. Henty’s With the Allies to Pekin masterfully juxtaposes a speech by Rex Bateman’s father explaining the suffering of the poor Chinese with a discussion his servant Ah Lo later has with his parents (after the Rebellion has broken out) in which he explains that the English want to trade, not fight, and have had their motivations misunderstood. This curious role reversal – in which the Englishman articulates a partial defense of the Boxers’ conduct (albeit prior to the start of the Uprising) and the Chinaman a defense of informal British colonization – allows for a complex form of identification to occur that locates anti-foreign violence in ignorance and propaganda and figures the Chinese as potentially proBritish – if properly instructed. At first, this latent mutability on the part of the Chinese masses seems to run counter to statements about the innate savagery of the Chinese populace, as demonstrated during the Uprising, as well as to the ideology of punishment manifested in the discourse about reprisals present in these texts. But savagery is subject to taming; just as the “tigerish” rebellious Sepoys of Tennyson’s “Defence of Lucknow” can be made mild, so too can China’s masses. In addition, it is important to recall

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Graydon’s idea that punishment is a lesson to be imprinted on Chinese bodies. When Rex stays with Ah Lo’s family on his way to Peking, Henty includes a long discussion between the servant and his father on the nature of things Western that aims to justify the imperialist project in political and moral terms while underscoring the similarities between the cultures themselves. The British are great fighters, but do not like fighting, Ah Lo states, “and it is only when their trade is interfered with, or their people ill-treated, that they go to war” (64). Religiously tolerant, they nonetheless believe in Protestantism, just as the Chinese believe in Buddhism. “[T]hey try to convert others,” Ah Lo continues, “just as the Buddhists came to China and converted large numbers of our people. They think that they are doing good, and spend much money in trying to do so. It is strange to me that they cannot leave things alone, but it is their way, and certainly I have no ill-will towards them on that account.” Absolved of improper economic aspirations and tolerant of other cultures but benignly trying to spread the word of the “true God,” Ah Lo’s British ultimately retain an inscrutability for the Chinese, demonstrating that while the cultures can coexist equably, they cannot, to use E. M. Forster’s terms, connect. Importantly, while Rex’s process of education follows a patriarchal/hegemonic father–son route, the Chinese peasant’s process of education operates in reverse: it is the son who teaches the father of the essential value of intercourse with the West. It is New China teaching Old China’s most stagnant members, its peasants. The imperialist allegory in Henty – underscored by his protagonist’s name of “Rex,” or “king” – is thus balanced by sympathy towards the rebellious Chinese and an effort to understand their feelings on the part of the Bateman patriarch. Rex’s father reminds his son of the indignities that the British have made the Chinese suffer – the trade in opium, the influx of missionaries, the forced opening of the ports, etc. He maintains that the Europeans should keep ambassadors in Peking but otherwise leave the country alone (unless invited to do otherwise), protesting vociferously over the “game of grab” started by the Japanese and Russians. (Hong Kong, having been grabbed much earlier, does not come under his purview.) Rex’s father ends his assessment of Chinese culture with a Darwinian analysis according to which, as a result of population density, “the struggle for life is so severe that the wits of the people become sharpened” (98). Henty’s argument of scarcity here leads to the conclusion that the Chinese are the shrewdest bargainers in the world, essentially acknowledging that for the Chinese the marketplace is always a battleground and envisaging the Empress’s tacit support for the Boxers as a response to historical restrictions

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on trade autonomy. Yet this attempt to encapsulate the Chinese point of view using Western scientific theories ultimately performs the same acts of cultural erasure on Chinese hegemony that Mr. Bateman believes to have created the disturbance. Generally speaking, the subaltern speeches recorded in all the Boxer novels partly exculpate the peasants. Instead, they vilify the Dowager Empress Cixi as a wicked woman who has “shown that she is capable of any atrocity” (Brereton, The Dragon of Pekin, 75). “It is the cruel Empress who hates the foreigners,” Serjeant’s Nina explains in A Tale of Red Pekin: and it is her emissaries who have stirred up the people against us. The Boxers are her tools really, and the ignorant people are told all kinds of things which they believe, that the Europeans take their little children and kill them, and that it is our presence here which causes the lack of rain, and then they pretend to see most wonderful apparitions, those who appear always bearing the same message, “Kill! kill!” (46)

Though an historically suspect reading of the Rebellion, this vilification of the Empress serves the ideological purposes of empire well: insurrection follows from the corruption and decadence of the central authority symbolized by its head; rival empires must then intercede to restore order. So prevalent was this vilification that, after the Rebellion, Cixi embarked on a public relations exercise that involved circulating photographic portraits to foreigners and as diplomatic gifts.44 Thus the novels conclude by proposing new regulatory measures to prevent future breakdowns, either for the British in China or for the Chinese government. In William Carlton Dawe’s The Plotters of Peking, the British are actually installed in the Palace so as to perform the function of reinstating the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, which, among other things, promoted rapid industrialization of the sort the Japanese had undertaken.45 At the time, the West understood this reform movement under Emperor Guangxu in laudatory terms, vilifying Cixi and her conservative allies who opposed it and viewing it as a precursor to the Boxer Rebellion’s rejection of all things foreign. Dawe’s novel features a protagonist and narrator who is an Englishman assimilated into Chinese society. He acts as the “Emperor’s Watch-Dog,” saving Guangxu from the Dowager’s plans to destroy him and thus safeguarding the Manchu state and pro-foreign reforms. Other novels focus more on the area of international trade. Henty’s With the Allies to Pekin closes with a complete reorganization of the protagonist’s family business in China, as a result of the Rebellion, a reorganization cemented by the family’s withdrawal to England to re-found their business.

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Brereton’s The Dragon of Pekin ends similarly when the control of a lucrative jade mine – wrested from the narrator’s father by the criminal Sung, later a Boxer leader – is regained by the family once the title deeds to property are found on Sung’s dead body. A new partnership between the two boy protagonists of the novel, Bob and his father’s ward Charlie, seals the basis for this new type of trade. (Whether such a concession ought to have remained in Chinese hands in the first place is not a question that this text raises.) Yet the novel also raises complex questions of sympathy with China by reducing the threat that upheaval in China poses to British international interests to Sung and his personal effects on Bob and Charlie’s family. On the one hand, this plot decodes the historical events of the Rebellion for a juvenile readership by turning it into a family drama. Sung’s evil behavior stands in for the larger Chinese barbarism that fueled the Uprising in the first place. On the other hand, it renders this distillation of a monolithic “Chinese” threat suspect by positing Sung as the specific problem needing resolution. The more naked side of this mercantile vision appears in “Prince Tuan’s Treasure” (1911), an Indian-published short story costing two annas by E. A. Freemantle.46 In this curious story, the action centers around the protection of the Peking branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, where protagonist Frank King and others survive the siege. After being rescued by Blue Jackets and Marines, King and others gather £3 million of goods off the streets of Peking; his £300,000 share allows him to marry Miss Stephens, whom he has met during the siege. While King is in Hong Kong selling his loot, a Chinese man tells him about the hidden location of a magnificent treasure belonging to the anti-foreign Prince Tuan. (Duan, or Zaiyi, was a leading supporter of the Boxers and head of Zongli Yamen during the Rebellion.) King enlists the help of the allied invasion force. They find treasure worth £21 million (half of which he himself receives, the other half going to pay the allies’ expenses), and he and his wife retire happily and prosperously to England. The noble siege at the Legation and the Peitang (Northern) Cathedral is here transposed to a financial institution that perhaps marks Europe’s true interests in China, as does the theme of looting, which was widespread in Peking among the soldiers of the allies. The money belonging to the most famous anti-foreign royal advisor and champion of the Boxers is appropriately transferred to the allies as an ironic form of indemnity. Thus narrative leaves no room for an interpretation of this plundering as in any way unjustified or unprincipled.47 Echoing a series of plots centering on the rescue of British diplomatic and mercantile personnel in China, the restorations or reconsolidations of

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commercial interests in these novels herald a future for China that sternly rejects xenophobia and the purportedly traditional Asiatic isolationism. The British are here to stay. In fact, they even make claims to belonging; unlike the authors, many of the characters featured in the texts are born and bred in China. It may be true, as The Lost Column muses at its end, that “They were wayfarers, far afield, in a strange land they had learnt to call their own, but England was the only land they loved” (379). But the underlying fact that they had learned to call China “their own” remains paramount. Strategies for regulating against future Boxer Uprisings also extend to the missionary activities that were a substantial cause of friction not only between the Chinese and the Europeans, but also among the Europeans in the years leading up to the Rebellion. The 1890s had seen an enormous increase in missionary efforts in the region, both Protestant and Catholic. “China was the goal, the lodestar, the great magnet that drew us all in those days,” wrote Sherwood Eddy of the Student Volunteers for Foreign Missions (qtd. in Esherick, Origins, 92–93).48 In contrast to the Taiping Rebellion, a popular movement perceived in the West as having stemmed from a bastardized Chinese understanding of Christianity and featuring a reform-oriented program, the Boxer Rebellion was seen as reacting specifically against missionary activities and as being regressive in its isolationist vision. Its manifestos specifically named missionaries as its targets because of their alleged criminal acts. “Attention: all people in markets and villages of all provinces in China,” ran one notice, “now, owing to the fact that Catholics and Protestants have vilified our gods and sages, have deceived our emperors and ministers above, and oppressed the Chinese people below, both our gods and our people are angry at them. . .”49 At best, British commentators saw violence towards missionaries as inaccurate, though if these novels are any indication, the Boxers’ accusations of sacrilege are hardly unjustified: In the best “B” movie tradition, The Dragon of Pekin introduces the Boxers through a shoot-out involving its protagonists, “unsavoury” monks, and an enormous statue of Buddha that serves as the boys’ fortress during the confrontation; The Lost Column has its characters hiding and escaping gangsters inside a hollow Buddha; and The Perils of Pekin features a Buddha statue blocking a door against a horde of Boxers, while another Buddha figure is positioned in front of a window to allow its boy-heroes to escape their pursuers. “That idol has done more for us than it ever did for the people who worshipped it,” one character quips (112–113; see Figure 3). The novels generally portray the British missionaries themselves as well intentioned, if misguided and misunderstood. French and German Catholic missionaries, however, are treated with less sympathy. Despite

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Figure 3. Turning the Buddha against the Chinese in Brereton’s The Dragon of Pekin (1902).

the even more “heroic” resistance by those stranded in the Peitang Cathedral, the novels focus on Catholic attempts to secure treaty rights to a status equivalent to the mandarins and on squabbling on behalf of their flock, actions which earned them dislike both from peasants and government officials alike. (The Catholic missionaries generated many more complaints than the Protestant ones and were probably more insensitive.)50 Writes Henty:

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We invade them with a vast crowd of missionaries, who settle themselves in all parts of the country, build themselves houses and churches, and set to work to convert the Chinese. Naturally the Chinese don’t like it. Certainly we should not like it ourselves if hundreds of Chinamen were to settle down in all our towns, open joss-houses, hold out all sorts of advantages to proselytes, and convert the lowest and most ignorant class of the population to Confucianism or Buddhism. But this is not all. Missionaries take the converts under their protection, set up a little imperium, demand the right to judge and punish their own people, and generally to set the local authorities pretty well at defiance; and the Catholic bishops have actually insisted upon having the title, rank, and power of Chinese viceroys. (97)

Here, the missionaries practice a dangerous form of imperialism – dangerous because it mimics formal imperialism in claiming sovereignty, judicial functions, and official status, with the Catholics exemplifying these demands at their worst. Such attempts at formal imperialism disrupt the free-trade imperialism championed by Henty and others, and, significantly, they do so by disrupting class structure. The “lowest and most ignorant classes” become Christians precisely because of the economic benefits they derive from it (although historical research does not support this view). The process upsets indigenous cultural arrangements, especially their most sacred traditions of “superstition” such as ancestor worship, and ruins the credibility of the European trader. One of the precipitating causes of the revolt – Germany’s seizure of the North China port Jiaozhou after two of its missionaries were murdered – comes under similar censure for its participation in another act typical of formal imperialism, the annexation of territory: “Suppose two Chinese had been killed in Germany, what do you think the Germans would say if China were to demand as compensation Bremerhaven?” (40). Not all Boxer narratives are so critical of missionaries; Serjeant’s Tale of Red Pekin appears to be written by a woman from a missionary family, who also authored a number of other Protestant-themed novels. Initially narrated by Cecilia, the child of a missionary doctor, the novel tells readers at its start, “The Chinese are dreadfully, dreadfully cruel, and very cunning and deceitful, but father says they make splendid Christians” (2). The Boxers, accordingly, are characterized as “like devils possessed” (6). Their most barbaric acts are towards native Christians, who die; the British characters lose a baby on their trek to safety, but otherwise survive unscathed to continue their good works. They owe their overall safety and their successful arrival at the Legation to Li, a wealthy native Christian converted by Cicely’s father, the suggestively named Paul St. John. Bewicke’s Out in

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China! also expresses guarded sympathy for missionaries. Blaming Parliamentary politics and British indifference to the individuals serving its imperial interests abroad, Bewicke has her British consul Forbes make the following comment about the missionaries after the Rebellion: “Oh! They don’t count. There is no close time for Missionaries now. Lord Salisbury has laid it down as an axiom, that they are to be always at all seasons ready for martyrdom” (172). Her sympathy is not unequivocal, however. Earlier in the novel, she cynically notes, a missionary essentially forces the party going to the temple to guard his family as he prepares to flee the coming Rebellion by insisting on offering his compound as shelter for the night. The most curious of the Boxer texts must be the missionary fantasy The Escort of an Emperor; A Story of China during the Great Boxer Movement (1910), set in that “city of the plain,” Peking, in the aftermath of the allied invasion.51 Written by the American Herbert O. Kohr, who claims to have lost his eyes in a dynamite explosion while in China as a young man, the tale posits the success of Elder Wood of the obscure and reviled “Sunlight Mission” in Peking. Wood’s extraordinary success at converting the Chinese after the Rebellion is the envy of other missionaries, who previously reviled him. The elder then converts a profane American military officer, who in turn works wonders with the royal family when he is chosen to escort the Dowager Empress back from her exile to Peking. The narrative depicts the Dowager as a force of Satan, who keeps the Emperor imprisoned; by contrast, the Emperor is presented as a pro-Christian, pro-reform character who would rule China justly if only he had the chance. The Escort of an Emperor ends with an appeal to Americans to avoid false idols, to remember the Lord, and to lean on him in their troubles. Rambling and massively incoherent thanks to the extended exegesis that fleshes out its plot, The Escort of an Emperor perhaps offers the best indication of what it was about missionaries that both the Chinese and novelists such as Henty disliked. Nonetheless, these texts inculcate their own utopian visions of informal imperialism in their idealistic discussion of the British-led international cooperation during the Boxer Rebellion and of Britain’s primacy in a sort of precursor to the military campaigns organized later in the century by the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations. In this, they reflect the opinions of the cultural moment in which they were constructed, though historians have cast doubt on the degree to which Britain held the strings. The novels inflate Britain’s leadership role in the events and the extent to which cooperation was actually achieved. Claude MacDonald, the British

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minister to Peking who headed the resistance in the Legations, appears as a paragon of British imperial diplomacy: an effective bureaucrat, a keen coalition builder, and a cautious, fatherly figure reluctant to send the adolescent protagonists on their perilous mission to deliver news to the troops at Tientsin. (In fact, many of the novels represent the adolescents as developing the idea of this mission on their own, pledging to conduct it with or without official support.) Britain’s troops, featuring a body of Lancers from India, serve as a monument to the overall success of its management of empire, as well as the loyalty of its subjects. (The irony of relieving the siege of the Peking Legation with troops whose forefathers had participated in the sieges at Lucknow and Cawnpore is lost on these writers.) When told that these Indian troops had entered Peking, the Empress Dowager was widely reported to have remarked, “perhaps they are our expected reinforcements from Turkestan”; the comment in itself a monument to Britain’s imperial achievement over the competition. Making the political personal, The Dragon of Pekin sends a detachment of Bengal Lancers with the boy protagonists scurrying up a river and into caves in an effort to capture the evil (and part English) Sung and restore their father’s property. The trip up the river and into the caves, with another party of Lancers crawling along the Great Wall, marks the degree of Britain’s control over territory and terrain made possible by the Rebellion. The Lancers eventually find Sung – though a Boxer kills him moments before they can get to him – and aid in the restoration of the boys’ patrimony, land, and mine concessions in the supposedly sovereign state of China. At the same time, the novels tacitly suggest that the consolidation of the Europeans in the more strategically viable British Legation was not an accident, but an act of fate reflecting Britain’s capacity for leadership, rather than her historical role as principal trader in the region. They also suture over tensions between different nationalities in the Legations Quarter and in the relief forces. Symbolized by the “International,” a makeshift gun used by the Europeans to withstand the siege and a recurring motif in these texts, the novels thus put Britain “in possession” of a new role as global overseer: “Perhaps the strangest incident of all, because it coincides with what happened so recently in Mafeking and Kimberley, is the effort we made to supply ourselves with another gun,” says Mr. Rankin of The Dragon of Pekin. We found one in the British Legation. It was old and rusty, and probably belonged to the French as far back as 1860, when they accompanied our forces

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The motives for sending troops to intervene in the Uprising are similarly glorified and placed within a naturalizing discourse. According to Gilson’s The Lost Column: They were men of different blood, come either from the cold, misty North or the warm and sunny South, to help their friends and serve their God and avenge a violence to their Faith. Since Richard the Lion-heart led his armies to the Holy Land there had been no such sight as this. It was a twentiethcentury crusade, wherein politics were flung to the winds, past rivalries forgotten in one great common cause – Humanity. (362)

Politics, though, seem to be flung to the winds only so long as Britain can exercise control over the international force. The novels consequently downplay the independent achievements of the other powers. Although Japanese forces played a key role in the relief of the Legations, these novels certainly do not elaborate this point – though they consistently praise the Japanese military organization, sometimes to the detriment of Britain’s own. The quiet optimism about the Japanese formula for Westernized industrialization and militarization expressed in these novels is consistent with political attempts to seek Japan as its ally in the region and to promote reforms in China itself. Writers such as Dilke had seen Japan as a natural ally for Britain as early as the 1870s, even dubbing it the “England of the East.”52 Japan’s surprising and decisive defeat of China in the 1890s had earned it further respect from European military forces, a respect then bolstered by its conduct in the international expedition against the Boxers. Its purchases of British military equipment (whereas the Chinese preferred German equipment) had also won it favor in British circles. Over the course of the decade following the publication of the Boxer novels, however, the guarded references to Japanese military prowess as noble are reconceived to fit a new paradigm of the “Yellow Peril” – in the form of the Asiatic invasion novel, in which the repressed Chinese make their return in league with their fellow “yellows” on the other side of the South China Sea. Despite the historical connections with China that the invasion novels would later use in their conflation of the two nations into a united front against Europe, Japanese citizens were also targeted during the Boxer Rebellion. Both in the siege and in the relief expedition, the Japanese

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were aligned with the Westerners, and commentators were careful to distinguish between Japanese and Chinese modes of civilization. The Boxer novels reflected these sentiments, but also helped consolidate them for their readers. Henty, for instance, has Rex’s father argue that Japan and Britain need to unite after all this is over in insisting that China shall not suffer further loss of territory at the hands of the Russians or anyone else. There is no question that that is our best policy. It is to our interest that China shall remain whole and united and capable of holding her own against Russia. Neither Britain nor Japan can have any desire for territory, and after the war is over, an alliance offensive and defensive between these two nations would be worth all the loss of life and property we have incurred. (274–275)

The sacrifices of the Boxer Rebellion, in other words, are to be the altar of a Japanese–English entente that will solidify Britain’s global noble premiership over nations motivated by baser self-interest and the “game of grab.” Yet in the years from 1905 onwards, this optimism about Asia’s adoption of Western methods cedes to hysteria about East Asia’s teeming masses, supposedly overrunning Australia and America and South Africa and on their way to England’s shores – a hysteria that reaches its culmination in the invasion novels. As historical fictions of a tightly delineated type, narrations of the Boxer War thus encourage the tracing of an intricate network of imperial anxieties radiating from the Middle Kingdom to India to Germany and Europe and demonstrate conclusively the implicit, if sometimes submerged, links between discourses of direct and indirect modes of imperialism.

chapter 4

Britain “knit and nationalised”

Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898–1914

After the attempt of the Chinese in 1900 to cast out the foreigners from China, an attempt which resulted in the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Russo-Japanese War, and the predominance of Japan in the East, it seemed as if China surrendered entirely to Eastern influence, and was likely to develop as Japan had done forty years earlier. China lay, as it seemed, at the feet of Europe, with open doors, about to become a wondrous Western Power, ready to come to the heel of the nations that still diplomatised for “spheres of influence” in her realm. Yet, owing to the astuteness of the Chinese Government, not a suspicion of the real state of things was raised. As a matter of fact, the Chinese Empire, so far from acknowledging herself vanquished, came to dream of becoming Supreme. Represented at the European Courts, and at Washington, she grasped the idea of a world-wide Empire to be obtained and kept by just those methods of civilisation which were worth adopting. . . The time came – the hour. And China overflowed her walls like a flood – a ghastly, organized, calculating flood into Europe. . . S. N. Sedgwick, The Last Persecution (1909)1

The Chinese host was to resemble a flight of locusts, covering the entire sky from horizon to horizon, each member of which was armed with some implement, not so much for the purpose of killing, as for the purpose of protracting his own death, while the rest of the host pressed forward, blighting as they went. His duty was hardly to fight, but to occupy time in dying. For this service none were too old, few too young – and women were as good as men. Yen How’s army would consist of the 400,000,000 which formed the population of China. M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Danger (1898)2

They have no common criminal to grapple with, but a man steeped in the duplicity of the East and West – a fiend incarnate, a very devil let loose. William Carlton Dawe, The Yellow Man (1900)3

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This chapter is the first of three focusing on representations of China and the Chinese in Britain. My attention shifts from material set in the geographical space of China largely to material set in Britain or produced there, as in the case of the dramatic works discussed in Chapter 5. This part of the book questions whether the broad distinctions between the more metropolitan-focused works detailed in these chapters and the more locally inflected texts of the first three chapters are meaningful. It also asks how and why Chinese bodies acquire different identities when textually located in British space. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, many British commentators saw the potential for change in Asia in optimistic terms. China was a slumbering giant that, once awakened, would join the ranks of modern nations, inaugurating a period of prosperity for both that country and its trading partners. With arms sales booming, railroads sprouting from Mukden to Kyoto, and reformist elements in both China and Japan gaining authority, Asia’s future looked bright, especially from the distance of London. True, such optimism ran in tandem with a counter-discourse, which argued that these changes gave East Asians the power to threaten Europe in both economic and military terms. But this pessimistic assessment of recent developments remained subordinate, crowded out by the feeling that China was becoming a part of the globalized community at last. In the years following the Boxer War, however, sentiments shifted, especially in the realm of popular literature, and despite the Boxer Protocol of 1901, with its initial embargo on munitions imports. The wave of optimism receded, to be replaced by an increasing sense of trepidation. The “unruly” peasants who took arms against the foreigners during the Rebellion might symbolize the past from which China was receding, but the participation of a modernizing military and the collusion of the central government in the Uprising cast doubt on the idea that China would necessarily embrace a pro-Western future. No greater example of China’s “semi-civilized” status could be found than this union of the modern and the traditional. Japan’s own program of imperialist expansion evoked similar worries about the potential for confrontation between European and Asian powers, especially after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). Meanwhile, growing resistance to Chinese immigrants in North America and across the British Empire further stimulated negative attitudes towards the Chinese. Even the cadre of students that China was sending overseas to be educated aroused suspicion, on the grounds that they might bite the hand that fed them and turn their skills against their teachers.4

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War of the world Summing up these shifts is this comment by Lionel Holmsley at the start of Percy F. Westerman’s aptly titled novel When East Meets West (1913): “I guess we’re sorry we ever patronized the yellow races,” he exclaims.5 When East Meets West is typical in a number of ways of the genre of Asiatic invasion novels that arose in the years between the Boxer Rebellion and the First World War. In the first place, it embodies the shift in imperialist writing to a treatment of “the Empire as a barricade against a new barbarian invasion.”6 Thus, it exemplifies what Arata sees as a move from problems thrust outward towards the colonies in “High Victorian fictions” to disruption “from the periphery of the empire to threaten a troubled metropole” (107). Second, it sees British and American intervention in East Asia as a kind of patronage or gift. Third, it sutures over historical and political differences between the Chinese and the Japanese people and their leaderships in order to mold them into a combined super-threat. As fellow novelist Matthew Phipps Shiel puts it in The Yellow Wave (1905), “Japan is the head, China the body, that head and body making Hercules.”7 The super-threat represented in this Sino-Japanese union is seen as the renewal of “natural” racial allegiances between the Celestial Empire and Nippon. It is also characteristic of contemporaneous American writing.8 Finally, Westerman’s novel reverses the dangers of the gift of knowledge. The Asian enemy attempts to use Western tools to attack the West in its own house, but fails. By contrast, protagonist Holmsley’s knowledge of the East – gleaned from service as an officer in the collaborative Royal British and Imperial Japanese Mail Service – allows him to prevent a Japanese onslaught from reaching London. These texts of imperialism in reverse envisage a fusion of Western technology with Eastern “tradition” that functions as a radically unstable combination, thereby paralleling late Victorian racial discourse about the instability of hybridity. The stories are nearly always set partly or wholly in London, enshrined as the metropole under threat from a periphery beyond its colonies. They involve unearthing a “yellow devil incarnate” (often a British-educated Chinese or Japanese intellectual), who lies hidden at the Empire’s literal and figurative heart. These villains demonstrate how the “East” has imbibed modern ideas about warfare while holding on to centuries-old “traditions” of barbarism. The novels feature scenes of opium dens, restaurants, public schools, and even the British Museum’s Reading Room, which underscore the fact that the “Yellow Peril” threatens all segments of British society. They respond to turn-of-the-century

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anxieties about immigration – anxieties strikingly similar to those voiced today in Europe and America – reflecting debates about the importation of Chinese coolies to America, South Africa, and Australia and the passage of the 1905 Aliens’ Act in Britain. The genesis of this popular and highly successful sub-genre of adventure fiction lies in part in the perception that the Boxer Rebellion had further decentered the authority of the Manchu dynasty and had intensified the scramble for China. Indeed, references to the Uprising are often directly emplotted in the conspiracy theories that form the basis for many of these texts. For instance, the second Fu Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor: Hitherto Unpublished Adventures in the Career of the Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916), by Sax Rohmer, revolves around Eltham, a missionary who has returned from China and who is said in the novel to have been the cause of the Rebellion.9 He is captured and tortured because of his support of a reform-minded mandarin in “Ho-Nan,” who threatens to interfere with Fu Manchu’s expansionist scheme. This “devil doctor” critically seeks to expand the small Chinese presence in London’s Limehouse district to almost unimaginable proportions. Similarly, the descriptions of the techniques employed by Chinese masterminds like Fu Manchu in their efforts to conquer the world owe their legacy to the memory of the Boxers: the novels use hypnotism (widely believed to have been a Boxer instrument) and rely not on soldiers, but on a mass of men (often the same “hordes” of peasants who rose in 1900) to fight their battles. These are the novels that fulfill the observation made in Brereton’s Boxer tale The Dragon of Pekin: for the problem of this Far East corner of the globe promises to set the nations of Europe at one another’s throats. Should these Boxers persevere with their rebellious tactics and the Pekin Government join them, an Allied army, including French, Germans, Russians, American and English, not to mention others, will come in and attempt to suppress them. And that done, who can say what will result?. . . In my eyes, China is a snake, slowly uncoiling its folds. Soon, if we are not careful, it will turn upon those who come to crush it, and sting them fatally. (66–67)

Many invasion novels incorporate a reprise of the Rebellion into their plot lines. This time, however, they clear up lingering questions about the level of government sanction for the Uprising by having the Chinese authorities unequivocally direct plans to exterminate foreigners. The Chinese desire to purify their nation of alien influences thus serves as a foil to the novels’ own plots to root out the dangerous Chinese presence in London, a presence envisaged as the beachhead for reverse colonization. Fu Manchu’s very

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name, which conjures up the Qing dynasty that ruled China until just before Rohmer’s series began, is evocative of the official nature of the threat that these novels see Britain as facing (though he himself is said to be a maverick mandarin). To a degree, these texts also respond to questions of immigration and political instability within Europe, and they represent a displacement of fears about Germany’s increasing militarization onto a more distant horizon. As part of a larger strand of invasion novels centered around Germany – including George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and Erskine Childers’s famous The Riddle of the Sands (1903) – Asiatic invasion novels often figure a war within Europe (England vs. Germany) as the necessary precursor for the more invidious war that will follow between Europe and Asia (united Europe vs. a united China and Japan). Divide and conquer – to “play off one white against another” – is an old trick of China’s, according to Shiel’s The Dragon (1913), attributing that maxim so often applied to the British themselves to his “yellow” adversaries.10 In envisaging a two-stage conflict pitting Europe against itself and then against Asia, the invasion novels accurately predict the global, multi-theater nature of the impending Great War. The presumption is that the devastation of European forces and weapons in the first conflict gives “Asiatics” the access that allows them to decimate Europe in the second conflict. Like several of the Boxer narratives (which point the finger at Germany’s retaliatory seizure of Jiaozhou as a precipitating cause for the Rebellion), many invasion novels more or less blame Germany. In the end, however, Britain always saves the day, often gaining a loose imperialistic control over the West, as well as the rest, in the process. The invasion novels thus open up the possibility of revolutionary change in the nature of the nation state. The hope is for a new kind of democracy and panEuropean societal organization made possible by the collapse of institutional structures caused by the invasion of the “hordes” from the East, who sweep “in waves” across Europe towards Britain or who utter the deadly, inarticulate “yellow scream” that freezes everything in its path. This new democracy fulfills the terms of the Hague Convention of 1899 by “recognizing the solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations” and by putting Britain in the position of “extending the empire of law.”11 It is also a fulfillment, with totally different ideological aims, of the upheavals that Marx and Engels predicted would ensue from Europe’s contact with Asia. This new democracy also bears the stamp of Dilke’s “Greater Britain” and its projected girdle around the world. Thus Asiatic invasion novels presume that British-led cooperation among European and

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American powers is the only means to fight off the undifferentiated mass of East Asians that threaten them. Whereas ethnic and racial distinctions between Japanese and Chinese are persistently elided (several of the novels feature half-Chinese, half-Japanese villains), distinctions between Europeans are highlighted. Emphasis on intra-European difference foregrounds Britain’s leading role in terms of its scientific and warfare ingenuity and proffers a coalition of European forces that makes use of specifically national capabilities. “Greater Britain” also has its mirror in the “Greater Orient” that conspires for world domination in these texts. On the surface, this amalgamation seems to support Edward Said’s contention that the European imagination lacked discrimination in conceptualizing the myriad geographies of the “Orient” and the “East.” While these novels rely on readerly assumptions that different Eastern societies are more closely linked to each other than they are to Europe, nonetheless they also reflect more nuanced geopolitical concerns. The union of China and Japan is treated as a matter of historical inevitability – of biological and cultural siblings coming together – but the broader coalition that sweeps in other Orientals is based on the successful exploitation of anti-imperial sentiment or weaknesses in local power structures. In the Fu Manchu series, the evil doctor is aided by Britain’s own imperial subjects: the beautiful Arab slave Kâramanèh, who seems to hail from some British-controlled region, lascars, and others, whose presence in the imperial heartland is a sign both of empire and its discontents. This chapter examines Asiatic invasion novels from Britain in order to emphasize the continuities with other ways in which the British narrativized the Chinese. Yet these works also form part of a larger network of early science fiction and reflect concerns about the “Yellow Peril” in other nations involved in imperialism in Asia. Related narratives proliferated in other “Anglo-Saxon” countries, mainly Australia and the US, emphasizing the transnational frame for Anglophone discourses about the Chinese. In “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910), for instance, Jack London speaks of the “English-speaking race” and the “English-speaking mind” in contradistinction to the (non-linguistically defined) “Chinese mind.”12 British texts circulated in North America and throughout the Empire; Australian invasion novels like Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave were even published in London. Across the Channel, two important titles were L’invasion jaune (1909) and L’Asie en feu: Le roman de l’invasion jaune (1904).13 These works also envisaged a combined Chinese–Japanese threat; the first part of Danrit’s L’invasion jaune is entitled “La Mobilisation Sino-Japonaise.”

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British invasion novels themselves plot the “Yellow Deluge” in terms of geopolitics. They emphasize inter-European antagonism, as well as intraAsian alliance, positing anxieties about Germany and Russia in distinctly global terms. Their Asian masterminds capitalize on local Asian problems to effect their plans to conquer Europe. They annex India and then Asiatic Russia in the long march to the metropolitan center. One of the first acts of war in the series of “Yellow Peril” novels produced by Shiel generally involves bringing India into the Sino-Japanese fold. In The Yellow Wave, the invasion is kicked off by a revolt in India and a simultaneous declaration of war by Germany, engineered by the Japanese leader. In both instances, these novels titillate readers in specific ways. It is no accident that the loss of the “jewel in the Crown” heralds more dramatic forfeitures. Nor is it unthinkable that nationalists within India might prefer to be governed by the Japanese or the Chinese, instead of the British, in light of Subhas Chandra Bose’s pact with Japan during the Second World War. The novels also trace a lineage of sedition in India back to the Mutiny, which, not coincidentally, modern Indian historians perceive as a war of independence. The leaders’ designs on Asiatic Russia similarly reflect Japan’s successes in the Russo-Japanese War, which underscored Europe’s potential vulnerability to Asian forces. Such plots capitalize on readers’ knowledge of imperial affairs and their anxieties about Britain’s future as a global power. These are the tensions that must be resolved by the novel’s end to assure a positive outlook for British preeminence, an outlook that matches that of the Boxer narratives. One noteworthy feature of these novels is the way in which the Asiatics who threaten Britain are divided into two groups. The first group consists of the intellectuals, the masterminds who develop the plans to pit the “yellow races” against the “white” ones, the second of the masses who follow them. The former are instances of what Arata terms “Occidentalism”; they are like Stoker’s Dracula, whose “physical mastery of his British victims begins with an intellectual appropriation of their culture, which allows him to delve the workings of the ‘native mind’” (120). They are also like the title character(s) of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), with a multiplex personality embodying a dialectical mix of atavistic savagery, scientific acumen, and the gentlemanly behavior of the professional classes. The “yellow” twist to these precursors grafts fears of East Asia’s rise onto their generic trope of misused intelligence as threat. As Dana Seitler notes, in a pattern that also applies to the protagonists of earlier novels, “what is supposed to frighten us” about Fu Manchu is that he “is never simply described as bestial or atavistic, but rather as combining bestial with

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civilized qualities. In fact, Fu Manchu’s true threat to the ‘white race’ seems to lie in his ability to be both physically degenerate and unusually gifted in the higher arts of civilization.”14 This dualism also conflates two distinct strands of representation in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras: On one side of the ring was a refined Chinese culture, as exemplified in displays at the China Courts of international exhibitions held in Britain and the colonies in the 1880s; as personified in the Marquis Tseng, China’s top diplomat in Britain; and as described in the spate of articles in periodicals about his domestic arrangements in London. On the other side was the coolie, the figure central to many indentured labor schemes in the settler colonies, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The admixture of the refined and the barbaric inside the character of the Asiatic mastermind gives them a class mobility that their education and social position ought to preclude. Their association with low society, as well as high, is crucial to their invasion plans because knowledge of the manners and customs of the marginal enables them to manipulate the masses. The opening chapter of Shiel’s The Yellow Danger, for instance, clarifies that Dr. Yen How’s “mental breadth” is consistent with transgressive social affiliation, but it tellingly articulates his cross-class associations in terms of lack of appropriate sympathy, rather than broadened sympathy: In whatever country he happened to be – and he was never for many years in any one – he was most often to be found in the company of people of the lower classes; and of these he had a very intimate knowledge. So great was his mental breadth, that he was unable to sympathise with either Eastern or Western distinctions of class and rank. He often struck up chance friendships with soldiers and sailors about the capitals of Europe; and these patronised and exhibited him here and there. (5)

Described only a paragraph earlier as claiming noble descent in both China and Japan and possessing the highest European academic qualifications, this sketch of Yen How conflicts with the contacts the novel has him make in England before leaving to organize his invasion plans: these are solidly middle class and respectable. (Indeed, how can someone unable to distinguish class boundaries associate primarily with the lower classes?) Nevertheless, the novel must set up Yen How’s contact with lowness to render the later invasion plot plausible. Where the Asiatic masterminds house characteristics of civilization and barbarism within a single persona, generating narrative tension for the

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novels out of the interplay of these elements, by contrast, the East Asian populace appears only en masse in de-individualized, animalistic terms. This mode of presenting the masses has three aims: First, it recapitulates a key myth about the Boxer Rebellion, that government agents misled the mob into rising up against the foreigners; this misdirection means the masses themselves can, in theory, be exculpated of their actions. A similar misdirection grounds the masses’ involvement in the schemes of domination found in these texts. Second, it serves as a metaphor for the potential for insurrection that lies within Europe’s own working classes. Marx’s promise of a revolution in Europe sparked by the reactions of Chinese bodies within China here constitutes a threat to British social order in the form of Chinese bodies that exceed China and the roles of indenture that have been sanctioned for them in colonial space. Thus, these novels advance a conservative view of labor relations and transpose anxieties about working-class unionism onto the Chinese. Third, it takes human agency away from these masses. This configuration of the Chinese masses is crucial to the narratological goal of making British survival dependent on the assertion of individual agency. Much like Holocaust narratives, these novels invest the survival and heroic actions of their protagonists with greater significance for the culturally and ethnically defined group to which they belong. The novels therefore capitalize on anxieties about Chinese labor and immigration, according to which the “semi-civilized” is the better worker because he has more animal endurance and fewer individual needs: he can survive on lower-quality or cheaper food, endure harsher physical conditions, and work for lower pay. Thus the “Yellow Danger” lies in the very fact that Asiatics are less evolved in Darwinian terms; their relative lack of individual demands and needs makes them a stronger collective force, whether laboring in colonial mines and plantations or joined together in a military force. The very qualities of endurance and industriousness that Britons in Asia advanced in favor of Chinese labor schemes are used against the Chinese. In Shiel’s 1898 The Yellow Danger (which eerily precedes the Rebellion, but which is set at the end of 1899), the Chinese and Japanese are reduced to a single, deadly, primordial utterance: the “yellow scream”; the cover illustration personifies the Chinese masses into an oversized image of Yen How, complete with dragon-claw fingernails, who is reaching across a globe to clarify the precise nature and reach of the threat (see Figure 4). Other novels refer to the “yellow wave,” liken the Chinese to the biblical plague of the locusts, and apply adjectives like “teeming” and “swarming”

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Figure 4. The cover of M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898).

to them. Although it might seem paradoxical, such representations are consistent with Victorian stereotypes about the coolie body as a mechanized, amalgamated force for two reasons.15 First, the valence of the zoomorphism conjured up by imagery of teeming and swarming associates the Chinese body with birds, insects, and bees; these are animals that move in groups, without individual agency, and often with a single leader (the parallel, in this case, being the Asian intellectual). Zoomorphism is consistent with Hayot’s description of the Chinese laboring body in the American context as “enduring, impervious to physical pain, and mechanical or

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slavish in its relation to freedom, pleasure, and a volitional relation to history” (Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin, 139). The flight of locusts quoted in the epigraph also suggests a concern more with the visitation of the Chinese body on the European self than with the Chinese body per se, also typing it as impervious to the pain of a protracted death and able to sacrifice itself for the needs of the collectivity. Second, the example of the “yellow scream” again emphasizes that the Chinese body can only operate en masse; the scream is also an embodied danger to the European listener that nevertheless requires no physical contact. “The fragmentation and animalization of the Asian body,” Seitler recalls, “and the diacritical strategies deployed to register its ghastliness are put to the service of Western productions of a racial type that bears the weight of group identity” (163). In their vision of the “swarms” and “hordes” which sweep westwards, these novels also emplot unprecedented, rapid population shifts that are distinctly modern but are actually viable because they are coupled with China’s anachronistic and feudal practices. For instance, what could be more modern than the mobilization by mastermind Dr. Yen How in The Yellow Danger of the “400,000,000 which formed the population of China,” than the enlisting an entire civilian population into a war? Yet the citizens themselves are armed not with guns, but with crude “implements.” They are also engaged in an anti-modern death drive, urged on by callous leaders who disregard that most basic of rights, the right to live. They thus conjure up popular nineteenth-century images of the Juggernaut, a seemingly unstoppable machine of destruction and a caution about the function of self-sacrifice. Again, the danger comes from the way in which the Chinese adopt the fruits of “civilization” – weapons, for instance – but fail to place them in a moral framework that will assure their just use. In this way, the novels also mirror many of the debates about coolie labor and “coolie immorality,” which seek to stem the flow of Chinese immigration by elevating issues of morality over utility.

Insidious insiders If the visibility of an amalgamated mass is what defines the legions that threaten Britain and the Empire in these novels, it is the invisibility of their leaders – and of the network that links them back to Asia – that serves as the enabling mechanism for the invasions being contemplated. Invariably, the Asiatic invasion novel relies on the premise that Japanese or Chinese agents can operate without attracting attention. Invariably, too, these novels open in Britain, typically in London or along the “Celtic fringe.” The threat of

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reverse colonization therefore always already begins at home: either through the direct action of the Empire itself (for instance, by opening its schools to the elite of Asia) or through the inability to effectively police the boundaries of the home country. The novels therefore propose a vision of transgression that is doubly articulated: it is a transgression both of physical boundaries and of the intellectual boundaries established by Western education and influence on the East. Earlier narratives incorporating Asian characters had already set the stage for this pattern; De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), with its Malay wayfarer, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), with its Hindu priests roaming England, are important examples. In Australian writer Guy Boothby’s version of Frankenstein, Dr. Nikola’s Experiment (1899), Nikola’s henchman is a “Chinese ruffian” named Quong Ma, who moves effortlessly around London and the area around the remote castle Nikola has purchased in the north of England. The less well-known The Yellow Man, published by Dawe in 1900, features a series of murders carried out in an English rural setting by members of a Chinese secret society. In this work, which puts paid to the idea that Rohmer invented the “yellow devil incarnate,” the motive for the murders is revenge for an English collaborator’s defection in a plot to kill the Chinese Emperor. The mysterious red, egg-shaped design which symbolizes the society and appears out of nowhere at the site of each murder attempt is emblematic of the group’s ability to remain invisible in the “most English” of settings. Says the novel’s boy protagonist in a powerful statement about reverse imperialism and globalization, “I was fearful of this murder society of yellow men … who willed a crime in China and had it executed in a country town in England. I take it that such power would make the boldest pause, and if he had any imagination he might well shrink in horror from the one thought of contact with it” (147). The notion of telegraphic espionage and assassination – directed in Asia, performed in Britain – symbolizes another way in which the Chinese exploit modern technology to advance retrograde aims. In the invasion novels, too, Britain is crawling with Asiatics who are the advance guard of the invaders, but whose presence goes crucially unremarked. When East Meets West opens with the appearance of a “Jap,” who is mistaken for a German when found spying near the Isle of Wight. The mistake is significant: by conflating German and Japanese, the author foreshadows the move from primary enemy to secondary enemy that the plot later thematizes when war breaks out. Shiel’s earliest Asiatic invasion novel, The Yellow Danger, introduces its principal characters through a chance meeting on a London omnibus. Only when Dr. Yen How removes

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his hat is he remarkable as anything more than curious; otherwise, he can “pass” in the most public of places. Moreover, Yen How represents the dangerousness of a cosmopolitanism: “If ever man was cosmopolitan, that man was Dr. Yen How. No European could be more familiar with the minutiæ of Western civilisation. His degree of doctor he had obtained at the University of Heidelberg; for years he had practised as a specialist in the diseases of women and children at San Francisco” (4). Shiel’s later The Yellow Wave opens with a scene in a Japanese restaurant “hidden” in Bloomsbury, where members of a Japanese secret society called “The Tiger-hunters” are meeting to prepare for the coming invasion. The society, which is modeled after the Boxers, include in its numbers American and British agents. The restaurant, like the Asiatic presence in England, somehow manages to conceal itself in Bloomsbury, that hotbed of literary sedition. Writes Shiel, “Hardly a reader will know this restaurant; just where it is one may not tell: but it is in a residential block in Bloomsbury. One passes down a corridor, through a courtyard, up a stair, and knocks at a door on which are painted some Japanese words” (8). That the restaurant exists unnoticed in a residential block is a condemnation of cosmopolitan culture and its lack of boundaries. With an entrance like that of a speakeasy, the restaurant conceals yet protects the foreign “germ” that will later break out and infect the country at large. The novel then seeks to evoke the divide between East and West through food in descriptions of sashimi and sukiyaki that seem comical today, but are worth quoting for the way in which they seek to symbolize essential difference through an aesthetics of taste. The way of dining, Shiel states in his description of the room, is “the grimace of a dinner,” a mimicry of the West that succeeds only in being farcical – “the electric light over the eating-table looks down on the oddest way of dining . . . dinner and light together making a symbol of New Japan, East and West met at last” (8). The motif of East meeting West immediately alerts readers to this New Japan as a potential source of instability and threat. The food is even worse: Snacks of raw fish were before them, with a sauce which somehow “cooked” the fish; then came six pans of raw meat and onions on six spirit-lamps, and they cooked the meat, mixing sugar with it, deftly snatching hot tit-bits meanwhile into their mouths with their chopsticks, like long-beaked birds: for I take it that whereas forks are instead of the claws of beasts, chopsticks are instead of the beaks of birds; but forks are better than chopsticks, for beasts are better than birds. (9)

Technology is reduced to its most basic implements, the fork or the chopstick, with the reliance on a naturalized hierarchy between beasts and birds

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to clarify the superiority of the West. The analogy of the Asiatic to the bird is particularly significant in light of the later plot, for birds can fly over borders; beasts may be superior, but they are more territorially limited. (That said, many of the Asiatic invasion novels also explore air power as a means of defeating the threatening Asiatics.) These birds are also birds of prey. Again distinctions between the raw and the cooked are taken to be indicative of levels of civilization; the raw fish described can in no way be cooked satisfactorily as far as a British reader might be concerned. Shiel continues his analysis of the Japanese meal with this description of its end: “Dessert came – pickles – improbable tit-bits of salted vegetables; for whereas we others eat salt with meat, they ate sugar, but whereas we eat sugar for dessert, they ate salt” (10). As in the representations of Chinese dinners I have discussed elsewhere, East turns West topsy-turvy, inverting the “probable” and the natural and remaining incapable of sweet conclusions.16 A similar inversion of the natural marks the sweep of the invasion forces in The Yellow Danger. The uncontained presence of the East in the West causes almost apocalyptic changes that signal the unnaturalness of the invasion: Between those two mighty masses of mountains which, like the ramparts of the New Jerusalem, have locked in the Celestial Empire from contact, or knowledge, or suspicion, of the vague world beyond, they came. The Deadsea lake, after old ages, was amove, aflow. Through that mysterious land, which the race-venom of the Mongol race has made a third unknown Pole in the midst of the earth, crawled the weird procession, the unbounded caravan. The wild elephant and the mild-eyed zebu saw them with wonder, and the summer monsoon went gadding with the marvelous tidings toward the plain, and over the sea to Africa, gossiping that there above, on the high flat land, was a New Thing moving under the sun. The sources of the MeKong, the Saluen, and the Irrawady, which only the eye of the couchant tigress and of the yellow man had seen, beheld their week-long passage, and heard the creak of the cart, and the cry of the camel, and the muling of a child at the breast. (265)

The violation of nature is coded in explicitly biblical terms: the Chinese are not building a New Jerusalem; they usurp the role of New Thing when there should be no new thing under the sun; their caravan brings not Christ, but Armageddon. Later, in the midst of the invasion, Nature grows very angry, setting off an explosion in the South Seas that covers the world in darkness and a volcanic eruption in Timor that rocks Japan with tidal waves, thereby giving Britain time to regroup before Chinese forces attempt to cross the English Channel after decimating Europe.

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Like the Boxer fictions, Asiatic invasion novels also propel their narratives forward with plots involving disguise. Yet whereas in the imperial or protoimperial setting British protagonists use disguise for the purposes of gathering and purveying information or escaping capture and death, in the imperial homeland the “native” merely needs to adopt European dress to assure relative invisibility. The elaborate precautions taken by the Boxer heroes to disguise their bodies and dye their skins are not necessary for the Asiatic in Britain precisely because he comes from the “inferior” civilization. Description after description types the Britain-based Asiatic as, at first glance, a deformed or a smaller version of the Briton himself – a lesser self, perhaps, but not one to invite extraordinary attention. Whereas in the Boxer novels readers hope that the disguise will work, in these novels the opposite is true: readers await the moment when the disguise will be stripped and the Asiatic characters exposed for extirpation. For this reason, these novels often incorporate some flaw in the disguise – often a linguistic one – that sets up the antagonist for failure. Linguistically marking this failure to pass also introduces another parallel between the Asiatic and the working-class Briton, even though the Chinese and Japanese “imposters” in these novels are from the opposite end of the class spectrum in their home environments. Thus Western education fails to eradicate the stereotypical difficulty that the “Chinaman” has in pronouncing the letters “r” and “t,” just as George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle lapses into Cockney at moments of stress. Dr. Yen How, for instance, “had two defects – his shortness of sight, which caused him to wear spectacles; and his inability, in speaking without effort, to pronounce the word ‘little.’ He still called it ‘lillee’” (5). The Westernized Asiatic is the imperfect copy. In fact, the strategy employed by these novels is to collapse the distinction between mimicry and disguise: the Asiatic villains intend mimicry by acquiring the intellectual and physical trappings of European culture, but they end up merely disguising their dangerous, inalienable Eastern identities. The novels then extend this interpretation to the Asiatic societies as a whole to explain their antagonists’ success in organizing Chinese populations against them. Thus these works see China’s own notion of “Chinese learning as essence, Western learning as utility” in a very different light. As Westerman puts it in East Meets West, “All the cruelties practised by the Samurai in days gone by, the savage excesses of the Boxers, will reappear from beneath the thin yet deceiving veneer of western civilization” (39). And reappear they do, made crueler and more dangerous by being possessed of technology. In the fifty years since Engels published his

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comparison between Persia and China, the situation had considerably altered: Japan had already introduced a fully Westernized, technologically adept military, and China was moving to import military technology and expertise from Europe – with a resulting increase in the level of Britain’s anxiety about the uses to which this technology might be put.17 If, in invasion novels, technology plays the crucial role of stimulating, then repulsing, the threat of reverse imperialism, the reason lies not so much in the descriptions of battles and encounters that are standard to the genre whatever the geographic setting, as it does in the specific coding of the Oriental imitation of European technology in a moral context. Under this schema, the “rights” to technology lie firmly with the civilized, to be taught to Eastern subalterns only so long as production and distribution remain firmly in the hands of the European imperial center. When access to technological innovation falls outside these boundaries, however, it is immediately labeled as malevolent and out of control – in much the same way that “rogue” states today are coded as evil for their desire to possess nuclear weapons. This is particularly true of weapons such as biological warfare, which the Hague Convention had proscribed. The invasion novels are consistent, therefore, in providing corrupt mandarins who are both Western-educated and technologically ingenious. These include Rohmer’s “Yellow Peril incarnate,” whose knowledge of poisons and animal behavior far exceeds that of any doctor or scientist in Britain; the public-schooleducated Li Ku Yu of Shiel’s The Dragon, able to recreate and better the technological models he is offered; and Osaka Toya of Westerman’s When East Meets West, a mastermind of submarine battle strategy. The Promethean gain of technology, hereby linked to the hubris of the Asian geniuses’ desire to construct their nations through an imperialist expansion that mirrors Europe’s own, becomes, in these narratives, a question of moral degeneration – into barbarity, cruelty, torture, parasitism, and the effacement of the individual. And it is precisely the morally flawed nature of their technological innovation that allows Britain to marshal its forces after heavy losses and regain the upper hand. Presaging post-Second World War discourse on East Asia’s ability to organize technology more effectively than the West, but its inability to supersede it in terms of innovation because of its devalued notions of the individual, the novels represent technology through overdetermined significations of modernity and progress, of the moral imperatives of imperialism, of originals and copies. In reducing the “Yellow Danger” to an imperfect mimetic act being carried out by the Western-educated antagonists of the narratives, the novels offer a moral grounding for their formula of racism

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and xenophobia. As Judith Butler and Jean Baudrillard have, in different ways, suggested, the anxiety of mimesis arises out of the question of the imperfect original, that is, the copy is already a copy of a copy for which no original actually exists. This anxiety collides neatly with the imperial anxieties present in these novels. The technological original in the invasion novels is supposed to signify a teleological notion of Western progress; when the imperfections of its use in non-Western hands come to light, however, they throw into question whether that progress actually exists, and whether it is linear or circular in nature. However, Asia’s ability to use Western technology to great effect against its creators can be, and is, placed by these authors within a teleological notion of progress by suggesting that European civilization loses battles because it is no longer interested in the primitive act of warfare. Eastern civilization, by contrast, remains stuck at a dangerous level of aggressiveness that nonetheless cannot succeed in wiping out the West because it is fundamentally inferior. Shiel encapsulates this point of view in the following passage from The Yellow Wave: The inferior yellow race has been beating the white in war, and everybody is crying out, “It is no longer inferior!” But it is because it is somewhat inferior that it beats; because it is in that stage of development which has a genius for war, whereas the white races are now getting into the stage which has a genius for the arts of peace. At an early stage in development every one could bring down a bird with a stone, and at that game of throwing stones a black Marutse or Batlapan boy can now beat us all, not because he is better than we, but because we are better than he. In the same way the Japs beat the Russian with the machines which he invented for them, not because the Japs, or the Boers, or the Prussians are better men, but because the greatest white nations are just getting past that stage of development which has a genius for war. (69)

The threat being voiced here is carefully crafted: The East possesses a genius for war, embodied in the Western-educated villains featured in all of Shiel’s plots. Darwinian-style logic allows for such a genius to be individualized as an intelligent foe, as the fittest member of a race that nonetheless remains at a lower state of development. All natives are comparable under this schema, specifically all natives who come into contact with the British. More importantly, white natives who do not belong to the “greatest white nations” are comparable to non-white natives. Singled out are the Boers (who even today are labeled “Africa’s only white tribe”) and the Prussians, representative of the German “race” that will set off the primary warfare in the novels. Shiel’s comments also need to be read in light of the Hague

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Convention of 1899 and the later convention of 1907, both of which were aimed at the “pacific settlement of international disputes.” The danger of the mimetic Eastern mastermind also lies in his abilities to expose the flaws in the design of the original. In an interesting reversal of what has come to be a standard topos of science fiction – in which the invaders’ use of superior technology is stymied by the crucial discovery of a weak point in either their physical bodies or in their technological ones – the “yellow” invasion novels posit the weakness within Western society itself, and in a monster of its own creating: an educated, partly technologized East. The flaw therefore always emanates from the “original,” in the sense of the construction of the social. The novels specifically brand educational elitism as the source of the problem: admitting the Oriental to public schools like the fictitious Brockweir, to universities like Heidelberg, to the scientific community at large promotes the seeds of race hatred and revenge on the part of the Easterner while equipping him with the tools and thought mechanisms needed to try to effect that revenge. In this vision of empire, wars are still being fought and won on the playing fields of Eton. The second novel of Shiel’s “Yellow Danger” trilogy, The Dragon, for instance, takes a schoolboy fight at Brockweir between Prince “Teddy” and Li Ku Yu or “Sky-Blue,” son of a Chinese Home Office official, as the genesis for the subsequent conflict between the two empires that these individuals later come to lead. The ideologically charged space of the public school as the proving ground for masculinity and muscular Christianity in Victorian fiction and as the traditional locus for training imperialists provides for the process of personal identification and sympathy between the English protagonist and the Asian antagonist. At the same time, the interpolation of the personal and the political in the figure of the Eastern intellectual allows the ultimate failure of the invasion scheme. That is, the incapacity on the part of the genius of the “lesser race” to keep personal and societal goals separate stands as a marker for an incapacity to entirely control the empire he hopes to create. Personal vengeance, in fact, is a theme typical of many narratives about Chinese encounters with the British of this period, and often this vengeance takes on an explicitly sexual coding – especially in Shiel’s works. Imperfect masculinity or impractical sexual goals stand in for the imperfect technological imitation and the impractical copying of imperialist expansion that the invasions attempt to establish. The homoerotic tension created in the public school fight in The Dragon – emphasized by Li Ku Yu’s act of rubbing his cheek against Teddy’s at its conclusion with “venomous affection” – works itself out as the two characters become heads of state (it is no accident that Teddy is the

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Prince of Wales, after all). That tension is increasingly triangulated through the conflict over Eulalia Bayley (Teddy’s girlfriend and later wife, coveted by Li Ku Yu) and Sky-Blue’s Japanese servant Oyone (who covets Teddy). Just before dying after his invasion fails, Li Ku Yu writes a letter to Teddy, calling him “brother” and stating, “I have loved you well” (339). The Yellow Danger posits a similar sexual motive behind the invasion, when Dr. Yen How is scorned by servant girl Ada Seward with whom he falls in love; because of his unalienable racial difference, she finds his attentions laughable. Yen How later leads himself into a rivalry with the “hope of England,” a young man named John Hardy, whom he erroneously believes also loves Ada. When he finally catches up with Hardy, Yen How tortures John by branding him with Ada’s and How’s initials. This description is crosscut with an illicit love scene recalling the willow-pattern plate story, in which two young Chinese people whose affections are contrary to their parents’ wishes are brutally murdered. Shiel’s portrayal of Hardy is curious; he gives Hardy persistent markings of effeminacy, despite his supposed “weakness” for women. Shortly after he is introduced, Shiel has the Telegraph describe Hardy as follows: “His face is said to be the gravest, saddest, prettiest girl-face in the land, and his disposition in private life is much more than usually mild, soft, and affectionate” (74). He has asthma (depicted in terms identical to that most Victorian of “female” diseases, tuberculosis), and at a crucial point in the fight to save Britain, he falls ill. Nevertheless, this presentation is consistent with Seitler’s reading of the nervous and neurasthenic bodies but strong minds of Rohmer’s protagonists and its function to raise narrative tension and titillate. In The Yellow Wave, the motive for the Japanese Baron M–’s invasion plan stems from his wife’s suicide years earlier. She had killed herself to resist unwanted sexual advances from a Russian nobleman.18 Cultural hybridity, perhaps more than racial hybridity, stimulates inappropriate behavior. More importantly, cultural hybridity gives the non-European the desire for miscegenation. It perverts “natural” sexual object choice; it incites race hatred at the very point that it proposes cross-cultural unions.

Technologies of takeover The battles over and with technology that issue from this hybridity are especially important because of how they seek to extend sovereignty in novel ways: suzerainty over unclaimed air and water spaces (The Yellow Danger), control over bodies through germs and chemicals (When East

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Meets West, The Yellow Danger), rule over the mind through hypnosis and cinema (The Dragon), and over bodies through pharmacology (the Fu Manchu texts). The boundaries of control as traditionally conceived – over land – are broken down and replaced by the more amorphous borders that science and rationalism have opened up. In so doing, they mirror the blurring of internal boundaries that operates in these novels, that is the boundaries between China, Japan, and India on the one hand and England and the Continent on the other. They also evoke the sense of the imperial immune system and its potential permeability that Laura Otis has explored.19 The only way to circumvent the inevitable machinery of a reverse imperialist expansion is through new technology, seemingly the only response to an amorphous and numberless (hence unquantifiable) threat. This technology takes the form of airships, submarines, biological warfare, and other mechanisms that at the time fell outside the purview of traditional warfare and were often proscribed by it. Yet the threat of the uncontainable Other, these novels argue, allows for the suspension of standards; an inhuman threat justifies inhuman and even genocidal responses. Notably, these responses are also impervious to borders and boundaries, as traditionally perceived. Westerman’s novel When East Meets West, in particular, includes passages on the suspension of the Hague Convention protocols once biological warfare becomes the only appropriate self-defense: the ultimate revenge against the infection of the East becomes inoculation of European troops who then operate as carriers for a new plague that sweeps eastwards, instead of westwards. John Hardy in The Yellow Danger also uses a plague to fight the Yellow Plague by introducing cholera. The disease quickly reaches epidemic proportions, killing 150 million people in three weeks and prompting the remaining 100 million “yellow men” in Europe to agree to a withdrawal. Unlike Westerman, however, Shiel portrays the use of biological warfare as a “crime,” for which his character is immediately punished by dying in a bizarre duel. The airships that effect the rescue of Britain and Europe in Shiel’s The Dragon succeed similarly through their capacity to permeate enemy spaces and attack in ways entirely analogous to the germ. Able to penetrate into the heart of enemy territory and especially to remove the capital hidden in a tower deep inside Germany, these ships bear much in common with cell theory prevalent at the time; both sides attempt to win their conquests by “infecting” and incapacitating key installations of military or financial importance. In London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion,” the Americans actually wipe out the Chinese by dropping various plagues contained in glass tubes from airplanes.20

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In addition, these novels offer an important discussion of how sovereignty needs to be redefined in the age of psychology. Written at precisely the moment in which Freud and others were attempting to establish psychoanalysis as a science, the novels stress the ability of the criminal Chinese to control their populations through psychoanalytic means: induced mass hysteria, hypnosis, advanced techniques of identification, and indoctrination become key elements in their strategies to overtake the West. The techniques themselves make reference to the history of the Boxer Movement, which was widely rumored to have used hypnosis and magic to rouse the people to rebellion and to render its fighters impervious to pain. While scientists were contesting the notion that hypnosis could turn people into automatons, the novels rely on popular perceptions that it could, and on the idea that the intrinsic self could thereby subject itself to the will of another.21 In conjunction with the discourse about awakening China from a thousand years of slumber, such techniques suggest that the masses can only be manipulated into another kind of sleep; even when they achieve some kind of self-consciousness, it is a misdirected and false one. The slumber/ waking analogy also visits itself on the victims of the Chinese, struck dumb with terror or failing to awake soon enough to the threat of the Yellow Peril. The novels crucially concern themselves with issues of mob/mass psychology through their discussion of two elements: 1. the representation of the new technology of cinema as a tool for the development of mass consciousness post-1895; and 2. the representation of the non-linguistic shriek uttered by the mob in its invasion of Europe and the paralyzing Terror invoked by that shriek, with its suggestions of primal terror and its deadly import and its referencing of Robespierre’s violent reign over the mobs after the French Revolution. That these texts forge a relationship between sound and hypnosis at the precise time that automated, reproducible sound became available to their readers in the form of mass-marketed wax-cylinder phonographs is itself compelling. Emerging visual and aural technologies feature casually or obliquely in a number of the novels discussed here. In Shiel’s The Yellow Danger, the scene in which Yen How tortures Hardy by alternately letting drops of water and vitriol land on his head in an irregular pattern encodes film’s discovery of sequence and montage. But it is the 1913 The Dragon that makes the most striking use of cinema, perhaps because its later publication date coincides with the development of multi-reel feature films and the rise of narrative film. In this novel, film is overtly and covertly concerned with tensions around the masses. The Dragon has leader Li Ku Yu establish a propagandistic film industry to incite the masses to hatred of Europeans in much the

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same ways that the Bolsheviks used cinema-trains to educate their populace about the Revolution. Imported from Germany (which is, of course, the primary rival to Britain in the novel), the cinematographs are instruments of organization that permit the construction of a mass consciousness, a “race” instinct and hatred of the Western “barbarian.” Reflecting contemporary criticism of cinema as a popular form lacking artistic integrity, Shiel’s representation of cinema hints not just at the type of propaganda film now familiar from the Nazi period, but also at conceptions of the base nature of the medium itself (as a “dissipation,” in Shiel’s words). The incorporation of a culture industry into Li Ku Yu’s invasion schemes comes to mark the very degradation of his culture itself (its savage and barbaric mood and instincts). At the same time, Shiel’s conception of cinema’s ability to shape or manipulate the sentiments of the masses creates another parallel between anxieties about the Chinese and about workingclass sedition at home. In the novel, Li Ku Yu orders the 125,000 movie machines in a seemingly inconsequential paragraph that follows a description of his brutal repression of an uprising in Turkestan – a description noteworthy for its highlighting of the “slicing” process of killing, an obvious analogy to film’s splice. Thus The Dragon links together film, violence, and insurrection from the start. Li Ku Yu’s quelling of the rebellion is characteristically brutal; he leaves behind him a “desert,” a forewarning of his intents in Europe. When the cinematographic machines make it to China, they are used to this effect: Meantime, the cargo of ordered cinematographs had arrived – Li Ku Yu’s first open act of war against the Christian races. He himself was head-master of one of the schools which he instituted to teach the use of the machines; he himself invented many of the “plots” – “plots” which had only one subject in infinite variety – a combat between white man and yellow, white women and yellow. And ever the yellow man ended best man, disembowelling the colourless mouse, cutting out his or her tongue, bamboozling him in business, hacking out his heart, dancing on his carcass. These films went out to districts of China and Japan where it was not even known that there were such things as white men; and the entrance fee being only a few li, they soon proved popular apostles of atrocity, became a dissipation, an all-day orgy of fun to hundreds of millions – for Li Ku Yu intimately knew the mood and instincts of his countrymen. (47)

The passage embodies both the threat of allowing the Other to possess technology and the reason why that technology ultimately fails when used against its creators: yet again, a technologized East Asia is simply a

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traditional Asia with a coating of civilization imposed. The cinematographs are suspect technology to begin with. In their plots of the struggle between white and yellow man and woman, the films they show represent only a continued scene of the barbarity generally ascribed by the colonizer to the colonized: unfair trade practices, disembowelment (with its hints at sodomy), linguistic disempowerment (tongue-cutting), desecration (dancing over cadavers), and savage dancing (that is, an orgiastic display of physical and sexual excess). The films project all the anxieties that readers might have about the Yellow Peril, although they anticipate an ending – the “besting” of the white man – that readers also know the novel will, by its conclusion, forestall. Even in this debased technological medium, Li Ku Yu’s films are not legitimate, for their plots are not real plots, but “plots” stamped as imperfect copies by their quotation marks. Just as the medium of film allows endless, theoretically identical copies to be made of a single original through mechanical reproduction, so the plots of these films replicate a single, unstable theme of hatred. This theme is unstable because it violates the naturalized hierarchy between West and East as mapped onto Good and Evil. The description of the films as “apostles of atrocity” underscores this moral and religious theme, as does the fact that the target here is identified as the “Christian races,” neatly aligning the West with a racialized moral authority. Moreover, in conjunction with the films, Li Ku Yu launches “Government Gazettes” that “promulgate the same two gospels of greed and cruelty” (47). Numbers are of specific importance to this schema. The incredible figure of 125,000 cinematographs combined with the audience of hundreds of millions for the films serve to conjure up an image of teeming, seething masses of Sino-Japanese and to highlight the perils of allowing the East to possess mechanisms for industrial reproduction and indoctrination. The image of monstrous enormity contrasts with the paltry sum needed to gain entrance to the films, well within the budgets of even the most downtrodden. Finally, the penetration of the cinematic apparatus into remote areas of China and Japan where the existence of these “Christian races” is itself unknown again shows the conjunction of the modern and the antiquated; the technological innovation becomes a tool to motivate centuries-old sentiments of xenophobia and cultural isolationism. Though Shiel’s portrayal of cinema ends with its use as the first, most ideological tool in Li Ku Yu’s war against the West, the idea of cinema reasserts itself in The Dragon back in England through the struggle over the invention known as the Redlike Ray. Created by Ralph Chinnery, Prince Teddy’s pal from Brockweir, it is to become the secret weapon to overcome a Chinese invasion of England that threatens to cross the English Channel

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in “airboats.” The ray operates by striking blind those who see it; it is cinema made deadly. Contained in a Pandora’s box labeled “Do Not Open,” it resembles a camera and projector rolled into one (like many early cinematographs): “It was a black box, cubical, two feet broad” fitted with a “cap which made it safe to handle” (114). When uncapped, the apparatus emits “a pencil of rays, very large in area, though very faint, for whose strange shade he had no name . . . just revealed to the eye by the dustparticles which the rays touched in the air” (245). The Redlike Ray is the source of struggle between Britain and China throughout the latter portion of the novel, as Li Ku Yu’s agent Oyone (who is also Chinnery’s mistress) tries to wrest it from Teddy’s wife Eulalia, who is ignorant of its properties. The ray falls into various hands during the novel, including those of an Anarchist drawn from the pages of Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), a retired American sailor, and Oyone. Unaware of its contents, the American opens the box with the ray in the middle of Hyde Park, blinding many and causing general mayhem. Eventually, however, Teddy gets his hands on the Redlike Ray; it is then used to stop an early version of the Battle of Britain by blinding the crews of incoming airships, who lose control of their craft and crash into the English Channel or land harmlessly in southern England. Beyond its obvious appeal to the large science-fiction audience for such novels as Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), the Redlike Ray serves as the antidote to Li Ku Yu’s cinema, by destroying the cohesion instilled by it, at the same time that it makes an ideological argument about film’s own ability to blind its audience through propaganda. Technology is dangerous when uncontrolled or in the wrong hands; when it is placed in the hands of the benevolent state – Prince Teddy – it can be used to good effect. The ray also provides a technologized version of the Chinese weapon of the shriek, which paralyzes through auditory means in much the same way that the ray does through visual ones. The primitive shriek, however, ultimately fails in its encounter with this scientific instrument.22 Whereas the cinema is the tool of an individual leader to organize an enormous mob of peasants by forging a common consciousness (based on “race”), the shriek is that mob’s weapon, uttered in order to break down consciousness among listeners, to destroy by rendering the individual incapable of participating in mass actions. Shiel’s novels therefore include scenes in which military forces rounded up to fight the Asiatic horde are rendered useless by the Terror caused by the shriek. Both the cinema and the shriek are weapons in China’s plan to destroy the West through intense violence, and both operate by theorizing

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the unknown. Li Ku Yu’s cinema takes the unknown, the foreign, and makes it appear knowable to the masses in terms of antithesis and destruction, while the shriek and its contingent Terror operate in the opposite way, incapacitating by further mystifying a radical foreignness. The Yellow Danger charts this process starkly as it applies to the shriek: The Black Death of the Middle Ages, which nearly altogether emptied Europe, inspired no doubt an equal tragic suggestion; but it probably failed in something of that staring, pallid, dry-throated panic characteristic of the Yellow Terror, chiefly on account of the element of the unknown and wholly novel in the Chinese cataclysm, – on account, also, of the certainty of his doom which pierced the heart of each European, – and on account, thirdly, of certain hints of unutterable horror which accompanied the rumours of the onward sweep of the yellow wave. (272–273)

The Sino-Japanese soldiers are like animals, stunning and immobilizing their prey with fear, then brutally butchering them. In this passage, Shiel has combined the “horror” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898) with an image of contagion and the anxiety of the Other to inspire an utterly Freudian terror attributed to the Yellow Peril. (Shiel liked this image so much that it recurs in similar form in his other Asiatic invasion adventures. The “yellow wave” also finds its way into Westerman’s When East Meets West.) He makes the Terror into that state of hypnosis that brings the subconscious to life, with all its associations of the primitive. Like the Redlike Ray, the Terror disables the senses, leaving its victim “staring,” immobile, and confused. Once again the question of internal class relations mapped onto the Chinese peasants rears its head. The threat of the Asiatic mob being articulated through the Terror of a mass invasion bears much in common with similar fears of working-class unrest so prevalent in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The Chinese masterminds of these novels share the same project as middle-class and industrial culture does in convincing the laboring classes to act on their behalf, if for radically different purposes. The imbrication of the working-class Briton and the imperial subject is again inescapable – a point brought home in The Yellow Danger, when labor unions nearly undermine the resistance to the invasion by secretly agreeing not to oppose a Chinese takeover in exchange for certain protections. And the Asiatic geniuses themselves are tainted by Oscar-Wilde-like habits of association with the working classes; they are seen to cross class lines as much as race ones, despite their sophistication. The association reinforces the trope that working-class contact is dangerous and contaminated through an imperial lens. Thus the Asiatic invasion signaled by the mob,

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the shriek, and the Terror collapses anxieties of a working-class revolution (one which, like the French Revolution, would get rid of the “conquered”) and, paradoxically, the threat posed by external immigration to workingclass livelihood in Britain and the Colonies. Though the means of articulating these concerns may be vastly exaggerated in the emplotment of invasion in these narratives, the concerns themselves are generated out of genuine social issues of the time of writing. Shiel enhances this emplotment by incorporating a slew of political figures into his narratives: Dilke, Beresford, and Lord Balfour appear, among others; having a protagonist named “Prince Teddy” in a novel dated 1913 is no more subtle. These are suspense stories, and they operate by inciting in their middle-class readers the same anxieties about a collapse and conflation of class and race that their characters face. They also conjure up fears about the construction of the nation as Britain moves into the twentieth century and begins to face the very real possibility of a European war. The anxieties articulated therefore seek to replicate in the readers’ psyches those textually imposed on Europe through the Terror and the invasions themselves. The aim of the Terror and invasions is to promote the maximum possible psychological disorder as the prelude to imposing an Asiatic structure of reordering. But this war is essentially a war of extermination, a fact that the British characters in these novels themselves recognize: “It was felt, of course, that the yellow conquest could not be an ordinary conquest, if it happened at all. There was no question of conqueror and conquered living together afterwards and fraternising, like Norman and Saxon. The yellow conquest meant, naturally, that wherever it passed, the very memory of the white races it encountered would disappear for ever” (The Yellow Danger, 256). Reverse imperialism is thus taken to its most extreme; beyond subjugation, it promises annihilation and historical erasure. The endpoint of the Terror seeks not to impose a new form of Superego, but to eradicate all traces of the West in the psyches of its subjects. Given the opening up of borders that these novels depict, the new Chinese Empire is to be founded not on the absorption of territory – though this is clearly important to provide overflow space for the booming Chinese population – but on the absorption of memory. Cultural encounter degenerates to its most basic, destructive form. The new global order will return everybody to the level of ignorance that The Dragon’s Li Ku Yu introduces cinema to overhaul: an Asiatic world “where it was not even known that there were such things as white men.” Yet this project of a totalizing reverse imperialism not only fails to succeed, it actually backfires and, in so doing, allows Britain to redefine

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itself as a globally acknowledged supreme nation-state. These novels end with the triumph of Britain over the forces of darkness incarnated in the Yellow Peril. Theorizing a more benevolent imperialism for Britain, the British do not carry out total extermination policies for the “yellow races” when they gain the upper hand. They do kill many millions – just enough to relieve the perceived pressures of overpopulation that were bandied about at this time in discussions of Chinese immigration to Australia, South Africa, and America. The motive, however, is not revenge, but self-defense. The British Empire’s own policies of extermination in places such as New Zealand are conveniently overlooked. With the notable exception of the Fu Manchu novels (which employ the detective formula of mysterious disappearances and miraculous escapes from death to perpetuate novel after novel), most of these narratives also end in the suicide or self-destruction of the Asiatic genius, emblematic of the self-destruction of their imperial aspirations. The trope invoked here is one of suicide to save face, rather than the atavistic or revenge suicide present in many of the literary texts discussed elsewhere in this book. Osaka Toya of When East Meets West hurls himself from the airplane that is to deliver him to the War Office in London for a humiliating bout of questioning. Similarly, when his invasion founders, Li Ku Yu kills himself after drawing up a benevolent plan for Prince Teddy to use in his recreation of the British Empire. Moreover, at no point in their narratives does order actually break down within the boundaries of Great Britain, however porous its borders may seem to be. Even though the Sino-Japanese mob may succeed in destroying first the institutional structures that govern the Continent and then those that govern Britain, they never usher in a collapse of order; the British become incapable of degenerating into a mob, however much they fear it. Instead, the very force of the Sino-Japanese horde pressuring them boosts their own sense of cohesion, as this passage from The Yellow Danger reveals: “At this time, the people of Britain, if they had never been so before, was genuinely a nation, as distinct from a mob. They had suffered keenly together, resolved and acted nobly together: and they had been welded in the furnace-heat. By a Nation we mean a multifold Man” (255). The novel takes the archetypal imperial adventure story of the individual boy who finds his identity and achieves manhood in his contest with “native” culture and writes it large; in place of a single man, it presents multifold Man. This Man represents the will and the force of the nation, forged in the confrontation with the chaotic mob of Otherness. “It is the Marathons and Trafalgars which knit and nationalise. At all events, Britain, now, with her largely decreased population, was certainly

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knit and nationalised,” Shiel continues. “She could proceed from thought to action almost with the spontaneity of a single brain and arm. In her hand was the sword – but upon her brow sat Deliberation, and the grave air of the Statesman” (255–256). The British have learned to “unite and fight” against their greater, common threat. Britain’s consequent success in repelling the Asiatic menace firmly and perpetually secures her role as world leader. As the narrator notes in “Rule Britannia!,” the final chapter of Westerman’s When East Meets West, “The capture of the Chino-Japanese armada brought Great Britain once more to the front as mistress of the seas, while the possession of Bisterne Hill’s secret [biological weapon K4] made her omnipotent amongst the races of the world” (290). Success lies not in Britain’s ability to recreate itself as a world empire, but in the world’s acknowledgment that this role is her natural and proper one. Unlike the Boxer narratives, these novels do not envisage empire in commercial or financial terms – or even explicitly political ones. The concept of a global market coordinated by Britain cedes instead to the reconstruction of the national in terms of leadership, divine right, and universal goodwill. Curiously, both The Dragon and The Yellow Wave end with the establishment of a socialist order that dissolves class tensions while asserting an abstracted sovereign will for the world. In the latter, the invasion is voluntarily ended, thanks to a Romeo and Juliet plot that makes both parties see the absurdity of their conduct. Somewhat illogically, the Japanese leader Baron M– holds a meeting in Osaka where he preaches “egalité,” rejects feudalism, and upholds the Enlightenment’s Reason (the “wide-eyed mother of liberty”) as the new battle cry. “[A]nd it is the destiny of your brothers in China, and of you here also, in your smaller way, to have a high hand in [Reason’s] triumph. Let us, then, be keen and diligent: let us all shout together: Long live the twentieth century! down with aristocrats, whether they be men or nations! long live the revolution” (317). Since the novel does not actually involve an invasion of Great Britain, the British do not have a leadership role in its resolution. In the former work, however, Britain is the pioneer for this new socialism. Prince Teddy dissolves Parliament and issues an edict making Great Britain and Ireland his private property. The other planks of his edict mitigate the autocracy of this act by devaluing money and establishing a welfare state founded on a muscular Christianity. Teddy abolishes punishment, inaugurates mandatory physical drills, makes education a fundamental priority, and gives everybody a uniform salary. Thus Teddy becomes the organic intellectual who replaces the pernicious intellectual embodied by the Asian mastermind.

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A similar process is charted in The Yellow Danger. At first, the Chinese invasion of Europe turns England into the “Great Mother” and London the “City of Refuge” as scores of immigrants flood her shores. Her major imperial rival, America, shows its lack of morality by refusing to accept any refugees for fear of “pauper immigration.” When America is then drawn into the conflict, it agrees to an alliance with Britain but backs down into “selfish aloofness” when faced with sacrifice. After the conflict finally ends, America pays for its attitude by being subsumed into a new and totalizing British Empire. First, the Continent of Europe becomes British territory. Then, the Chinese retreat from Africa and Asia: This meant that all Asia and Africa were British too. And if Europe, Asia, and Africa, then, beyond doubt, America also; for no two Powers, one so vast, the other so comparatively small, could coexist side by side without a formal or informal acknowledgment of the suzerainty of the greater by the smaller. The sceptre of Britain, therefore, stretched from pole to pole, and from the river to the ends of the earth. (344)

In the final portion of his novel, Shiel relapses into the fin-de-siècle present. Here, he makes it clear that the novel’s futuristic vision of Britain’s benevolent global sovereignty is also a concrete aspiration. “England,” he predicts, “no doubt, will, in truth, absorb the world: the Loadstone [sic] is within us” (347). Shiel puts this point in more biological and racially charged terms, as well, in suggesting that Britons have the kernels of all humanity and human ingenuity inside of them: “Is it not for this very reason – that all Man is embryo within us? Man the engineer, Man the conqueror, Man the ruler, Man the Puritan, Man the Greek, Man the Bacchant?” (347). Thus Britain literally comes to embody the world. The Briton is simultaneously a manifestation of universal Man, the Everyman, stripped of all sense of ethnic and racial difference, and its supreme example. The Briton therefore stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from these novels’ antagonists – the similarly embodied “Yellow Peril incarnate” – and as the force that will disable fiendishness and devilry by incorporating it. Intriguingly, for Britain to realize this potential to ingest and incorporate the globe, Shiel advocates a utopian, almost agrarian form of cosmopolitanism that recalls William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). He states: But we must change. If the world is to become English, the English must first become worldly. We will not, of course, do as we are – we are in such very shockingly bad form! God will not have his otiose, green world made into a great, base Factory. We are not wild and innocent enough, not simple and

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archaic and joyous enough. In England, there do not, at present, grow sufficient flowers to adorn a length of sceptre which could stretch across the earth. (347)

In a novel which demonizes Asian peoples as archaic and aggrandizes the role of technology in securing national survival, Shiel paradoxically makes an appeal for an anti-industrial, worldly England. Britons are to be turned into a people chosen by God to restore the earthly paradise of pre-lapsarian times. Shiel replaces Dilke’s girdle of cultural affiliation with one of flowers, symbolic of the bounty and munificence of this new world order. Ironically, though, technology is what will allow this new reality to come into being. It is the telescoping of space and distance, through air power, that will knit the world together: “When the journey from London to Pekin became a matter of a few hours, and a thing easy to each man, then Man, and each man, might be said, for the first time, to possess the earth” (347). A novel obsessed with hierarchy and difference, resonant with nationalism and xenophobia, The Yellow Danger ends up advocating a state of uniformity, applied globally. It frustrates the binaries between East and West that the invasion novels normally are at such pains to establish. “Real national culture,” Shiel states, can only be based on equality, an equality grounded upon the paradox of borders, walls, disguises, and warfare. In his vision of the future, “Upon the practical annihilation of one sort of space followed the annihilation of other sorts of space – of the space, for example, between you and me” (347). That so many of these novels conclude with an image of some form of utopian socialism encapsulates the paradox under which they operate: On the one hand, they represent continuity with other forms of imperial fiction-making. They are a wave of narratives that follow on from the Boxer tales, and they share their impulses; that is, they are jingoistic and retributive, and they reflect all the anxieties that Britain’s global expansion had evoked. On the other hand, they present a beneficent, superlative vision of empire as it might be. After the devastating race wars and apocalyptic encounters between East and West that they narrativize, the Asiatic invasion novels refashion the world so as to correct the mistakes of absentminded imperialism. They give direction to imperial processes that have unfolded in a seemingly haphazard fashion over centuries. They invest technology with the possibility of catalyzing social progress. And they reflect the growing political demands for forms of international cooperation that transcend the very nationalism to which they appeal. The course they chart, however grandiosely, is one from pessimism to optimism. Readers follow

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these authors on a journey of self-realization that, in the end, justifies their current prejudices and fears, but looks to a future that will dissolve them into a promise of harmony. Brantlinger has suggested that the genre of imperial Gothic, of which the invasion narrative is a sub-category, “express[es] the narrowing vistas of the British Empire at the time of its greatest extent, in the moment before its fall” (253). By contrast, these novels conclude by looking beyond the fall to a future full of even wider vistas and wider geographical expanse. In their world, Greater Britain will finally get its day as Greatest Britain.

chapter 5

Staging the Celestial

In the opening of The Chinese Mother, an outlandish 1857 drama about infanticide, a refugee from the Potato Famine in Ireland washes ashore at one of Britain’s newest colonies, the island of Hong Kong. “Ochhone!,” expostulates this middle-aged innocent, Biddy M’Grath. “This is a quare place intirely.” Complaining of her inability to communicate with the locals and utterly unaware of her own position as an interloper, she exclaims, “Thim squinting Chaneymen wid their long pigtails, cant understand a word o’ Christian language; and if a body asks a dacent question, they does nothing but splutther and talk gibberish; so that it’s like houlding a conversation wid the crows to talk wid ’em.”1 Despite her idiosyncrasies, the Irishwoman’s contention that China is a “quare place intirely” is a commonplace of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stage impressions of the “Flowery Land” and its inhabitants. More than novels, poems, travelogues, and other forms of representation in print media, the most prevalent and popular stage images of China and the Chinese conceived of the Celestials in stereotyped terms related to fantasy and disconnected from geography. In their hands, China came to represent the other side of the world that children were told they would reach if they burrowed far enough into the earth. At first glance, then, and in contrast to the variegation of the overall field of imperial writing, these productions appear more reductionist in their interpretations of the people, landscape, religions, and domestic arrangements than other kinds of representations of China and things Chinese. Often, especially in the mid-Victorian period, popular plays are less directly political than other forms of representation and spectacles portraying other geopolitical events, such as the Indian Mutiny. The works are less invested in psychological characterization and more concerned with superficial appearances expressed through elaborate sets, flowing costumes, and Orientalized sound effects. Much of the commentary surrounding the British public’s introduction to East and Southeast Asian music – through 161

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the Chinese orchestra at the 1884 International Health Exhibition and performances of the Javanese gamelan in London and Brighton in 1882 – pilloried it as noise or cacophony.2 The synchronicity of this encounter between actual music from Asia and theatrical aural representations of China as sonic dissonance speaks to the association audiences probably made between them. Even when direct political references to events such as the Boxer Rebellion provide a topical selling point for theatricals, the modes of farce, burlesque, and pantomime suggest the limitations of the producers’ engagement with important geopolitical events and, at a further remove, of audiences’ ability to perceive any political messages presented through the formulas used by these modes. For instance, Willard Holcomb’s American production Kin Fu or the Pursuit of Happiness: An Oriental Comedy Opera in Three Acts, which appeared at the Victoria Hall in late 1903, turns members of the anti-foreign uprising of 1900 into “burlesque Boxers on a burlesque raid.”3 Similarly, Alfred Dawe’s Sen Yamen, or An Overdose of Love, performed in Rugby in 1901, stages popular culture’s common fusing of the Chinese Boxers and boxing. Sen Yamen opens with a chorus of men wearing boxing gloves, singing, Chinese boxers here you see, Putting heads in chancer-ee Hard blows and cruel knocks, This is how we learn to box.

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Yet why should theater and spectacle stand out as events that failed to acknowledge or reproduce the subtleties of Anglo-Chinese interchanges or to understand China’s significance to the British Empire during the long nineteenth century when other forms of cultural production did so? What, moreover, is the value of placing a chapter surveying these spectacles alongside the more nuanced materials produced by writers in direct contact with China, such as the Hong Kong, Shanghai, and treaty-port writers discussed earlier? There are a number of answers to these questions. First, although these spectacles appear to proffer more standardized and abstractly exotic representations of the Chinese and other “Eastern” peoples and places, in reality their content, methodology, and meaning are more multiple. Some theatrical representations came in popular or seasonal forms of entertainment, such as the pantomime, while others emerged in legitimate and chamber drama, which often had focused authorial and didactic goals. Even at the popular end of the spectrum, the picture is complicated. Seeing these works as detached and timeless displays of exoticism implies that they

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operated in isolation, rather than in an environment where spectators accessed other discourses about China and British imperialism in Asia. In fact, their successful amalgamation of different Oriental geographies and their conflation of China and Japan at the fin de siècle undoubtedly conditioned readers’ receptiveness towards Asiatic invasion novels, where half-Japanese, half-Chinese masterminds like Shiel’s Yen How seem logical and where Rohmer’s Fu Manchu can revive thuggee and employ an Arab agent. Moreover, work by scholars such as Josephine Lee confirms that the use of yellowface in these productions was integrally tied to blackface minstrelsy, suggesting the layering of the interpretative frames that British audiences used.5 Above all is the need to recognize that the spectacle itself can be the politics, as the reactions surrounding David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism (2002) have demonstrated; depoliticizing China via a specific set of Orientalist images is an inherently political act. Thus, the primacy of ornament and adornment, pageantry and display, emphasizes a sense of mastery over a conceptually imperialized space of China, as does the incorporation of other Victorian panoptical forms, such as the panorama.6 At the same time, emphasizing the spectacles’ generic formulae ignores how Orientalism in its crudest forms can render a gamut of particulars more comprehensible to general audiences. Where audiences lack the historical and cultural knowledge needed to distinguish between Asian peoples and landscapes, Orientalism can provide an overarching frame to make certain distinctions and critiques legible. How stage Orientalism can be flexible enough to enable this process offers evidence of one way in which geopolitics filters into popular culture and consciousness. A case in point is the “new grand national spectacle” produced at Astley’s in 1858 against the backdrop of the Second Opium War, The Bombardment & Capture of Canton: A New & Grand Spectacle Founded upon Events in the Present War in China. On the surface, it replicates other Astley’s productions by being “full of bustle, brilliancy, and equestrianism” and involving a “phalanx of talent” and 500 “auxiliaries.”7 It includes scenes that, as Dong-Shin Chang notes, became standard on the London stage after the Macartney Mission to China in the 1790s, such as “the Celestial Palace at Pekin” and “the Hall of 10,000 Flowers.”8 Nevertheless, with its stated aim to “introduce an English audience to . . . scenes in China”; its inclusion of characters like Commssioner Yeh (the historical governor of Canton province); its depiction of a “complicated battle catastrophe”; and its staging of British triumph at exactly the moment Britain was struggling to restore control in India in the wake of the Mutiny highlight this genre’s capacity to function on multiple discursive levels.

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The popular plays discussed below were often part of larger, intermedial programs of entertainment. In the middle of the century, they would have been one of a series of plays or acts where imperial spectacle often was not the focus. By the late nineteenth century, such theatricals also appeared at multimedia venues and were integrated into exhibitions and fairs. Imre Kiralfy’s China, or the Relief of the Legations, for instance, was performed for thousands at the 1901 Military Exhibition in Earl’s Court, but needs to be viewed in conjunction with the other entertainments on offer, including a visit to a Chinese soldiers’ camp and a boat trip on the Canton River. The theatricals also demand consideration in tandem with the semianthropological displays of live “Chinamen” that were increasingly common at international exhibitions from the late 1870s. Before this period, there were performances by Eng and Chang, the ethnically Chinese “original Siamese twins,” who captivated audiences from 1829 after appearances at the Egyptian Hall, the Surrey Theatre, and Lewis’s Great Saloon, and who inspired an 1834 farce entitled The Siamese Twins at the Royal Fitzroy Theatre. “Chinese” jugglers, conjurors, and magicians offered other forms of popular entertainment with which the theatergoing public would have been involved.9 Also entering into the public’s consciousness was Chang the Chinese giant, who appeared with a female dwarf (to emphasize his stature) in London at the Egyptian Hall in 1865–6 and who was taken up by P. T. Barnum after a spectacular run at the Paris Exposition of 1867.10 These spectacles were also integrated into networks of commodity capitalism; for example, Chang’s performances featured Chinese bells, “introduced” to the public at the levees and available for purchase at Duff & Hodgson. Even the performance spaces themselves would have conditioned audience responses to the presentation of things Celestial; as Colin Chambers points out, “the auditoria of late Victorian and Edwardian theatre such as the Hackney Empire display a dazzling array of ‘Eastern’ reference.”11 Meanwhile, sets and scenery recreated the Chinese garden settings that Elizabeth Chang notes altered Britons’ aesthetic perspectives and disrupted the “cultural distinctions of vision and visual narrative that structured their conceptions of their own selves as perceiving, thinking, and knowing beings.”12 A second justification for devoting a chapter to plays about China and the Chinese is that they shed light on the uneven and variegated nature of Britain’s engagement with the region and its inhabitants over time, place, and genre. Not surprisingly, theatrical responses to military events – especially the Opium Wars, which occurred before mass circulation of newspapers and periodicals – collapsed the distance between Britain and unfamiliar geographies; they educated audiences about distinctions between imperial contexts

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and played their part in shifting public focus from Britain’s naked commercial aggression in China to a patriotic embrace of things ancillary to the opium trade. Moreover, what Anne Witchard calls pantomime’s “particular connectedness with its audience and [its] peculiar sensitivity to historical shifts in attitude” underscores a more direct set of exchanges between those involved in producing theatrical spectacles and their audiences than the print material discussed elsewhere in this book.13 It also highlights popular drama’s ability to use standard plots and tropes for representing Asian exoticisms in flexible and location-specific ways. Equally important is the coexistence of the “fantastic exotica that had long been a feature of orientalism” and plays conforming to Edward Ziter’s contention that theater became increasingly interested in particularizing imperialism’s geographic imaginary.14 Their coexistence acts as a reminder that audiences can respond to and enjoy different types of cultural representation, whatever their knowledge base. Third, tracing the licensing and production of theatricals about China and the Chinese yields regional, national, and wider imperial patterns of exposure to such material, belying the idea that empire was primarily a metropolitan concern and especially London-centric. The prominence in this chapter of plays licensed for production in East London – the very area where Britain’s own Asiatic communities had their bases – also suggests the broad class reach that plays and spectacle as a genre had. Similarly, the production of pantomimes and, towards the end of the century, musicals like The Geisha (1896) and A Chinese Honeymoon (1899) by local or visiting troupes to expatriate and Anglophone elite audiences within the Empire indicates one method of coalescing a global imperial polity and signals the absorption and deployment of Western stereotypes about Asian peoples, such as the Chinese and Japanese, by other Asian groups, such as the Indians and Ceylonese.15 Fourth, the relationship between theatrical spectacle and chinoiserie, which both Porter and Witchard have explored, signals the continuance of eighteenth-century modes of aesthetic investment in exoticism into the nineteenth century. It also foregrounds the ability of such spectacles to flourish alongside and in spite of competing systems for representing Asians as British interests in the region expanded. This continuance manifests itself in two key ways. Firstly, it reifies the commonplace association between China and stasis by making it a structural plot element, as in Aladdin pantomimes. This reification has the effect of stabilizing a rather unstable set of plots and characterization around Oriental, Chinese, or Tartar despotism (as it is variously called) and rendering it an immutable feature of how to understand China. Such reification often involves creating narratives

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around Chinaware – porcelain, nodding mandarin figures, vases, and the like – and animating the figures of the popular willow-pattern plate. The literal act of bringing China/china to life relies on the fixity of objects signaling “China” outside of the theater and, importantly, within the audience’s domestic environment, where China/china must be decorative and/or utilitarian. Or, as Marty Gould puts it, “though this human story is inscribed upon the surfaces of familiar, everyday objects, it would remain unheard were it not for the theatre, which assumes a didactic, exhibitionary function.”16 Secondly, chinoiserie’s persistence gives voice to a limited exploration of the transformation of gender roles and filial disobedience, often by enacting the events ostensibly painted on the willow-pattern plate. This exploration exposes popular attitudes towards nineteenth-century feminisms and to changes in the understanding of the function and goals of marriage. What also makes popular theater (and particularly pantomime) special in this regard is that although it involves yellowface, its reliance on widely understood formulas means that it largely bypasses the concerns about miscegenation that were so central to many types of imperial narrative. In this respect, willow-pattern-plate plays reiterate Carolyn Williams’s contention that The Mikado engages in “an autoethnographic project, through which English culture is defamiliarized, yet remains familiar. . . Cultural conventions, utterly taken for granted by an insider, are thus best illuminated under an estranging light.”17 Fifth and finally, this chapter contributes to my wider purview of AngloChinese engagement by underscoring the centrality of transatlanticism to cultural understandings of Britain’s presence in Asia and to representations of the diasporic Chinese outside of Asia. This transatlanticism apparently introduces certain anomalies. Especially towards the end of the Victorian era, plays and music hall numbers recycled certain American stereotypes about the Chinese and naturalized aspects of Chinese-American identity – chop suey, hand-laundries, the “heathen Chinee,” and the like – that were less significant to the landscape of the smaller Chinese communities in urban Britain (although certainly relevant in the Australian context). The association between blackface and minstrelsy on the one hand and yellowface on the other also reflects an American influence, and one not replicated in stage depictions of subcontinental Indians. Yet the fact that British audiences did not reject these representations of the Chinese hints at a high level of cultural interchange and at the convergences between British and American cultures that enabled notions of Greater Britain and Anglo-American alliance. In the discussion of specific theatrical productions provided below, I do not offer a comprehensive overview, not the least because many entertainments

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performed at music halls or in the provinces have not survived. Instead, I flag their importance to understanding the myriad ways that Victorian literary production engaged with China and the Chinese at home and abroad.

Chin-chin-chinaman: Chinese stage types According to Witchard, Aladdin pantomimes were what consolidated “fanciful representations of Cathay” in Britain.18 With their embrace of an exotic Orient extending eclectically from Africa to Arabia to the Far East, these plays gloried in rich Chinese costumes, despotic Chinese emperors, and street scenes in a make-believe Peking or Canton. In them, China came interspersed with puns, magic, satiric critiques of commodity capitalism (usually related to particular, branded products), and unlikely pantomimic transformations. John Maddison Morton’s Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp; or, Harlequin and the Genie of the Ring (performed at the Royal Princess’s Theatre in December 1856) typifies this mishmash of motifs that pantomime embraced and inculcated in young viewers. With its characters of Abanazor (“a Magician, supposed to be the real original Chinese conjuror, and always up to his tricks”) and the Widow Ching Mustapha, China and the Chinese are part of an array of exotic attributes subsumed into the fun of Christmas pageantry.19 Such pantomimic displays appeared at venues in the West End, East End, and the provinces that were diverse in social class, but at least until the late Victorian period, the pantomimes themselves remain consistent in their image of a relatively amalgamated world east and south of Europe, if not England. An East End play such as G. H. George’s Grand Pantomime of Harlequin Aladdin and the Lamp; or The Wizard, the Ring, and the Scamp (premiered at the New Albion Theatre, Poplar, in December 1873) ran the imperial gamut by featuring Aladdin, his mother Cup-o-tee, Fakerina, Vedah, and the demon character Zoo-loo.20 Plays that tapped into the pantomime heritage but concentrated more on China used pantomime’s Orientalism as their base line. Through comic names, they create a China where people indeed splutter and talk the gibberish that Biddy M’Grath assigns to them in her first impressions of the China Coast. The repeated association in these plays of China and childhood on one level cements the idea of the Other as unattainable, lost in the misty shrouds of fantasy; on the other hand, it bolsters late Victorian racial stereotyping about the Chinese that envisaged them as child-like and placed them somewhat above Africans in the ladder of races.

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Given the syncretic nature of pantomime – in which specific and local allusions and subplots were added to a stock comic plot – it is not surprising that many Victorian farces about China that draw on the panto tradition share a standard body of imagery. Their common comic repertoire makes them recognizable in a generic fashion and demands little or no historical or cultural knowledge about China from spectators. Instead, certain formulaic plotlines recur throughout the repertoire. These plotlines – which included stories about the theft of jewels and heirlooms, usually by a servant and often removed from a gaudy religious idol, or tales spun from bizarre Chinese laws, especially those regarding marriage – were frequently similar to those about Japan. Even after the public became increasingly aware of distinctions between Japan and China at the end of the Victorian era, and even after W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885) codified many of the most prevalent stereotypes as Japanese, a tremendous amount of borrowing, overlap, and syncretism persisted.21 Chief among these standardized plotlines is the arranged marriage plot, in which an elderly father – always a mandarin – betroths his daughter to an old and unsuitable man, instead of to the youth she loves. Plays often figure this plotline as a version of the story narrated on the popular willow-pattern plate, which is discussed below. In these works, China’s supposed stamping out of individual rights and its patriarchal system are foils for satiric commentary on Victorian society’s own unease with the marriage market and the state of women’s personal rights.22 The plays’ premises of thwarted love matches resolve themselves in three possible ways: In plays that take up the story of the willow-pattern plate, the young lovers are united in death or are transformed into doves, and thus escape their earthly constraints. In another body of plays, the lovers evade or overcome the father’s objections by demonstrating how unfit the preferred suitor is and how better equipped the girl’s choice is to provide for her and her family.23 Both these resolutions present an allegedly strange practice – that of arranged marriage without consent – as an archetypal Victorian struggle between filial duty and the love match. The third body of plays throws in a further twist by either having the maiden fall in love with a visiting Briton (typically an English military officer) or by making British friends who then intervene to save her from the old man to whom her father has pledged her. Isaac Wilkinson’s Ching-ama-ree: An Original Fairy Tale (first performed at the Brighton Aquarium, December 1884) involves a comic refashioning of Britain’s self-vaunted tradition of intervening to protect oppressed women when a bunch of fairies drag English boy-hero and sailor Ned across the world to prevent a

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Chinese princess’s unjust marriage.24 On arrival, Ned must overcome a bunch of Chinese conspirators: Hi-Hi, Lang-Ki, Tub-Hi, and Rapp-Hi, and the emperor himself, Ching-a-ma-ree. In this topsy-turvy world of rhyming couplets, goodness resides in the Tar, not the decadent aristocrat – who, in the author’s words, sees more of night than day – and exogamy provides the solution for that corrupt system of marriage brokering that has weakened the Chinese state. Ned asks his beloved Chinese maiden: And can you love a sailor, Of mean and lowly birth, With no one to befriend him, No great ones of the earth? A stranger and an alien In this a foreign land, With nothing to commend him But an honest heart and hand.

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Since Britishness naturally trumps indigenous class privilege, she can. Sometimes the rescue of the damsel in distress is part and parcel of gunboat diplomacy, as in the 1877 song “Love in Canton.” Here, Miss Lin’s father agrees to give her away to the old and ugly Mr. Tin, who, in exchange, will forgive the father’s debts to him. As the wedding is about to start, “the barbarian-English-men / Suddenly came a shore,” and a midshipman rescues Miss Lin: Say – will you marry me sweet Miss Lin?” “Certainly, Sir,” said she, “I’d rather have you than that monster Tin “In spite of his gold and tea.” Then on board of a Man of War, They were united for life; And Miss Lin, with the English Tar, Went as a Sailor’s Wife.

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Although a British sailor takes her away on a man-of-war as a “prize,” nevertheless the song makes it clear that Miss Lin must and does agree to the match.25 And if the audience is meant to see the father who sells his daughter to an unsuitable suitor as peculiarly Chinese, the father’s indebtedness also makes it entirely plausible in a British setting. Unsurprisingly, this body of plays thus asserts that the natural role of the British man is to protect and care for women, that Chinese women prefer British men to their own kind for the emancipation they offer (even though the maidens generally marry someone of a lower social class than their own), and more

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generally that modernity is better than tradition – with China standing in as a notion of tradition in an extreme form. The inappropriate May– December marriages between maids and elderly mandarins are often depicted as being authorized by, if not actually demanded by, outmoded or barbaric Chinese law; the rescue-by-Britons resolution to the narratives therefore proves consistent with Heidi Holder’s contention that melodramas with colonial settings present English law as redemptive in contradistinction to uncivilized “heathen” law.26 The emphasis in many plays about China on the capricious and frequent use of execution for “crimes” and the stupendous fascination with Chinese instruments of torture, such as the cangue, further support this idea. Intriguingly, these representations of love between Chinese maidens and British Tars tend to skirt the issue of miscegenation. The disjunction between the lack of anxiety surrounding miscegenation in the plays and the pervasiveness of anxieties about it in fiction about the Chinese reveals the way in which the license to fantasize concentrates spectators’ attention on other dynamics surrounding marriage. Yet this license operates under strict conditions that bypass, rather than disable, a racial problematic by asking audiences to read the scenarios through a combination of diegetic and extradiegetic elements. For instance, the employment of yellowface and conventionally Orientalized costumes highlights the autoethnographic context and makes the maiden underneath essentially British by foregrounding the artifice of disguise and by fostering audience awareness of the actor’s presence. Thus the love affair being consummated only seemingly crosses color lines. Audience familiarity with the transformation scenes in pantomime similarly enables them to read racial identity as mutable or immaterial. Finally, these scenarios dismiss tensions of miscegenation against popular theater’s ubiquitous backdrop of gender transvestitism, which similarly works to derail homoeroticism. By the end of the century, some works promote a humorous version of the sexual license theory with risqué settings that emphasize British masculinity and dainty Asian femininity. For instance, Owen Hall’s successful The Geisha: A Story of a Tea House revolves around a teahouse in Japan run by the Chinese Wun-ti, in another amalgamation of East Asia. There, the officers of the HMS Turtle come for rest and recreation. As the chorus sings in the opening scene, these “Great big English sailor men” “Marry little English Miss, / Flirt with pretty Japanese.”27 In the end, an officer does marry the chief geisha, but the comic operetta mode of the play, alongside Mimosa San’s image as a fast girl, disables any possibility that going beyond flirtation is in any way threatening.

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In downplaying miscegenation, plays about Chinese marriage differ substantially from those about Jews, where racialized cultural and religious characteristics function as the modus operandi of the drama. Their gendering of the Anglo-Chinese love affair also explains the lack of censure for and overall disinterest in miscegenation. The assumption that a woman takes on aspects of her husband’s national identity – which has a basis in citizenship law, where women lose their status as British by marrying foreigners – and the idealization of Chinese femininity as daintiness and delicateness (i.e. as another version of idealized Victorian femininity) also collude in making such ostensibly cross-cultural relationships unthreatening. In the rare cases in which the men assimilate into Chinese society, rather than the other way around, the plays aver that becoming Chinese actually means remaining British. Assimilation is not about “going native”; rather, Chinese identity constitutes itself as simply an alternative way to be British or English. In an early play such as The Chinese Junk, or The Maid and the Mandarin (1848), this potential for an assimilation that is not really assimilation reflects some fuzzy thinking about the Far East on the one hand; on the other, it shows that in popular discourse, pre-Darwinian racial thinking not only was not fixed, but also that it felt no compunction to be so.28 This play, a fanciful tale about the Keying Chinese junk then being exhibited in London, purports to explain how the junk and a set of Englishmen with Chinese wives had made it to Albion’s shores.29 In it, the character of Diggery Doggs/Dobbs is described as “A Cockney – Naturalized Chinese” (887), who has been in China long before the good ship Amphytrie arrives to precipitate the plot of the mandarin’s daughter Celeste falling in love with an Englishman. Early in the play, Dobbs’s partner says of him, “Well I don’t dislike the English, I have a sweetheart that was an Englishman, but now he is a Chinaman & just what I like a Chinaman to be, a little, short, fat fellow, full of fun & life” (889). In the course of being “Chinese,” meanwhile, Dobbs scandalously chases one of the priests’ pigs around a temple (he wants to steal and roast it) and sings “Bacon & Britain forever.” These actions test the limits of how Chinese he truly is and pave the way for him and Ching Ti to leave with the gunboat for London, where he tries to make a few bob by exhibiting Ching Ti and his friend Whang Tang Chow as the “Celestial twins.” He is, in short, the quintessentially British figure of the likeable rogue. However, if in 1848 naturalization to China means little, by the turn of the century naturalization from China means much. In Alicia Ramsey and Rudolph de Cordova’s Kucheng/Boxer-inspired work The Mandarin: A New and Original Melodrama in Five Acts (1901), the naturalized

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American Li Lung Fooh, a Chinese missionary, appeals to Her Majesty’s representative for the “protection of England” when the nefarious Wa Tung Kiang, Viceroy of China, wants to arrest him within the grounds of the consulate.30 Wa Tung Kiang scorns the missionary and his statement that “I am a naturalised American and you know it” (Act I, 33). But the consul Sir John refuses to hand him over, insisting, “No man ever asked that protection in vain” (Act I, 33). Therefore, the Chinaman who adopts Protestant and Western values is, in a rhetorical act of wish-fulfillment, no longer Chinese. He is a yellow-skinned Englishman or American.

China on a plate Aside from standardized plotlines, stage representations of China and the Chinese also promulgate and perpetuate formulaic images and actions – such as the Great Wall of China, the act of kowtowing, the use of parasols, and the “Feast of Lanterns,” which was also immortalized in comic operettas, magic lantern slides, and music hall tunes.31 A related phenomenon was narratives spun from Victorian domestic items, such as blue and white crockery, a subject that also engendered much fiction and satire from the late eighteenth century.32 In Britain’s Chinese Eye, Chang explores how this china serves as a “metonymic commodity” for Cathay and how texts about it provide “a material reference point for a pre-existing storehouse of images and narratives of Chinese gardens” (72) and exemplify “that the problem of Chinese visual difference must be equally the problem of textual production” (73). The invocation of porcelain on stage conforms to these patterns. My concern, however, lies less with the aesthetic elements that interest Chang and more with the function of animation in the specific context of the performative. Animation of the narratives implicated in the material commodity relies on the ubiquity of the porcelain object to naturalize the foreign so as to stage autoethnographic explorations of the limits of Victorian convention, especially around marriage, in ways that had become stereotypical by the time The Mikado appeared on the scene. Animation also extends the purview from plates to vases and porcelain figures such as the “nodding mandarin” and the “china bull” that similarly focused attention on China in Britain. Stage animations exploited the fact that a wide swath of the British population owned this chinaware to foster a sense of a shared investment in China/china. By making the willow-pattern plate, the porcelain figurine, or the teapot the starting point for their narratives, the plays envisaged

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China as emanating from the heart of the Empire. The shared knowledge that the willow pattern had its origins in Josiah Wedgwood’s Staffordshire firm and that much chinaware was imported from Holland mitigates the possibility that these objects were seen as “invasive” or raised anxiety that “Britain’s domestic spaces [were] overwhelmed by foreign forces,” as Gould suggests (Nineteenth-century Theatre, 127). Instead, China exists primarily as a reflection of the imperial self. Insofar as China remains the exotic setting for this reflection, the border of the plate frames, circumscribes, and contains China. In The Mandarin’s Daughter, first performed at Punch’s Playhouse and Strand Theatre in December 1851, the plate performs this role of neutralizing Chinese alterity by conflating more veridic displays of Chinese art and culture with common china.33 Retelling the urban myth that a Chinese mandarin had traveled to London to visit the Great Exhibition, it suggests Britain’s mastery of China on at least two levels: first, by placing it under the aegis of Britain’s organization of “the industry of all nations”; and second, by making the Chinese acknowledge the legitimacy of Britain’s appropriation of that country’s narratives. Proclaims Chim-pan-see: So of course, when I heard of your Great Exhibition, I was speedily found in a state of transition, On my dragon I came, but conceive my surprise! Round a public-house kitchen on casting my eyes, I perceived, upon table, stand, dresser, and shelf, In earthenware, china, stone-hardware, and delf, Drawn longways and shortways, drawn outside and in, On plate, cup, and saucer, dish, basin, tureen, A picture, which is but a full illustration Of an olden love story, well known in my nation.

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When the play ends, with the divided lovers on the plate united, the characters resolve to take a honeymoon cruise to Britain, collapsing the “olden” times of the earthenware tale with the present and thereby asserting, along with a slew of contemporary social theorists, that China was without history – unless that history referred back to Britain. Animation also stages a paradox between movement and still life. It creates an epistemological tension between the objects that encode China and the decoding function of the performative re-narrations, which paradoxically enhance the fixity of the objects’ original narratives. In a pattern that was already well established by the early Victorian period, China is literally imprisoned in the plates and figurines, frozen in an archaic and

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romantic timelessness that echoed political economy’s definition of the static East.34 Hence S. Bowkett and George D. Day’s 1897 The Willow Pattern Plate: A Comedy Opera in Two Acts includes the stage direction “Time – Any Epoch between 4000 b.c. and a.d. 1897.”35

Blackface, yellowface, and loss of face The slightly later A Chinese Idyl, or The Lost Ruby (1903) by Fred Danvers also contrasts Britain and China – and America – through marriage plots.36 In this farce about mixed-up correspondence between London and China, Hong Kong Viceroy Ping Pang has sent off to London for a bride, while the teahouse proprietor Ching Foo has asked another agency in London to provide him with someone to work in his establishment. When Belle Brighton, the tea girl from the Piccadilly Pagoda teahouse, arrives, she is mistaken for the bride; however, the real bride-to-be, Princess Stephanie of Mashonaland, is ignored and mocked. Belle eventually marries the viceroy, while the naughty Ching Foo, “a vindictive Chinese dwarf,” is forced to marry Stephanie as punishment for stealing the viceroy’s precious ruby. The play is a jumble of racial stereotypes, and it is also a jumble of genres and songs from across the musical comedy spectrum. It features a despotic mandarin who – literally – taxes his subjects to death or tortures them grotesquely; star-crossed lovers; a heroic naval officer (Lieutenant Lionel West of HMS Doris, stationed off Hong Kong), who falls in love with a delectable Chinese maiden; and a loud-mouthed but fun-loving girl from the wrong side of the tracks who gets her man in the end. (When the viceroy courteously invites Belle to lunch, she replies, shockingly, “Why I’m that hungry I could just do with a sausage & mashed, washed down with a pint of cold fourpenny.”) It also features all the broad comedy of musical farce; puns and dancing numbers with “nautch” girls and stereotyped dialect; the silly-girl sidekicks Pitty Boo and Katisha; and, of course, the villainous Ching Foo, whose comic comeuppance segues into domestic bliss as he warms to his black bride. “Well my punishment is not so severe after all, she is charming!,” Ching Foo exclaims at the play’s end. Princess Stephanie, moreover, is a comic – and common – amalgamation of the traditions of blackface and minstrelsy, who seems to hail more from the American South than from Africa. She is a “real coloured lady” who booms on stage with heaps of baggage and several “piccannies,” who “are all dressed gorgeously in all the colours of the rainbow.” “Yaas Your Excellency – dats so,” she tells the viceroy when she meets him. “I’se de

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real Princess right enough[.] Here to marry you ’ccording to your written agreement, See look’e here – I’se got ma papers.” Later, in the eerie temple in Canton, where the lost jewel is hidden, she sings a “coon song” to allay her fears. What is most intriguing about this bricolage of racial and dramatic types, however, is not its bizarre eclecticism, but its commonness for the turn-ofthe-century period. Certainly, earlier plays like the pantomimes established a context for having black characters crop up in what would otherwise be unlikely places in Asia. The telescoped worldview of pantomime fostered a naive multiculturalism by defying space, geography, and cultural particularity.37 Nevertheless, these plays make little attempt to fuse the African/ African-American and the Chinese; they merely present it as plausible that different groups cohabit the same space on the boards. Blackface and yellowface remain mutually distinct categories. At the end of the Victorian era, however, imbricated images of Chinese and African-American stage identities reached a zenith, with the comedy of the characterization produced by the layering of the different forms of stereotyping imposed on the characters. This layering seems always to have been in the form of a black person taking on, or attempting to take on, Chinese characteristics or personae, but, for obvious social reasons, never the other way around. Chinese society in these plays – and, by extension, in turn-of-the-century music hall performances – is a kind of exotic manipulation of white British and American society; beneath the masks and costumes, men and women with similar cultural values and similar attributes are revealed. In fact, in two translated versions of the comic operetta Ba-ta-Clan by Jacques Offenbach, Ching-Chow-Hi (1865) and Chang-hi-Wang (1879), the Chinese prince and various other ostensibly Chinese characters come out during the play as “true born Britons” and Americans.38 “The false Chinaman you see before you was once an English Nobleman – In me you behold the Marquis of Piccadilly,” declares the character of Dan-di-do, who initially fled to China to escape debts at home, in the 1879 version. Even the Taiping-inspired band of malcontents seeking to overthrow the prince has an Englishman in disguise as leader. As in the Boxer narratives, there is no incompatibility in true Britons successfully impersonating the Chinese elite and governing China in her name. African-American or African society, by contrast, is inalienably different, but above all inalienably and intrinsically funny, with this comic aura working to utterly deny any individuated subjectivity that might transcend the racial typing. Thus when Stephanie appears in the second act of

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A Chinese Idyl dressed “in extraordinary Chinese costume, baggy trousers &c. the more ludicrous the better,” the humor of the situation is produced by an effect of doubling. Her original ridiculousness as a “coon” character is not so much conflated by the new ludicrousness of her Chinese outfit as it is exacerbated by it. Her comic lack of success in disguising herself, combined with her absurd nobility as an African princess, fits Michael Pickering’s observation that the “black woman in minstrelsy’s racial compendium was constructed as the reverse image of genteel white femininity.”39 Stephanie’s ineptness in adapting to Chinese dress stands in stark contrast to other plays and music hall routines, where British women successfully and unproblematically disguise themselves as Chinese maidens or men pass themselves off as coolies or mandarins. Not only is disguise a distinct privilege of whiteness, it is frequently (as in the novels about the Boxer Rebellion) a key means to escape from hostile yellow menaces (be these menaces political or sexual). Whereas in G. A. Clarke and Harry F. Spiers’s Boxer play The Yellow Terror (1900) a character can successfully hoodwink the Chinese into thinking he is one of them by rubbing curry powder on his face, Stephanie’s Africanness can never be hidden. On stage and for the British characters, racial and ethnic identity can be reconstructed, and mimicry functions as a form of mastery. For black characters, however, the association between mimicry and mockery can never be ruptured. The musical hall number “The Nigger Chinee, or His Pigtail Wouldn’t Grow” (1877), written and sung by Harry Hunter “in the Manhattan Minstrels Popular Entertainments, in London and the Provinces,” presents a similar picture of indelible blackness that marks its “stupid nigger” protagonist as incapable of changing his looks, and by extension incapable of superseding his place in society.40 (See Figure 5.) The “nigger” abandons Carolina for China, where, “Wanting to be beautiful,” he stains his skin yellow and tries to grow a pigtail. Owing to his kinky hair, however, the pigtail will not grow, and Chinamen begin to stare: “Couldn’t understand his speaking, / Couldn’t understand his hair.” “Darkie” is arrested, given a half an hour to make his pigtail grow, then executed. The song goes on to say, “There’s a moral to the story, / But I can’t remember it.” Yet the moral is clear. Despite the stereotype of quixotic and extreme East Asian punishment, in this case the punishment does fit the crime: The “nigger” courts his fate by being unable to accept his place; he must be punished for abandoning – in this order – his master, his wife, his children, and his elderly father. His inclination to “roam” and to “pass” warrant

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Figure 5. The cover of “The Nigger Chinee.”

death. The song simply displaces a more typical American narrative to China, where a presumed racial uniformity allows someone who tries to pass to be punished exactly as he “ought” to be punished at home. That the ineffable difference of the “nigger” is signaled by his hair and not his skin is an intriguing choice, but not one that mitigates racism. By 1900, the pigtail had become emblematic of Chinese identity in Britain and served as a racial indicator. Yet the black man stands outside of all definitional standards; his only norms are those traits like woolly hair that mark him as inferior. The China of the song contains all the attributes of a civilized society – prisons, judges, public opinion, codes for acceptable standards of dress, and so on – and thus forms an alternative West in the East.

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Bloodthirsty Buddhas More specifically Chinese was the representation of Buddha figures and other “pagan” idols – although even here there is great confusion between the Chinese and Indian contexts, with the Hindu war goddess Kali popping up in unlikely places. Such representations could be dismissed as ill-informed and hyperbolic, with their descriptions of demonic and bloodthirsty Buddhas, priests subscribing to cults of human sacrifice, and religious statues that somehow double as machines used to torture unwitting Britons. Nevertheless, as with the stage Jew, these similarly ubiquitous representations (or misrepresentations) reveal important aspects of the way in which the British public understood other, non-Christian religions and those who practiced them. The plays’ images of Asian religions expose three factors about Britain’s understanding of the foreign and its ability to be (or not to be) assimilated. First, these representations are almost always associated with idols and icons. They are object-based, rather than philosophical. The objects offer rich possibilities for stagecraft, with characters climbing into or atop giant Buddhas or thrown into trapdoors hidden by idols, or they grab, pull down, and wreck idols to secure their freedom from imprisonment. This concentration on statues and figures is appropriate in stage terms because it helps to structure dramatic action – plots are propelled through the manipulation of these props, often so that Britons can demonstrate their grit. Yet the emphasis on religious props is also important because it presents Eastern religions not as mysticism, but as idolatrous, with toppling the idol being akin to unseating the moral system to which it is attached. The second factor is the decided anti-clericalism of the plays. These works always show priests as interfering with a kind of natural purity in the Chinese masses. They pervert the inherent morality of the Chinese people with their artifice, and their ceremonies are often revealed to be chicanery. Thus the priests are vicious, conniving, greedy, and self-seeking. They are usually used by or in the service of evil mandarins, rather than functioning as free-thinking agents or religious leaders. In plays about the Boxers, in particular, the priests serve as henchmen to the self-serving mandarins who manipulate them and the populace. In The Yellow Terror, the priests guard the prisoners on behalf of Ching Yuan, the mandarin who has attacked the town’s English Legation. Priests, moreover, are generally described as in seclusion or at least only appear in the plays when the scene moves to the temple grounds or interior. Like monks, they are confined to

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the temple precincts and thus operate only within its sphere. (In alternative, more benign depictions in some romantic comedies about mandarins’ daughters, these women hide in the temple, where the priests help them to escape with their true loves.) Much of this characterization sounds more like a hostile description of Catholicism than of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, suggesting that understanding foreign religions was bound up in and to some degree contained by Britain’s own internal religious conflict and its conflict with the French. The third aspect of the plays’ portrayal of Eastern religion is their overall secularism. With certain exceptions, popular plays confine religion to plot and signally fail to draw any conclusions beyond the basic assumption that the Chinese are misguided heathens. Although Christianity in general and Protestantism in specific underlie the way in which the plays react to Chinese idolatry, the desire to see the Chinese converted or to shore up British missionary efforts in the region seems largely absent. Even plays which take the Kucheng massacre of foreign Christians (1895) or the Boxer Rebellion as their theme present Christianizing as a worthy undertaking but focus more on plot than on religious themes. For instance, The Yellow Dread (1903) and Alone in China (1904) – two versions of the same play that combine Kucheng and the Boxer Uprising into their plotlines – are stories about a missionary and his family.41 Yet the action concerns the unscrupulous Lieutenant Henry Haldane, captain of the Spitfire gunboat, and his “adventuress” assistant Adele Crichton. They team up with the Boxers in order to steal jewels from the idol of the “mighty God Kwan-tai” and wreak revenge on the missionary Charles Hemingway and his friend (and later wife) Kate Belton for their respectability. (Haldane believes he has been cheated out of an inheritance by Charles, who is his cousin, and schemes to have him and his son Freddy killed.) True, the Boxer cause is shown as a kind of religious zealotry. The Boxer leader, mandarin Wang-Hai, informs his band, “The most dangerous of these barbarians are the accursed Christian Missionaries, who seek to convert our people from the ancient faith of our forefathers. They shall be destroyed, – no mercy, – no pity, – shall be shown to the alien dogs who swarm about us. We will uproot them from the sacred soil of China, and rest not until they are utterly exterminated” (Alone in China, 42). Nevertheless, from the start, Wang-Hai is shown to have venal personal motivations, not religious ones, for his behavior, while the real meat of the play is in domestic drama, kidnapping, onstage torture (complete with thunderous sound effects), dastardly acts on the part of the British and Chinese conspirators, and deeds of derring-do by the rest of the Britons.

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The real message of the play, so far as it exists, is political and proimperialist. As the noble sailor Bill Stunt explains to the audience: My stars and top’sls, if a few of our members of Parliament would come to these parts for their summer holiday instead of doing the Continong’ they might see whats [sic] going on in the world especially if they was forced to try on the apparatus [of torture] themselves. Whats the use of ruling the waves with expensive battle-ships, and point 7 guns, if we dont’ [sic] teach these Yeller devils, a lesson in humanity, or blow them into their proper place in the infernal regions[?] (47)

Spectacular politics and dramatic moralities Forcing the Chinese into their “proper” place was, in fact, something proposed by many plays about China that embroidered political themes, especially those that premiered around the end of the nineteenth century. Spectacle plays in particular foregrounded fighting, explosions, and special effects that showed Britons meting out their lessons in humanity in appropriately dramatic and exciting ways. Although fictional in form, these plays and their scenography resembled the panorama in that they too “laid claim to the historical and geographical real through an indexical bond, premissed on their status as topographically correct and authentic reconstructions of battles, landscapes or ancient antiquities such as the Acropolis in Athens” and that they too put audiences in the position of historical witnesses or war reporters.42 The incorporation of the panorama itself into the theatrical spectacle, as in the case of Astley’s plays about the First and Second Opium Wars, also heightened the hyperrealism of the reenactment of Britain’s military contests with China by invoking what Alison Griffiths sees as the employment of revisitation as a structuring principle for the medium (“Shivers,” 2). Describing Robert Burford’s panorama of Nanking, which appeared at the Panorama in Leicester Square in 1845, Griffiths notes the form’s mode of presenting “a composite view of Nanking, rather than a 360-degree view of an event taking place in a unified space and time” (“Shivers,” 14). Audiences watching theatrical spectacles that combined panoramas and dramatic action probably would have understood the narrative structure and the reenactment of battle scenes in similarly composite terms and through analogy with the visual elements. As the Victorian period progressed and Britain consolidated its hold over territories in Asia (especially after 1857), theatrical spectacles became increasingly unsympathetic towards the Chinese, with triumphs of patriotism

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being used to justify ever more outrageous onstage violence. In Wars in China or the Battles of Chinghae & Amoy, which ran at Astley’s from May 13, 1844 just after the First Opium War, the Chinese themselves are not actually to blame for the conflict, even though the play ends with the spectacle of the battle of Amoy. Instead, the outbreak of fighting is engineered by the “vile” Molak, a “poor Malay [who] was brought over to England by the Captain of an Indiaman, then discharged & left in the streets to starve” (608). Molak blames the British for his brother’s death and, through his role as messenger/interpreter, he scuppers ongoing negotiations, tricks the Chinese into acting in a way the British understand as treachery, and leads both sides into war in order to secure vengeance. He also tries to rape Alice Cameron, the adopted daughter of the leader of the British forces, and brutally encages her when she refuses to accede to his demands. The figure of Molak encapsulates the overlap between representations of Malays and the Chinese state that Schmitt describes: “the comments are striking insofar as they mirror the logic of Britain’s excuse for war – that the Chinese empire had itself ‘run amuck,’ brutally and rashly destroying British interests, and that it was likely to do so again unless stopped” (68). The play is also intriguing because it sees Alice’s presence in the colonial landscape as not unusual. Alice’s claim that she is “in her element” on the battlefields of empire contests the view that it was unusual in the mid nineteenth century for wives and daughters to accompany men on expeditions overseas. Despite a surprisingly accurate portrayal of Islam for the period, the play presents partly Anglicized, lower-class colonial subjects as inherently compromised; this theme is racialized when Alice declares that Molak’s dark features are “the black index of a false treacherous heart” (627). The autonomous Chinese, by contrast, still retain the potential for nobility of thought and action. The stereotypical refrain, in which Chinese characters call the British barbarians, expresses not irony so much as independence – it is an expression of their legitimate capacity for cultural and political selfdetermination. In another production from the 1840s, only the truly evil Cha Chew Chile hates the “English” in The Chinese Junk. The noble Lang Koning, who has traveled to England, has nothing but praise for Britain and its technological superiority: “We look’d upon the English as Barbarians, but recent events have occurred to prove that all our Engineering & fortifications, as nothing when opposed to the British, folks say a British Man o War is worth its weight in Gold. We have been compelled to pay double its weight in Silver, to accommodate matters” (889). However, British

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demands for post-war indemnification in no way provoke resentment in this character. Instead, Lang Koning announces that like the “foreign” Tartar conquest of China, English influence will have a positive, educative effect: “I tell you boy, good comes out of evil, the Chinese Empire will be more enlightened, as clever as we call ourselves, than we should otherwise have been in a Century to come” (890). Britain, in effect, is posited as the minority group that will lead the Han masses to progress and enlightenment.43 The 1858 work The Bombardment & Capture of Canton: A New & Grand Spectacle Founded upon Events in the Present War in China, which also appeared at Astley’s, similarly exculpates the Chinese for some of their actions and presents a surprisingly balanced picture of the conflict. The English, as the play calls them, are “an enemy whose love of lucre would scatter poison through the fair land of China[;] until these white men are extirpated, there is no hope nor safety from our Country” (7). If British political and economic motives are impure, Britons themselves are not. A Chinese general urges the emperor early in the play, “Yet are they brave & skilful – we must not forget how less than 20 years ago, they wrung from China some of her best possessions & shed Celestial blood in torrents” (11). By the end of the century, however, much of the potential for empathy with a Chinese people seeking to stop a pernicious drug trade and overcome foreign invaders has evaporated from dramatic spectacles. Representing the Second Opium War forty years later in 1899, the “pyro-spectacular” play The Bombardment of Pekin shows only treacherous Chinese who wreak vengeance on European civilians in ways analogous to those of stage representations of the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow during the Mutiny. Produced by the Canadians Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, The Bombardment of Pekin opens with hand-to-hand sword conflict in the first scene, proceeds to the feast of lanterns, glories in the escape of British officers from a great pagoda strangely reminiscent of the Tower of London, moves on to the spectacle of Chinese punishment with the bastinado, and winds up with the demolition of the city walls, bombardment, and the city in flames. Late-nineteenth-century fireworks are vividly employed to conjure up an intense nostalgia for the glories of Britain’s imperial adventures overseas. Jacky Bratton has argued that such displays substituted stock plots and devices, at times linking them only tangentially to the events from which they took their title.44 Certainly, Hand and Teale also produced two similar “pyro-spectacular” works – one about the defeat of Montezuma (though this, too, is figured as a narrative of imperial conquest) and the other about

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the relief at Lucknow during the Mutiny – that suggest the interchangeability of the imperial backdrop to the performance of British patriotism and valor.45 The distance between the Second Opium War and The Bombardment of Pekin, copyrighted around forty years after the conflict, also suggests the recycling of the past to fit a narrative of imperial expansion, but one only loosely connected with the actual history itself – just as the “pyrotechnic” Mutiny play recasts the popularity of Dion Boucicault’s Jessie Brown; or The Relief of Lucknow (1858).46 These displays seem more about showing off acrobatics, sword fighting, and especially the “grande finale” firework displays of the burning cities than to highlight British military prowess in specific conflicts – notwithstanding the fundamental recourse to history needed to generate this type of display and their reliance on plots which exploit history to show British soldiers and sailors rescuing women, children, missionaries, and the like from being massacred at the hands of cruel Chinese and Indians. Despite the historical remove from the actual events described, the “pyrospectacular drama” does foster a notion of patriotism grounded in the heroics of battle and more especially in the heroics of spectacle itself. It offers a complete justification for the policy of gunboat diplomacy with a scene in which British and French officers show Prince Kung (Gong; Yixin), brother to the Emperor, a copy of “the treaty which the allies have come to enforce and which the Chinese have always ignored” (4). The transmutation of the motives for the bombardment and subsequent invasion of China’s capital from trade prerogatives to vicious and unwarranted Chinese reprisals against innocent Europeans, with various acts of Celestial treachery also woven into the drama, serves to reinforce a dichotomy between civilization and barbarism that the spectacle foregrounds by literally emblazoning across the stage how right makes might.

East of opium: dramas of morality, politics, and empathy Although jingoistic spectacles and infantilizing pantomimes were dominant ways of portraying China and the Chinese on the Victorian stage, a more socially invested and subtler genre of representation did exist. This genre of drama centers on issues of morality, often invoking current events in Britain’s relations with China (such as the opium trade and the Opium Wars) to suggest various means for helping the Chinese masses and extending Britain’s much-vaunted role as world protector and moral arbiter. In many cases, these dramas have a direct motive in terms of their plans to improve the Chinese, as in plays with a missionary content; in other cases,

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they are primarily engaged in a specific critique of Britain’s behavior in China and only circumstantially with China itself. Those who penned these plays share Henry Whatley Tyler’s belief in 1857 that the Chinese “ignorant, though highly educated, and barbarous, though old in civilization, vast in number, and capable of great utilities and mighty improvements, present the largest, the most unoccupied, the most fertile field for the exercise of these [British] duties, responsibilities, and privileges.”47 Plays on the subject of the trade in opium – widely condemned by religious and liberal groups as a form of forced impoverishment and incitement to vice – generally fall into the latter category. Such plays wanted to use the stage to reach a wider audience than reformers could with pamphlets or other devices, especially in the case of the well-organized anti-opium movement, linked as it was to groups like the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Societies. On stage, moral and political crusaders tried to pitch that reaction not in terms of the overthrow of the country’s institutions, but in terms of an internal reevaluation of Britain’s colonial role that would cause immoderate and immoral desires to truck, barter, and trade to be replaced by more moral and moderate prerogatives as appropriate to Europe’s most powerful empire. Physician and temperance writer John James Ridge’s 1870 Ki-Ling of Hankow: A Chinese Dramatic Incident, for instance, converts the fictitious story of one family’s destruction through opium into a moral allegory about Britain’s involvement in the trade and China’s rights to selfdetermination.48 The play presents the history of a Chinese mandarin who has lost his son. Years later, the prodigal Too Foo, now a hopeless opium addict, appears before Ki-Ling when he is sentenced to death for having failed his guard duty at the city walls; he has betrayed his comrades by falling into an opium stupor. So, far from excusing his behavior, his addiction makes it doubly egregious: Nay, rather does it aggravate your crime. From such excess do nameless evils flow Which must be stamped out with unsparing hand Or soon the State will be o’erwhelmed in ruin.

(6)

Then, Too Foo offers a spirited defense of his habit, one clearly calculated to refute contemporary arguments that a Chinese inclination to vice – and not British drug-peddling – was at the root of the opium problem: I do admit that I have sought relief From all my griefs by this benumbing drug. The more my need, the more I sought thereto; The more I sought, the more did need to seek;

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When most I needed, least could ease obtain. I never meant to excess, but tried to gain That sweet assuagement of my gnawing grief Which only could be reached by slow increase.

(7)

This remarkable passage acts as a rejoinder to racialized conceptions of vice as they were being touted in late Victorian Britain. It does not, however, lead Ki-Ling to relent. Only once his connection to the “wretched slave of opium” becomes apparent, and when he himself is rebuked for his own more moderate fondness for the pipe, does the mandarin resolve to give his son mercy and a chance to reform. “Curse him who woke this slumbering fiend within,” his son tells him, in an appeal clearly meant to place the blame on that other patriarchal entity, the British Empire, Taught me to know what else had been unknown, And being thus unknown, had ne’er been sought. You sowed the seed whence comes this bitter fruit Which time and circumstance have ripened thus.

(10)

While the play retains Asiatic despotism, to be condemned for its overzealous cruelty in stamping out the evils of opium, and while its moral is one of forgiveness and repentance couched in biblical allegory and functioning as a thinly veiled call for Protestant proselytizing, Ki-Ling of Hankow nevertheless insists on a Chinese right to autonomy and, in so doing, formulates a potent rebuttal to Britain’s interference. It suggests the importance of using personal narrative on stage to advance moral arguments, but also to familiarize the audience with people from a radically different culture. Aiming to render the unfamiliar readable and comprehensible, the stage directions of the play suggest only one prop, Ki-Ling’s opium pipe, and resist the impulse to exoticize and overly Orientalize. This sort of staging also is intended to make the play more mobile for performances in various kinds of venues, as well, but this fact merely underscores the author’s need to make this story of opium addiction on the other side of the world have immediate meaning in Britain. Thus despite Marx’s philippics against “the English people at home” who “look no farther than the grocer’s where they buy their tea” and who “are prepared to swallow all the misrepresentations which the Ministry and the Press choose to thrust down the public throat,” plays like Ki-Ling of Hankow encourage audiences to empathize with the Celestials.49 And they teach them how to do just that, through plots that center on such “universal” tropes as the wayward or lost child, the hypocritical parent, and the value of mercy over retribution. Of course, such morality-mongers left themselves open to charges of hypocrisy,

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as Punch pointed out when, in 1844, it published a satiric piece on “AntiSlavery in China,” in which a group of Chinese meet to express their concern about slavery in British mines, factories, and agricultural districts.50 Opium was not the only subject for China-set plays with moral objectives. The Treaty of Nanking and the establishment of Hong Kong aimed to open up the Chinese not only to Western commerce, but also to spiritual enlightenment, and brought in its wake missionaries of all persuasions. These merchants of morality had their champion in the unconventional drama The Chinese Mother, Dr. Tanner of Bombay’s wacky play on the practice of female infanticide in China. Featuring the working-class Irishwoman Biddy M’Grath, who accidentally winds up in Hong Kong and who ends up running a convent-based orphanage for abandoned girls, the play is both a vindication of the rights of women and a paean to the burgeoning class of missionaries who, from the 1840s forward, began to make China their target. It also suggests exactly how different the perspective from the “margins” could be, when emphasis on mass entertainment and spectacle gives way to more complex, issue-based dramas intended for an informed and probably more elite public. Although more a chamber drama than a performance piece, The Chinese Mother offers a highly intellectual and moral reading of China, one clearly not intended for the kind of popular audience for which pyrotechnic displays of the bombardment of Peking and recapitulations of the willow-pattern plate romance were tailored even though Chinese characters are named after types of tea. The date of Tanner’s play, 1857, is of crucial importance to his understanding of the potentially regenerative nature of Christianity when brought to China and of the possible success of such an endeavor when guided by divine will. Written on the cusp of the Indian Mutiny, the play recalls an aspect of the imaginary geography of Asia in the mid-Victorian period that receded later in the century with the passing of the East India Company and the institution of formal rule on the subcontinent. Until that time, the East India Company ran not only India, but also monopolized the China trade, and her clippers had exclusive rights in the China Seas and in the hongs, or trading warehouses, in Canton (Guangzhou). The China trade – which consisted primarily of selling Indian opium in exchange for Chinese tea – at this point was essential to the Indian economy, and thus to the well-being of the empire as a whole. In fact, according to contemporary estimates, it was responsible for up to one-third of the revenue of the subcontinent. (Marx’s more sober figure is one-seventh.)51 Moreover, China’s future as an unviable site for formal British imperialism had by no means been decided at this point, meaning that many observers thought Britain’s commercial and

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moral authority in India would be extended eastwards. The issue of infanticide, the subject of the play, had long been one of great interest in India and, like “suttee,” was subject to a vigorous campaign of suppression at the precise moment that The Chinese Mother was being written. W. R. Moore, appointed in 1855 as Commissioner for Investigating the Extent of Female Infanticide in the Benares Division, had yet to see his Report on Female Infanticide published when he was killed in the Sepoy Rebellion. The Chinese, meanwhile, had been “notorious for their cold indifference in the exposure and murder of their children” from at least the publication of John Barrow’s Travels in China (1804).52 Across the Indian Ocean, the negotiations behind the Treaty of Nanking and the birth of the British colony of Hong Kong in the 1840s meant that the relationship between China and the West was undergoing rapid change, as well. The testing of China’s much-reviled policy of isolation during the First Opium War, with the Anglo-French invasion of Canton, fueled considerable speculation as to the future of Britain’s investment in the world’s largest market and the potential to transform China’s citizens into what they patently refused to be: consumers. The Second Opium War, the so-called Arrow War, was raging at the very time that Tanner was writing and had excited moral condemnation back in Britain. “Every vessel under British colours is associated by the Chinese with the demoralization and ruin of their country,” writes Tyler. [E]very British subject reminds them of the drug which he represents. All good Chinese, Imperialists as well as Insurrectionists, dislike the British, who bring ruin to so many of their countrymen; and all bad ones hate the British, by whom they are ruined. The merchant is cursed for it, the man is detested for it, the missionary is reproached for it, and applied to for remedies to counteract it. Let Englishmen reflect on these things, and approve them if they can. (31)

One of the most intriguing aspects of The Chinese Mother is the picture it gives of Hong Kong at this very early period. Hong Kong is a refuge from the worst excesses of Chinese behavior, including cruelty, corruption, torture, and child murder. However, in order to articulate this vision of Hong Kong, The Chinese Mother must completely ignore the circumstances of the colony’s formation. As a result, except for periodic statements about how Britons in China unwisely incite the Chinese to violence by insulting their customs – violence which is often visited on the heads of ordinary Chinese, and not the foreigners themselves – the play makes no references to the Opium Wars or even British military presence in the region, an

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astounding omission partly facilitated by the all-female cast of characters. Nor does it acknowledge that by the terms of Britain’s convention with China, the baby-rescuing and conversion initiatives that the Sisters of Charity practice in “that strange country, on the confines of which we are living” (17), are entirely illegal. Published in London, Dublin, and Baltimore, The Chinese Mother also offers an unusual intervention into the genre of missionary writing about Chinese by being an Irish, Catholic work, in contrast to the more pervasive and condemnatory Protestant discourse that was predominant in literature about China. In part, the Catholic and Irish orientation of The Chinese Mother motivates an ideology of sympathy on the grounds of a fundamental, oppressed humanity in need of salvation. The enthusiasm for the possibility of redemption for all that is intended to inspire the play’s characters, author, and audience thus is in keeping with critical understanding of Victorian racism as growing increasingly codified and inflexible only later in the century. In part, though, the play’s difference from contemporaneous Protestant pieces about Chinese manners and customs lies in the extremely precise similarity articulated by its author between the Irish peasantry, typified by Biddy M’Grath, and the Chinese. This parallelism is reinforced by the essentially rural and agricultural background of the main protagonists of the drama, be they Irish or Chinese, and the invocation of an essentially metropolitan and masculine authority – in the form of the mandarin, the governor of Hong Kong, the police, etc. – only in abstentia or through intermediaries. Biddy’s accidental arrival in Hong Kong has a specific cause in the Potato Famine and the resultant death of her family through “fever.” “[H]alf starved whin the praties failed” (12), she applies for a job as a “cabin boy” (thinking she’s had enough experience taking care of her own cabin) and is engaged as a companion to the captain’s wife. Whither they go she knows not, until she is duly dumped in Hong Kong. Famine forms the tangential plot link between Biddy and Sister Margaret, who rescues her as she wanders tired and hungry on the praya at Hong Kong and who had formerly nursed her father back in Ireland, and thus impels the action of the drama. On a more fundamental level, however, the link The Chinese Mother makes between famine in Ireland and in China serves to embody a political and moral message about the common heritage of suffering shared by the poor of both countries, as well as the consequent similarity of its effects. It is a message about the principle of scarcity relocated to the mind, but one where human desires are spiritual and not commodity-oriented. In addition, far from being an example, like suttee

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(with which it was routinely connected in the Indian context), of what Spivak calls “white men saving brown women from brown men,” the famine link voices more problematic ideas about the effects of British colonial practice both near and far from home.53 It rejects the formulation by Protestant missionary James Peggs, writing in 1830, of “the lightness with which such crimes of [infanticide] are perpetrated in China with impunity” and therefore repudiates the “awful view” this presents of the “Celestial Empire, loaded with crime, deluged with blood, and ripe for destruction!”54 It also motivates the religious message of the play, for, as Sister Margaret states, “Isn’t it as easy to go to heaven from here as from Ireland?” (14) and “Isn’t it a glorious work that you’ve got to do, Biddy?” (22). Of course, locating the causes of infanticide in famine, rather than barbarism, still exculpates women from their actions and retains the placing of blame on forms of patriarchy. In that respect, The Chinese Mother differs markedly from what Josephine McDonagh sees as the pattern for representations of infanticide in Britain: these tend to be dominated by the figure of the unnatural, infanticidal woman. The Chinese Mother, through the notion of famine, almost pretends that women are superfluous to the act itself.55 In China and India, however, the main means of committing infanticide – that of child exposure – was said to actually reflect maternal and perhaps paternal interest because it introduced the potential for the children to be saved. Thomas Malthus, for instance, noted that poor people in China’s large boat communities who drowned their babies often fastened a gourd to their limbs first, so that they would float and perhaps be rescued.56 He saw in this act a sign of care, rather than criminality. Sentiment thus needed to be overridden or counteracted by (male) reason, which might make infanticide seem practical and preferable to a life of misery for the individual child or her social unit, that is, the family. The Chinese Mother amply proves this thesis; on the point of abandoning the infant Mary, Apiou laments her cruel husband and the cruel fate of Chinese women. Her heart revolts at the deed, even though her reason tells her it is best, and she even returns later to the scene of the abandonment in an unsuccessful bid to rescue her child. Such a presentation of famine also suggests that the odd absence of the Opium Wars in the text is a calculated choice, not an act of ignorance, as The Chinese Mother exhibits a clear awareness of current discourse surrounding infanticide in China, not to mention the work of population theorists such as Malthus. In the 1850s, China was suffering from the effects of serious drought, which had led Western religious figures based in China to note a remarkable increase in the incidence of infanticide and child exposure. In his 1856 report to the Bishop of Arras, the president of the

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Conseil central de l’œuvre de la Sainte-Enfance, Monsignor FrançoisXavier-Timothée Danicourt, Bishop of Kiang-si, cites what he calls the unbelievable misery afflicting at least a third of the country at that time as the cause for this increase. Danicourt blames the practices of infanticide and child exposure on these problems of scarcity, rather than on questions of immorality.57 “Before placing before you the deplorable statistic of children exposed, suffocated, and drowned every year in China,” Danicourt says, “I would like to point out that in France, for instance, child exposure is always much more common in times of misery and corruption” (7; my translation). Danicourt also is at pains to explain local beliefs that a baby is not human before it has been cleaned, emphasizing that most victims of abandonment or murder are unwashed newborns.58 Early in the play, Tanner similarly has his Mother Superior explain to the ignorant Biddy what her role will be if she accepts her office of babygatherer with these lines: “the people are addicted to the most horrible practices. They are even so cruel, that if they think they have too many children, or are too poor to keep them, they throw them out upon the roads, as soon as they are born, and leave them there to perish, or even to be devoured by the pigs or dogs” (19). Yet it quickly becomes apparent that this cruelty is tied to economic necessity, not to an unnatural lack of affection for offspring, allowing Tanner to incorporate the ideological assumption that the Chinese are not, in truth, innately base, but only led astray by their false beliefs. In fact, this characterization of the Chinese faith accompanies some extremely odd descriptions of Buddhism and the bloodthirsty rites practiced by this cult (“Buddha loves blood,” exclaims one character). But even the intensity of their idolatrous ferocity serves to shore up the Britons’ commitment to their Christian potential. Biddy sees her mission – to rescue as many abandoned girls as she can and, through baptism, to save the souls of those she cannot take to Hong Kong – as a way to “chate” the devil (26). After an ill-advised attack on “that big-bellied image, as I seed just now in that gim-crack of a timple” (25) on her first expedition upcountry, she comes to realize that although she and the Sisters of Charity who employ her may see the Buddha as the devil incarnate, iconoclasm is not the way to help the “poor blind hathens.” Such actions only make the Chinese Christians in the neighboring villages suffer, her companion Assom reminds her, adding, “They won’t be converted by violence” (58). Baptism and soul-saving, Biddy concludes – when once she escapes the angry villagers – offer a “bittherer blow” to the devil than “the knock I give his nose wid the big stone I flung at him” (26). Her views are thus at odds with the more

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imperialist employment of religious objects in the melodramas and farces discussed above. In addition, her Mother Superior’s typing of the “horrible practices” of infanticide, child abandonment, and Buddhism as addiction underscores the lack of agency that Chinese peasants have in controlling their destinies and therefore serves to exculpate them. This specific lack of agency applies most especially to women (though not to Irishwomen), and therein lies the explicit feminist program of the play, which gives rise to the implicit formulation of divine grace as reserved for women. There are no male characters in this play, and the blame for every horrific act described resides firmly with men, their greed, and their unnatural desires. Chinese women therefore are wholly victims, and wholly subaltern; unable to seek their own redress, the play asserts, they should seek it in heaven, where they have a voice and where their prayers eventually will receive an answer. The continuation of Biddy’s exchange with the Mother Superior makes this clear, when she answers Biddy’s question as to why child exposure in China is a fate applied “specially to their little girls”: “Avarice, in part, as I have said; and, in part, the want of that respect for our sex, which devotion to the all-perfect Mother of God has infused into the hearts of Christians. Woman is despised and degraded, save where belief in Mary’s Motherhood has given her dignity” (19). On Biddy’s first expedition, the audience sees Apiou, the mother of the baby Biddy will later christen as Mary, descrying the child’s “cruel father” who “commanded thee to be torn from my bosom” (23). However, Apiou proves unable to actually leave her child. She hides and watches in the hope of seeing her daughter saved, until she mistakes Biddy in her fearsome bonnet for a monster and runs away in fright. In charting Mary’s history in tandem with Biddy’s good works, the play continues to show the subjugation and abjection of women in China, while formulating the Church as the only route to greater freedom both on this earth (in the company of other women) and in the hereafter (in the company of Mother Mary). Chinese Mary is, of course, rescued, even though Biddy is forced to leave her after she baptizes her and hangs a medal of the Virgin around her neck. The girl is raised by the cruel stepmother Seau-Mei, who nevertheless loves her against her will. Later, she tries to protect Mary when the now adolescent girl catches the mandarin’s fancy, only giving in to his plans to abandon his first wife and wed Mary instead when the mandarin’s intermediary threatens her own life and that of her stepdaughter. Here, male lust, like the avarice that leads to infanticide, threatens the destruction of women and the upsetting of a moral economy of monogamy

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and filial piety. Mary, of course, refuses – not for herself but because she cannot repay with baseness the kindness of the mandarin’s first wife – and eventually escapes to Hong Kong. Her stepmother, meanwhile, is forced to placate the enraged mandarin by swearing false testimony against a Catholic priest, Father Dominic. The father is duly martyred, and Seau-Mei saves her own life, but she is so disgusted by the proceedings and the patent corruption of the Chinese way that she is soon willing to accept a new faith when she arrives in Hong Kong to look for Mary. Ultimately, it is not only their status as victims that makes the women of the play so amenable to religious conversion and such obvious targets for missionary activities, but also their instincts for maternity and against patriarchal cruelty. They are, therefore, natural Christians in waiting. The conclusion to this remarkable play heralds the end to China’s nearly 2,000-year wait for salvation: All the characters, whatever their past, embrace the Lamb of God and the Virgin. Such an ending is not merely typical of the play’s genre so much as fundamental to the project of missionary narratives as a whole, which must offer conversion to convince their home audiences of the universal path to propriety. So readers should expect the long soliloquy extolling the virtues of Catholicism, as the play pulls away from China and addresses its spectators back in Britain. What they might not expect, however, is who these spectators are figured to be: the playwright’s own children, boarders at St. John’s Priory, Banbury. To them, then, is dedicated this serious piece of moral improvement; for their “amusement” has the paternal Catholic father scripted the play. It is they who, at a far remove from Hong Kong and the imperial scene, are being asked to decipher that “conversation wid the crows” (9) that Biddy says on the play’s opening page makes up the discourse of “Chinay.” And it is this endeavor to tease meaning out of gibberish and splutter, pigtails and tiny feet, that enlists these small spectators in the program shared by all these plays about China. For, whether these works depict the Chinese as Christians in waiting or queer creatures who inhabit the orbit of plates, farces, musical extravaganzas, and “pyro-spectacular” dramas, they all have one thing in common: that they conceive of the Middle Kingdom as a site on which to project fantasies about Britain’s role in the world. In so doing, they present a dramatic tableau of how the spectator at home got swept up in the theater of empire.

chapter 6

A Cockney Chinatown The literature of Limehouse, London

Possibly the greatest city of the Barbarians is not worse than the worst of some portions of a great city with us; nor should I refer emphatically to the wretchedness of London were it not for the boastful ignorance manifested by Barbarian writers and literati. These always speak of the prëeminence of English civilization – of the grand and humanizing influence of their true religion – of the wealth, the liberty, and the happiness of the people! No other tribe is so humane, so just, so brave, so wise, so free, so prosperous, so contented and happy! Ah-Chin-Le, Some Observations upon the Civilization of the Western Barbarians, Particularly the English; Made During a Residence of Some Years in Those Parts (1876)1

Think if the slums were to bring to birth a slit-eyed mongrel, as Mr. Arnold White, whose sincerity in this cause needs no praise on our part, foreboded the other day. The United States fought off their Yellow Peril only just in time, so did Australia. Our turn may come next; let us, therefore, be forearmed.

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 19012

Writing in the periodical The Nineteenth Century in September 1878 in defense of the character of Chinese immigrants and their culture, Walter H. Medhurst, a prominent British diplomat in China, proposed an analogy between them and the Westerners who descried their presence in America, Australia, and elsewhere. The general impression of vice attributed to the Chinese, Medhurst proclaimed in this article on “The Chinese as Colonists,” stemmed from the low-class origin of many of the immigrants to white settler colonies, not from their essential Chineseness. As to the traits that ostensibly constituted Chinese identity, Medhurst continued, “If clannishness, patriotism, persistence in the habits and ideas to which one has been brought up, frugality, the desire to acquire money in order to lay it out at home, and a settled determination to lay one’s bones on native soil, can be characterised as crimes or objectionable traits, then many are the 193

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Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, and Americans, who cannot afford to throw stones at the ‘heathen Chinee.’”3 Medhurst’s championing of Chinese immigrants as an ideal workforce for imperial labor schemes both reiterates the stereotypes of “immorality, vagrancy, and insubordination” slung at expatriate Chinese and repudiates them by exposing them as class-based, situational, and indicative of British cultural and economic intolerance. At the same time, it signals the fundamental disjunction between the salutary role of diasporic Chinese in building and servicing the British Empire and the ways in which propaganda converted them into symbols of depravity and alienness in its most essential forms. In so doing, “The Chinese as Colonists” hints at the crucial misreading and leveling of class in the Chinese context that was so essential to the way in which British observers and commentators demonized the Chinese, as Chapters 1 and 4 have shown. Nowhere did this disjunction between the “Chinaman” as the lawabiding citizen of empire and popular perceptions of him as the “yellow peril incarnate” reveal itself more clearly than in the fictions produced around the turn of the century about the small but visible Chinese community at the heart of the imperial metropolis. These fictions were penned by a variety of authors ranging from the City merchant turned slum- and crime-writer George R. Sims to the East End autodidact Thomas Burke to the hack and novelist Rohmer (Arthur Sarsfield Ward) to Edwin Harcourt Burrage, creator of the Ching-Ching sailor and detective series in the 1880s and 1890s, which, although penny dreadfuls, buck the trend of making the Chinese into villains.4 With varying degrees of sympathy towards their Chinese protagonists, these writers claimed to chart the unknown world of the East End, where the Chinese community mainly resided, and to capitalize on the mystery and danger of “Oriental London” to create a kind of Oriental Gothic. “Oriental London” was a phenomenon that arose only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although a Chinese presence is recorded in Stepney as early as the 1760s, early information on the community’s size is scant and imprecise. The National Register for October 13, 1813 includes a police bulletin about riots among “Chinese Lascars” in Shadwell, leaving three dead and seventeen wounded; the report claims there were 500 Chinese in barracks belonging to the East India Company. However, its ethnic classification of these Chinamen is vague. In 1855, Lt.-Col. R. M. Hughes estimated that of the 10 to 12,000 Asiatic and African seamen employed by Britain, half that number passed through Britain every year, and 10 percent of that total were Chinese; this information would make the

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figure of Chinese sailors passing through London in the mid nineteenth century approximately 500 to 600.5 It took the expansion of the treaty ports and Hong Kong, combined with the opening of the Suez Canal, to spark the first wave of immigration to the capital. These Chinese – nearly all men – were mostly sailors employed on British vessels or the shopkeepers and lodging house masters who supported them. With a permanent population of only a few hundred at most that could swell when a ship arrived, their numbers grew slowly until a second wave of immigration just before the First World War.6 London’s Chinese population settled along a few narrow and dingy streets in Limehouse, Pennyfields, and Poplar – not far from the Limehouse Causeway and the East and West India Docks, and near the redeveloped area Canary Wharf.7 The Limehouse area remained the most important center of the Chinese community in London until the 1940s, when the Blitz destroyed vast swaths of docklands and dispersed the community. New immigrants arriving after the Second World War settled in the West End, where present-day Chinatown is located and where Chinese restaurants mushroomed in the inter-war period. Fictions about this community respond to wider concerns about the consequences of the “breakdown” of China on the stability of Britain’s imperial position in the years before and after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, with its related anxieties about the “scramble for China,” and follow in the wake of unpopular large-scale labor exportation schemes in the Transvaal, the Caribbean, and Malaya, as well as concerns about Chinese immigration in Australia and North America. Despite the tiny size of Britain’s resident Chinese community, they titillate readers by siting the Yellow Peril at home. The “Cockney John Chinaman,” W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews pointed out during the height of the Boxer Uprising, afforded an opportunity for the “Yellow Problem” to “be studied at least in miniature and ‘on the spot’ a great deal nearer home.”8 They also displace fears centered around other immigrant groups: in specific, they superimpose the rhetoric of the urban “cancer” caused by Eastern European Jews flocking to East London onto the small community of Chinese. The anti-Semitic tract England under the Jews, for instance, accuses London’s Jewish community of promoting the immigration of other obnoxious aliens, i.e. Chinese, Poles, Italians, and Germans (36), and maintains that Jews import Chinese laundrymen to England because only other Asiatics are capable of cleaning their filth (86).9 Similarly, in an 1879 report on an article on “L’Émigration Chinoise,” the Times articulates this connection between Chinese and Jews in terms of a common parasitic relationship to European culture, and specifically as an incitement to potentially destabilizing

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working-class anger, paraphrasing as follows: “We shall see a rise in the cities of Europe Chinese quarters which will cause discontent among our working classes, with whom they will have seriously to reckon, and the Chinese element will end up by fixing itself among us like the Jews.”10 The fact that the Chinese could not be read in terms of traditional tropes of immigration and urban existence rendered them capable of having these anti-Semitic anxieties imposed on them, anxieties that were given an additional fillip by also grafting onto them tropes of urban crime and depravity geographically tied to the neighborhoods in which they resided and developed in narratives penned by the likes of Charles Dickens, Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, and Harrison Ainsworth. As Blackwood’s magazine exclaimed in the 1901 passage that serves as an epigraph to this chapter, “Think if the [London] slums were to bring to birth a slit-eyed mongrel, as Mr. Arnold White, whose sincerity in this cause needs no praise on our part, foreboded the other day.” And think these writers did, regaling audiences with tales of these bizarre denizens of one of London’s darkest, most impenetrable corners, the slum areas of Limehouse, Pennyfields, “Tiger Bay,” and the Ratcliffe Highway. Following on the heels of earlier literary and artistic representations of the Asiatic presence in England – such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Gustave Doré’s engravings for William Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872), James Greenwood’s account of his visit to a den in In Strange Company: Being the Experience of a Roving Correspondent (1873), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) – these later tales expand on themes of British victimization at Chinese hands and Oriental infection promoted by opium use that have been aptly described by scholars like Cannon Schmitt and Barry Milligan.11 They do so by making the experiences of immigration, miscegenation, and assimilation as central to their plots as the fantastical landscapes of opium dens and the equally fantastic invocation of secret societies, revenge killings, and plans for the Chinese invasion or takeover of Britain. In their hands, opium – that transmogrifying substance so crucially linked to Britain’s historical encounter with China – is naturalized into the debate about Britain’s now multicultural slums and the general conflation of the threat of internal working-class upheaval and unruliness prompted both by the demon drink and by anxiety about wide-scale antiimperialist uprisings, which the events of the Anglo-Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the birth of Indian nationalism brought to the fore. Importantly, the turn-of-the-century literary intensification of opium’s

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danger occurs after it had lost much of its economic importance to India and the Empire because Chinese production for internal consumption had replaced importation. If these narratives also continue to conceptualize the crucial location for imperial interchanges as London, their London remains dynamic, as open a space for contradiction and change as China itself is supposed to be static and immutable. The new fascination not just with the presence of the “Chinaman” in the heart of empire, but with describing and defining the character of the “Chinaman” both as an individual and as a collective force involved in shaping London as an imperial city, marks a shift from earlier British writing. That literature had concentrated on the corrupting effects of coming into contact with Orientals (such as the recurring nightmares inspired by De Quincey’s Malay and the “Chinafication” of Princess Puffer and John Jasper in Dickens’s Edwin Drood). By contrast, the literature of the late century also began to take into account the way the Chinese actually lived in London. In contradistinction to the unalienable alterity with which they often were endowed, in reality these men both assimilated (both narratively and historically, they married Irish or English wives, since few Chinese women came to Britain) and were respected in the wider East End community as sober, hard-working shopkeepers and providers for visiting Asiatic seamen. As George A. Wade wrote in “The Cockney John Chinaman”: Taken altogether, however, the Chinaman in Limehouse is a most peaceable, inoffensive, harmless character. He is on good terms with his neighbours, most of whom speak well of him. He is picturesque in a region where it is sadly needed; his street is unique in this country. It might be thought that the district would somewhat resent his presence there, but on the whole, it must be confessed that Limehouse is rather proud of the honour done it by his being where he is!12

Similar patterns prevailed in New York, where the Chinese community also was small until the 1870s. During the period from 1820 to 1870, one in four Chinese men in New York married Irish women.13 As the introduction to this book notes, opium was important to many representations of the Limehouse Chinese, but it was by no means the only factor; nor was it key to the daily lives of the East End’s Chinese community. Nevertheless, in more than any other area of Victorian representation of the Chinese, opium has dominated criticism about the London Chinese, in large part because of the prominence of De Quincey in Romanticist scholarship, Dickens in Victorianist scholarship, and Rohmer in twentieth-century

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popular culture scholarship. Following texts like Drood, moreover, criticism has tended to further this imbalance by ignoring the fact that the Chinese did not even run several of the small number of opium dens extant in London.14 Similarly, Victorian exaggerations about the prevalence of opium-smoking in the area – and the projection back in time of literary depictions of the dens dating from the 1910s to the 1930s – often remained unquestioned. Indeed, Matthew Sweet has argued that the London opium den is a myth. Nineteenth-century accounts of opium dens, he argues, adhere to a “shared repertoire” of imagery stemming from one central fact: “Nearly every account of an opium den in nineteenth-century journalism is a description of one of two establishments in New Court Shadwell. . . Two small businesses run by a handful of Chinese immigrants and their English wives and girlfriends: this is the reality obscured by clouds of textual smoke.”15 Moreover, by the late nineteenth century, opium dens were rarer than in mid-century, when the reporting craze about visiting them emerged. Writing in 1898, Charles W. Wood explains, “The days when opium dens flourished and waxed rich were some fifty years ago. Since then they have gradually declined from various causes.”16 To redress the balance, this chapter shies away from seeing drugs as the constitutive element of representations of the Chinese, exploring other narrative strains that were central to the conception and narration of the Chinese presence in London. Paying less attention to opium means paying more attention to what was said about the Chinese themselves and particularly about their sexual integration into the metropolis. The final part of the chapter, however, returns to the theme of opium to analyze how it resurfaced after the First World War with such a degree of prominence that it overshadowed earlier representations of the Chinese in which the substance was absent or, as in the case of Thomas Burke’s work, formed a subordinate element to larger themes of social injustice and transgressive affection. In stories such as Burke’s “The Chink and the Child,” published serially and then anthologized in the bestselling Limehouse Nights (1916) and memorialized in D. W. Griffith’s 1919 film Broken Blossoms, the author offers a corrective to the nefarious Chinaman of narrative fame in the form of the nobler Cheng Huan.17 Cheng is not only capable of loving an impoverished white girl, whose own father Battling Burrows physically and sexually brutalizes and eventually murders her, but also in eliciting readerly sympathy for that love in ways reminiscent of Dalziel. This sympathy is in no way diminished when Cheng kills Burrows and commits suicide after Lily’s death. The suicide-and-revenge plot fits a stereotypical

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pattern; it identifies Chinese masculinity as inherently problematic and associates it both with the emasculating transmogrification of opium and with feminine sensitivity. It links the Chinese man to sensation literature, crime fiction, and melodrama, where female protagonists are nearly always the ones to perform crimes of passion. Nevertheless, the mode of sympathy Burke employs crosses the color bar, encouraging readers to empathize with Cheng as they do with Stephen Hedley in “The Colour Line.” How early film framed Limehouse yields evidence that contemporary audiences could achieve this sympathy. Jon Burrows notes that the success of Broken Blossoms in Britain depended on the ability to “render Limehouse as an Americanised ‘costume’ fantasy with precious little connection to the realities of British life” so as to disable more subversive readings of “the chivalrous Chinaman who worshipped the white girl and did not exact any return of his devotion,” quoting a report by an officer in the Women Police Service presented to the London County Council.18 Burrows notes that having ushers dressed in Chinese costume, theaters decorated with paper lanterns and caged birds, and adding live actors miming a scene in a Buddhist temple were additional ways used to “separate the cinematic fiction from social reality” (292). In effect, distributors and cinemas invoked the template of pantomime’s fantasy China to divert attention from the possibility of transracial sympathy that both Burke’s source text and Griffith’s film expose. Critics often read Limehouse Nights in terms of female and adolescent sexuality and the period’s anxieties about the threat of national and “racial” pollution or degeneration posed by foreign men involved in relations with British women (as Witchard ably does) and from the perspective of the East End characters themselves (as Sascha Auerbach does).19 However, I want to argue that reading these narratives through treaty port fiction, through male sexuality, and through authorial voice reveals different continuities between the “East” and the “East in the West”: On a historical level, they reflect continuity with the praise for Chinese men’s work ethic and morality evinced by Medhurst and other “China hands” and by students of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. They also demonstrate that the different degrees of sympathy towards China and the Chinese, even within racist texts, found in literature written “out in China” are also present in literature produced “at home.” On a fictional level, they both mirror and invert treaty port literature’s interest in miscegenation. They run a similar gamut between sympathizing with Chinese people, once the narratives have individualized them, and treating them as inalienably other and repulsive. In Asia, the fictions usually map liaisons between European men and

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Chinese concubines, with narrative attention paid more to issues of masculinity than to worries about the destabilizing effects of British men’s “halfcaste” progeny; the small size of the mixed-race population mitigated the sense of threat to imperial rule. In London, these fictions map relationships between Chinese men and British women, which explains the obsession with “racial” purity seen at the gutter-end of the journalism and fiction about Limehouse. On a class level, Limehouse fictions similarly capitalize on readers’ ignorance of Chinese social structures and institutions to position Chinese characters fluidly with regard to British conceptions of class and class mobility. With protagonists drawn from class backgrounds that more closely resemble those of the reader than East End slum dwellers, Limehouse fictions also establish continuity with the way treaty port narratives invest in the Westerner’s inability to read Asian class dynamics properly, as in “The Human Form Divine” or the literature’s numerous references to missionaries adopting mandarin costume. In the diasporic setting, this misreading also assumes that an amalgamated identity based on common (“Chinese”) race or national origin trumps class. The result is to enable and naturalize plots that locate mandarins in the London slums. Invasion narratives also follow this pattern by frequently making their Asian masterminds, Fu Manchu included, operate out of East End settings highly inappropriate to their status within their own community. Whereas invasion narratives misread Chinese class and the related assumption of a shared Chinese identity for conservative purposes, Burke employs them differently. By figuring the Chinese character as the wouldbe protector of chastity, as the true believer in female domesticity and the “angel in the house,” he turns the Asiatic presence in Limehouse into a potentially moralizing force in contradistinction to the corrupt, almost irredeemable slum-dwellers who, by themselves, lack agency for change. In contradistinction to China-based tales like “The Vampire Nemesis,” where violence towards women symbolizes a betrayal of a privileged class background, Burke’s narratives pin the blame on the influence of an environment of deprivation. In turn, Cheng’s own less deprived origins enable his noble intervention in the geography of the East End. Whereas in the stage versions of the free-choice love plot discussed in the previous chapter white men arrive to save yellow women from yellow men, in Limehouse the yellow man fulfills the role of the white woman’s savior – albeit belatedly, as in “The Chink and the Child.” Even more problematically, in contradistinction to China-based stories, Burke’s women are largely victims of direct male oppression, rather than

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subjects capable of responding to patriarchal (or imperial) violence with violence of their own. In this respect, I agree with Auerbach’s analysis of Burke that “British masculinity indeed faced a crisis . . . that stemmed mostly from its own voluntary dissipation” (114). Auerbach avers that the narratives demonstrate the prioritization of “race over respectability in the assessment of social relations by the community” (116). However, I want to distinguish between this diegetic phenomenon and the more radical readerly sympathy towards Chinese men that Burke also invokes. George R. Sims, moreover, praises Chinese control of property, wealth, and other conventional signs of respectability for their salutary effect on a Cockney microcosm in the 1905 story “Li Ting of London,” discussed below.20 Burke’s individuation of the character of Cheng Huan and others like him, while not abandoning generic formulae for late Victorian crime and slum fiction, nevertheless reframes these formulae by suggesting racially and culturally transgressive solutions to peculiarly British urban problems. Burke, in effect, proves what Dawe asserts in his more racist The Yellow Man – that the East can only creep into the West with the latter’s collusion. Whereas for Dawe such collusion is unwitting – with the Britons who cooperate with his Chinese and Japanese villains unaware of the vampirelike danger that they invite to cross the threshold into London – with Burke and writers such as Sims, collusion is both desirable and potentially regenerative. British stories like those in Limehouse Nights often imitate narrative representations of Chinatowns in the American cities of San Francisco and New York – cities with Chinese populations that were considerably larger than that of London, whose 1901 census recorded a permanent population of 237, 60 percent of whom were seamen – and they were sometimes targeted at the American consumers of these fictions.21 Indeed, Burke’s collection gained popularity first in the United States and then at home, highlighting the significance of transatlantic cross-fertilization in representing the Chinese. In fact, in fiction and cinema of this period, including Broken Blossoms and Griffith’s later Dream Street (1921), the British metropolis arguably functions as an analogue for American domestic concerns about Chinese immigration and immigrants.22 Seitler, for instance, sees the Fu Manchu novels as signifying “the Asian immigrant’s perceived threat to the [American] nation” (133). Owing, perhaps, to American models, London fiction was much more obsessed with the Chinese than with Lascars, who, statistically, were considerably more numerous. Its subject matter often embraces scenarios familiar from the American context, with its anti-immigration statutes,

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portrayal of Chinese occupations such as laundrymen, and, from the end of the century, an obsession with a Chinese criminal underworld operating in urban environments.23 Although gangs, or tongs, did not flourish in London in the way that they did in America and Australia, they are a prominent feature of literary and media descriptions of the Limehouse Chinese. As in tales of San Francisco, those of Limehouse and Pennyfields created Chinatown as a domain of the architectural uncanny: an environment of dark alleyways, tunnels, hidden passages and rooms, trapdoors that dump people into the Thames – a landscape, in other words, of enclosure, claustrophobia, and alienation, and a fitting counterpoint to the West End.24 Opium dens featured in representations in both North America and Britain, and in both fiction and film, with the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s 1905 “Rube in an Opium Joint” (in which a sea captain takes a young couple on a tour of an opium establishment) being an example of this crossover.25 As across the Atlantic, narratives of the Chinese in Albion take up themes of white slavery, in which “Anglo-Saxon” women transform into wizened old Chinese women working in opium dens. This narrative was bruited in the 1890s in West Coast periodicals such as the San Francisco Examiner and in contemporaneous American fiction.26 Despite an overwhelming lack of evidence that anything along these lines was occurring in Britain, this myth resurfaced in London in turn-of-the-century fiction; its popularity was unsurprising given the legacy of W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” (1885); the status of Dickens’s final novel; and the charged anti-immigrant atmosphere underlying new legislation against “aliens.” Despite their conformity to international patterns for representing Chinese immigration and Chinatowns, nevertheless narratives about the Chinese community in Limehouse place their own stamp on the genre by figuring the London Chinese in terms of British imperial concerns and by inserting them into other narrative patterns used to describe the heart of darkest London, such as detective fiction, the Newgate novel, and the slum reform narrative. In fact, the generic force of the Limehouse fiction’s precursors exerts such power over these representations that nearly all fiction about Britain’s Chinese is set in London, despite the existence of pockets of Chinese settlements in the shipping centers of Liverpool and Cardiff and despite riots that decimated Chinese laundries in the Welsh city in 1911.27 London, Burke would later write in The Ecstasies of Thomas De Quincey (1928), “gave [De Quincey] a shock from which he never recovered: a shock that meant a load of suffering for him and a load of treasure for us. For the rest of his life he was to have always before his eyes the racing

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phantasmagoria of London faces and in his ears its tumultuous footfalls” (18). The literature about Orientals in Britain that embraced De Quincey also embraced this notion of London setting as necessary to establish both their readers’ acceptance of plots involving “Asiatics” and their conviction that the experience of imperialism had irrevocably altered Britain’s urban landscape, if not the countryside. Limehouse narratives therefore place significant emphasis on the political implications of the Chinese presence in the metropolis – ranging from exaggerated fears of reverse imperialism in works such as Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and The Yellow Wave (1905); to admonitions about “John Chinaman” as the conduit for an opium infection capable of disabling the indigenous and especially Irish workforce resident in East London; to worries about London’s unwitting service as a place of asylum for secret agents opposed to the Manchu government’s authority, and thus threatening to Britain’s commercial interests, in texts such as Dawe’s The Yellow Man. The Limehouse texts also underscore their contribution to and divergence from East End economies of excess centered in immigration, crippling poverty, and alcohol abuse. Moreover, the invocation of broader imperial concerns in these narratives underscores that these texts differ from the larger body of fictions of empire, produced in India, China, and elsewhere, that describe essentially middle-class engagements with imperial others. These tales of Limehouse, even when written by “outsiders” such as Sims, seek to create an image of how a spectrum of working-class cultures were implicated in imperial encounters, and how they were changed by them. At the same time, they proffer and undercut notions of the radical similarity of middle-class views towards Britain’s poorer subjects, at home and in the Empire.28

“A Chinaman’s chance” The first writer to apply the label “Chinatown” to the Limehouse district – a moniker that had gained currency in America in the 1850s – was Sims, who used the term to conjure up a more unified geographical and cultural identity for the almost exclusively male Chinese inhabitants clustered around the East and West India Docks, as well as to suggest the vitality of that community and its entrenchment in the life of the East End. As a fiction writer, Sims sought on the one hand to balance a historical and anthropological reading of the London Chinese as part of the gamut of queer, often downtrodden, characters who populated the dark continent of the East End (which he sometimes referred to as “colonies”). These

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characters enthralled readers of his myriad publications, which included the 1902–3 Street Life in London (which contained several articles on the Limehouse Chinese) and a 1905 article on them written for the Strand Magazine.29 On the other hand, he proposed a moralistic reading of Cockney Celestials; he promoted them as model citizens and assistants in the sorts of slum reform that he championed in his famous tracts of 1889, How the Poor Live and Horrible London.30 With self-determination and betterment from within outcast London seemingly impossible, Sims presents Chinese men as a catalyst for change that effects itself through relations with women of the community and, generationally, through their progeny. As such, his methodology for individuals to supersede their impoverished conditions in his fiction is in keeping with his condemnation, in his writings as an activist, of philanthropy’s lack of interest in the oppressed groups within the metropole and its abdication of its responsibility to its own people. Working within stereotypical middle-class views of the equivalence between Britain’s urban poor and the teeming poor of the nation’s overseas colonies, Sims notes, “In the matter of water and air, the most degraded savage British philanthropy has yet adopted as a pet is a thousand times better off than the London labourer and his family, dwelling in the areas whose horrors medical officers are at last divulging to the public” (How the Poor Live, 64). So desperate has the situation become that the urban poor are in such a state of degradation that they not only interest the medical professions, but also attract the anthropologist’s gaze: “There are not wanting signs that the ‘one-roomed helot’ and his brood are about to receive a little scientific attention. They have become natural curiosities, and to this fact they may owe the honour in store for them, of dividing public attention with the Zenanas, the Aborigines, and the South Sea Islanders” (63). In both these quotations, the key issue for Sims is making the public take notice – a public, incidentally, which ironically reinforces the equivalence between primitives and slum-dwellers by excluding both from the parameters constituting the “public.” Yet because taking notice is connected to ideas of abjection and curiosity, the middle classes are sarcastically maligned and, like Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, they prove fundamentally incapable of assuming responsibility for the condition of the London laborer. At best, their attention is divided among different specimens of exotic humanity; at worst they prove totally unable to acknowledge the horrors on their doorstep. In short, the members of this public cannot fulfill a role as agents of improvement. Although Sims broached the subject of the Chinese in a variety of non-fictional or loosely anecdotal works, it is in the title story of his

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1905 anthology Li Ting of London and Other Stories that he most clearly articulates his vision of the Chinese male as enabling influence. A fictionalized version of a family history that he presents as real in the 1906 collection The Mysteries of Modern London, “Li Ting of London” offers a self-critical narrative that titillates the presumed middle-class reader by presenting, then mocking, typical British notions of the Chinese.31 Working on a historical register, it incorporates elements of the story of political leader Sun Yat-Sen’s captivity at the Chinese Legation in London during his student days in order to test prevailing assumptions about the status of immigrants. According to the 1897 autobiographical Kidnapped in London, Sun Yat-Sen was lured into the Chinese Legation and unlawfully detained by Chinese officials, who later denied the incident after his escape.32 Unlike the episode in Sims’s story, however, in Sun Yat-Sen’s case, British officials were reluctant to intercede for fear of the political consequences. However, it was widely circulated in China that Lord Salisbury ordered the Legation to release Sun Yat-Sen when, as a result of press reports of the incident, thousands of Londoners swarmed the Legation and threatened to destroy it.33 Sims’s tale makes use of these stories by relating the history of a mysterious Chinese sailor who, Horatio Alger-like, works his way to wealth from the London docks to a marriage with his landlord’s daughter and ownership of a successful second-hand furniture store. However, the narrative takes a surprising turn when Li Ting goes back to China to settle some business and becomes incommunicado. His daughter, filled with romantic ideas, coaxes the mother, “who never really understood her husband,” to travel to China. There they discover that the Empress has held Li Ting prisoner because he is pretender to the throne. By this time, he has already sought asylum at the British delegation and gone back to England to rejoin his family. The wife and daughter return from their adventure, and they all live happily ever after, their delusions of grandeur successfully allayed, breeding satisfaction with their humble but peaceful life in London. Along the way, mother and daughter undergo a little humorous culture shock designed as a send-up of Western impressions of the East – when arriving in China, for instance, the wife is told that her husband is an important Boxer. She replies incredulously, revealing her East End origins, that “[m]y husband never used his fists in his life” (16). (This comment also echoes the British stage’s conflation of the Boxers and boxing.) When told of his many (non-existent) Chinese wives, she faints and contemplates a divorce, though reluctant to believe her husband to be a bigamist. Her husband’s pidgin English at the start of the story is a similar source of mirth,

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though the laugh is at the expense of the reader’s expectation and not at Li Ting’s. Beyond the farcical explosion of the Orientalist prejudices held by Li Ting’s family – prejudices that Sims’s metropolitan readers, ignorant both of Chinese customs and behavior, are meant to share – lies a more serious consideration of the realities of Chinese settlement in Britain, a symbolic expression of the lack of work ethic among the working classes of the East End, and an articulation of the difficulties faced by British observers and audiences in accepting racially and culturally hybrid figures as progressive, familiar, and integral to the constitution of Britishness in an imperial and industrial age. To advance this viewpoint, the narrative bends the historical conditions of Chinese immigration to London by balancing the realistic portrayal of Li Ting’s marriage to a British wife with the more improbable granting of naturalization papers to Li Ting himself. Chinese sailors and shopkeepers resident in Limehouse did, in fact, make attractive husbands to Cockney women because, in the words of one wife, with Chinese men “you were always sure there was a meal on the table, and good clothes.”34 An article entitled “Oriental London,” published by Sims three years earlier in his Living London series, reiterates this point when its author states, “All the established Chinamen have married Englishwomen, and in their case marriage has not been a failure, for they seem happy. Their children look healthy and are comfortably dressed, and most of them are very nice looking. These dark-haired, black-eyed boys and girls, with the rosy cheeks and happy looks, are real little pictures.”35 (Home Office records produced in response to allegations by one Mrs. Robinson in 1911 about Chinese men trying to lure schoolgirls into sexual liaisons begrudgingly admitted that relationships between Celestials and local women were generally of a benign character, concluding, “Undesirable as it is that British women should marry or consort with Chinamen, it is generally admitted that the Chinamen treat women well, usually marry them and make good husbands of their class.”)36 Naturalization, however, was a boon seldom granted even to Hong Kong Chinese.37 In fact, in this period, Li Ting’s wife actually would have lost her status as a British citizen for the duration of her marriage. Bending history in this manner allows Sims to promote an absorptive model of British identity, rather than the more palpable and xenophobic policing of boundaries between “native” and “foreign” promoted by laws regulating the entry of aliens into the United Kingdom.38 It also implicitly reverses the trend of earlier literature to see, through the haze of the opium den,

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processes of “Chinafication” as contaminatory, degenerative, and criminal – particularly with respect to the mythically destructive influence of the Asiatic male on popular female figures like Lascar Sally and Princess Puffer. This was the view fostered by missionary reformers such the Rev. George Mitchell, who in his 1925 work Down in Limehouse, warned, “Christ is needed, too, where English girls are inveigled in the meshes of Chinese sorceries, and made to serve as votaries at the altars of their gambling hells.”39 In place of traditional images of the “Chinaman” as sexually weak (soft, feminine, hairless, harmless, perverted) and as potentially emasculating in his ability to sap the sexual vitality of a working class enervated and brutalized by generations of grinding poverty, alcohol dependence, and physically abusive behavior towards women, Sims’s Chinese protagonist is the quintessence of British standards of good conduct and manliness. For Sims, moreover, children produced out of such unions are not the “slit-eyed mongrels” envisaged by Arnold White, but “real little pictures,” in stark contrast to the alternative pictures of the progeny of East End poverty being touted by Dr. Barnardo and other reformers of this period.40 Yet Li Ting and his daughter’s implicit absorption into British culture – into the mother culture embodied by his wife with her “old-fashioned English notions” that need not be altered to allow her to fit in “the awful boots [Chinese women] wear” (13) – and the force of their example as a model for working-class regeneration, proves possible only by rearticulating normative notions of class as fundamentally constitutive of behavior. Although Li Ting is an alien who prosaically starts at the bottom of the rag-and-bones heap upon arrival in London, his noble birth later enables him to transcend this socioeconomic condition in order to achieve a more appropriate place within his adopted “nation of shopkeepers.” The personal narrative of Li Ting’s rise to economic prosperity thus defies – but does not actually overturn – the vision of the utter inescapability of poverty and the geographical containment of the working classes proffered by better-known slum-life narratives such as George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). Because he is in political exile, Li Ting conceals his status and pretends to be just another coolie. On landing in London, he therefore rents rooms from a rag-and-bottles shop proprietor, the follower of a profession made notorious for its connection to the criminal element in the works of Charles Dickens and a quintessential East End denizen. Through Li Ting’s initiative, however, the shop quickly becomes a second-hand furniture store. The Chinaman then buys a shop on the main thoroughfare, marries his partner’s

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only daughter, and takes over the business, providing his father-in-law with economic stability in the form of an annuity. Meanwhile, Li Ting’s new profession as a broker of “culiosities” charts his personal shift from the object of curiosity as an alien to the purveyor of curiosities that themselves become naturalized through their decorative function in the archetypal Victorian drawing room. Through this process, subjectivity and agency replace objectification and passivity. He turns a static situation into a dynamic one, not merely for himself, but for those close to him, as well. Li Ting himself, in embracing the hybrid identity that ultimately entitles him to be a British subject (in both literal and discursive terms), must translate Chinese nobility into its unequal equivalent, middle-class subjectivity. He does so not only by rejecting the emblems of his status in China – his pigtail and dress, his pretensions to the throne, etc. – but also by being transformed by his creator into the exact type of bourgeois individual often held up as the model for the working classes of East London. He relinquishes or loses his various claims to being Chinese, right down to his own name – a strategy that ultimately disables any anxiety of reverse colonization within the narrative. Moreover, the Chinese aspects of his nobility – i.e. his originary class status – are either concealed or effaced; they are gradually sutured into the nobility of character that defines his British persona and supersedes its Celestial origins. Thus he only reveals his aristocratic background to his wife by accident, when she gives him hot rum for a cold. Yet that accident offers an opportunity to confirm his new identity as noble Briton because his indiscretion under the influence of rum becomes a signal of habitual abstinence that contrasts markedly with the gin- and beerdominated lives of his working-class peers in East London. Property ownership also plays a significant role in the narrative of Li Ting’s conversion into a proper kind of Londoner. He gradually builds an empire of holdings in his neighborhood that confirm his commitment to and integration into the urban fabric of the city – again without inciting fears of reverse colonization – and thus acquires a position of status among an East End community of renters, boarding house residents, and workhouse inmates. During his absence in China, these holdings are further naturalized by his tenants when they remove the sign for the “Ting Buildings” from a shopping arcade he owns because “it sounded better” (9). For his own part, the putative reason for his return to the Middle Kingdom is to “see about some property that had come to him through the death of a relative” (10). This property, however, turns out to be the Chinese state: what he should be acquiring is the throne, and with it the ability to exert a negative influence over Britain’s trade preeminence and political

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maneuvering in East Asia. Instead, he abandons his claims after being imprisoned by the Empress, subsequently receiving asylum at the British Legation and heading back to his family. Upon his return and the confirmation of his British identity, he is able to occupy a store in the vicinity of the power base of the British Empire (Westminster) without challenging its authority. The modern-day option of partial assimilation is not available; it is too threatening both for himself (making him subject to Chinese assassination attempts) and for the British around him (fearing the effect those ties might have on their economic and cultural autonomy). Moreover, his daughter speaks Cockney, not Chinese or pidgin, emphasizing the importance of the erasure of audible alterity to the goal of fitting in.41 Sims’s story thus proves its moral, that its protagonist has made the right choice in opting to become “a Prince who prefers a side street in Westminster to the Happy Despatch” (23). Although from a pagan country, Li Ting explicitly embodies the best attributes of the Protestant work ethic, especially as it was espoused by the many imperial missionaries who served their apprenticeships in the East End before heading out East: Li Ting is hard-working, loyal, abstemious, non-violent, and devoted to his family. He specifically avoids the many plagues of life in the East End: boxing arenas, gin palaces, music halls, and the like. According to his wife, he also was “never one for female society,” and thus is not drawn in to the economy of the sex trade so linked to Chinese alterity in opium den literature, haunted by descriptions of “Tiger Bay” prostitutes and their vaginae dentatae. Li Ting even moves his family out of these contaminated East End spaces to more salubrious West End quarters as soon as finances permit. Moreover, although the narrative appears to condone his act of miscegenation – even to applaud it for producing Lizzie Ting, who “with her English dress and speech and her Chinese features, was always a striking figure of the shop” (10) – at the same time, it makes it clear that this enabling model of hybridity depends on an underlying sympathy with Li Ting’s anomalous origins as a mandarin.

A paw thing but mine own An ideologically related, if more tragic and sinister, vision of the destabilizing/restabilizing effects of the Chinese presence in London on both fictionalized working-class characters and presumed middle-class readers emerges out of Burke’s work, most particularly in the stories comprising Limehouse Nights. Like Sims, Burke’s approach to the topic of East London and the Chinese was heavily influenced by the music hall tradition; in his work, he

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carries over many of the forms and conventions of the genre, and also invokes many of the typical plotlines of stage melodrama.42 An autodidact who claimed to have grown up in East London not far from the areas he describes, Burke forged a successful career for himself as a journalist and fiction writer that was cemented when Limehouse Nights became a runaway bestseller, first in the United States and then in Great Britain.43 Griffith rapidly produced a celluloid version of “The Chink and the Child,” the first story of Limehouse Nights, which appeared in 1919 and starred Lillian Gish. Preceding E. M. Forster’s middle-class model of imperial rape by nearly a decade, Limehouse Nights presents a picture of working-class cultural interaction as violent and as devastating as Forster’s in its social, if not its political, consequences. The “mild and gentle” Burke has been characterized as devoid of “social consciousness”; Vance Kepley, Jr., goes so far as to state, “Burke’s sensationalism and essential shallowness is nowhere more evident than in Limehouse Nights, which is filled with purple prose and rather predictably O’Henry-like twists.”44 Yet although the anthology contains much of the gritty naturalism and fascination with the exotic that characterize his predecessors in their writings about East London – Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, Andrew Mearns (author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London [1883]), and Walter Besant among them – Burke’s writing does not obscure his readers’ (or characters’) own complicity in the events spawned by the horrific conditions he describes. And because Burke’s fiction underscores the tensions produced by the simultaneous internationalization and impoverishment of the city under industrialization, it affords an exemplary opportunity to expose the fallacies of middle-class conceptions of the Chinese. Throughout, it is the hidden supporters of the social system, Burke’s putative readers, who bear the blame for the East End atrocities he chronicles and who come to recognize their complicity through the operation of readerly sympathy. So shocking were the book’s themes that Grant Richards, his publisher, had difficulty in finding a US house to release Limehouse Nights.45 For this reason, even though “The Chink and the Child” is Burke’s bestknown fiction, it is in some ways one of his least interesting pieces because it works so neatly within stereotypes – and especially American stereotypes – about Chinese immigrants. Pedophilia, effeminacy, self-sacrifice, suicide, cool revenge, opium enervation, decadent pleasure, an Orientalized aesthetic sense, and potential white slavery are all implicated in the tale, which presents an East End worthy of the worst excesses of the penny dreadfuls and Yellow Peril writers. Whether or not Burke actually endorses such stereotypes, this cocktail of characterizations made “The Chink and the

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Child” the representative narrative of the Limehouse Chinese community, especially after the success of Griffith’s film. I now want to recall the distinction I made in my discussion in Chapter 2 between the novel, the short story, and its anthologized form. As with Dalziel, so too with Burke, the format of the collection is fundamental for interpreting the narratives because of the multiple, accretive perspectives it gathers. The anthology’s title highlights the significance of this structuring principle by suggesting “Limehouse” and its denizens must be constructed over many “nights.” Just as in Chronicles of a Crown Colony, the picture of readerly sympathy that I develop below depends on the tensions and continuities between the different stories that make up Limehouse Nights, as well as their intertextual relationship to Burke’s sequels. The commercial success of Limehouse Nights, perhaps fueled by a ban on the book by many circulating libraries, seems to have encouraged Burke to pander to the public’s desire for sensationalism in some of his less nuanced, subsequent representations of the Limehouse Chinese. Probably because of Griffith’s influence, scholarly interest in Burke concentrates overwhelmingly on “The Chink and the Child.” As a result, the contours of the anthology are obscured, as well as the fact that it was the anthology, rather than this single story, that made Burke’s name. Critics rarely pose this distinction, overlooking the fact that “The Chink and the Child” appeared a year before the collection in Colour, where it was introduced as being “by the author of ‘London Nights,’ a book which is proving one of the sensations of the literary season” (82). Other, potentially more fascinating narratives about the Chinese that pepper the anthology, some also published serially, disappear from view. In her analysis of Limehouse Nights, Carol Watts singles out “The Chink and the Child” “from the rest of Burke’s collection because of its distinctive interpretation of the characteristics of melodrama,” arguing its narrative technique compromises spectatorial technique and brings the reader “into close proximity to a realm of sensory assault, which centrally involves the affective impact of race.”46 However, I want to suggest that not only does this pattern appear in other stories, but also that the function of the anthology as a collective structure is to effect this collapse of distance. Limehouse Night’s “The Paw” makes these points clear. “The Paw” is the horrific story of a working-class family apparently torn apart by a woman’s attraction to a Chinese immigrant, but in actuality destroyed by the brutal conditions of the East End. Although the Times Literary Supplement characterized “The Paw” as “not a story, but a piece of brutal, horrifying, useless writing” in its original review of Limehouse Nights,

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to contemporary readers it may be one of the collection’s most fascinating.47 Like “The Chink and the Child,” this narrative concentrates its melodramatic spectacle around the axis of love across color lines, and like “The Chink and the Child,” this transgressive/cross-racial desire appears, on the surface, to be implicated in a backlash against women, their sexual desires, and their increasing self-determination in the modern era.48 And like “The Chink and the Child,” the narrative uses the figure of the innocent, battered child to propel the narrative towards its grotesquely dramatic conclusion. Yet the narrative supersedes these elements by concentrating on male domestic violence that finally remains within the bounds of the nuclear family. As in Dalziel’s story “The Colour Line,” in “The Paw” it is white racism that disrupts and destroys and Chinese masculinity that is presented in wholesome and sympathetic ways. The story runs as follows: Fleeing from the abusive treatment of her common-law husband, Greaser Flanagan, Daffodil abandons her daughter and moves in with a kindly Chinaman. Her husband hatches a brilliantly cruel plan to regain his wife, involving beating and starving his toddler into a murderous stupor while repeating a mantra of the lines, “Someone oughter stick a knife – stick a knife – stick a knife – someone oughter stick a knife acrost that bloody Chink!” (70). When the brainwashed daughter enters the darkened bedroom shared by Daffodil and the Chinese man, however, she mistakenly kills her mother. The horror of the story’s climax derives not from a frustration of readerly expectations of the Chinaman’s death, nor from the act of matricide, nor even from the terrible child abuse that precedes it, but from the system of social and specifically urban oppression that degrades the human psyche as much as its pollution, overcrowding, and poverty destroy its physical frame. In a subversive breaking-away from troping East End Chinese as savage and animalistic, Burke puts a member of the British working class into the position of brutalizer and exposes the dreadful urban conditions that cause this brutality to surface. Burke allies “Chinese men with white women as creatures of sentiment and aestheticism who are pitted against the brutality of Western masculine aggression and patriarchal dominance.”49 Still, Flanagan’s Irish surname hints that Burke substitutes one stereotype for another. Burke begins his story with a description of Limehouse in spring as de-naturalized, the ultimate urban nightmare: “Limehouse has no seasons. It has not even the divisions of day and night” (63). Instead of fields and nature, he says with irony, “how much sweeter are the things of the hands, the darling friendliness of the streets!” (63–64). He proceeds to set up the

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rather hostile city – and not the Chinaman – as the evil incarnate, the agent that turns Flanagan, “a weak man, physically and morally flabby,” into an opium smoker, into a cold-blooded murderer (64). In so doing, he implicates the West End in the depravity of East End conditions, locating the victimization of East Enders and the destruction of their manhood not in alien-sourced opium dens, but in home-grown oppression. He also underscores the connections between working-class women and Chinese men that make unions such as the one between Daffodil and the Chinaman so plausible. Here, the horrible “lemon hands” of the Chinaman that so offend Greaser Flanagan form a continuity with the “lemon curls” of his daughter, as well as with his wife’s name, Daffodil. What is most striking about this portrayal of the Chinese male in “The Paw” is the fact that its central Chinese character is the absent center of the narrative, making it clear that the story deals with preconceptions and prejudices against the “Chinaman” that rebound against their authors. The “Chinky,” as the character of Phung-tsin is repeatedly called, is voiceless. He never appears, and Greaser’s accusation that Phung-tsin has stolen Daffodil is simply an unwitting acknowledgment of his own inadequate masculinity in the face of a woman’s capacity to choose her own lovers. De-individualized and silent, Phung-tsin constitutes the perfect foil for the “weedy opium jolter” Flanagan’s own problems. Yet in “The Paw,” as in “The Chink and the Child,” the “Chinaman” speaks through his affection and his sacrifice for his beloved, exposing his innate humanity in contradistinction to the jealousy, uncontrolled rage, and other images of excess that mark his indigenous antagonist.50 The Greaser himself can speak only through violence, and then only indirectly through the daughter whom he brutalizes into a half-animal-like, pre-linguistic state. (And, given the context of the narrative, Burke as narrator serves as Greaser’s double, himself recording and interpreting the lives of people who cannot or do not write their own stories.) The Greaser’s very attempts to limit desire within fixed racial bounds are frustrated not only because the child mistakenly commits matricide, but also because they rely on repudiation of the female agency that gives Daffodil the ability to choose between him and the “Chinky” – a repudiation that the narrative explicitly undercuts with the statement that “she took her departures when and as she chose” (65). Nevertheless, if this narrative strikes at the heart of the discursive “problem” of alien immigration to London – that it destabilizes normative sexual boundaries and threatens imperial ideologies of manliness by offering alternative models of sexual selection – it does so not by rejecting these Victorian codes of

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masculinity, but by seeing them as displaced or perverted by poverty. Phung-tsin’s intrusion into Limehouse is not the cause of this destabilization, but merely the means of making it more apparent: “the Chinky” brings out the worst in men like Greaser. The story thus becomes a perverse revisiting of the charges leveled at the Chinese onto the East Enders themselves: Greaser Flanagan indeed appears to be victimized through his contact with an alien presence, but merely because that contact exposes the overarching level of victimization to which he and his kind are subject; he is indeed enervated by the contest with the “Chinky,” but only because of his own fears of fighting him and “his cold, wet terror at the prospect of the Old Bailey and the light cord” (67); he is indeed infected by his close proximity to the Oriental, but the “poison in his blood” (73) that propels his murderous lust is his own sense of inadequacy. Written when the very idea of imperial prowess was under attack from various fronts, “The Paw” presents urban, working-class masculinity as bankrupt. Read in conjunction with “The Chink and the Child,” it suggests that sensitivity, that the proverbial “kindness of the Celestial,” could potentially replace violence and brutality and bring rotten Limehouse back to nature. If this view both re-Orientalizes the “Chinaman” as peaceful Confucian (a theme of Griffith’s reworking of Burke in Broken Blossoms) and leaves ideas about essential femininity undisturbed, it still offers an important alternative to the rabble-rousing, jingoistic character of much other literature about the Chinese written from Britain. Similarly, if Burke’s oeuvre recycles stereotypes linking the Chinese in London to opium dens, the point is not to reinculcate a connection between the Chinese and Orientalized vice, but rather to provide another instance in which superstructural processes of impoverishment visit themselves on East Enders. In fact, “The Paw” – with its depiction of an enervated, morally weak protagonist whose passion for his “girl” is the only sensation that competes with opium dreams for control over his emotions – actually reverses the convention that the Chinese have corroded Britain’s moral fiber with their gambling and opium. On one level, opium retains its association with Chineseness, but on another level, it acts as a kind of truth serum, making manifest unpleasant aspects of British masculinity that might otherwise remain latent.51 In this story, then, opium serves as a palliative to London realities, allowing Greaser Flanagan to “snatch some of the rich delights that life gave to others” (64). Much like alcohol (for which it often serves as an analogue), excessive use and the context of consumption are what turn opium from a recreational drug into a destructive agent. Thus when

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Flanagan resorts to opium in a desperate attempt to deal with losing Daffodil and the drug magnifies his pain, spurring him to develop his murderous plan, Burke does not foist the blame on the Chinese opium den, just as the narrative blame for Daffodil’s defection to Phung-tsin lies with Flanagan himself (she leaves him a “derisive note of final farewell”). Instead, opium – like gin – becomes the visionary substance that permits some characters to see the nightmarish limitations of their urban, socioeconomic situation, and at the same time inspires an individuation of the overwhelming intrusion of the city into mental, as well as physical, life.52

Dens of iniquity Burke’s representation of opium in “The Paw” as not in itself harmful is consistent with the impressions of those colonial officials who saw occasional opium smoking by Chinese laborers as a potentially beneficial release mechanism, rather than an inherently harmful substance. It is also consistent with historical fact: While the British government and the middle-class press promoted widespread anxiety about opium-smoking among the working classes, in actuality, opium dens were for normally hard-working Chinese or other Asian sailors who smoked while on holiday.53 Besant, in East London, noted this disjunction when describing his visit to an opium den as follows: “We have read accounts of the dreadful place, have we not? Greatly to my disappointment, because when one goes to an opium den for the first time one expects a creeping of the flesh at least, the place was neither dreadful nor horrible” (205–206). Wade accurately called attention to the difference between opium houses and pubs in his analysis of the character of the “Cockney John Chinaman,” while pinpointing concern about the dens as being a factor external to the local community. Personifying the neighborhood, he writes: Limehouse knows one or two such houses, and also that nearly every Celestial more or less likes to smoke opium. But it thinks, and doubtless correctly, that “people who live in glass-houses should not throw stones”; and while there are so many drinking-shops in the district where it can find English men and women lying dead drunk outside the doors, it does not see any particular vice in the inhabitant of the Limehouse Causeway having his pipe of opium where he does not make an open spectacle of himself to all the world, at any rate! (306)

Even an observer more inclined to be critical and moralistic, writing in the August 1, 1877 edition of the London City Missionary Magazine, comments more on their social utility than on their destructive nature:

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Similarly, most gambling halls (which often doubled as dens) were for Chinese men to play mahjong or fan tan. Few working-class Britons were attracted to either forum (laudanum and horse-betting being more popular); neither would they have been welcome. Chinese sailors considered the opium den one of the few sites for group interaction and conversation. (Thus it is his lack of interest in opium and the contingent socializing that provides an early clue to Li Ting’s noble origins in Sims’s story.) Some historians, notably Colin Holmes, have argued that the First World War marked a change in attitude towards the Chinese, claiming that belief in Chinese involvement in drug-dealing led to increasing hostility towards the community’s presence in Britain.55 Holmes probably overemphasizes the importance of this discursive shift, in part because he stresses this change over what could be seen as the continuity of Victorian journalistic and fictional representations of the “Cockney Chinatown” as a center of infectious, drug-related vice. Moreover, as James Hevia points out, the emergence and popularity of the antagonistic literary representations of the Chinese that culminated in figures like Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in the 1920s was rooted in older, “widely diffused understandings of the history of the Anglo-Chinese contact in the nineteenth century.”56 Nonetheless, the greater visibility of the Yellow Peril after the First World War also created a greater market for stories about the Chinese and their opium dens.57 It is also important to note that the importation of coolie laborers and the organization against the use of Chinese seamen in the immediate post-war period meant that, for the first time, working-class groups absorbed and reiterated racist attitudes towards the Chinese that middle-class observers had promulgated for several decades (though the extent to which the community in Limehouse adopted the resentment towards Chinese workers seen at the docks is less apparent). Moreover, the clear change in police attitudes towards opium dens in the post-war period also encouraged exaggerated literary depictions of a Chinese criminal underworld; before 1908, especially, they had tolerated the dens but after the war began to close them down and arrest their proprietors. These literary depictions also altered the agency of fiction’s Chinese characters, who went from being

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passive proprietors of opium-smoking establishments to active agents of evil and criminality, aiming to attach British society and incite its downfall. The result was an overtly racist and nationalist strain of fiction, which, unlike the work of contemporaneous writers such as Burke, made no effort to mitigate its prejudices by playing with or reshaping stereotypes about the Chinese or by studying the East End communities where they could be found. At the head of this movement was Sax Rohmer, who published the 1915 novel The Yellow Claw and the 1919 one Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic.58 Originally a journalist, Rohmer was a top-seller in his own time. Like Burke, if Rohmer is remembered today, it is for screen adaptations of his narratives, namely the line of Fu Manchu films – several starring Peter Sellers – based on the Chinese Moriarty he created and Sir Denis Nayland Smith, his Sherlock Holmes clone. These films and many of Rohmer’s later works in the 1920s and 1930s do, indeed, draw force from increased resentment toward and an overall codification of racism directed at the Chinese. Yet Rohmer’s early works such as The Yellow Claw owe as much, if not more, to Victorian writers such as Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle and their formulation of exotic conspiracies. In describing the bespectacled antagonist Ho-Pin as having “a terrifying beetle-like appearance” (106) and “Ho-Pin, the beetlesque” (117), Rohmer neatly combines stereotypes about slit-eyes with a reference to Richard Marsh’s bestselling The Beetle (1897), another text about a mysterious Oriental in London. (Marsh’s less successful 1901 novel The Joss: A Reversion also features Asian characters roaming London to recapture a British man who has escaped from his role as “the Great Joss” in Southeast Asia, where he was progressively mutilated by his handlers to turn him into a grotesque idol.) Rohmer’s tales continue the work of the earlier Yellow Peril invasion novels discussed in Chapter 4. Writers such as Dawe and Shiel adduced criminal elements to the mandarin characters who plot against Britain, although the geography for their novels is as often the West End as the East End. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and The Yellow Wave (1905) also feature East Asian masterminds whose presence prefigures Rohmer’s specific twist on the Chinese drug connection: the involvement of high-status and highly educated Chinese characters, instead of the poor immigrants who comprised the Limehouse Chinese community. Although it does not feature the famed duo, Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw rode the wave of Rohmer’s success with his first Fu Manchu story, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913). The novel presents a tale about high-class opium dens in Limehouse and Paris, in which wealthy customers (mainly

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women, but also a prominent politician) are tricked through blackmail and other means into giving up their money to a wily Chinese crime lord, who is in the process of establishing a worldwide network for such defrauding. The Yellow Claw, the hand that threatens to divert England’s wealth back into the arms from which it originally was stolen by the opium trade, works as a kind of infection, a deadly disease of decadence whose very concealment allows a cycle of blackmail and robbery to be perpetuated. Located in a hidden spot on the Limehouse Causeway with a ginger import business as its front, the subterranean opium den which is the focus of the bulk of the novel’s action becomes a literal representation both of the criminal underworld and of the decaying roots of middle- and upper-class society. The working class – figured largely through the character of the dishonest butler Soames, who later becomes an attendant at the ritzy opium den while hiding from the police to escape prosecution for a murder he did not commit – is motivated by a combination of greed and scorn for a middleclass society that allows itself to be manipulated by the nation’s enemies. Soames’s pointless desire to increase his bank balance and pilfer from his employers draws him in to a world in which the foreign (as non-Western) is decidedly labeled as evil. The novel’s premise, with its international conspiracy to defraud England of its wealth and to simultaneously blackmail politicians over policy issues, allows the latent fear of reverse imperialism to surface prominently; this fear is cemented when the British victims in the novel who are exposed to the Yellow Peril of opium actually turn yellow. Here, too, Rohmer exposes the Chinese community as a natural metaphor for circulation, especially given their main (legal) function in Britain, their involvement in the shipping industry. Rohmer’s circulation is not so much the positive one of wealth, goods, and population within a global economy but the circulation of contagions (racial “impurity,” drugs, etc.) – a direct analogy to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), whose similar economic interests visit England as a plague and destroyer of heterosexual harmony. Regenia Gagnier has shown how Stoker’s novel in part reflects concern about economic takeover from Eastern Europe in the wake of the discovery of oil, or “black blood,” in Romania, and one figured in terms of the disruption of the family and the introduction of deviant sexuality.59 Opium, in Rohmer’s novel, functions similarly to sap the blood of the British middle and upper classes, transforming them quite literally into yellow, desiccated monsters who more than resemble the images of the women Dracula attacks. A similar perversion of family structures and of economic autonomy ensues, sparking hysteria about the flow of capital eastwards.

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Thus Rohmer taps in to both labor controversies (through which the Chinese, despite their incredibly small numbers compared to the Lascars, became the focal point for union cries of stolen jobs) and the discourse on gambling halls (through which the working-class man was said to squander income otherwise destined for wife and family). He adapts the theme of the bleeding of white money into yellow hands for a bourgeois audience by making that audience the purported victim for the opium scheme; where other writers contain these threats to the interaction of the working classes with the Chinese, Rohmer here has them transgress the boundaries of the East End. At the same time, the explicitly sexual nature of the threat being crudely articulated in this and other Rohmer novels serves the dual function of titillating the reader with an elaborate detective plot and of “informing” British society as a whole of the existence of such a threat. Though at the center of The Yellow Claw, middle-class marriages are entirely barren; society’s decadence has perverted both the natural outlet for affection and for wealth (i.e. children). The novel opens with the murder of a beautiful opium addict, who has come to warn a detective writer of his wife’s common plight at the hands of the Chinese syndicate. The discovery of her nearly nude body in the writer’s flat leads to speculation that she is the author’s paramour, giving the murder obvious sexual overtones. When he learns that his society wife has, in fact, not actually been paying visits to a friend in Paris for the last several years (as she claims), he jumps to the immediate conclusion that she is carrying on an extramarital affair. But opium substitutes for this liaison, with similarly destabilizing effects on the family and household. Contaminated as though by syphilis or other venereal disease so central to Victorian plotlines, she must die by the novel’s end to open up a place for Helen, the “deserving woman” who is the daughter of the husband’s closest friend. He, significantly, is a doctor and also the connection between the doomed women and Sir Hugh, the up-and-coming politician and opium addict who is his patient. Sir Hugh’s dissipation and slow death by opium stand in for a type of sexual indiscretion or excess that has direct consequences for Britain as a nation: without the intervention of the police and the incomparable M. Max of Paris, Ho-Pin’s opium conspiracy threatens to strike at the political, as well as the social, core of British society. Rohmer’s linking of sex, drugs, and national security is today a cliché – a commonplace of current discourse on crack and heroin and middle-class addiction to cocaine, and one regularly conscripted to explain American foreign policy interventions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and

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Afghanistan. Yet it is noteworthy for its (unconscious) vision of competing empires, in which the commodity of exchange, opium, provides the opportunity for the Celestial Empire’s revenge and recolonization of the capital taken from it by decades of informal imperialism and “gunboat diplomacy.” The docks, caverns, boats, and other liminal spaces amidst the urban decay of London’s East End – which provide the setting for much of the novel – also suggest the way in which the modern city is a porous space allowing for unparalleled concealment and conspiracy distinctly tied to notions of working-class revolt. Cars and trains, and in fact all means of entrance into and egress from the East End and the underground opium dens, consequently play an important role. Clients must be escorted into this alien world and can traverse its boundaries only with the help of the semi-Oriental Mr. King (a Greek who serves as a front man for the business) and his cohorts; a luxurious black limousine (like a hearse) picks clients up at a train station and transports them blindfolded to the East End.60 These clients are culpable in that they court disaster by entering the slums and putting themselves in contact with the contagion and urban decay that then infects them morally and physically. The “contaminating” Chinese presence, however, roams freely over the urban landscape of London, ensnaring its wealthy clientele at home, in their own neighborhoods, where they feel most secure. Unlike Burke, who lays claim to membership in East End society, Rohmer as an outsider proves ultimately concerned with reinforcing ideas of race and class containment – with the closing of the urban center’s lacunae. His story seems inspired by an actual arrest made during the First World War and described by his friend Captain Edward Tupper, national organizer for the anti-Chinese National Union of Seamen and a key proponent of anti-Chinese racism in the 1920s, in his 1938 book Seamen’s Torch.61 Tupper reports a meeting during the war with a police official, after a Chinese man in Poplar had been fined £300 for opium possession: Chief-Inspector Yeo – whom I knew very well, and whom I had helped to run to earth several undesirables – declared that this yellow man was merely the agent of a rich syndicate in England. This syndicate was distributing opium and its deadly derivatives throughout the West End; young officers, young women, and middle-aged men, racked by the nervous strain of war, were learning to “kiss the cup” – smoke opium. In this was a threat against national life which might, in the long run, bring about a more devastating state of affairs than even the loss of the War could bring. (165)

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Given Tupper’s racist, anti-Chinese stance, the accuracy of the comments he makes about the Chinese is questionable, but the quotation gives some indication of the currency of conspiracy theories involving the Chinese, as well as of Rohmer’s recycling of them. Burke’s narratives were essentially private, in that they discuss the interaction of specific personages and the consequences of oppression on individual characters. In contrast, Rohmer’s invest in the public and collective effect of the Chinese presence. Not only in The Yellow Claw, but also throughout the Fu Manchu series, Rohmer invokes conspiracies, murder, and sensation so as to draw the middle-class reading public into the “national” threats being voiced. Rohmer capitalizes on the working-class problem of substance abuse by transforming it into a more generalized, deadly anxiety about cultural interaction. In this novel, the neat collapsing of the “East” of the East End with the “East” of the all-inclusive Orient demarcated by Said and others functions not as it does in Burke to expose the effects of institutionalized poverty, but rather to incite new modes of containment, assuring that East and West shall never be allowed to meet. Yet despite these differences, with their emphases on danger, on street life, and on urban landscape, Burke and Rohmer come to embody a critical shift that occurs in the first decades of the twentieth century, one often identified as the shift to modernism (though neither of these works are typical of high modernism in their stylistic concerns). Burke in particular highlights the urban, disjointed character of narrative and nature through the flâneur-like quality of his fiction – and especially his journalistic wanderings through London that appeared in Nights in Town: A London Autobiography (1915). As with his contemporaries Jean Rhys – in such works as Quartet (1928) and Voyage in the Dark (1934) – and Virginia Woolf – in particular in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) – Burke presents a sort of vagabond, aimlessly wandering about the streets of London, who serves both to chart the city in its most intimate and secret nooks for the reader and to expose his own sense of placelessness. There is an insistence on modernity as an urban phenomenon and on the place of the author as firmly located within this urban setting. The modern lies in a renewed awareness of the author as politician and in a rejection of the pastoral setting that epitomizes much of previous literature (hence Burke’s ironic scorn for the trappings of spring in “The Paw”). Where earlier Victorian industrial fiction presents the city itself as the problem, Burke blames the educated and the middle-class consumer. He further argues that the dire situation in the slums may provide the conditions for the incubation not of the slit-eyed mongrel of Arnold White’s

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fantasies, but of the artist. In “The Hunger for Beauty,” a 1928 essay that explains his aesthetic and political principles, Burke comments that beauty has more force than Marx, and is far more important to the poor who must sacrifice for it than to the comfortable: “In every man – black savage or white scholar – lives the hunger for what we call beauty. It is the essence of all noble religions; and it is this hunger which compels unlearned people to desire coloured vases and strident landscapes and pictures of impossibly angelic children feeding scarlet robins.”62 Implicit to this notion of leveling is an assumption that the aesthetic is the true realm for social change and can be accessible to all across class boundaries. “The world will never be remoulded by politicians or scholars or parading preachers,” writes Burke. “Whatever of fairness it holds to-day has been given to it by the artists, the creators of ideas, the dreamers of beauty; and the more their message spreads the cleaner will the world become” (10–11). Scholarship and learning have little to do with this message, he continues, “for many highly educated people are insensible to true beauty, while many of the uneducated – inarticulate artists – are keenly sensible to it” (11). Ultimately, what makes these and related fictions about the London Chinese so compelling is their insistence that London’s cultural foundations have become unstuck, and that therein lies a potential for dynamic reconstruction no longer tied exclusively to middle-class ideologies. As Burke says of the East India Docks in Nights in Town (1915), here you find the scum of the world’s worst countries . . . [the] fusion of blood and race and creed. A degenerate dross it is, but, do you know, I cannot say that I don’t prefer it to the well-spun gold that is flung from the Empire on boatrace nights. Place these fellows against our blunt backgrounds, under the awful mystery of the City’s night, and they present the finest spectacle that London affords.63

Beyond the spectacle that narrative renderings of such scenes of a multicultural and vibrant city afford their readers is a vision of East London – and not Whitehall and Westminster – as the true heart of empire, as the point from which the narrativization of empire and of the Orient begins. At the start of “The Chink and the Child,” Burke explains that people tell his tale of star-crossed love and lovers not only in the vicinity of the Ratcliffe Causeway and Pennyfields, where it occurred, but also in “far away Tai-ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder wither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually” (13). That what emanates from these docks, alongside tea and cotton and the other commodities of imperial

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exchange, is a tragic love story is itself a synecdoche of the story of empire. It is the story of complex, fractured unions between East and West, natives and aliens, the story of new forms of human affection and human suffering that have and must always be the witting and unwitting mission of empire as it extends itself across time and space, across alien and familiar landscapes.

Conclusion No rest for the West

. . . he answers the questions that should concern all of us: Will this turn out to be the Chinese century? Should we be scared? Or will the Red Dragon crash and burn? Back cover to the DVD of Niall Ferguson’s China: Triumph and Turmoil (2012)

After the Second World War, the hub for London’s Chinese community moved definitively from the East to the West End, from an area connected with global shipping and poverty to a district tied to entertainment and eating. Much of the fast-growing Chinese community today – estimated in 2011 as 2.2 percent of the population for London and 0.83 percent for England and Wales – has no direct historical relationship with its Limehouse progenitors.1 Yet popular culture has still transferred many stereotypes about Limehouse to the new Chinatown. Nor has the move from the docks to Soho altered the way in which London’s Chinatown continues to function as a portal for how Britain understands China. Niall Ferguson opens his recent documentary for Channel 4 television, China: Triumph and Turmoil (2012), with a stroll through Gerrard Street. “Thirty years ago, when I was seventeen,” he narrates, “the word ‘Chinese’ meant takeaway chicken chow mein, otherwise known by the thinly disguised racist epithet chinkie.”2 Despite the need to immediately disavow the potential racism of how he frames the program’s content by calling attention to it, the opening shots placing Ferguson in the landscape of a British ethnic enclave begs this question: Would a documentary on India similarly set its opening moments in Southall or Bradford? The answer is probably no, and the difference in treatment partly reflects the distinction the late Victorians made between an India within the “Greater British” fold and a China outside and hostile to it. What this directorial choice makes clear, in other words, is that Ferguson’s (hi)story is 224

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not one of China, but of what “China” means to Britain and America. More than his academic credentials, the diaspora and an anecdote about an Americanized Chinese food imported into Britain establish him as a cultural mediator – one who is himself situated between the US and the UK – entitled to narrate the story of China to the West. I began this study by asking “why China matters.” In recent years, the answer has become increasingly obvious. From an American or European vantage, China seems to be having its global moment. Now, as much as 120 years ago, the “awakening” of China is big news – then from the decline of the Qing dynasty, today from decades of communist slumber. What may be less obvious is the many convergences between how China and the Chinese figured in the Victorian imagination and how they figure today. How and why have images of China as ossified, despotic, and cruel continued to circulate? How have stereotypes about China and the Chinese been transformed; grafted onto new economic, political, and cultural realities; or persisted despite these realities? Why does the motif of “the rise of China” – a dubious phrase at best – persist? After all, China was no more isolated and hermetically sealed during the twentieth century than it was during the nineteenth century, when Britain and others felt the need to open it up “oyster-like.” Although notable exceptions include the novelist Xiaolu Guo and “Madame Miaow,” aka Anna Chen, auteur for “The Steampunk Opium Wars,”3 another question is: Why, in Britain if not in North America, are self-definitions by China and Chinese diasporic communities powerfully eclipsed by these rigid tropes? Finally, why does “China” continue to exert an unsettling influence over the “West”? The consensus about China, from at least the nineteenth century, is that big is bad. As in the invasion novels, China’s large population, especially, becomes a mechanism through which to focalize the threat of the “rise of Asia.” The invasion novels configure the Chinese threat as Asia exceeding its borders and boundaries, and excess remains a dominant trope in contemporary representations of China as “teeming.” The notion of China’s population “problem” is again predicated on a dualism revolving around this excess: on the one hand, the potential threat that these population pressures pose to the West from within China (internal excess), and on the other, the closely related threat that China poses through its potential to exceed its national or regional boundaries. The Western imaginary continues to tie China to notions of excess in reactionary discourses about emigration. Even when it seems most sympathetic to individual Chinese people caught up in the global dynamics of population shifts, it demonizes China by essentializing Chinese standards of human rights as fundamentally inferior to Western ones, especially through the supposed de-emphasis of individuality and lack of commitment to liberty.

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Representations of “snakeheads” as ruthless people smugglers bring together this idea that the Chinese have a fundamentally different approach to the individual and the sense that China’s global interconnectedness is criminal and oppressive. These gangs evade the Western nation state and its ability to police borders, all presumably with sub-rosa support from Chinese officials at the local, if not national, level. When twenty-three illegal Chinese immigrants working as cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay in February 2004, it was “gangmaster” Lin Liang Ren on whom the blame was pinned, rather than the market forces that demanded prices so cheap that lives were put at risk. He was sentenced to fourteen years in jail on twenty-one counts of manslaughter, despite protesting “that the ultimate responsibility lay with the clients, blaming frequent price-cutting by middlemen for the harsh regime.”4 The incident led to the passage that same year of the Gangmaster (Licensing) Act. Response to the tragedy uniformly sees it in terms of globalization. In the 2005 Richard Dimbleby lecture, Sir Ian Blair, then head of the Metropolitan Police, commented: “The inquiry into that stretched from overcrowded housing in Liverpool to the role of triad gangs in China: a single investigation” (Guardian, November 16, 2005). Nick Broomfield’s sensitive 2006 film Ghosts had the laudable goal of exposing what he sees as a modern form of slavery, but an unfortunate corollary was the continued association of the Chinese character with the inhumanity of peopletrafficking. In Kevin Littlewood’s equally sensitive “On Morecambe Bay” (2012), nominated for the “Best Original Song” category of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2012, Christy Moore sings, “Their final phonecalls halfway round the world crossed / As between the river estuaries they raced the tide and lost.”5 The song’s first-person narrator pities the workers’ “dreamless” lives “not worth dying for.” He remembers having seen them sending money orders of “all their hard earned pay,” an indicator of “Tales of crossing borders on the road to Morecambe Bay.” Yet the song lambasts neither the middlemen nor supermarkets for their complicity. Instead, it points the finger at treacherous nature – with a refrain of “for the Tide is The Devil” – and other, greedy Chinese: “In Fujian and Zeeland they mourn their next of kin / Gang masters with snake tattoos call money loans back in. . .” The impression that China constitutes a threat to a globalized world via commodity exchange has taken a decidedly environmental spin in recent years. On the one hand, an exotic China offers a positive cornucopia, as in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). TCM provides herbs, drugs, and treatment methods like acupuncture to feed the complementary health

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market or to give hope to the seriously ill (cancer patients, early AIDS patients using Compound Q, etc.). On the other hand, Europe and America view China as posing a significant environmental and health threat. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), bird flu, and the H1N1 swine flu are all associated with China. The medically sound theory that the close proximity between livestock and people in China may present an opportunity for microbes to species-jump is easily misconstrued. The 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Britain featured lurid headlines and pictures of sweet-and-sour pork after claims that illegally imported meat intended for a Chinese restaurant had brought the disease to Britain.6 The ensuing media storm led to a significant downturn in the Chinese restaurant industry. Amidst allegations of racism, Anna Chen and the Chinese community organized a protest march on April 4, 2001, ending at Downing Street outside the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.7 Tellingly, the title of the thread about these allegations on the “British Chinese Online Forums” website is “Foot ’n’ Mouth – The Yellow Peril.”8 A scaremongering article by Paul Harris and Anthony Browne published in the Guardian on April 1, 2001 screamed “Smuggled Meat Threatens UK with Catastrophic Viruses.” The article knit together ebola, the Nipa virus, and various other dangerous pathogens with the “Chinese connection” to foot and mouth (specifically naming two Chinese supermarkets where illegal meat could be found) and to illegal bushmeat sold at Brixton Market. African airlines were described as “culprits.” The article implied, in no uncertain terms, that Britain’s inability to control its borders and monitor meat importations, the desire by “ethnic minorities to enjoy traditional delicacies,” and the Asian and African catering industries were to blame. Browne and Harris quoted a spokesperson for a logistics company at Heathrow as saying, “If a part of the airport becomes contaminated with any form of virus it could easily leap between continents in a matter of hours.” No comment was sought from any Asian or African restaurants, shopkeepers, or community leaders. Browne – who also published a report in the Observer entitled “The Last Days of a White World” (September 3, 2000) – is now the head of the British Bankers Association. Of more recent origin is the melamine scandal. Likewise, snakehead fish, an invasive species in the US, has been linked to illegal importation for an underground Chinese market, according to a New York Times article entitled “A Delicacy on Chinatown Plates, but a Killer in Water.”9 However valid the concerns surrounding these issues, they are collectively subsumed into the idea that China’s arrival in the “West” constitutes an embodied attack on “Western” lifestyles.

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As in the nineteenth century, the mirror discourse for the threat of China at home is the threat China poses to the rest of the world from within. Linking China’s internal labor force with the world economy and the pressures it exerts on global markets, this formulation recalls Marx’s pronouncements in the 1850s (and Malthus’s theory of exponential population growth), with multinational corporations – in collaboration with the nation state – standing in for nineteenth-century imperial practice. Ferguson takes up this idea of China as the new center in his documentary, appropriately subtitled “Triumph and Turmoil” and labeled “ill-informed racist nonsense” by Anna Chen in her online review.10 “We’re having to kowtow to new Asian masters,” he intones, only a minute into the program, no doubt consciously echoing Britain’s late-eighteenth-century “problem” of establishing diplomatic ties with China when the Macartney mission refused to perform this obeisance to the Emperor Qianglong. Ferguson proceeds to reinstill the stereotype of topsy-turvy China: “and yet the more I look at China, the more incomprehensible it is.” His documentary revolves around the potential of Chinese entropy and its significance for the West. Consciously reformulating nineteenth-century assumptions about China as always on the point of disintegration, Ferguson stretches the principle of entropy back to the formation of a unified Chinese state under Qin Shi Huang. He sums up 2,000 years of Chinese history as having “one purpose”: to prevent its empire from falling apart. History has never been so teleological. Autarky is the hallmark of the Chinese mode of being, according to Ferguson, a phenomenon he juxtaposes in a predictable but nonetheless distasteful manner with a Western investment in individual freedom. “Individual freedom seems to count for less” in China is his dubious claim. Equally disturbing is his repeated paraphrase of Marx; China, he avers, is “haunted by the spectre of distintegration.” The implicit assumption underlining all these ideas is that China itself is the specter haunting Europe, not with communism but with a Chinese worldview of collectivism and the suppression of individual liberties so crucial to the so-called Western tradition. Ferguson’s articulation of the “Asian values” argument thus emphasizes its irreducible difference from democratic ones. Collectivity and autarky also provide a means of harmonizing China’s diverse regional and ethnic differences into a single fused identity; the documentary visually encodes this centralization of power in shots of the anonymous exterior of a Communist Party building in Beijing that Ferguson is not supposed to film. Despite his references to China’s “minority” groups and his images of Chinese Muslims, his dubious, longdurée projection of the historical expansion of China in terms of a Han

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majority “enveloping” non-Han minorities yields the overriding message that there is just one China. Yet, as in so many nineteenth-century narratives, for Ferguson, China’s biggest threat to its own “rise” is China itself. “What would it be like to live in a Chinese-dominated world? Should we be scared? Or could the Red Dragon crash and burn in a recurrence of the chaos that has devastated China in the past?” he asks, before mentioning a figure of 16 million lives lost in the White Lotus rebellion (1796–1804) – later said to be “running amok over a huge sweep of the empire” – and 20 million killed in the Taiping Rebellion.11 The main cause for China’s entropy in the past, present, and future? Corruption on a massive, unimaginable scale. Ferguson typifies the way in which the Chinese state continues to serve as the sign of difference. That state is widely assumed to be all-controlling in ways that Western governments no longer are, having in many cases divested themselves of ownership of their infrastructure. The media is awash with articles about how China is buying up Africa, beating the West at its own game of postcolonial “development”; how China is snapping up public utilities and public debt across the Western world; and how China is leveraging its considerable assets to prevent recession for its own people at whatever cost to its trading partners. Where once the world supposedly witnessed Anglobalization, now it is witnessing Zhonglobalization. The Middle Kingdom is back in the middle, and what it means to be “Chinafied” remains a burning question. Widely bruited anxieties about China’s “stranglehold” on the production and dissemination of rare earths – its hoarding of supplies, its refusal to export them to Japan during a recent spat, and so on – are predicated on the similar idea that China harbors nefarious plans to dominate the global economy and manipulate it to its own benefit. Currently, the World Trade Organization is investigating complaints from the US and the European Union because, according to the Financial Times, “China’s grip on rare earths supply – and Beijing’s ability to halt exports at will – has long alarmed foreign governments, who have been racing to develop alternative sources to break China’s monopoly.”12 What is striking about the rare earths coverage is its replication of the arguments that led to the original Western incursion in China in the 1830s–1850s, its language of “grip,” “stranglehold,” and “monopoly,” and the need to force China to trade in the way that the West wants. Are we seeing another version of the infamous “trade imbalance” that led European merchants to foster a demand for illegal opium so as to counter the cost of China’s monopoly on tea?

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Recently, companies have begun to cite technological espionage as a reason to move factories in China back to their home country, reasserting the notion that the West is the site of creativity and East Asia the home of cheap imitation – something even Ferguson denies. “[C]ontrary to the view that China is condemned to remain an assembly line for products ‘designed in California,’” he noted in his November 2010 piece in the Wall Street Journal, “the country is innovating more. . . This is part of a wider story of Eastern ascendancy.” Nevertheless, Ferguson begins his piece by raising anxiety about paramount leader Hu Jintao’s belief that “We are the masters now.” He ends it with these intentionally disturbing words, words that retain the problematic pupil–master analogy so prominent in nineteenthcentury Asiatic invasion novels: “The gentlemen in Beijing may not be the masters just yet. But one thing is certain: They are no longer the apprentices.” Another touchstone for anxieties about China’s rise is the area of human rights. Many in Asia have long claimed that the West uses human rights as a stick with which to beat China, citing Tibet as one example, in a pattern that dates back to the nineteenth-century obsession with Chinese methods of torture. More recently, attention has focused on workers’ rights in companies contracted to manufacture for large corporations like Apple, such as Foxconn. In March 2012, the Fair Labor Association released a damning report on Foxconn’s labor practices, shortly after a long piece on why Apple does not manufacture in the US appeared in the New York Times (January 21, 2012). While there is no disputing the significant problems with Foxconn’s record, how some in the media represent the company is another matter. With headquarters in Taiwan and huge factories dotting China and other “developing” countries, such as Brazil, Foxconn brings together communist China, capitalist China, Western consumers’ desires for cheap goods, and corporate greed, all linked to high US unemployment and the issue of human rights as symbolic of China’s incomplete appropriation of “modernity.” A focal point in media discussions of Foxconn has been workers who commit suicide by jumping and the company’s response of putting netting to break their fall. Whatever a person’s belief in the notion of universal human rights, the association between suicide and the Chinese still raises the problematic idea that what it means to be human in China differs in unacceptable ways from Western standards. Chinese companies, if not the Chinese state, still occupy a despotic role, suppressing individual rights and reiterating that the Chinese laborer is a mechanized body.

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As in Victorian times, these economic anxieties about China’s power translate directly into cultural representations. Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing, published in English in 2010, juxtaposes a nineteenth-century narrative of Chinese indenture with a modern narrative involving the grandson of a returned laborer, Ya Ru. The novel’s villain, Ya Ru is an unscrupulous businessman who plans to develop large tracts of Africa using hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers. The novel’s drawing together of narrative strands that bridge the nineteenth century and the contemporary is in keeping with the more generalized idea that Chinese diaspora not only constitutes a threat, but that Chinese people have a “race” allegiance that trumps any loyalty to their “host” country. Not only is this formulation widely divergent from the themes of novels by writers of Chinese descent that similarly juxtapose the two periods – Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, Fae M. Ng’s Bone, etc. – it is also consistent with the logic behind the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Importantly, the Indian diaspora is rarely viewed in this light. Another good example is the BBC’s Sherlock, a neo-Victorian phenomenon that walks a thin line between its claims to offer a send-up of the many stereotypes it recalls and a reassertion of their cultural force, as my perhaps unsympathetic analysis below shows.13 The series stars Benedict Cumberbatch as an updated Sherlock Holmes, the world’s only “consulting detective,” and Martin Freeman as his stalwart sidekick. Sherlock recycles Doyle’s original formula of a male mastermind whose superior relationship to the economy of knowledge complements his marginalized position within both the social order and law enforcement. In keeping with the spirit of Doyle’s original, this Sherlock’s alluring machismo has to ground itself through the specter of imperialism; in one scene intended to be humorous in the second-season episode “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock rescues Irene Adler (Lara Pulver) from being beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan while disguised, Richard-Burton like. The first season’s final episode was entitled “The Great Game.” China and Chinese are at the core of the second episode of the first series, “The Blind Banker,” written by Steve Thompson and directed by Euros Lyn.14 It premiered on August 1, 2010, with an initial viewership of 6.442 million, rising to 8.66 million for that week.15 The plot revolves around the mysterious deaths of the head of the Hong Kong desk of the Shad Sanderson investment bank, Eddie Van Coon, and a journalist, Brian Lukis. The link between the men is that both are members of an “ancient crime syndicate” (61) – the Black Lotus tong, a “vast network” with

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“[t]housands of operatives” (103) – involved in antiquities smuggling. One of them has stolen a jade pin worth £9 million and originally belonging to a Chinese empress from the tong, although he is unaware of its value. Neatly conflating transnational theft with the world of international finance, the program implicitly references the history of Anglo-Chinese banking that made HSBC one of the world’s largest corporations, alongside the corporate greed exposed by the credit crunch. As in invasion novels, it is the Chinese ability to penetrate where they ought not be able to go that constitutes China’s mystery and threat. Black Lotus member Zhi Zhu (meaning “spider”) penetrates the inner sanctum of the bank – the office of founder William Shad high up in the former Natwest Tower – to leave his message in a strange cipher subsequently discovered to be the ancient Hangzhou (actually Suzhou) numbering system. As in many nineteenthcentury narratives, Britain’s own role as a drug-pusher in China is projected onto the Chinese themselves. Drugs are one of the business activities of the suggestively named Black Lotus (lotus-eating, death, etc.); the name also encodes a potential reference to the White Lotus movement. As with Ferguson, the episode must frame “true” China by way of Chinatown. The beautiful Soo Lin Yao (Gemma Chan), described in the shooting draft as “a fragile little doll” (1), improbably lives off Gerrard Street, above the “Lucky Cat” curiosity shop central to the smuggling subplot. To hammer home the point that Chinatown is more China than London, when Sherlock and Watson visit the area on the trail of Van Coon’s murderer, the soundtrack plays eerie music while the camera lingers on the sign of Gerrard Street’s Far East Restaurant. It is in Chinatown that Oriental knowledge’s opacity dissolves: Sherlock figures out that the cipher is a numbering system after Watson finds it scrawled on a price tag at the Lucky Cat. The show opens with a scene featuring Soo Lin. Soo Lin is Zhi Zhu’s sister and a curator at the National Antiquities Museum, a stand-in for the British Museum. She is performing a tea ceremony for visitors using one of the collection’s teapots. This moment sets in train several associations. First is the amalgamation of East Asia: The Western mind associates the tea ceremony more with Japan than with China. Later, “Blade Runner” origami black lotuses (as Anna Chen calls them) are left on the bodies of the tong’s victims. Second is the association of China with anachronistic time, following on from the idea that the cipher, like the abacus, is an “ancient device” coeval with modernity to the Chinese. The teapot bolsters the idea that preservation of the past and of tradition are central to Chinese culture. “The great artisans say – the more the tea pot is used, the more beautiful it

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becomes,” says Soo Lin. The pot’s lustrous patina comes from the accretion of time – its continued use as a utilitarian object is what renders it beautiful, as opposed to the beauty of the modern and the new. In the script, ten out of the ten times the word “ancient” appears, it is used in connection with China, among them “ancient device” (35), “ancient number system” (45), “ancient Chinese dialect” (45, 84A), “mystic ancient runes . . . Chinese numbers” (55), “Ancient relics of China” (69), and “Ancient Chinese escapology act” (78). Finally, the disappearance of the curator shortly after this scene paves the way for the episode’s introduction of triads and globally interconnected East–West movements of goods and capital. Soo Lin must be connected to this world through a plotline that elicits audience sympathy for her but still tars her (and China) as criminal. In her self-narration shortly before being murdered, she explains that her parents were killed in the “demonstrations. 1989” – i.e. in the furor around Tiananmen Square widely seen in the West as the autocratic suppression of young China’s striving for democracy. She and her brother were forced to join the Black Lotus to avoid becoming ragged street urchins in “Yellow Dragon City.” “Two orphans,” she says. “We had no choice. We could work for the Black Lotus or starve on the streets like beggars.” Instead of engaging in prostitution, she becomes a smuggler, carrying heroin to Hong Kong. Britain, predictably, and its educational opportunities, offer an escape: “I’m not proud. I’m ashamed of how I lived. But I managed to get out. I managed to leave that life behind me. I came to England – studied; night school. They gave me a job here. Everything was good. A new life” (63). However, what proves China’s threat is that escape is not actually possible in a globalized world. “But they never really let you leave. A small community like ours – they are never very far away” (63). Never mind that Soo Lin has chosen to live in Chinatown or that the writer makes the shop below her flat the transfer point for the smuggling operation. The message is clear: China is not only dangerous, criminal, and globalized, it also never suspends its vigilance and control over its citizens, whether at home or in the diaspora. This message may jar with claims by Sherlock that the opera/acrobatics performance that legitimates the tong members’ presence in London takes place because exit visas are scarce – despite the more likely scenario that Britain has onerous and complicated procedures for Chinese citizens to gain entry.16 Yet, as the reference to Tiananmen makes clear, it is fundamentally the Chinese state that constitutes the threat. Before she can narrate her history, however, viewers must be induced to sympathize with her through a scene of the white heteronormative male

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desire of a young, British postgraduate, Andy Galbraith (Al Weaver). Galbraith works alongside Soo Lin, and his concern about her disappearance shortly after she mysteriously rebuffs his advances helps Sherlock to solve the case. The difference between China and Britain is encoded during the interchange when he approaches her. “Four hundred years old, [and] they’re letting you use it to make yourself a brew,” he says, before inviting her not for tea, but to the pub. (Much later, Sherlock will surprise Soo Lin while she is hiding in the museum by asking her if she wants a biscuit with her tea.) Galbraith’s open desire for Soo Lin – so much so that his boss suggests she might have quit her job because of unwanted attention – intentionally contrasts with the not so sublimated homoerotic dynamic between Sherlock and Watson. (The series has Watson constantly protest that he is not gay.) The key to the plot is an Oriental mystery – the book “cipher” incongruously graffitied on London’s landscape – rather than the Ku Klux Klan signs of Doyle’s original. (Sherlock himself is assisted by a modern-day Baker Street Irregular in the form of a Banksy-style graffiti artist.) Of course, the key to the cipher is the city itself. The book needed to decode it is a London A to Z, while the local headquarters of the tong are in a disused tramway tunnel, signaling China’s occupation of an anachronistic space directly linked to urbanization and rapid transit. In perfect neo-Victorian fashion, solving the cipher links together regressive gender politics with Orientalist fantasy when Watson’s date Sarah sees what Holmes cannot – that Soo Lin Yao has given them a Rosetta stone by translating a few words of the cipher. Later, the episode punishes Sarah for outfoxing Sherlock when she and Watson are kidnapped by Shan, the female Black Lotus General. Shan has been trailing Holmes and Watson to try and find the location of the missing hairpin. However, her grip on knowledge is unequal to Sherlock’s, and she mistakes Watson for Sherlock. The tied-up Sarah is placed in the scenario of an acrobatic act seen earlier. Shan pierces a sandbag controlling a weight that, when empty, will propel a dagger to kill Sarah. “Everything in the west has its price,” Shan tells Watson in staccato English. “So. The price for her life. Information” (94). The stage is set for Sherlock’s last-minute rescue of the damsel in distress from this deadly penile penetration, which instead strikes Zhi Zhu. All this action relies on Sherlock’s prior interference with Watson’s goal to “get off with Sarah” (76A). Women, in this program, are educated, capable professionals – Sarah is a GP, Soo Lin a museum curator – but they can never measure up to Sherlock. A running joke in the series is Sherlock’s manipulation

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the pathologist “Miss” Hooper – as she is identified in the script – because she has a crush on him. In what Chen sees as the “Anna May Wong Must Die” no-miscegenation syndrome – and as punishment for her drugsmuggling past – the show kills off Soo Lin. And what has happened to the jade hairpin that the banker-cum-smuggler Eddie Van Coon has stolen from the Black Lotus? He has given it as a gift to his PA and lover Amanda after she dumps him: amanda: I thought . . . he was taking me for granted. He didn’t appreciate me. (Sighs. Finally admits. . .) Stood me up once too often. We’d plan to go away for a weekend and then suddenly he’d leave. Fly off to China at a moment’s notice. (100)

The episode seems to think it embodies certain feminist values, only to undermine them in reality; again, this undermining takes place against the backdrop of the contrast between ancient China and modern Britain. In the script, Sherlock recovers the pin and hands it to the (female) museum director in front of a mannequin of the Empress Wu Zeitian, described as the “Only woman to rule Imperial China. . . Nothing of hers has survived” (102). Unlike in the plot of Collins’s The Moonstone, here the Asians do not get their own back – their criminality types them as illegitimate possessors of what is now universal human patrimony, more appropriately stored alongside the rest of the loot in the museum. Wu Zeitian may have died 1,400 years ago during the Tang dynasty, but the context is more Cixi and the Qings. Later, Watson hands the money Sherlock has earned from Van Coon’s employer for solving the corporate security breach to Andy. He suggests that Andy donate the money to his employer, so that the museum will make a benefactor’s plaque in Soo Lin’s name. Unable to consummate a relationship with Andy, Soo Lin literally becomes a part of the museum’s dead culture, instead. In the actual filmed version, however, we never know the fate of the pin, beyond seeing the headline “Who Wants to Be a Million-Hair?” on the cover of the Daily Express while Watson and Sherlock are eating breakfast the next day. The episode ends with a reversal of Dawe’s formula in The Yellow Man of “a murder society of yellow men … who willed a crime in China and had it executed in a country town in England.” Shan, now back in China, is on Skype with a man whom the audience knows to be Moriarty. “Without you – without your assistance – we would not have found passage into London. You have my thanks,” she tells M (104), shortly before the final

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blackout as the camera shows the red dot of a laser guide on her forehead. Moriarty may be the bigger villain for Britain, more ruthless and more global in the truest sense than the Black Lotus. But the fact remains: it is through China and the questions China’s presence raises about nation, allegiance, and wealth that the series introduces him. Much as it did 170 years earlier with the First Opium War, or as it did during the Cold War when Samuel Huntington formulated his “clash of civilizations” model, as a narrative entity, “China” is still the “rest” that troubles the “West.”

Notes

INTRODUCTION: TOPSY-TURVY BRITAIN AND CHINA 1. Julian Croskey, “The S. G.”: A Romance of Peking (London: Lamley & Co., 1900), 107–108. 2. Walter Henry Medhurst, The Foreigner in Far Cathay (London: Edward Stanford, 1872), 172–173. Medhurst, a longtime diplomat and son of a missionary to China, was later involved in organizing Chinese emigration in connection with the British North Borneo Company in the 1880s. For biographical details, see Charles Alexander Harris, rev. T. G. Otte, “Medhurst, Sir Walter Henry,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com. 3. Betty [pseud.], Intercepted Letters: A Mild Satire on Hongkong Society (Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, 1905), 79–80. 4. See James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenthcentury China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11–12. 5. For details on Beresford and his mission, see Geoffrey Bennett, Charlie B: A Biography of Admiral Lord Beresford of Metemmeh and Curraghmore (London: Peter Dawnway, 1968), 196–225. 6. Charles Beresford, The Break-up of China with an Account of Its Present Commerce, Currency, Waterway, Armies, Railways, Politics and Future Prospects (London: Harper & Brothers, 1899), 1–2. 7. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 3. 8. I use the phrase “the people identified with that space” because even for the Victorians, an ethnic Chinese identity was not coextensive with the territory within the Chinese Empire. 9. George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 1936, in Saros Cowasjee, ed., The Oxford Anthology of Raj Stories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 281–287. 10. See Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). In her chapter “The Birth of a Super-sign,” Liu shows how worried the British were about whether the Chinese government referred to them in derogatory terms and the immense effort they put into controlling what Chinese words could be used in official communiqués. 237

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11. Friedrich Engels, letter to N. F. Danielson, September 22, 1892, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 311. 12. See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 174–208. 13. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the period which initiated modern contact between Britain and China; the Macartney mission of 1792–1794 epitomized Enlightenment Europe’s new form of encounter with the Chinese authorities and paved the way for a boom in governmental, trade, and consumer interest in China, encompassing such areas as gardening, porcelain, and chinoiserie. A number of scholars have explored how Britain configured China as a site for these multiple interests – and as an aid to British self-definition within an emerging modern European nation-state. See David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Chi-ming Yang, “Virtue’s Vogues: Eastern Authenticity and the Commodification of Chinese-ness on the 18th-century Stage,” Comparative Literature Studies 39.4 (2002): 326–346; Adrian Hsia, ed., The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998); Robert Batchelor, “Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the British Nation through China,” in Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Robert Batchelor, “On the Movement of Porcelains: Rethinking the Birth of Consumer Society as Interactions of Exchange Networks, 1600–1750,” in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 95–121; and Jeng-Guo S. Chen, “The British View of Chinese Civilization and the Emergence of Class Consciousness,” Eighteenth Century 45.2 (2004): 193–206. On the Romantics, see Nigel Leask’s chapter on De Quincey and Coleridge in British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially 217–220 and his conception of the “global nervous system or free market” (219); Josephine McDonagh, “Opium and the Imperial Imagination,” in Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, eds., Reviewing Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 116–133; and Althea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1968). 14. Bernard Porter, The Absent-minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5. 16. Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xvii. 17. BRIC is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. “Chindia” is a coinage from 2004 to describe the combined economic force of India and

Notes to pages 12–16

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

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China. On the concept of Chindia, see Peter Engardio, ed., Chindia: How China and India Are Revolutionizing Global Business (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007). Many contemporary Indian historians dislike the political implications of the terms “Indian Mutiny” and “Sepoy Rebellion” to describe the conflict of 1857, with some preferring to refer to it as the First War of Independence. Although these names are problematic, I use them in this book because they were the names by which the Victorians universally referred to the conflict. Qtd. in Karl Marx, “The New Chinese War,” New York Daily Tribune, September 27, 1859, in Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, 204. Charles Wentworth Dilke, “Preface to First Edition,” 1868, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries. With Additional Chapters on English Influence in Japan and China and on Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements, 8th edn. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1885). Frederick Wilkin Iago Airey makes this claim in Pidgin Inglis Tails and Others (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1906), 8. Amitav Ghosh’s historical novel about the eve of the Opium Wars, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2008), shows pidgin’s universality as a language of exchange by having his African American protagonist learn it in order to communicate with his Indian shipmates. Albert Barrère and Charles G. Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant Embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian Slang, Pidgin English, Tinkers’ Jargon and Other Irregular Phraseology (Edinburgh: The Ballantyne Press, 1889), vol. i: xxi. Headed for much of the period by Sir Robert Hart and staffed almost exclusively by Europeans and Americans until the late nineteenth century, the IMCS was the Chinese government’s principal source of revenue until after the First World War. The Customs Service was organized by Sir Rutherford Alcock first in Shanghai and then in all of the treaty ports and was “superintended by a British Inspector-General at Peking, and officered, even down to tide-waiters, by foreigners of all nations,” as Medhurst notes in The Foreigner in Far Cathay (54). On this plot, see Rachel Bright, “‘Irregular Unions’: Alicia Bewicke Little’s A Marriage in China and British–Chinese Relations in the Late-Nineteenth Century,” Schuylkill 5.1 (2002): 38–53. James Dalziel, Chronicles of a Crown Colony (Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1907), 35. Examples of this focus on opium include Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Curtis Marez’s initial two chapters of Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Marez, “The Other Addict: Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smoke Screen,” ELH 64.1 (1997): 257–287; Terry M. Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Jeremy Tambling, “Opium, Wholesale, Resale, and for Export: On Dickens and China,” Dickens Quarterly 21.1 (2004): 28–43 and 21.2 (2004): 104– 113; Joaquim Stanley, “Opium and Edwin Drood: Fantasy, Reality and What the

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Doctors Ordered,” Dickens Quarterly 21.1 (2004): 12–27; Wenying Xu, “The Opium Trade and Little Dorrit: A Case of Reading Silences,” Victorian Literature and Culture 25.1 (1997): 53–66. See also Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, “China in Dickens,” Dickens Quarterly 8.3 (1991): 99–111. 27. Shanyn Fiske, “Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth-century Literature and Victorian Studies,” Literature Compass 8.4 (2011): 214–226. 28. In addition, literary studies of opium use only a partial archive of materials. Key resources like the Friend of China periodical – produced from 1875 to 1916 by the Quaker-connected Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade – and the China Inland Mission’s China’s Millions and Our Work among Them (1875–1952) demand further study. On the Society, see Andrew Blake, “Foreign Devils and Moral Panics: Britain, Asia and the Opium Trade,” in Bill Schwarz, ed., The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1996), 240–249; J. B. Brown, “The Politics of the Poppy: The Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, 1874–1916,” Journal of Contemporary History 8.3 (1973): 97–111. 29. There are many areas of narrative production that this study does not broach, including the translation of Chinese classics, as well as the body of criticism about Chinese literature and drama that proliferated during the Victorian period and that appeared in periodicals such as The Nineteenth Century. A prominent figure is missionary James Legge, whose The Chinese Classics appeared in 1861 and who translated works about Chinese religions, including The Texts of Taoism (1891) for Max Müller’s series Sacred Books of the East. On Legge, see Norman J. Girandot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Wong Man Kong, James Legge: A Pioneer at Crossroads of East and West (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Educational Publishing Co., 1996). A related phenomenon comes in the form of “Chinese tales,” written by British writers as if they were translations from the Chinese. Ernest Bramah’s The Wallet of Kai Lung (London: Grant Richards, 1900) is a well-known example of this genre. 30. “The Yarn of the ‘Broker Swell,’” in China Punch 18 (August 27, 1874): 4. 31. Victorian travel literature about China has been a source of critical interest for some time. See Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Nicholas J. Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Jeffrey N. Dupée, British Travel Writers in China: Writing Home to a British Public, 1890–1914 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004); Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn, eds., A Century of Travels in China: A Collection of Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). See also Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, ed., The Far East, vol. iv, Nineteenth-century Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Consolidation 1830–1910 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003).

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32. Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); “‘Eyes of the Proper Almond-Shape’: Blue-and-White China in the British Imaginary, 1823–1883,” Nineteenth Century Studies 19 (2005): 17–34. 33. These include Wang Gungwu, Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: War, Trade, Science, and Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John Yue-Wo Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the “Arrow” War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Arthur David Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958); and Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent (New York: Norton, 1998). 34. Work on missionaries in China includes Eric Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Kathleen L. Lodwick, Crusaders against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874–1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Patricia Miriam Barr, To China with Love: The Lives and Times of Protestant Missionaries in China (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972); W. K. Cheng, “Constructing Cathay: John Macgowan, Cultural Brokerage, and Missionary Knowledge of China,” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 12.2 (2002): 269–290; Patrick Hanan, “The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-century China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60.2 (2000): 413–443; and Susan Fleming McAllister, “Between Romantic Revolution and Victorian Propriety: The Cultural Work of British Missionary Narratives,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Oregon (1997). For information on Buddhism’s reception in Britain, see J. Jeffrey Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). For a Victorian discussion, see Max Müller’s “The Religions of China,” Nineteenth Century 48 (January–July 1900): 373–384, 569–581, 730–742. 35. See also work on the literature of British imperialism in Southeast Asia, including Philip Holden, Modern Subjects/Colonial Texts: Hugh Clifford and the Discipline of English Literature in the Straits Settlements and Malaya 1895– 1907 (Greensboro: ELT Press/University of North Carolina, 2000) and Tamara S. Wagner, Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819–2004: Colonial and Postcolonial Financial Straits and Literary Style (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). 36. Henry Norman, “Our Vacillation in China and Its Consequences,” Nineteenth Century 48.281 (July 1900): 11. 37. On the rewards of the interaction between postcolonial approaches in literary studies and current practices in imperial history, see Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24.3 (1996): 345–363.

242

Notes to pages 19–35

38. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1. 39. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 40. On the relationship between China and Britain before the mid nineteenth century, see D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, 2nd edn. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 41. Nigel Cameron, Barbarians and Mandarins: Thirteen Centuries of Western Travelers in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 364. 42. Robert S. Winn, “A Chinese Adventure,” in Alfred Miles, ed., Fifty-two Stories of Greater Britain (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1901), 412–420. 43. Bessie Marchant, Among Hostile Hordes: A Story of the Tai-ping Rebellion (London: Gall and Inglis, 1901). 44. J. A. R. Marriott, “The Imperial Note in Victorian Poetry,” Nineteenth Century 48.282 (August 1900): 243. CHAPTER 1: THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MODERN CHINESE: NARRATING CHINA THROUGH THE TREATY PORTS 1. John Otway Percy Bland, Verse and Worse: Selections from Tung Chia [aka Bland] (Shanghai: Oriental Press, 1902), iii. Bland was a Customs official and Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Council at the time he published this book. See Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900–1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 31. He was also a correspondent for the Times during the Boxer War of 1900. 2. William A. Rivers, “A Tai-pan of the ’Fifties,” Anglo-Chinese Sketches (London: S. R. Menheneott, 1903), 5–7. Rivers was the pseudonym under which Veronica and Paul King published. Paul King served in China in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service and records his experiences in In the Chinese Customs Service: A Personal Record of Forty-Seven Years (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924). Steven Ralph Hardy discusses Anglo-Chinese Sketches in his chapter on Rivers in “Expatriate Writers, Expatriate Readers: English-Language Fiction Published along the China Coast in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2003. 3. Lise Boehm [Elise Williamina Edersheim Giles], introduction to China Coast Tales, 2nd edn. (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1898). Boehm married Sinologist Herbert A. Giles, of the Wade-Giles transliteration system, in 1883. 4. The British also made up the bulk of its “indoor” staff. For statistics, see Stanley F. Wright, The Origin and Development of the Chinese Customs Service, 1843–1911 (Shanghai: n.pub., 1939), 48. 5. “Julian Croskey” was a pseudonym adopted by Charles Welsh Mason, who had formerly worked for the IMCS and who publically revealed his use of the name

Notes to pages 36–38

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in the autobiographical diatribe “One of the Lost Legion,” published in the New Century Review in 1898. 6. For a thorough discussion of the British in China, see Frances Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843–1943 (London: John Murray, 1998). 7. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Britain and China, 1842–1914,” in Andrew Porter and Alaine Low, eds., The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 149. Vol. iii of The Oxford History of the British Empire. 8. Most mission societies set up shop in the “native quarters” of Chinese cities; they also did not restrict themselves to the treaty ports, illegally establishing bases in restricted areas of the Chinese interior. The concession and settlement areas in smaller ports opened up towards the end of the nineteenth century were not always where the foreign community lived or worked, often because the land ceded to them was undesirable and malaria-ridden, although still subject to intense land speculation. 9. See Dana Arnold, “Ambivalent Geographies: The British Concession in Tianjin, China, c.1860–1946,” in Julie F. Codell, ed., Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 143–155; James A. Cook, “Reimagining China: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and a Transnational Modernity,” in Madeline Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 156–194; Lee Ho Yin and Lynne DiStefano, “Chinese-Built Western Towers: The Hyper-Tradition of the Overseas Chinese’s Fortified Towers in the Cantonese Counties of Kaiping and Taishan,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments 18.1 (2006): 27–28; Maurizio Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin: Heterotopia and Italian Colonialism in Mainland China,” Urban History 36.3 (2009): 399–425; Jeremy E. Taylor, “The Bund: The Littoral Space of Empire in the Treaty Ports of East Asia,” Social History 27.2 (2002): 125–142. 10. Joseph W. Esherick, “Modernity and Nation in the Chinese City,” in Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 6. 11. See, for instance, Julian Croskey, The Shen’s Pigtail and Other Cues of AngloChina Life (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894) and Rivers. 12. See Osterhammel, “Britain and China,” 149: “British rule over the Chinese, as in Hong Kong, in central Shanghai, and also Singapore, was confined to fluid, comparatively modern urban environments that had largely been created by the European invasion itself: frontier cities in zones of inter-cultural compromise.” See also Robert Bickers, Britain in China, 69. 13. Bickers, Britain in China, 76. For a discussion of how Indians were employed in China, see Claude Markovits, “Indian Communities in China, c. 1842– 1949,” in Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot, eds., New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 55–74.

244

Notes to pages 39–64

14. Bland, Verse and Worse, iii. For biographical information on Bland, see Bickers, Britain in China, 31. 15. Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850– 1995, 3rd edn. (London: Longman, 1996), 156. 16. See, for instance, Harry Collingwood, A Chinese Command: A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas (London: Blackie and Son, 1915). 17. William Carlton Dawe, “A Night in Canton,” in Kakemonos: Tales of the Far East (London: John Lane, 1897), 100. 18. Stephen Arata, Fictions of Social Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 159. 19. See Jacqueline Young’s reading of Mason’s personal investment in the novel in “Rewriting the Boxer Rebellion: The Imaginative Creations of Putnam, Weale, Edmund Backhouse, and Charles Welsh Mason,” The Victorian Newsletter 114 (2008): 21–24. 20. See also Hardy, “Expatriate Writers, Expatriate Readers,” 128–133, 162–163. 21. Brady, “Little Mertens,” 44. 22. Dolly, The Vampire Nemesis, 9. The tales first appeared in the Anglo-Chinese press. See also Hardy’s chapter on Dolly, “Expatriate Writers, Expatriate Readers,” 298–330. Hardy’s research reveals that Dolly, like Dalziel, worked on steamships (299). 23. Roslyn Jolly, “Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007): 161. 24. Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 11. 25. See, for example, W. C. Metcalfe’s Pigtails and Pirates: A Tale of the Sea (London: Blackie and Son, 1908), in which the adversity faced by a group of ship’s apprentices in the South China Sea turns bullies into model men and forges them into a “manly,” moral community. 26. James Payn, By Proxy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), vol. i: 1. 27. C. Mary Turnbull, “Hong Kong: Fragrant Harbour, City of Sin and Death,” in Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush, eds., Asia in Western Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 118. 28. See G. W. Keeton, Extraterritoriality in China (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1928), vol. i: 284–285. 29. The book was also published while the Kings were in Britain. See King, In the Chinese Customs Service, 176, 177. CHAPTER 2: PROJECTING FROM POSSESSION POINT: JAMES DALZIEL’S CHRONICLES OF HONG KONG 1. The Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, The Philippines, & C. for the Year 1898 (Hong Kong: The Daily Press, 1898), Directory, 244. Britain hoisted its flag at Possession Point in January 1841 at the conclusion of the First

Notes to pages 64–69

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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Opium War. The Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong Island in perpetuity to Britain, and it became a Crown colony a year later. After the Second Opium War (1857–1860), China permanently ceded the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutter’s Island. In 1898, Britain extended the colony substantially by obtaining a ninety-nine-year lease on the area that became known as the New Territories. Only this last tract was due to revert to China in 1997. At the turn of the century, Hong Kong Island (specifically, the urban core known as the city of Victoria) was the main area in which Britons lived, worked, and socialized. However, a land boom was under way in Kowloon. See also Hardy’s discussion of Betty in “Expatriate Writers, Expatriate Readers,” 18–19. I see no evidence for the decline in “Anglo-Chinese” fiction in the early twentieth century that Hardy proposes. See the population statistics in the 1898 Chronicle and Directory, which list a total population of 246,880: 3,269 “Europeans and Americans other than Portuguese,” 2,263 Portuguese, 1,348 Indians, 272 Eurasians, 882 “other races,” and 200,005 Chinese (“Directory,” 254). Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 14. James Dalziel, In the First Watch and Other Engine-Room Stories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907); High Life in the Far East: Short Stories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909). There is no record of further fiction, although he did write Silver & the Dollar (Hong Kong: Newspaper Enterprise, 1931). See Chronicle and Directory, Directory, 563 (“Coasting and River Steamers”); 624 (“Foreign Residents”). James Dalziel, A Paper on Light Draught Steamers for River Service, with Remarks on Types Suitable for the West River Trade, and Maps, Diagrams, Dimensions of Steamers, Etc. (Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, 1898). Dalziel is no longer present in the list of foreign residents in the South China Directory for 1904, 1905, and 1906, nor in its list of staff on coasting steamers. Nor does he appear in the Who’s Who in the Far East for this period. However, topical references to events such as the Russo-Japanese War suggest that he still may have been in the region in the years leading up to the publication of his anthologies. See The Institution of Mechanical Engineers List of Members 1st May 1929 (London: Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 1929), 39. For information on Dalziel’s death, see “Tinwald Churchyard Inscriptions,” homepages.rootsweb. com/~scottish/indextinwaldchrh.html. “High Life in the Far East,” Bookman 36 (Spring 1909): Supplement 2. “Our Library Table,” Athenæum 4170 (September 28, 1907): 366. On Conrad, see Robert Hampson, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2000). Edward Salmon, The Literature of the Empire (London: W. Collins Sons, 1924), 166–167. Vol. xi of Hugh Gunn, ed., The British Empire: A Survey in 12 Volumes. Xu Xi, “Writing the Literature of Non-denial,” World Englishes 19.3 (2000): 417. Abbas, by contrast, sees the local in Hong Kong as “already a translation . . .

246

Notes to pages 70–73

so that the question of the local cannot be separated from the question of cultural translation itself” (Hong Kong, 12). For Abbas, the choice of linguistic medium is largely irrelevant because “the colonialist mentality can find expression in Cantonese just as well as in English” (Hong Kong, 12). 16. See Thurin, Victorian Travelers. 17. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). 18. See Bickers, Britain in China; Markovits, “Indian Communities in China.” 19. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6, 309–310. 20. Ronald Robinson, “The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London: German Historical Institute/Allen & Unwin, 1986), 268. 21. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). In Civilisation: The West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011), however, Niall Ferguson avers, “Recent research has demolished the fashionable view that China was economically neck and neck with the West until as recently as 1800” (304). This issue featured in an acrimonious exchange between Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books. See especially their respective letters on December 1, 2011 (33.23): 4. 22. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Without Coal? Colonies? Calculus?,” in Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Unmaking the West: “What-If” Scenarios that Rewrite World History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 266. 23. Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, “Introduction: The Rise of East Asia in Regional and World Historical Perspectives,” in Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 24. Pablo Mukherjee, “Introduction: Victorian World Literatures,” The Yearbook of English Studies 41.2 (2011): 2. 25. Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); “Globalizing Victorian Studies,” The Yearbook of English Studies 41.2 (2011): 20–40. 26. Robinson, “Excentric Idea of Imperialism,” 270. 27. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in TwentiethCentury China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London: German Historical Institute/ Allen & Unwin, 1986), 299. 28. Thurin, Victorian Travelers, 165. 29. The Opinions of Mr. Briggs (Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1904).

Notes to pages 73–76

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30. See, for instance, Henty’s By Conduct and Courage (London: Blackie & Son, 1905). The back of the volume contains a list of Blackie & Son’s “Illustrated Story Books” of historical tales by Henty, followed by “Story Books for Boys,” “Story Books for Girls,” then “Illustrated Books for Children” and so on, ending with “Scripture Picture-Books” and “Animal Picture-Books.” 31. South China Morning Post, May 19, 1904: 4e–f. 32. Rudi Butt, “Hong Kong’s First: Newsies in the Nineteenth Century,” hongkongsfirst.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/newsies-in-nineteenth-century.html. 33. David Porter, “Historicizing the History of Chinese Literature,” unpublished paper, Inter-Asian Connections III, University of Hong Kong, June 8, 2012. 34. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895–1927,” in Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 142–195. See also Michel Hockx’s work on Republican journalism in Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003) and Yong Z. Volz and Chin-Chuan Lee’s work on the ideological contest between British and American newspapers in China in “Semicolonialism and Journalistic Sphere of Influence,” Journalism Studies 12.5 (2011): 559–574. 35. “The Murder at Bangkok. British Bluejacket Dismissed,” China Mail, January 20, 1902: 5c. Under the rules of extraterritoriality, a British magistrate heard a case such as this one, involving two British subjects. 36. Even in literature about India and as late as 1901, the rule of separation was far from emphatic. An important example is the popular 1901 New Woman novel Anna Lombard by Annie Sophie Cory, aka Victoria Cross (London: Continuum, 2006). The novel revolves around the title character’s proposal of polyandry to the narrator, Gerald Etheridge. Gerald is tortured and titillated by Anna’s “marriage” to her electrically attractive servant Gaida, whose physicality contrasts sharply with the Briton’s passive, restrained, and inadequate masculinity. Gerald codes his subsequent repulsion at the progeny of Anna and Gaida’s union in racist terms, but the reader perceives that it is rooted in jealousy, rather than the horror of racial violation; the true horror comes when Gerald incites Anna to commit infanticide and proposes a happy ending once she has done so. 37. See also Turnbull’s discussion of Charles Halcombe, a Customs official who married a Chinese woman and also wrote a novel on this theme (“Hong Kong,” 118–119). 38. See Christina Firpo, “Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children from the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956,” Journal of Social History 43.3 (2010): 2. 39. William Dalton, The Wasps of the Ocean: or, Little Waif and the Pirate of the Eastern Seas. A Romance of Travel and Adventure in China and Siam (London: E. Marlborough & Co., 1864), 1. 40. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44.

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Notes to pages 77–86

41. See Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 42. Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48. 43. Erin O’Connor, “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism,” Victorian Studies 45.2 (2003): 220. The Spivak quotation comes from “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 44. John Thomson, Through China with a Camera (London: A. Constable & Co., 1898), 24. 45. Wang, Anglo-Chinese Encounters, 112. 46. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2. 47. Dalziel, In the First Watch, 252. 48. Cf. Catherine Gallagher, “Floating Signifiers of Britishness in the Novels of the Anti-Slave-Trade Squadron,” in Wendy S. Jacobson, Dickens and the Children of Empire (London: Palgrave, 2000), 78–93. Reading naval novels from 1830 to 1890, Gallagher argues that anti-slaving naval tales “achieve Britishness by viewing the Atlantic as a system of differences and similarities requiring the interchangeableness of particulars. Britishness here seems not so much a single identity as a mode of exchanging identities across national and perhaps even racial lines” (82). Dalziel’s tales indicate that this mode of identity formation had not necessarily been superseded or suppressed in late Victorian and Edwardian maritime fiction, and extended to the Pacific, as well. 49. Dalziel, High Life, 283. 50. See Henrik Ibsen, The Pillars of Society and Other Plays, ed. Havelock Ellis (London: Walter Scott, 1888). 51. For a discussion of anachronistic space and postcolonial theory, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–17. 52. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 64. 53. Critics have devoted considerable attention to the conventions of imperial adventure fiction. In Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, White provides a comprehensive overview of the typical “intoxication” with empire that marked the genre and that saw it often enlisted in the service of imperial expansion. See also Patrick Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991). 54. See also Kelly Boyd’s chapter “‘Manhood Achieved’: Imperialism, Racism and Manliness” in Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 123–152. In reviewing this related body of adventure fiction, Boyd notices instability and flux in attitudes towards race, especially in the period from 1890 to 1920, but does not find a celebration of miscegenation of the kind present in Dalziel’s chronicles.

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55. Review of In the First Watch, Academy 73 (September 28, 1907): 953. 56. Cf. Gallagher, “Floating Signifiers,” 78: “Britain, many would now agree, began less as a homeland than as a way of being abroad. It did not pre-exist its empire and then ‘expand’ overseas, but was instead produced by expansion and might therefore be analysed as a phenomenon of extra-territorialization.” 57. Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 1. 58. See, for example, Edward Greey [sic], Blue Jackets; or, The Adventures of J. Thompson, A.B. among “The Heathen Chinee”: A Nautical Novel (Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co., 1871); James R. N. Cox, “Caught and Caged,” Boy’s Own Paper 6.286 (July 5, 1884): 630–632 and 6.287 (July 12, 1884): 649–650; Collingwood, A Chinese Command; Metcalfe, Pigtails and Pirates. 59. See “Above Normal,” in Dalziel, High Life, 269–304; “Maguire’s Trip Home,” in Dalziel, In the First Watch, 32–46. 60. See “Maguire’s Trip Home” and “Dead Reckoning,” in Dalziel, In the First Watch, 144–181; “The Passing of Pan-Fat: Coal-Trimmer,” in In the First Watch, 182–195. 61. “The Spectre of Three Chimney Bluff,” in Dalziel, High Life, 238. 62. The original version thus follows a long line of satires from Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) to the small sub-genre of purportedly Chinese-authored travelogues with titles such as England through Chinese Spectacles: Leaves from the Notebook of Wo Chang (London: Cotton Press, 1897) published in the late nineteenth century to provide an “outsider’s” critique of urbanization, industrialization, and London manners and customs. See also Ah-Chin-Le, Some Observations upon the Civilization of the Western Barbarians, Particularly the English; Made during a Residence of Some Years in Those Parts, trans. John Yester Smythe (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1876). 63. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23. 64. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 175. 65. Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908), 242. 66. Lise Boehm, “Peter Wong,” no. 6, China Coast Tales, 2nd edn. (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, Limited, 1898), 59. According to Steven Hardy, this story appeared under the title “Peter Wong’s Revenge” in 1891 in the North China Daily News (108); see his discussion, “Expatriate Writers, Expatriate Readers,” 120–123. CHAPTER 3: PEKING PLOTS: NARRATING THE BOXER REBELLION OF 1900 1. W. Murray Graydon, The Perils of Pekin (London: John F. Shaw and Co., 1904), 286; W. A. P. Martin, The Siege in Peking: China against the World (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1900), 16.

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Notes to pages 98–103

2. “Beheading of a Chinese Boxer,” dir. Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, 1900, British Film Institute. 3. Although modern historians largely refer to the events of 1900 as the Boxer War, as with the 1857 Mutiny/Sepoy Rebellion, I have retained the usage of Boxer Rebellion/Boxer Uprising to emphasize the conceptual frame that the Victorians themselves had of the conflict. 4. For an informative (if sometimes inaccurate) overview of the Rebellion and its antecedents, see Peter Fleming’s 1959 The Siege at Peking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 5. The “Boxers” reportedly gained their name from descriptions of them in the North China Daily News by inland missionaries early in 1900. At their rallies, they held demonstrations of their “magic” capacities (often using epileptics as mystics) and miraculous resistance to bullets and steel. Properly speaking, the Boxer Rebellion was not actually a rebellion; it professed to support the Qing government. 6. The eight allied countries were Britain, America, Japan, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. Officials of eleven nations were holed up within the Legation during the siege; fourteen nations overall were represented. 7. C. A. Bayly discusses the Indian elite’s reaction to the Rebellion in “The Boxer Uprising and India: Globalizing Myths,” in Robert Bickers, eds., The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 147–155. 8. Robert Bickers, “Introduction,” in Robert Bickers, ed., The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), xii. 9. Such mythmaking was by no means a solely British phenomenon. Yixu Lü finds a similar pattern in German literature in “German Colonial Fiction on China: The Boxer Uprising of 1900,” German Life and Letters 59.1 (2006): 78–100. 10. For a discussion of newspaper and cartoon coverage, see Jane E. Elliott, Some Did It for Civilisation, Some Did It for Their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002). 11. Constancia Serjeant, A Tale of Red Pekin (London: Marshall Brothers, 1902); Mrs. Archibald Little, Out in China! (London: Anthony Treherne, 1902). 12. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 200. 13. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” in William Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 53–72. Robert Hart blamed both the Boxer Rebellion and the crisis of authority for the Manchu government on the effects of British-imposed treaty stipulations, especially the principle of extraterritoriality. See “These from the Land of Sinim”: Essays on the Chinese Question (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901). 14. See Suleri’s introductory chapter in The Rhetoric of English India. 15. This Russophobia makes its way into several novels about China published in the late nineteenth century. In Croskey’s “The S.G.”, Hart is the only thing preventing Russia from annexing China. An early invasion novel, Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of

Notes to pages 103–108

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Australia (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1895) zooms forward to 1954, when Russia forces China to participate in an invasion of Australia to prevent a full-scale invasion of her own territories. For historical background on the period, see Mary H. Wilgus, Sir Claude MacDonald, the Open Door, and British Informal Empire in China, 1895–1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987). 16. Drought, starvation, and the advancement of Christianity into the Chinese interior are among the causes of the Uprising assigned by historians. See Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 17. The Boxer Rising: A History of the Boxer Trouble in China (Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury, 1900), i. The passage cited here was written by Dr. Hykes of the American Bible Society shortly before the Rebellion. 18. A short-lived ceasefire late in July gave the besieged a chance to restore their fortifications. Several thousand people, mostly Chinese Christians and schoolgirls, resisted siege at the Peitang under the auspices of the French Bishop Favier. Though conditions were even direr and their resistance as potentially heroic, British novelists do not focus on this siege, perhaps because its main players were French, Italian, and Chinese. 19. Despite the fact that the Rebellion came as a surprise even to foreigners in China, a body of fiction strangely seems to predict this type of occurrence on the eve of the outbreak. Among these works is Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale’s Pyro-Spectacular Drama, The Bombardment of Peking (n.p.: Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, 1899) about the European invasion of Peking in 1860. 20. Frederick Sadleir Brereton, The Dragon of Pekin (London: Blackie and Son, 1902), 159. 21. The myth behind the Mutiny is that use of either sacred or profane fats (pork to offend the Muslims, cow to offend the Hindus) in guns carried by the Sepoys sparked the Rebellion, and not larger economic and political issues. With China, the country’s xenophobia and inability to understand “benign” missionary activities prove to be the impetus for revolt. Reports that Europeans had poisoned wells, circulated by the Boxers, had a similar inflammatory effect on the populace that the fat issue had had in India. 22. According to Xiaobing Li in the entry for the “Taiping Rebellion” in China at War: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), the uprising devastated more than fourteen provinces, while estimates of the death toll range from 20 to 30 million people (441). 23. Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011), 251–253. 24. Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and in Europe,” 1853, in Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, 15–22. 25. Karl Marx, “The Opium Trade,” September 20, 1858, reprinted in Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, 188. 26. Friedrich Engels, “Persia and China,” June 5, 1857, reprinted in Marx and Engles, On Colonialism, 111.

252

Notes to pages 110–118

27. Clive Bigham, author of A Year in China (1901), quoted in Fleming, The Siege, 77. 28. Charles Gilson, The Lost Column (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), 41. 29. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139. 30. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 197. 31. Post-Rebellion cinema also evinced an expanding scopic mastery over China. See Matthew D. Johnson, “‘Journey to the Seat of War’: The International Exhibition of China in Early Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3.2 (2009): 112. 32. See Frank Norris’s “The Third Circle” (1895), a penetration of “China in America” in San Francisco’s Chinatown. This story was anthologized in The Third Circle (New York: John Lane, 1909), 13–27. 33. The Boxer narratives’ reading of disguise depends on ignoring the fact that missionaries in China often adopted local dress. Novels about missionaries are often more historically accurate in this respect. William Carlton Dawe’s The Mandarin (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1899) describes the head of the Inland Mission at Fong-Chin, as wearing “the ordinary costume of a Chinese gentleman” (80). 34. There are few working-class British characters in these novels, with the notable exception of the comic figure of Mr. Pannick in Gilson’s The Lost Column. 35. See Dong Ning Lin’s discussion of this scene in “Power and Representation in Victorian Discourse on China,” PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 1994. 36. Henty’s model for Rex may be Richard Burton, whose linguistic competence allowed him to safely enter Mecca in the disguise of an Afghan trader. 37. Cf. Suleri’s chapter on Kipling in The Rhetoric of English India. 38. Bristow, Effeminate England, 11. 39. On this issue, see Neville Hoad, “Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolutionary Narratives of Difference,” Postcolonial Studies 3.2 (2000): 133–158. 40. Frank Proschan, “Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys, and Graceless Women: French Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese Genders,” GLQ 8.4 (2002): 438. 41. George Manville Fenn, Stan Lynn: A Boy’s Adventures in China (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1902), 37–38. Stan Lynn is technically a novel about pirates, but little distinguishes its presentation of the Chinese scoundrels from contemporaneous, explicitly Boxer-themed companions. 42. In The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), Christopher Lane discusses the sublimation of same-sex desire in the imperial context. The book’s introduction is particularly germane to my analysis. 43. The “large-footed” assertion here is dubious, since the women of the peasant families from which the Boxers were drawn would not have practiced footbinding. Nor did Manchu women.

Notes to pages 121–132

253

44. These portraits featured in a 2011–2012 exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery entitled “Power|Play: China’s Empress Dowager.” See asia.si.edu/ explore/china/powerplay/default.asp. 45. William Carlton Dawe, The Plotters of Peking (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907). Though not about the Boxer Rebellion per se, the Uprising is an explicit subtext. 46. E. A. Freemantle, “Prince Tuan’s Treasure,” Prince Tuan’s Treasure and Other Interesting Tales of the “Boxer Rebellion of 1900” (Vellore: The Record Press, 1911). Freemantle was apparently the proprietor of this press. 47. As James L. Hevia notes in “Looting and Its Discontents,” the scale and pervasiveness of looting in August 1900 was a cause of concern at the time. In Robert Bickers, ed., The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 93–114. 48. Esherick points out that in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionary forces in China more than doubled, from 1,296 in 1889 to 2,818 in 1900 (Origins, 93). 49. Qtd. in Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, eds., China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 190. Translations of some Boxer manifestos would have been available to the novelists discussed here. 50. Esherick, Origins, 84–85. 51. Herbert Ornando Kohr, The Escort of an Emperor; A Story of China during the Great Boxer Movement (Akron[?], OH: no pub., 1910). 52. See Dilke’s paean to the Meiji reforms in “English Influence in Japan,” Greater Britain, 566–590. CHAPTER 4: BRITAIN “KNIT AND NATIONALISED”: ASIAN INVASION NOVELS IN BRITAIN, 1898–1914 1. Sidney Newman Sedgwick, The Last Persecution (London: Grant Richards, 1909), 9–10. 2. Matthew Phipps Shiel, The Yellow Danger (London: Grant Richards, 1898). 3. William Carlton Dawe, The Yellow Man (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1900). 4. According to Harley Farnsworth MacNair’s The Chinese Abroad (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1924), Chinese students came in small numbers to Britain to study; one-quarter were sent by the government. MacNair estimates that about 300 Chinese students were present in Britain in 1916 (247). 5. Percy F. Westerman, When East Meets West: A Story of the Yellow Peril (London: Blackie and Son, 1913), 164. 6. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 230. 7. M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Wave (London: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1905), 36. 8. See Colleen Lye’s discussion of Jack London in America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14–17. Lye points out, “At its core, London’s ‘yellow peril’ concerns

254

Notes to pages 133–150

Japan’s inevitable mediation of the modernization of China” (16). See also Patrick B. Sharp, Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 101. 9. Sax Rohmer [Arthur Sarsfield Ward], The Devil Doctor: Hitherto Unpublished Adventures in the Career of the Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu (London: Methuen & Co., 1916). 10. The Dragon was republished as The Yellow Peril in 1929, perhaps because with the demise of the Chinese Empire (of which the dragon was the symbol), the title no longer had sufficient resonance. 11. “The Hague Convention (I) for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes (Hague 1) 29 July 1899.” The Avalon Project, Yale University, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/hague01.asp. 12. Jack London, “The Unparalleled Invasion: Excerpt from Walt. Nervin’s Certain Essays in History,” McClure’s Magazine 35 (July 1910): 308. For an analysis of American narratives of Chinese invasions, see William F. Wu, chapter entitled “Early Novels of Chinese Invasion,” The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction 1850–1940 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), 30–40. 13. Capitaine Danrit [Émile Augustin Cyprien Driant], L’invasion jaune, 3 vols. (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1909); Féli-Brugière and Jules Louis Gastine, L’Asie en feu: Le roman de l’invasion jaune (Paris: C. Delagrave, 1904). 14. Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 165. 15. Eric Hayot discusses this stereotyping of coolie labor in the context of a US invasion novel (Arthur Vinton’s 1890 Looking Further Backward) in “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures: Nationalism and Its Discontents,” Representations 99 (2007): 99–129. 16. Ross G. Forman, “Eating out East: Representing Chinese Food in Victorian Travel Literature and Journalism,” in Julia Kuehn and Douglas Kerr, eds., A Century of Travels in China: A Collection of Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 63–73. 17. For a seminal discussion of novelistic images of technology vis-à-vis warfare at the turn of the century, see I. F. Clarke’s chapter “Science and the Shape of Wars to Come, 1800–1914,” in Voices Prophesying War 1763–1984, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 57–92. See also Johan A. Höglund, “Mobilising the Novel: The Literature of Imperialism and the First World War,” PhD thesis, University of Uppsala, 1997. 18. The Chinese invasion described in this novel primarily involves Russia, not Britain, and actually avoids the virulent xenophobia of his other two works by being less concerned with mapping an East/West divide. 19. Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-century Literature, Science and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 20. See Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 105. 21. See Otis, Membranes, 120–125.

Notes to pages 153–165

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22. In The Yellow Danger, the shriek itself becomes an act of mimicry that similarly fails; the Chinese mob makes the sound “pop,” parroting the guns it fires, as it sweeps westwards (287). CHAPTER 5: STAGING THE CELESTIAL 1. Dr. Tanner, The Chinese Mother: A Drama (London: Richardson and Son, 1857), 9. Tanner later published The Foundling of Sebastopol: A Drama (London: Burns, Lambert & Oates, [1867]). 2. On reactions to the 1882 gamelan performance at the Royal Aquarium, see Matthew Isaac Cohen, Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11–12. 3. Willard Holcomb, Kin Fu or the Pursuit of Happiness: An Oriental Comedy Opera in Three Acts, adapted from the Hungarian of Jeno Fargao, music by Gaza Markus, Isidore Witmark. Licensed for Victoria Hall, November 30, 1903, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection 1903/29, 75. All subsequent plays from this collection are noted as LCP. 4. Alfred Dawe, Sen Yamen, or An Overdose of Love (Theatre Royal, Rugby, October 7, 1901), music by Frederic William Sparrow (LCP 1901/27). 5. Josephine Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 90. 6. See, for instance, W. D. Broadfoot, Wars in China or the Battles of Chinghae & Amoy, Astley’s Theatre, May 13, 1844, LCP 42975, ff. 598–641. On panoramas and colonial contexts, see Robert D. Aguirre, “Annihilating the Distance: Panoramas and the Conquest of Mexico, 1822–1848,” Genre 35.2 (2002): 25–53. 7. Joachim Hayward Stocqueler, The Bombardment & Capture of Canton: A New & Grand Spectacle Founded upon Events in the Present War in China. In Two Acts. To be perform’d at Astley’s Royal Ampitheatre on Easter Monday, April 3rd, 1858, LCP 52973H. This description comes from an advertising bill dated April 10, 1858, and held in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s theater collection. 8. Dong-Shin Chang, “Chinese Sorcerer: Spectacle and Anglo-Chinese Relations,” Conference on Race, Nation, and the Empire on the Victorian Popular Stage, University of Lancaster, July 13, 2012. 9. On the relationship between the Victorians and “curiosity” in drama and spectacle, see Brenda Assael, “Victorian Curiosity,” The Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 62–84. 10. Chang was involved with a number of musical numbers, including Charles Godfrey’s “Chang, the Great Fychow Galop” (London: Duff & Hodgson, 1866) and “The Great Chang Polka” (London: Duff & Hodgson, 1866). 11. Colin Chambers, Black and Asian Theatre in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 71. 12. Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 70. 13. Anne Witchard, Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 30.

256

Notes to pages 165–171

14. Edward Ziter, “Staging the Geographic Imagination: Imperial Melodrama and the Domestication of the Exotic,” in Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 191. 15. Owen Hall, The Geisha; A Story of a Tea House: A Japanese Musical Play (London: Hopwood & Crew, 1897); George Dance, A Chinese Honeymoon: A Musical Play in Two Acts, music by Howard Talbot (London: Hopwood & Crew, 1902; perf. Hanley, October 16, 1899; Royal Strand Theatre, October 5, 1901). 16. Marty Gould, Nineteenth-century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 127. 17. Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 257. Williams takes the concept of autoethnography from James Buzard. 18. Witchard, Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie, 37. 19. John Maddison Morton, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp; or, Harlequin and the Genie of the Ring: A New Comic Christmas Pantomime (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1856). 20. G. H. George, Grand Pantomime of Harlequin Aladdin and the Lamp; or The Wizard, the Ring, and the Scamp (London: Williams and Strahan, 1873[?]). 21. Greater familiarity with Japan did not make the presentation any less exoticist, however. Even when the Criterion presented a short season of works in Japanese by a troupe from Tokyo in July 1901, the two plays enacted were separated by a performance by the famous exotic dancer Loie Fuller. 22. See, for instance, Reginald de Koven and Larry B. Smith, The Mandarin: A Chinese Comic Opera in Three Acts (Royal Edinburgh, licensed October 21, 1896; LCP 53612C). 23. An interesting example of this pattern is Mandarin’s Ghost (New Hall, Walsingham, licensed March 31, 1897; LCP 53625H). 24. Isaac Wilkinson, Ching-a-ma-ree: An Original Fairy Tale (Brighton: I. Wilkinson, 1884). 25. On the development of the theatrical figure of the Tar, see J. S. Bratton, “British Heroism and the Structure of Melodrama,” in J. S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Brendan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder, and Michael Pickering, eds., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 18–61. 26. Heidi J. Holder, “Melodrama, Realism and Empire on the British Stage,” in J. S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Brendan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder, and Michael Pickering, eds., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 130. 27. Hall, The Geisha, 5. The play featured music by Sidney Jones, with lyrics by Harry Greenbank, and opened at Daly’s Theatre in 1896. It was so successful that it reopened for Christmas 1897. 28. The Chinese Junk, or The Maid and the Mandarin in 2 Acts (Britannia Saloon, Hoxton, September 1848), LCP 43013, ff. 886–932. 29. On the Keying, see Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 294–297. See also

Notes to pages 172–175

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Catherine Pagani, “Objects and the Press: Images of China in Nineteenthcentury Britain,” in Julie Codell, ed., Imperial Co-histories: National Identities and the British Colonial Press (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 153–157. Alicia Ramsey and Rudolph de Cordova, The Mandarin: A New and Original Melodrama in Five Acts, licensed March 7, 1901, LCP 1901/7. The play had a successful run at the Grand Theatre, Islington. On the Great Wall of China as metaphor for the divide between the sexes, see The Great Wall of China (Criterion, April 8, 1876, LCP 53165G). On Britain’s role in making the “invisible” Great Wall visible, see Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China against the World, 100 bc–ad 2000 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006). On the mythology surrounding kowtowing and British Ambassador Lord Macartney’s refusal to do it – a refusal rehearsed by many popular plays – see Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 70–71. One intriguing feature of these stagings of China is the relative absence of opium or opium dens, at least until the late nineteenth century. Willow-pattern-plate plays include: West Digges, A China Wedding: An Original Mythical Fancy. In One Act (Duke’s, Holborn, May 21, 1877), LCP 53187B; G. Manchester Cohen, Y’Lang Y’Lang: The Fair Maid of Too Bloo. A Piece of Old China. An Original Nautical Pantomime (Normansfield, Hampton Wick, January 5, 1892), LCP 53518J; Basil Hood, The Willow Pattern: Comic Operetta in Two Episodes (London: Chappell & Co., [1901]); and Ching-a-ma-ree. William Palmer Hale and Francis Talfourd, The Mandarin’s Daughter! Being the Simple Story of the Willow-Pattern Plate (London: Thomas Lacy, 1851). See, for example, The Chinese Exhibition, or the Feast of Lanterns, licensed December 1844, LCP 42980, ff. 986. S. Bowkett and George D. Day, The Willow Pattern Plate: A Comedy Opera in Two Acts (The Marina, Lowestoft, licensed September 28, 1897), LCP 53639A. Fred Danvers, A Chinese Idyl, or The Lost Ruby (licensed December 14, 1903), LCP 1903/32. See, for instance, W. J. Verner’s Harlequin and the Willow Pattern Plate: The Four Corners of the Globe out on the Spree. A Pantomime Sketch (Queen’s, October 5, 1860), LCP 52995V. See Jacques Offenbach, Ching-Chow-Hi and a Cracked Piece of China, trans. and adapted by William Brough and German Reed (Grand Theatre, Islington, August 14, 1865), LCP Ms 1865.53044K. This play, performed at the Royal Gallery of Illustration, London, presents Britishness as a union of disparate elements who all present themselves as an ironically unified and indistinguishable Chinese type. Two are Londoners – Dan-di-do and Miss Polyhymnia Poddles, of the London Popular Concerts – and one is the Irishman Terry O’Mulligan. See also Chang-hi-Wang: Operetta in One Act by Offenbach, translated and adapted by Frederic Maccabe (licensed for the Royal Theatre, Birmingham, March 28, 1879), LCP 53216C. Offenbach’s original played in

258

39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

Notes to pages 176–184 Paris in 1855 and came to the St. James’s, London, in May 1857, with Offenbach conducting. See Richard Northcott, Jacques Offenbach: A Sketch of His Life and a Record of His Operas (London: The Press Printers, 1917), 39. Michael Pickering, “Mock Blacks and Racial Mockery: The ‘Nigger’ Minstrel and British Imperialism,” in J. S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Brendan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder, and Michael Pickering, eds., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 198. Harry Hunter, The Nigger Chinee, or His Pigtail Wouldn’t Grow (London: J. A. Turner, 1877). Ilett Ray, The Yellow Dread: An Oriental Melo Drama in Four Acts (Masonic Hall, Wimbledon, licensed November 16, 1903, LCP 1903/27). The typescript of this play has the original title as The Yellow Terror. According to Allardyce Nicoll, the first performance of the play was at Irving, Seacombe, February 29, 1904. See Nicoll, English Drama 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 904. See also Henry T. Johnson, Alone in China (licensed June 15, 1904 for Alexandra, Birmingham; Brixton, June 20, 1904). Alison Griffiths, “‘Shivers Down Your Spine’: Panoramas and the Origins of the Cinematic Reenactment,” Screen 44.1 (2003): 2, 11. See also Edward Ziter, “Orientalist Panoramas and Disciplinary Society,” Wordsworth Circle 32 (2001): 21–24. Ziter calls for the geopolitical analysis of the nineteenth-century entertainment industry because he claims it served as a primary site through which Britain imagined the Empire. Similar sentiments are repeated in Charlies Harrie Abbott’s The Celestials or the Flowery Land: Anglo-Chinese Musical Farce in Two Acts (licensed October 10, 1898, LCP 53665L, lyrics by J. W. Houghton, music by F. Osmond Carr). J. S. Bratton, “Theatre of War: The Crimea on the London Stage 1854–5,” in David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt, eds., Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television 1800–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 119–137. A case in point is Stocqueler, the author of The Bombardment & Capture of Canton. He also wrote The Battle of the Alma (Astley’s, 1854). Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, The Conquest of Mexico and Death of Montezuma: A Pyro-Spectacular Drama (Ottowa: T. W. Hand Firework Co., 1903); Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, Hand and Teale’s Spectacular Drama of “The Relief at Lucknow”: An Original, Outdoor, Military Spectacle, Designed to Exhibit New Pyrotechnic, Scenic and Spectacular Effects (n.p.: Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, 1895). Dion Boucicault, Jessie Brown; or The Relief of Lucknow (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1858). On depictions of the Uprising, see Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 199–224, and Gould, Nineteenth-century Theatre, 155–208. Henry Whatley Tyler, Questions of the Day. No 1. Indian Revenue from Indian Opium; Chinese Money at the Expense of Chinese Life; British Honour or British Disgrace; Questions Which Should Be Considered in the Treaty to Be Concluded with China (London: James Ridgway, 1857), 32.

Notes to pages 184–194

259

48. J. James Ridge, Ki-Ling of Hankow: A Chinese Dramatic Incident (London: John Kempster, 1870). 49. Marx, “English Ferocity in China,” New York Daily Tribune, March 22, 1857, reprinted in On Colonialism, 106. 50. “Anti-Slavery in China,” Punch, or The London Charivari 6 (1844): 103. 51. Marx, “Revolution in China and in Europe,” New York Daily Tribune, June 14, 1853, in On Colonialism, 15–22. See also Gregory Blue, “Opium for China: The British Connection,” in Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 32–35. 52. John B. Beck, “Infanticide,” in Theodric Romeyn Beck and John B. Beck, eds., Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, 7th edn. (London: Longman and Co., 1842), vol. i, 230. 53. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 287. 54. James Peggs, India’s Cries to British Humanity, Relative to the Suttee, Infanticide, British Connexion with Idolatry, Ghaut Murders, and Slavery in India, 2nd edn. (London: Seely & Son, 1830), 131. 55. See Josephine McDonagh, “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold,” in Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash, eds., Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 217. 56. See William Burke Ryan, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, and History (London: J. Churchill, 1862), who takes issue with Malthus’s reading of poverty as causation and the gourds as compassion, concluding, “Save us from our friends!” (236). For Thomas Malthus’s overall compassion towards Chinese infanticide, see “Of the Checks to Population in China and Japan,” An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, 1798; 1803 (London: Dent, 1973), 125–138. See also the discussion of Hume’s views on infanticide in China in Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 41–42. 57. François-Xavier-Timothée Danicourt, Infanticide et exposition des enfants en Chine (Amiens: Lemer Ainé, 1863), 9. 58. For Chinese views on infanticide, see James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 60–61. CHAPTER 6: A COCKNEY CHINATOWN: THE LITERATURE OF LIMEHOUSE, LONDON 1. Ah-Chin-Le, The Civilization of the Western Barbarians, 274. 2. “Foreign Undesirables,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 169 (February 1901): 289. 3. Walter H. Medhurst, “The Chinese as Colonists,” Nineteenth Century 4.19 (September 1878): 518.

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Notes to pages 194–196

4. Burrage’s Ching-Ching series began with the maritime adventure Handsome Harry of the Belvedere (1886) and progressed to a series of adventure tales about the wily Chinaman’s exploits in Britain. See especially Wonderful Ching-Ching (1885) and Young Ching-Ching (1886). In 1888, Burrage began a boys’ paper called Ching-Ching’s Own and later Best for Boys’s Ching-Ching’s Own, which included narratives featuring Ching-Ching as a detective. See Ralph Rollington [H. J. Allingham], A Brief History of Boys’ Journals, with Interesting Facts about the Writers of Boys’ Stories (Leicester: H. Simpson, 1913), 101–103. 5. R. M. Hughes, The Laws Relating to Lascars and Asiatic Seamen Employed in the British Merchants’ Service, or Brought to the United Kingdom in Foreign Vessels (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1855), 6. 6. Census numbers do not necessarily reflect residents born in Hong Kong or other British dependencies. See Colin Holmes, “The Chinese Connection,” in Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes, eds., Outsiders and Outcasts: Essays in Honour of William J. Fishman (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1993), 74. The Chinese also had a small presence in the West End, where there were already Chinese laundries by 1900. See Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 266 n9. There were also several restaurants operating in this area early in the twentieth century. 7. For historical information on the British Chinese, see John Seed, “Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–40,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 58–85; Holmes’s John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London: Macmillan Education, 1988); J. P. May, “The Chinese in Britain,” in Colin Holmes, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978); Kwee Choo Ng, The Chinese in London (London: Institute of Race Relations/Oxford University Press, 1968); and Joanne M. Cayford, “In Search of ‘John Chinaman’: Press Representations of the Chinese in Cardiff, 1906–19,” Llafur: Journal of Welsh History 5.4 (1991): 37–50. 8. “China Town in London,” Review of Reviews 22 (July 2, 1900): 51. 9. Joseph Banister, England under the Jews (London: Joseph Banister, 1901), 36, 86. 10. Times, November 22, 1879, 11e, reporting on Guillaume Henry Jean Meyners d’Estrey, “L’Émigration Chinoise,” Annales de l’Extrême Orient 2 (1879): 1–5. 11. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1822); Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood; William Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage, ill. Gustave Doré (London: Grant & Co., 1872); James Greenwood, In Strange Company: Being the Experience of a Roving Correspondent (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873); Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Strand Magazine (1891): 623–637. For critical analysis of this literature, see Cannon Schmitt’s chapter “De Quincey’s Gothic Autobiography and the Opium Wars,” in Alien Nation: Nineteenth-century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 46–75. See also Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains, and David Faulkner,

Notes to pages 197–202

261

“The Confidence Man: Empire and the Deconstruction of Muscular Christianity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” in Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 175–193. 12. George A. Wade, “The Cockney John Chinaman,” The English Illustrated Magazine 23 (July 1900): 307. 13. John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Quimbo Appo’s Fear of the Fenians: Chinese–Irish–Anglo Relations in New York City,” in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 128–129. Showing once again the class breach in the anxieties about miscegenation, Henry Snell argues in a publication of the Independent Labour Party, The Foreigner in England: An Examination of the Problem of Alien Immigration (Keighley: The Rydal Press, 1904), “it is just possible that the English race is strengthened and kept virile by the steady stream of alien blood that is poured into it” (10). 14. For instance, Richard Rowe, in Picked up in the Streets, or Struggles for Life amongst the London Poor (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1880), visits the premises of Eliza, the supposed model for Princess Puffer, and describes her as being married to an Indian Lascar and able to speak Hindi (38–39). 15. Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 92. 16. Charles W. Wood, “In the Night-Watches,” Argosy 65.387 (February 1898): 209. Wood attributed the decline particularly to the end of the practice of paying Chinese and Indian sailors on arrival in England. 17. Thomas Burke, Limehouse Nights, 1916 (London: Daily Express Fiction Library, n.d.); Broken Blossoms, dir. D. W. Griffith, perf. Lillian Gish and Richard Barthlemess (United Artists, 1919). “The Chink and the Child” first appeared in Colour 3.3 (October 1915): 82–88. 18. Jon Burrows, “‘A Vague Chinese Quarter Elsewhere’: Limehouse in the Cinema 1914–36,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 6.2 (2009): 289, 292. 19. Witchard, Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie, 219–228 and 234–239; Sascha Auerbach, Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 109–118. 20. George R. Sims, “Li Ting of London,” in Li Ting of London and Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), 7–23. 21. Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books were simultaneously published in London and New York. See Tina Chen, “Dissecting the ‘Devil Doctor’: Stereotype and Sensationalism in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu,” in Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa, eds., Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 220. For census figures, see May, “The Chinese in Britain,” 121–122. 22. It is noteworthy that Griffith had never set foot in Limehouse when he made Broken Blossoms and therefore worked entirely with an American conceptual map of overseas Chinese enclaves. 23. An archetypal example of the American genre is Frank Norris’s 1897 “The Third Circle.” In this story, a beautiful young woman (with “the fresh, vigorous,

262

Notes to pages 202–206

healthful prettiness only seen in certain types of unmixed American stock” [16]) is kidnapped while visiting San Francisco’s Chinatown with her fiancé. Many years later, the narrator discovers her as a slave of the opium lord Ah Yee. 24. On the architectural uncanny in representations of San Francisco’s Chinatown, see Emma Jinhua Teng, “Artifacts of a Lost City: Arnold Genthe’s Pictures of Old Chinatown and Its Intertexts,” in Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa, eds., Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 55–56. 25. “Rube in an Opium Joint,” American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905, Library of Congress FLA 3818. 26. See, for instance, C. W. Doyle, The Shadow of Quong Lung (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1900). 27. On the Chinese community in Wales, see Cayford, “In Search”; Panayi Panikos, Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 112. On Liverpool and Chinese laundries in the 1890s, see P. J. Waller, “The Chinese,” History Today 35 (1985): 9. See also Maria Lin Wong, Chinese Liverpudlians: A History of the Chinese Community in Liverpool (Birkenhead: Liver Press, 1989). 28. For an analogous instance of fiction about working-class interaction with the Chinese appearing in an Australian mining community, see Louis Becke, Chinkie’s Flat (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904). In Fergus Hume’s popular The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (London: Hansom Cab Publishing Co., 1888), a slum-girl disappears and consorts with a “Chinaman” in Sydney. Hume would later write a murder mystery set in London, centering around the figure of a half-Scotch, half-Chinese woman nicknamed “Mother Mandarin,” who is the proprietor of an opium den. See Mother Mandarin (London: F. V. White & Co., 1912). For historical information on the Chinese in Australia, see Andrew Markus’s Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850– 1901 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979). 29. George R. Sims, “Trips about Town: V. In Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs,” Strand Magazine 30.175 (July 1905): 35–40. 30. Sims, How the Poor Live, and Horrible London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1889). 31. George R. Sims, “The Romance of Reality,” in The Mysteries of Modern London (London: C. Pearson, 1906), 164–165. 32. Sun Yat-Sen, Kidnapped in London: Being the Story of My Capture by, Detention at, and Release from the Chinese Legation, London (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1897). Although ostensibly written by Sun, modern scholarship indicates that the book was authored by a British friend, James Cantlie. See John Yue-Ho Wong, The Origins of an Heroic Image: Sun Yatsen in London, 1896–1897 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1986), 185–188. 33. Chen Shaobai, cited in John Yue-Ho Wong, “Sun Yatsen: His Heroic Image a Century Afterwards,” Journal of Asian History 28.2 (1994): 154–176. 34. Qtd. in Wong, Chinese Liverpudlians, 30. The same dynamic held true in New York. See Wong Chin Foo, “The Chinese in New York,” Cosmopolitan 5

Notes to pages 206–212

263

(March–October 1888): 297–231. See also Emma Jinhua Teng, “Miscegenation and the Critique of Patriarchy in Turn-of-the-Century Fiction,” Race, Gender & Class 4.3 (1997): 69–87. She reads Asian-American writer Sui Sin Far’s “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” and “Her Chinese Husband” as narratives demonstrating the superiority of a Chinese husband over a white one for working-class protagonist Minnie. See Sui Sin Far [Edith Maude Eaton], Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, ed. Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 56–83. 35. Count E. Armfelt, “Oriental London,” in George R. Sims, ed., Living London (London: George Cassell and Company Limited, 1902), vol. i, 84. 36. See the notes attached to the “Report on Mrs. Robinson’s Allegation re Chinamen,” HO 45/11843/18. 37. An unusual case of naturalization in the 1840s for a half-Chinese tea broker from Macau can be found in National Archives records, HO 45/8909. 38. This absorptive model was also reflective of historical realities. As Stead’s periodical Review of Reviews noted in its article “China Town in London,” the children of Anglo-Chinese marriages are always given English first and last names and wear English dress. See “China Town in London,” 51. See also Wade, “The Cockney John Chinaman,” 305. 39. George Mitchell, Down in Limehouse (London: Stanley Martin & Co., 1925), 13. 40. On Barnardo, see Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 88–139. 41. See also Dorothea Flatau’s half-Irish, half-Chinese schoolboy in “Chingie” in Pong Ho: A Volume of Short Stories (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1924), 265–278. 42. Carol Watts discusses some of these characteristics in “Adapting Affect: The Melodramatic Economy of Broken Blossoms,” Film Studies 3 (2002): 31–46. 43. Like Charlie Chaplin, Burke seems to have fabricated his personal history and altered it to suit the circumstances. For biographical information, see Fred B. Millett, “Thomas Burke,” in John M. Manly and Edith Rockert, eds., Contemporary British Literature: A Critical Survey and 232 AuthorBibliographies, 3rd edn. (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1935), 160; his obituary in the Times, September 24, 1945, 7d; and Anne Witchard, “Thomas Burke, the ‘Laureate of Limehouse’: A Biographical Outline,” ELT/English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 48.2 (2005): 164–187. 44. Vance Kepley, Jr., “Griffith’s ‘Broken Blossoms’ and the Problem of Historical Specificity,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.1 (1978): 41. The characterization of Burke’s appearance comes from A. St. John Adcock, Gods of Modern Grub Street (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1923), 114. 45. Grant Richards, Author Hunting by an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), 127. 46. Watts, “Adapting Affect,” 37. 47. “Limehouse Nights,” Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 1916: 464. 48. Cf. Watts, “Adapting Affect,” 35.

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Notes to pages 212–220

49. Teng, “Miscegenation and the Critique of Patriarchy,” 71. 50. As Julia Lesage notes, “Griffith changed Burke’s Chinese protagonist from a schemer and ‘worthless drifter of an Oriental’ to a poetic, peaceful Buddhist lover of beauty. Ostensibly BROKEN BLOSSOMS has a moral message: Asian Buddhist peacefulness is superior to Anglo-Saxon ignorance, brutality and strife.” See Julia Lesage, “Broken Blossoms: Artful Racism, Artful Rape,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema 26 (1981): 51. 51. Burke wrote that his fascination with opium came from reading De Quincey, claiming Confessions of an English Opium Eater was the first book he purchased. One of his earliest literary efforts (published much later) consisted of an edited edition of De Quincey. See Thomas Burke, ed., The Ecstasies of Thomas De Quincey (London: George G. Harrap, 1928), 23. 52. A related reading of opium in Drood appears in Stanley, “Opium and Edwin Drood.” Stanley argues that Jasper’s use of opium is more related to psychological alienation than to “cultural différence” (17). 53. See Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), who make it clear that objections to opium dens emanated from middle-class observers outside of Limehouse, and not from their working-class neighbors. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of the dangers of foreign ingestion in Edwin Drood in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 183. 54. “Missionary to the Asiatics and Africans,” London City Mission Magazine 42.500 (August 1, 1877): 178. 55. Holmes, “The Chinese Connection,” 71–93. Marek Kohn, in Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (London: Granta, 1992), also argues that the key obsession was not opium, but Chinese men’s relations with white women during the first quarter of the twentieth century (57). 56. Hevia, English Lessons, 318. 57. Shannon Case attributes the greater visibility of Chinese London as much to Burke and Rohmer as to historical developments. See “Lilied Tongues and Yellow Claws: The Invention of London’s Chinatown, 1915–45,” in Stella Dean, ed., Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914–45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 18. 58. Rohmer, The Yellow Claw; Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic (London: Cassell and Company, 1919). 59. Regenia Gagnier, “Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism,” in Regina Barreca, ed., Sex and Death in Victorian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1990), 140–157. 60. According to Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, in their subjective Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press Popular Press, 1972), Rohmer grew interested in Chinatown in 1911 when an editor asked him to investigate a “Mr. King,” a known drug trafficker, in Limehouse (4).

Notes to pages 220–231

265

61. Edward Tupper, Seamen’s Torch: The Life Story of Captain Edward Tupper, National Union of Seamen (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1938). 62. Thomas Burke, “The Hunger for Beauty,” Essays of Today and Yesterday (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1928), 9–10. 63. Thomas Burke, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 84. CONCLUSION: NO REST FOR THE WEST 1. My population statistics come from “The Ethnic Population of Britain Broken Down by Local Authority,” Guardian, May 18, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/ news/datablog/2011/may/18/ethnic-population-england-wales. Information about the Chinese community’s growth rate comes from the Office of National Statistics’s “Population Estimates by Ethnic Group, 2002–2009,” May 18, 2011, www.ons.gov.uk. 2. Niall Ferguson, China: Triumph and Turmoil, dir. Adrian Pennink, Chimerica Media and Educational Broadcasting Corporation for Channel 4, 2012. “Chinks” was a term for Chinese food in America, as well. See also the article “Get Ready to Be a Slave in China’s World Order” on Ferguson’s website, www.niallferguson.com. 3. “The Steampunk Opium Wars” was first performed at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, on February 16, 2012. More information about it can be found on Anna Chen’s website at: www.annachen.co.uk/the-steampunkopium-wars. 4. Jill Insley, “A Working Life: The Gangmaster,” Guardian, July 29, 2011. 5. The lyrics are taken from www.christymoore.com/lyrics/on-morecambe-bay. 6. Valerie Elliott and Philip Webster, “Smuggled Meat Blamed for Epidemic,” Times, March 27, 2001: 1. 7. Peter Hitchens, “Brown’s Chinese Restaurant Lie,” Daily Mail, April 15, 2001, online at www.dailymail.co.uk. 8. See www.britishchineseonline.com/forum/showthread.php?t=409. 9. Liz Robbins and Jeffrey E. Singer, “A Delicacy on Chinatown Plates, but a Killer in Water,” New York Times, April 29, 2011, www.nytimes.com. 10. Chen, “The Triumph and Turmoil of Niall Ferguson’s Obsession with China,”madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/triumph-and-turmoil-of-niallfergusons.html, March 13, 2010. 11. The Red Dragon, of course, was an imperial symbol in China. 12. Leslie Hook and Jonathan Soble, “China’s Rare Earth Stranglehold in Spotlight,” Financial Times, March 13, 2012. 13. See also the review from August 1, 2010 on Chen’s blog, “Sherlock and Wily Orientals,” madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/sherlock-and-wily-orientalsbbc-stuck.html. 14. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tc6t2. Thompson’s script for the episode can be found on the BBC Writer’s Room site, www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/ scripts/sherlock-the-blind-banker.

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Notes to pages 231–233

15. Jason Deans, “Sherlock on the Case with 6.4 Million,” Guardian, August 2, 2012; “Weekly Top 30 Programmes,” August 2–8, 2010, Broadcaster’s Association Research Board, www.barb.co.uk. 16. Gwyn Topham, “Tourism Bosses Say Visa Red Tape – and Cost – Are Putting off Chinese Visitors,” Guardian, August 17, 2012.

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Index

Abbas, Ackbar, 66, 74, 245 Academy, 86 adventure fiction, 8, 9, 17, 25, 43, 44, 57, 58, 60, 68, 73, 76, 101, 113, 117, 118, 133, 156, 248, 260 Africa, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 26, 51, 64, 68, 74, 105, 137, 143, 146, 158, 167, 174, 229, 231 African Americans minstrelsy, 163, 166, 174, 176 representations of, 19, 28, 175–177, 239 Africans, 15, 26, 28, 99, 167, 175–176, 194, 227 Aguirre, Robert D., 11, 255 Ah-Chin-Le, 193 Some Observations upon the Civilization of the Western Barbarians, 193 Ainsworth, Harrison, 196 airplanes, see airships airships, 27, 149, 153, 156 Aliens’ Act of 1905, 133 amah, 38 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 202 “Rube in an Opium Joint,” 202 amok, 181, 229 Amoy, 36, 45, 181 amuck, see amok anachronistic space, 84, 140, 232, 234, 248 Anglo-American alliance, 3, 13, 17, 19, 38, 48, 111, 166 Anglobalization, 13, 229 Anglo-Boer War, 16, 26, 41, 99, 104, 105, 127, 146, 196 Anglophone writing, 8, 12, 27, 69, 74, 75, 135, 165 anthologies, 24, 29, 33, 47, 73, 77–79, 88, 97, 205, 210, 245 Apple, 230 Arata, Stephen, 47, 132, 136 architecture, 37, 80, 111, 202, 262 Armfelt, E., 206 “Oriental London,” 206 arranged marriage plot, 168–170

Arrighi, Giovanni, 71 Arrow War, see Opium Wars, Second Opium War Asian American Studies, 19 Asian religions, representation of, 178–180 Asiatic despotism and stasis, 11, 27, 31, 37–39, 64, 71, 90, 105–109, 121, 146, 165, 167, 173, 174, 185, 197, 208, 225, 230 Asiatic masterminds, in literature and film, 27, 74, 75, 133, 136, 145, 147–148, 154, 156, 157, 163, 200, 217 as fiends or devils incarnate, 130, 132, 141 invisibility of, 140–143, 144 Asiatic Mode of Production, 11, 108 Associated Chambers of Commerce of Great Britain, 3 Auerbach, Sascha, 199, 201 Australia, 9, 12, 26, 44, 77, 82, 87, 108, 129, 133, 135, 141, 156, 193, 195, 202 authors, China-based, 9, 10, 16, 17, 31, 33, 45 babu, figure of, 75 Backhouse, Edmund, 118 Ballantyne, R. M., 86 Bangkok, 75 Bangkok Times, 74 Banister, Joseph, 195, 260 England under the Jews, 195 barbarians, images of Westerners as, 6, 14, 15, 30, 46, 84, 118, 151, 169, 179, 181, 193 barbarism, Chinese, trope of, 59, 60, 90, 98, 101, 108, 113, 122, 125, 132, 137, 145, 152, 183, 189 Barnardo, Dr., 207, 263 Barnum, P. T., 164 Barrow, John, 187 Travels in China, 187 Baudrillard, Jean, 146 Beckford, William, 196 Vathek, 196 Beijing, see Peking

289

290

Index

Beresford, Charles, 3–4, 36, 155, 237 The Break-up of China, 3–4, 36 Besant, Walter East London, 210, 215 Betty, 1, 3–4, 6, 13, 64, 73, 74, 81 Intercepted Letters, 1, 8, 64 Bewicke, Alicia, 14, 43, 73, 101, 118 A Marriage in China, 14, 73 Out in China!, 43, 48, 101, 118, 125–126 Bhabha, Homi, 69, 70, 93, 112 Bickers, Robert, 38, 70, 72, 100 The Boxers, China, and the World, 101 blackface, 28, 163, 166, 174–177 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 193, 196 Blair, Ian, 226 Bland, J. O. P., 30, 31, 38, 43, 242 Verse and Worse, 30, 38, 43 Bloomsbury, 142 body hair, 14, 112, 115–116, 207 Boehm, Lise, 24, 32, 44, 45, 50, 51, 242 China Coast Tales, 95, 249 “Dobson’s Daughter,” 50, 51 “In the Sixties,” 33 “Peter Wong,” 95 “Playing Providence,” 44 Boehmer, Elleke, 76 Bohemianism, 77 Bombardment & Capture of Canton, The, 70 Bombay, 37 Boothby, Guy, 141 Dr. Nikola’s Experiment, 141 boredom, 8, 23, 44, 47, 54 Borneo, 22 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 136 Boucicault, Dion, 52, 183 Jessie Brown, 52 Bowkett, S., and George D. Day, 174 The Willow Pattern Plate, 174 Boxer Rebellion, 9, 15, 19, 25–28, 34, 35, 46, 48–49, 59, 61–62, 81, 98–129, 132, 134, 136, 138, 142, 144, 150, 157, 159, 162, 171, 175, 176, 178, 195, 196, 205, 250, 251, 252, 253 hypnotism, 103, 110, 133, 150 in invasion novels, 133–134 international relief force, 27, 104, 111, 113, 122, 127 news footage of, 99 Peitang (Northern) Cathedral, 122, 124, 251 relief of the Legations, 27, 128 Seymour’s relief column, 106, 115 Siege of the Legations, 26, 98, 100, 101, 104–106, 111, 114, 122, 127–128, 250, 251 treaty to end, 104, 131 Boy’s Own Paper, 86, 87 boy-heroes, 24, 62, 82, 105, 106, 111, 112, 117, 122, 123, 127, 168

Brady, S. E., 32, 52–55 The Jewel and the Lotus and Other Stories “Little Mertens,” 32, 52–55 Brantlinger, Patrick, 101, 119, 160 imperial Gothic, 160 Bratton, J. S., 182 Brazil, 4, 14, 74, 230 Brereton, F. S. The Dragon of Pekin, 105, 109, 110, 116, 121, 123, 127, 133, 150–153 BRIC, 12, 238 Bristow, Joseph, 57, 115 Britain globalization, 10 Britain and China trade imbalance, 11, 229 British consular service, 36, 40, 41, 42, 44, 49, 51, 56, 107, 118, 126, 172 British Empire, 3, 4, 5, 12, 16, 17, 24, 60, 64, 70, 80, 107, 156, 158, 160, 162, 185, 194, 209 British Legation, 3, 26, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 125, 127, 209 British Museum, 132, 232 Britishness, 44, 45, 95, 169, 206, 257 Brontë, Charlotte, 78 Jane Eyre, 78 Broomfield, Nick Ghosts, 226 Browne, Anthony “The Last Days of a White World,” 227 Browne, Anthony, and Paul Harris, 227 “Smuggled Meat Threatens UK with Catastrophic Viruses,” 227 Buddhism, 120, 125, 179, 190, 191, 199, 241, 264 Buddha statues and figures, 123, 168, 178, 179 Buddhist temples, 118, 126, 175, 178, 199 Burke, Thomas, 95, 194, 200, 201, 210–211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221–223 “The Chink and the Child,” 199, 200, 210–211 The Ecstasies of Thomas De Quincey, 202 “The Hunger for Beauty,” 222 Limehouse Nights, 29, 209–215, 221 Nights in Town, 221, 222 “The Paw,”, 211–215 burlesque, 162 Burma, 103 Burrage, Edwin Harcourt, 194 Ching-Ching series, 194 Burrows, Jon, 199 Burton, Richard F., 13, 231, 252 business imperialism, 5, 43 Butler, Judith, 146 Butterfield and Swire, 67

Index Calcutta, 2, 12, 37, 46, 74 Cameron, Nigel, 23 Cannadine, David, 163 Ornamentalism, 163 canon, Chinese literary, 74 Canton, 12, 30, 34, 42, 46, 107, 167, 175, 186–187 cantonments, 45, 64, 102, 105 Caribbean, 10, 12, 91, 137, 195 Casarino, Cesare, 86 Catholicism, 82, 103, 123–125, 179, 188, 192 Celestial Empire, see China Ch’ing, see Qing dynasty Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 19 Chambers, Colin, 164 Chan, Gemma, 232 Chang the Chinese giant, 164, 255 Chang, Dong-Shin, 163 Chang, Elizabeth, 17, 164, 172 Chen, Anna, 225, 227, 228, 232 “The Steampunk Opium Wars,” 225 Chesney, George Tomkyns, 134 The Battle of Dorking, 134 Childers, Erskine, 134 The Riddle of the Sands, 134 China and autarky, 228 and ciphers, 232, 234 and entropy, 26, 228–229 and fears of world domination, 135, 138, 229–230 Zhonglobalization, 229 and human rights, 225, 230 and individuality, 27, 110, 138–139, 145, 168, 199, 213, 225, 226, 228, 230, 233 and monopoly, 229 and rare earths, 229 and technological espionage, 230 as opportunity, 11, 15, 49, 131 as potential catalyst for revolution in Europe, 107–108 as threat and danger, 8, 11, 15, 25–26, 27, 49, 61, 82, 93, 99, 102, 106, 110–113, 122, 130–160, 170, 199–201, 203, 218–220, 225–236 awakening of, 131, 150, 225 becoming “Chinafied,” 229 “break down” of, 36, 195 break-up of, 48 British interests in, 42, 103 British place in, 45 British presence in, 44, 51, 58, 63, 80, 187 carve-up of, 3, 36, 80, 88, 99 Chinese century, the, 224 Chinese labor, 16, 138

291

comparison to medieval Europe, 111, 140, 154 corruption, 35, 47, 48, 59, 61, 73, 119, 121, 145, 169, 187, 190, 192, 229 English-language press in, 1, 9, 17, 43–44, 66, 74, 103 foreigners’ place in, 40 Great Wall of, 15, 37, 127, 172, 257 imitation versus innovation, 145–147, 230 isolationism and xenophobia, 3, 8, 11, 15, 23, 34–35, 37, 40, 44–45, 58, 60, 71, 81, 90, 98–100, 103, 106–109, 119, 121, 122, 123, 133, 143, 146, 152, 159, 162, 179, 187, 225, 251 modernization of, 25–27, 35, 70, 71, 131 “opening-up” of, 22–23, 33, 51, 106, 128 partition of, 2, 39 population as problem, 225 relationship between China and the West, 109 resistance to modernity, 100 “rise of China,” 26, 225 scramble for China, 10, 26, 42, 120, 129, 133, 195 “sick man of Asia,” image of, 80, 99 spheres of influence, 105, 130 Tsung-li-Yamen, 38, 104, 122 up-country, 60, 62 women’s condition, 191 China Coast, 8, 31, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47, 92, 109 China Mail, 1, 17, 43, 75 China Punch, 17 Chinafication, 197, 207 Chinaman, the, 1, 11, 24, 47, 58, 59, 116, 119, 144, 171, 172, 175, 194, 197, 198, 199, 207, 212, 213, 214, 260 Chinatown, 195, 201–203, 216, 224, 227, 232, 233 Chinaware, 148 in literary texts and plays, 172–174 nodding mandarin figures, 166, 172 teapots, 172, 232–233 willow-pattern plate, 148, 166, 168, 172–174, 186 Chindia, 12, 238 Chinese acrobatics, 183, 233 and atavism, 136 and cruelty, 24, 59, 96, 121, 125, 144–145, 152, 162, 183, 185, 187, 189–192, 225 “arrested development” of, 115 as animalistic, 15, 93, 109, 138, 212 as savage and inhumane, 25, 96, 98, 119, 136, 144, 149, 151–152, 204, 212, 226 Chinese in Australia, 166, 262 Chinese in Britain, 9, 17, 131, 195 population of, 224 Chinese in Liverpool, 202, 226 Chinese in London, 22, 28–29, 44, 110, 204, 211, 224, 227

292

Index

Chinese (cont.) population of, 224 Chinese in New York, 197, 201 Chinese in San Francisco, 201 Chinese in Wales, 202 “Chineseness,” 95, 99, 193 inscrutability of, 10, 24, 37, 114, 120, 228 jugglers, 164 magicians, 164 masses, 25–27, 89, 93, 100, 110, 119, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137–140, 143, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 178, 182, 183 as locusts, 130, 138, 140 comparison to British working classes, 59, 109–112, 138, 144, 154, 196, 203–204 mob, 25, 46, 59, 62, 106, 109, 111, 123, 138, 150, 153, 154, 156–157, 255 naturalization as British or American, 171, 206, 208, 263 peasantry, 61, 106, 109–110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 121, 124, 131, 133, 153, 154, 191, 252 peasantry, and Irish, 28, 188 relationship to pain, 139–140, 150 superstition of, 100, 108, 113, 119, 125 theater, drama, pantomime, and popular music about, 28, 161–192 trope of cunning, 24, 44, 48, 53, 55, 87, 105, 125, 218, 260 zoomorphism in representations of, 139, 143 Chinese Americans, stereotypes of, 166 Chinese food, 224–225, 227, 265 allegations of illegally imported meat, 227 Chinese Honeymoon, A, 165 Chinese immigration, 37, 133, 140, 156, 166, 194, 195, 200, 201, 202, 206, 225, 231, 233 students, 131, 253 to North America, 131 to the British Empire, 131 Chinese Junk, The, 171, 181–182 Chinese labor schemes, 56, 137, 138, 194 Chinese law, depiction of, 168, 170 Chinese migration, 19 Chinese mistresses, 53–55, 57, 153 Chinese postal service, 48 chinoiserie, 165–166, 238 Christianity, see also “native Christians” Christianity, in China, 123, 179, 186, 251 Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, The Philippines, & C., The, 64 cinema, 26, 98–99, 149, 150–153, 155, 198–199, 201, 202, 226, 252 narrative reenactments of the Boxer Rebellion, 99

circulation of texts, 2, 7, 9, 18, 72, 73, 164 Cixi, 26, 98, 103–104, 106, 117, 120–121, 126, 127, 205, 209, 235 photographic portraits of, 121 Clarke, G. A., and Harry F. Spiers, 176, 178 The Yellow Terror, 176, 178 Cockney John Chinaman, 195 Cohen, Paul A., 111 Collingwood, Harry, 43 Collins, Wilkie, 141, 217, 235 The Moonstone, 141, 235 Colour, 211 colour line, 47, 53, 76, 77, 81, 90–92, 95, 170, 199, 212 Compound Q, 227 compradors, 75 concubinage, 14, 24, 49, 75, 81–82, 85, 89, 90, 200 Confucianism, 125, 179, 199, 214 Conrad, Joseph, 24, 32, 67, 78, 83, 85, 86, 87, 153, 248 Almayer’s Folly, 67 Falk, 78 Heart of Darkness, 78, 154 Typhoon, 78 Victory, 67 coolies, 38, 40, 42, 87, 111, 112, 133, 137, 139, 140, 176, 207, 216, 254 Cooper, Frederick, 19 cosmopolitanism, 29, 42, 70, 142, 158 costumes, 161, 167, 170, 175 Crimea, the, 4 Croskey, Julian, 1, 24, 32, 35, 48–51, 56, 61, 99, 242 The Chest of Opium, 24, 48 “The S. G.,” 1, 32, 35 The Shen’s Pigtail, 61 “A Shooting Trip in the Grand Canal,” 61 crown colony, 2, 37, 97, 244 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 231 Daily Mail, 104 Daily Telegraph, 12, 76 Dalton, William, 76 The Wasps of the Ocean, 76 Dalziel, James, 8, 24, 32, 52, 67, 68, 72, 81, 82, 83, 87, 90, 96–97, 191, 245, 248 A Paper on Light Draught Steamers for River Service, 67 Chronicles of a Crown Colony, 24, 66, 68, 77, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92–96, 199, 211, 212 “A Marriage of No Importance,” 14, 16 “Da Sarto’s Sister,” 14, 17 “Small Pot,” 77–78 “The Colour Line,” 10, 16, 18, 73–77, 78, 87 “The Daughters of the King,” 17

Index High Life in the Far East, 24, 66, 67, 82–84, 86, 87, 89, 92, 97 “Above Normal,” 82 “Love for a Year,” 82, 84, 89 “The Sickness of a Dream,” 83 In the First Watch, 66, 67, 86, 87, 88 “Heroes to Order,” 86 “Maguire’s Trip Home,” 87 “The Flaw in the Crank-Shaft,” 86 Damrosch, David, 7 Danvers, Fred A Chinese Idyl, 174–176 Daoism, 179, 199 Darwin, Charles, 120, 138, 146, 171 Dawe, Alfred, 162 Sen Yamen, 162 Dawe, William Carlton, 26, 43, 46, 47, 121, 217 The Plotters of Peking, 121 The Yellow Man, 26, 130, 141, 201, 203, 235 Yellow and White, 47 “Yellow and White,” 9 De Quincey, Thomas, 16, 197, 202–203, 264 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 141, 196, 197 detective fiction, 112, 156, 194, 202, 219, 231, 260 Dickens, Charles, 41, 196, 197, 207, 210, 239 Bleak House, 204 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 16, 196, 197, 198 Princess Puffer, 197, 207, 261 “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” 41 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 12–13, 37, 128, 134, 155, 159, 253 diseases, 148 AIDS, 227 bird flu, 227 cancer, 227 cholera, 149 ebola, 227 foot and mouth disease, 227 H1N1 swine flu, 227 Nipa virus, 227 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), 227 syphilis, 219 tuberculosis, 148 disguise, uses of, 49, 101, 106, 112, 114, 176–177, 231, 252 distribution, of literature, 2, 9, 17, 19, 23, 42–44, 46, 68, 73, 83, 96 Dolly, 24, 43, 55–58, 244 The Vampire Nemesis and Other Weird Stories of the China Coast “The Vampire Nemesis,” 19, 55–58, 91 domesticity, 81, 94, 200 Doré, Gustave, 196

293

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 196, 217, 231, 234 “Man with a Twisted Lip,” 196 drinking, 46, 55, 57, 86, 196, 203, 207, 208, 214, 215 Dutch East Indies, 87 East India Company, 85, 109, 186, 194 empires entwined, 4–7, 13, 90, 108 Empress Dowager, see Cixi endogamy, 81, 82, 84 Eng and Chang, 164 The Siamese Twins, 164 Engels, Friedrich, 8, 106–109, 134, 144 New York Daily Tribune, articles in, 108 “Persia and China,” 102 Englishman, brown-skinned and yellow-skinned, 3, 75, 95, 112, 172 Esherick, Joseph W., 104, 123, 253 espionage, telegraphic, 141 ethnicity, 14, 53, 88 Eurasians, 6, 14, 15, 31, 52, 58, 64, 76–77, 90, 91, 245 European Union, 229 expatriates, 18, 23, 28, 31–33, 51, 64, 66, 73, 78, 165, 194, 243 extra-imperialism, 5, 17, 44, 68, 87 extramarital relationships in literature, 45, 46, 47, 52, 83, 118, 219 extraterritoriality, 15, 34, 56, 58, 247, 250 fallen women, 84 famine, 188–190 famine, in China, 188 farce, 162, 164, 174 femininity, Chinese, 171 femininity, imperial, 50, 77, 84, 89, 170, 171, 176, 214 Fenn, George Manville, 86, 116–117, 252 Stan Lynn, 116–117, 252 Ferguson, Niall, 13, 224–225, 228–230, 232, 246, 265 Triumph and Turmoil, 224, 228–229 Fifty-two Stories of Greater Britain, 59 Financial Times, 229 First World War, 26, 132, 195, 198, 216, 220 Fiske, Shanyn, 16 Fleming, Peter, 250 The Siege at Peking, 118 Flowery Land, see China Foochow, 51 foot-binding, 118, 192, 207, 252 foreign China, 8, 9, 17, 32, 33, 35, 37–38, 42, 45, 50, 51, 59, 62, 63, 85 foreign devils, image of Westerners as, 15, 30, 42, 58, 59, 119

294

Index

formal imperialism, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 23, 37, 38, 39, 49, 56, 69, 72, 74, 80, 100, 103, 125, 129, 158, 186 Formosa, see Taiwan Forster, E. M., 120, 210 Foxconn, 230 France, 11, 19, 32, 38, 45, 50, 75, 76, 100, 102, 103, 106, 115, 123, 127, 128, 133, 179, 183, 187, 190 Frank, Andre Gunder, 11, 71 Freeman, Martin, 231 Freemantle, E. A., 122 “Prince Tuan’s Treasure,” 122 French Revolution, 150, 155 French Shanghai, 22 French Concession, 22, 32, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 150, 154 Fu Manchu, 22, 29, 133, 135, 136, 149, 156, 163, 200, 201, 216, 217, 221, 261 Fuzhou, see Foochow Gagnier, Regenia, 218 Gallagher, John, 69, 72, 102 gambling, 46, 207, 214, 216, 219 gamelan, 162, 255 Gangmaster (Licensing) Act, 226 geopolitics, 4, 6, 40, 48, 49, 62, 100, 135, 136, 161, 162, 163 George, G. H., 167 Grand Pantomime of Harlequin Aladdin and the Lamp, 167 Germany, 2, 3, 19, 34, 45, 61, 87, 88, 102, 103, 104, 123, 125, 128, 129, 133, 136, 141, 146, 149, 151, 195 militarization of, 134 Gilbert, W. S., and Arthur Sullivan, 166 The Mikado, 166, 168, 172 Gilson, Charles, 110, 112, 128 The Lost Column, 110, 112, 123, 128 Gissing, George, 196 The Nether World, 207 global turn, the, 72 globalization, 6, 10, 19, 25, 71, 107, 111, 131, 141, 157, 218, 225, 226, 229, 233 glocal, the, 68, 73 the local and the global, 74 going native, 9, 85, 171 gold rush, 108 Gould, Marty, 166, 173 Granite Isle, see Hong Kong Graydon, W. Murray, 98 The Perils of Pekin, 98, 99, 111, 120, 123 Great Game, the, 49, 111, 115, 231 Greater Britain, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 17, 19, 24, 25–26, 27, 36, 37, 38, 47, 60, 75, 134, 135, 160, 166, 224 Greenwood, James, 196

In Strange Company, 196 Griffith, D. W., 198 Broken Blossoms, 198, 199, 201, 210, 211, 214, 261 Dream Street, 201 Griffiths, Alison, 180 Guangxu, 121 Guangzhou, see Canton Guardian, 226, 227 gunboat diplomacy, 15, 37, 40, 87, 106, 119, 169, 183, 220 Guo Xiaolu, 225 Haggard, H. Rider, 60 Hague Convention of 1899, 134, 145, 147, 149 Hainan, 102 Hale, William Palmer, and Francis Talfourd, 173, 257, 271 The Mandarin’s Daughter, 173, 257, 271 Hall, Catherine, 9 Hall, Owen, 165, 170, 256 The Geisha, 165, 170, 256 Hamashita, Takeshi, 71 Hand, William Thomas, and Walter Teale, 182–183 The Bombardment of Pekin, 182–183 Hangzhou, 232 Hart, Robert, 32, 35, 47, 48, 49, 50, 56, 103, 239, 250 Hawaii, 10 Hayot, Eric, 110–111, 139–140, 254 The Hypothetical Mandarin, 110–111, 139–140, 254 heathen Chinee, trope of, 18, 114, 166, 179, 194 Henty, G. A., 8, 9, 43, 73, 86, 101, 121, 126, 247, 252 In Times of Peril, 101 With the Allies to Pekin, 101, 113–115, 121, 124–125, 129 heterosexual romance plot, 112, 117, 174 Hevia, James, 216, 253 Holcomb, Willard, 162 Kin Fu or the Pursuit of Happiness, 162 Holder, Heidi, 170 Holland, 11, 82, 173 Holmes, Colin, 216 homoeroticism, 117, 147, 170, 234 homosexuality, 90, 115, 140, 234 homosociality, 57, 88, 97 Hong Kong, viii, 8, 12, 17, 22, 28, 30, 31, 37, 39, 42, 44, 46, 49, 51, 58, 64–97, 103, 107, 122, 161, 162, 174, 186, 190, 192, 195, 206, 231, 233, 245, 260 Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, 17, 122, 232 Hong Kong Telegraph, 74

Index hongs, 34, 38, 61, 186 Hundred Days Reform, 75, 121 Hunter, Harry, 19 The Nigger Chinee, 19, 176–177 hunting, narratives of, 25, 32, 59–63 Huntington, Samuel, 236 hybridity, 14, 15, 27, 31, 32, 47, 50, 51, 52, 58, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 93, 96, 102, 112, 132, 148, 206, 208, 209 Ibsen, Henrik, 53, 84 Ghosts, 84 Imperial Maritime Customs Service, 14, 23, 31–36, 39, 40, 44–45, 47–51, 55, 56, 59, 61, 85, 103, 239, 242 imperialism, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 29, 39, 41, 43, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 95, 100, 107, 108, 119, 125, 129, 132, 135, 141, 145, 159, 163, 165, 186, 203, 213, 218, 231 absent-minded, 29 free-trade imperialism, 43, 66, 87, 119, 125 identikit model of, 9, 85, 87 top-down, 5, 18, 72 imperialisms, 5, 11 India, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 24, 28, 31, 32, 38, 39, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 91, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 118, 122, 127, 129, 136, 149, 163, 186, 189, 197, 203, 224 Indian Civil Service, 34 Indian Mutiny, 12, 26, 61, 77, 85, 101, 105, 107, 117, 119, 136, 161, 163, 182, 183, 186, 187, 239, 250, 251 Cawnpore, 98, 101, 105, 127, 182 Lucknow, 98, 101, 105, 127, 182, 183 Indian nationalism, 136, 196 Indochina, 76, 103 infanticide, 28, 161, 186, 187, 189–192, 247, 259 informal imperialism, 5, 7, 12, 23, 32, 35, 45, 56, 69, 70, 72, 74, 102, 119, 126, 129, 220 international exhibitions, 137, 164 China Courts, at, 137 Great Exhibition of 1851, 173 International Health Exhibition, 162 Military Exhibiton of 1901, 164 Paris Exposition of 1867, 164 invasion novels, 25, 49, 100, 106, 109, 110, 111, 128, 129, 130–160, 163, 196, 200, 217, 225, 230, 232, 250, 254, 255 amalgamation of Chinese and Japanese, 105, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 167, 170, 232 and early science fiction, 135, 147 extermination, 155–156 French novels, 135 war between Europe and Asia, 134

295

war within Europe, 133–134 “yellow scream,” the, 134, 138–140 “yellow shriek,” 47, 51 Yellow Terror, 150, 153–155 Irish Potato Famine, 28, 161, 188 Islam, 181, 228, 251 Italy, 3, 102, 195 jade, 122, 232, 235 Japan, 2, 3, 10, 19, 25, 27, 34, 36, 39, 44, 75, 86, 87, 102, 103, 104, 105, 120, 121, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 157, 163, 165, 168, 170, 201, 229, 232, 239, 253, 256 modernization of, 25, 254 Japanese Americans, internment of, 231 Jerrold, William Blanchard, 196 London—A Pilgrimage, 196 Jews, 16, 28, 171, 178, 195 Jiaozhou, see Kiaochow jingoism, 28, 39, 85, 159, 183, 214 Jolly, Roslyn, 56 Joshi, Priya, 72 Juggernaut, the, 140 Kali, 178 Kelly & Walsh, 1, 9, 42, 73 Kepley, Vance, Jr., 210 Keying, the, 171, 256 Kiaochow, 61, 125, 134 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 231 Woman Warrior, 231 Kingston, W. H. G., 86 Kipling, Rudyard, 49, 50, 77, 78, 86, 111, 252 A Fleet in Being, 86 Kim, 50, 78, 111, 114–115 “M’Andrew’s Hymn,” 86 Kiralfy, Imre, 164 China, or the Relief of the Legations, 164 Kohr, Herbert O., 126 The Escort of an Emperor, 126 Korea, 2, 10, 103 Kowloon, 2, 245 kowtowing, practice of, 97, 172, 228 Kucheng massacre, 171, 179 Kung, Prince, 183 Kyoto, 131 Lane, Edward, 43 An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 43 lascars, 135, 194, 201, 216, 219, 261 Latin America, 14, 74, 87, 91, 137, 219 laundries and laundrymen, Chinese, 166, 195, 202, 260, 262 League of Nations, 126

296

Index

Lee, Josephine, 163 Lee, Leo Ou-Fan, 70, 75 Shanghai Modern, 70 Lee, Sky, 231 Disappearing Moon Café, 231 Leonard d’Oliver, see Dolly Levine, Philippa, 70 Limehouse, 5, 28, 29, 44, 110, 133, 195–223, 224, 264 literary production, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 66, 73, 99, 101, 167 Literature of the British Empire, The, 68 Little Englander, 41 Littlewood, Kevin, 226 “On Morecambe Bay,” 102 Liu, Lydia H., 6 London, 2, 5, 8, 9, 16, 19, 24, 41, 43, 44, 46, 58, 63, 66, 67, 72, 73, 76, 87, 92, 97, 111, 113, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171, 173, 174, 176, 188, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221, 224, 232, 233, 234, 235, 244, 251 Chinese criminal underworld in, 202, 216–219, 232–236 Oriental London, 194 The East End, 28, 110, 165, 167, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224 West End and Soho, 167, 195, 202, 209, 213, 217, 220, 224, 260 London City Mission Magazine, 215 London, Jack, 135, 149 “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 135, 149 London–Kowloon Monorail, 2, 6, 13 looting, 103, 122, 253 “Love in Canton,” 169 Lyn, Euros, 231 Macao, 31, 34, 74, 77, 89, 273 Macartney Mission, 163, 228, 238 Macau, see Macao Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 2, 112 MacDonald, Claude, 104, 114, 126 Malay, “treacherous,” 181 Malaya, 55, 195 male sexual license, 52, 81, 92 Malthus, Thomas, 189, 228, 259 Manchu dynasty, see Qing dynasty Manchuria, 10, 102 mandarins, 27, 33, 38, 46, 59, 62, 81, 112, 124, 133, 134, 145, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 184, 185, 188, 191, 192, 200, 209 Mankell, Henning, 231 The Man from Beijing, 231

Marchant, Bessie, 25–26 Among Hostile Hordes, 25 maritime literature, 24, 82, 85–87, 88, 248 Markley, Robert, 10 Marriott, J. A. R., 29 “The Imperial Note in Victorian Poetry,” 29 Marryat, Frederick, 86 Marsh, Richard, 217 The Beetle, 217 The Joss, 217 Martin, W. A. P., 98 The Siege in Peking, 98 Marx, Karl, 11, 106–108, 109, 134, 138, 185, 186, 222, 228 articles in the New York Daily Tribune “Revolution in China and in Europe,” 24 masculinity, Chinese, 111, 115–118, 199, 205, 207, 210, 213 masculinity, imperial, 44, 83, 87, 88, 94, 95, 97, 112, 115, 116, 147, 148, 170, 201, 212, 213–214, 247 masses undifferentiated East Asian masses, 135 Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney, 110 From the Abyss, 110 Mayhew, Henry, 210 McDonagh, Josephine, 189 Mearns, Andrew, 210 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 210 Medhurst, Walter Henry, 1, 15, 193–194, 199, 237, 239 “The Chinese as Colonists,” 154–155 The Foreigner in Far Cathay, 1, 25, 31 melamine, 227 melodrama, 84, 93, 116, 170, 191, 199, 210, 211 metropole, 2, 4, 6, 9, 24, 26, 32, 38, 43, 44, 58, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 81, 83, 84, 88, 97, 102, 104, 113, 115, 132, 136, 145, 194, 197, 204, 222 micro-colony, 77 Middle Kingdom, see China military, British, 25, 40, 42, 46, 59, 122, 126, 128, 169, 183, 187 Indian troops, 127 Milligan, Barry, 196 mines and mining, 74, 122, 127, 138 miscegenation, 6, 9, 14, 19, 24, 28, 46, 47, 50, 51, 55, 57, 62, 68, 77, 85, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 112, 148, 166, 170–172, 196, 198, 199, 200, 209, 235, 247, 248, 261, 263 missionaries, 8, 11, 15, 18, 31, 36, 45, 58, 61, 76, 95, 100, 102, 103, 112, 113, 117, 120, 126, 133, 172, 179, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 200, 207, 209, 240, 250, 251, 252, 253 in narratives about the Boxer Rebellion, 18 Mitchell, George, 207 Down in Limehouse, 207

Index Mitchell, Sagar, and James Kenyon “Beheading of a Chinese Boxer,” 79–80, 95 modernism, 221 modernity, Chinese, 70, 101, 131, 132, 140, 141, 152, 230, 232 modernity, colonial, 84, 94 modernity, Western, 15, 29, 86, 108, 145, 170, 220, 221 Moore, Christy, 226 Moore, W. R. Report on Female Infanticide, 187 Morecambe Bay cockle pickers, 226 Moretti, Franco, 7 Morris, William, 158 News from Nowhere, 158 Morrison, Arthur, 196, 207 A Child of the Jago, 207 Morton, John Maddison, 167 Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, 167 Mrs. Archibald Little, see Alicia Bewicke Mukden, 131 murder, 24, 46, 48, 55, 58, 61, 75, 98, 103, 104, 112, 125, 130, 141, 148, 149, 151, 187, 190, 198, 212, 213, 214, 215, 218, 219, 221, 232, 233, 235 Murger, Henri, 77 muscular Christianity, 47, 57, 87, 147, 157 music, Asian, 161, 162, 164, 167 music halls, 28, 166, 172, 175, 176, 209 Nanjing, see Nanking Nanking, 180 panorama of, 180 narrativity, 10 nationalism and the nation state, 19, 26, 27, 43, 134, 156, 159, 226, 228, 236 “native Christians,” 27, 100, 103–104, 107, 114, 118, 125–126, 184 New Territories, 85, 245 New Woman, 50 New York Times, 227, 230 Ng, Fae M., 231 Bone, 231 Nineteenth Century, The, 193, 240 Ningbo, see Ningpo Ningpo, 55 Noronha & Co., 74 Norris, Frank, 112, 261–262 North China Daily News, 31, 66, 242, 250 O’Connor, Erin, 78 Occidentalism, 136 odd women, 52, 83, 92 Offenbach, Jacques, 175 Ba-ta-Clan, 175 Open Door policy, 2, 38, 251, 287 Opinions of Mr. Briggs, The, 73, 78

297

opium, 10, 11, 12, 16–17, 24, 31, 34, 39, 40, 48, 55, 57, 107, 109, 120, 132, 165, 183, 186, 187, 196, 197, 198, 199, 202, 203, 210, 213, 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 229, 232, 264 in theater and spectacle, 16–17 opium dens, 5, 16, 29, 132, 196, 202, 206, 209, 213, 214, 215, 217–220, 257, 262, 264 Opium Wars, 8, 12, 31, 39, 40, 109, 164, 180, 183, 187, 189, 239 First Opium War, 22, 28, 34, 108, 181, 187, 236, 244 Second Opium War, 12, 107, 163, 182, 183, 187, 245 Oriental Press, 9, 43 Orientalism, 6, 7, 11, 16, 39, 43, 106, 161, 163, 165, 167, 170, 206, 210, 214, 234 stage Orientialism, 163 Orwell, George, 6 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 36, 39, 69, 70, 72 Otis, Laura, 149 imperial immune system, 149 “out in China,” 24, 46, 199 outports, 8, 23, 31, 40, 46, 57, 95, 118 pagodas, 182 panoramas, 163, 180 pantomime, 28, 162, 165–168, 170, 175, 183, 199 Parkes, Harry, 107 passing, 114, 115, 142, 144, 176, 177 patriotism, 99, 165, 180, 183, 193 Payn, James, 58 By Proxy, 58 Pearl River Delta, 2 Peggs, James, 189 Peking, 3, 37, 42, 54, 63, 98, 100, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114, 120, 122, 126, 127, 167, 228, 229, 230 the Forbidden City, 99, 111, 113 penny dreadfuls, 194, 210 performance venues Astley’s, 163, 180, 181, 182, 258 Brighton Aquarium, 168 Egyptian Hall, 164 Hackney Empire, 164 Lewis’s Great Saloon, 164 New Albion Theatre, Poplar, 167 Panorama, Leicester Square, 180 Punch’s Playhouse, 173 Royal Fitzroy Theatre, 164 Royal Princess’s Theatre, 167 Strand Theatre, 173 Surrey Theatre, 164 Theatre Royal, Rugby, 162 Victoria Hall, 162, 255, 272 Persia, contrasted with China, 108, 145 Philippines, 2, 19 Pickering, Michael, 176

298

Index

pidgin, 13, 75, 205, 209, 239 pigtails, 19, 22, 41, 98, 99, 112, 113, 116, 161, 176, 177, 192, 208 pirates and piracy, 17, 43, 56, 61, 87, 252 Pluck, 86 poetry, 8, 17, 33 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 71 Port Arthur, 2, 36, 86, 103 Porter, Bernard, 10, 39 Porter, David, 74, 165 Portuguese, 34, 64, 74–75, 77, 80, 89, 245 postcolonialism, 12, 64, 66, 72, 78, 79, 91, 229, 248 Proschan, Frank, 115 prostitution, 82, 89, 202, 210, 233 Protestantism, 120, 123–126, 172, 179, 185, 188, 189, 209, 253 psychoanalysis, 150, 155 psychology, in invasion novels, 150 public schools, 92, 95, 132, 145, 147–148, 152 publishing patterns, 6 Pulver, Lara, 231 Punch, 186 Qianglong, 228 Qin, Shi Huang, 228 Qing dynasty, 3, 22, 24, 26, 34, 35, 81, 88, 99, 108, 130, 133, 134, 155, 182, 225, 235, 250, 254 Qingdao, see Tsingtao Queen Victoria, 3 race, 3, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 28, 31, 39, 40, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 57, 61, 64, 76, 77, 81, 84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 101, 110, 111, 113, 115, 119, 132, 135, 137, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 167, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 188, 199, 200, 201, 206, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222, 224, 227, 228, 231, 247, 248 “whitening up,” 118 railroads, 15, 38, 103, 110, 131, 151, 220 railways, 130 Ramsey, Alicia, and Rudolph de Cordova, 171–172 The Mandarin, 171–172 rape and sexual violence, 55, 77, 117–118, 181, 210 Ray, Ilet, 179–180 Alone in China, 179 The Yellow Dread, 179–180 restaurants, 132 Chinese, 195, 227, 260 Japanese, 142 restaurants, “ethnic,” 103 reverse colonization, narratives of, 25, 28, 102, 133, 141, 149, 155, 208, 220 Review of Reviews, 195 Rhys, Jean, 221

Quartet, 221 Voyage in the Dark, 221 Rich, Adrienne, 90 Richards, Grant, publisher, 210 Richards, Thomas, 3 Ridge, John James, 184 Ki-Ling of Hankow, 184–186 Rivers, William A., 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40–42, 43, 200, 242 “A Tai-pan of the ’Fifties,” 30 “The Human Form Divine,” 40–42, 200 Anglo-Chinese Sketches, 30, 34, 41, 43, 61–63 “‘Twopence Coloured,’” 49 Robinson, Ronald, 69, 71, 72, 102 Rohmer, Sax, 134, 141, 145, 148, 163, 194, 197, 216, 219, 221, 264 Dope, 217 The Devil Doctor, 133 The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, 217 The Yellow Claw, 29, 217–221 Russia, 2, 3, 4, 12, 19, 34, 36, 45, 48, 49, 50, 86, 87, 88, 102, 103, 107, 120, 128, 129, 133, 136, 148, 254 Russophobia, 103, 250 Russo-Japanese War, 130, 131, 136, 146, 245 Said, Edward, 78, 135, 221 sailing ships, 87 Salmon, Edward, 68 San Francisco Examiner, 202 sanitation, 88 scarcity, principle of, 120, 188, 190 Schmitt, Canon, 181, 196 scientific racism, 84, 90 Second World War, 136, 145, 195, 224, 231 secret societies, 100, 110, 141–143, 196, 202, 231–234 Sedgwick, S. N., 130 The Last Persecution, 130 Seeley, J. R., 68–69 The Expansion of England, 68–69 Seitler, Dana, 136, 140, 148, 201 Selden, Mark, 71 “semi-civilized,” the, 15, 41, 111, 131, 138 Sepoy Mutiny, see Indian Mutiny Sepoy Rebellion, see Indian Mutiny Serjeant, Constancia, 101, 117, 121, 125 A Tale of Red Pekin, 101, 117, 121, 125 Shanghai, 2, 8, 23, 30–32, 38–46, 49, 52, 53, 59, 62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 88, 162, 222, 239 Shanghai, International Settlement, 5, 32 Shanghai Mercury, 103 Shantung, 103 Sharpe, Jenny, 77, 91, 117 Allegories of Empire, 77, 91, 117

Index Shaw, George Bernard, 53, 144 Sherlock “The Blind Banker,” 3, 186–189 Shiel, M. P., 6, 26, 136, 155, 163, 217 The Dragon, 109, 134, 145, 149, 150–153, 155, 157 The Purple Cloud, 153 The Yellow Danger, 26, 130, 140, 144, 148, 149, 150, 154–155, 203, 217 The Yellow Wave, 132, 135, 136, 148, 157, 203, 217, 254 short story, genre of, 33, 68, 77–79, 97, 122, 211 Sims, George R., 50, 194, 201, 203–209, 216 Horrible London, 29, 204 How the Poor Live, 29, 204 “Li Ting of London,” 29, 50, 201, 205–209, 216 Street Life in London, 204 The Mysteries of Modern London, 205 Singapore, 2, 70, 222, 243 Sino-Japanese War, 36, 39, 128 Sinology, 54, 93 Sinophilia, 18, 53 slavery and the slave trade, 27, 56, 87, 184, 186, 226, 248 slums, 29, 193, 194, 196, 200–207, 220–221 smuggling, 48, 86, 87, 232–235 smuggling, people, 226 snakeheads, 226 socialism, 157–159 South Africa, 3, 5, 10, 26, 74, 105, 129, 133, 156, 195 South African War, see Anglo-Boer War South China Morning Post, 66, 73 South Pacific, 56, 76, 204 Spain, 10, 75 Spanish American War, 10 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 69, 78, 189, 248 Stead, W. T., 195, 202, 248 “Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon,” 248 steamships, 9, 47, 67, 86, 88, 94, 114 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 56, 78, 86, 136, 240 “Beach at Falesá,” 240 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 136 Stocqueler, Joachim Hayward, 163 The Bombardment & Capture of Canton, 163 Stoker, Bram, 57, 136, 218 Dracula, 57, 136, 218 Stoler, Ann Laura, 19–22, 84, 85 Strand Magazine, 204 submarines, 145, 149 Suez Canal, 195 suicide, 23, 30, 55, 86, 89, 94, 95, 148, 198, 210, 230 Suleri, Sara, 89, 102 Sun Yat-Sen, 205 Kidnapped in London, 205 suttee, 187, 188 Suzhou, 232

299

Suzie Wong, world of, 2 Sweet, Matthew, 198 T. Fisher Unwin, 66, 74, 87–88 taipans, 85, 89, 92 Taiping Rebellion, 18, 25, 39, 81, 107, 109, 123, 175, 229, 251 Taiwan, 10, 36, 44, 103, 230 Taku forts, 104–105 Tanner, Dr. The Chinese Mother, 28, 186–192 taotai, 24, 59, 61 Tar, the figure of, 82, 169–170, 256 tea, 11, 23, 169, 174, 185, 186, 222, 229, 232, 234 teahouses, 170, 174 technology, 27, 38, 98, 105, 132, 141, 144–147, 156, 159, 254 Western, and Eastern “tradition,” 34 telegraph, 2, 38, 80, 118 temperance writers, 184 Tennyson, Alfred, 28, 95 “The Defence of Lucknow,” 28, 95 theater and drama, 78, 161, 183 conflation of China and Japan, 163 popular, 165 pyro-spectacular performances, 28, 182–183, 186, 192 Thompson, Steve, 231 Thomson, John, 80 Through China with a Camera, 80 thuggee, 163 Thurin, Susan, 70, 73, 79 Tiananmen Square protests, 233 Tianjin, see Tientsin Tibet, 103, 230 Tientsin, 36, 100, 105, 110, 113–115, 127 Times, 101, 195, 242 Times Literary Supplement, 211 tong, see secret societies topsy-turvy, 14, 143, 161, 169, 228 torture, 25, 44, 112, 117, 145, 170, 178, 179, 187, 230 cangue, 25, 170 Traditional Chinese Medicine, 226 transatlanticism, 18, 201–202 treachery, “Chinese,” 8, 50, 52 Treaty of Nanking, 22, 36, 37, 186, 187, 244 Treaty of Tientsin, 33, 36, 61 treaty ports, 8, 12, 22–24, 29–63, 66, 70, 72, 75, 81, 85, 99, 103, 106, 162, 195, 199–200, 239, 243 concessions, 36, 38, 45, 49, 58, 61, 73, 103, 105 triads, see secret societies Tseng, Marquis, 137 Tsingtao, 2 Tuan, Prince (Duan, or Zaiyi), 122

300

Index

Tupper, Edward, 220–221 Seaman’s Torch, 220–221 Turnbull, C. Mary, 59 Tyler, Henry Whatley, 184, 187 typhoons, 45 unequal treaties, 22 United Nations, 126 United States of America, 2, 10, 11, 13, 19, 22, 26, 31, 34, 35, 38, 44, 47, 52, 66, 72, 75, 76, 77, 81, 99, 110, 111, 126, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 139, 142, 149, 153, 156, 158, 162, 166, 172, 174, 175, 177, 193, 194, 195, 201, 203, 210, 219, 225, 227, 229, 230, 239 vampires and vampire bats, 55–58, 109, 201 vengeance and revenge, theme of, 24, 47, 57, 95, 110, 141, 147, 149, 156, 179, 181, 182, 196, 198, 210, 220 Victorian novel, genre of, 78 Victorian worldview, 11, 12 Wade, George A., 197, 215 “The Cockney John Chinaman,” 197, 215 Wall Street Journal, 230 Wang, Gungwu, 70, 80 Anglo-Chinese Encounters, 70 warfare, 145–148 biological, 145, 148–149, 157 chemical, 46 Wars in China, 181 Watts, Carol, 211 Wei-hai-wei, 36 Westerman, Percy F. When East Meets West, 132, 141, 144–145, 149, 154, 156, 157 Westermarck, Edward The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 95 Westernized Asiatic, 144 as imperfect copy, 144

White, Andrea, 78 White, Arnold, 193, 196, 207, 221 White Lotus movement, 229, 232 Wilde, Oscar, 16, 154 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 16 Wilkinson, Isaac, 168, 256 Ching-a-ma-ree, 168 Williams, Carolyn, 166 Williamson, James, 98 “Attack on a China Mission,” 98 Winn, Robert S. “A Chinese Adventure,” 25, 59–61 Witchard, Anne, 165, 167, 199 women authors, 9, 17, 33, 45–46, 117, 118 women’s suffrage, 89 Wood, Charles W., 198 Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway, 221 World Literature, 7, 71 World Trade Organization, 229 xenophobia, 15 British, 15, 254 mutual, 15 Xiamen, see Amoy Xinhai Revolution, 3, 22, 34, 35, 88, 104 Xu Xi, 69, 245 Yangtse, see Yangtze River Yangtze River, 2, 23, 31 Yeh, Commissioner, 163 Yellow Danger, see Yellow Peril Yellow Peril, 6, 15, 26, 28, 44, 46, 49, 128, 132, 135–137, 150–158, 193–195, 210, 216–218, 227, 253 yellowface, 28, 163, 166, 170, 174–177 Young, Robert, 93 Ziter, Edward, 165 Zongli yamen, see China: Tsung-li-Yamen

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture General editor g i l l i a n b e e r , University of Cambridge

Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill miriam bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by donald e. hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art herbert sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians andrew elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by john o. jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and robert l. patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry lindsay smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle kelly hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater william f. shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by margaret homans, Yale University and adrienne munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels pamela k. gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature alison byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific vanessa smith, University of Sydney

14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home monica f. cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation suzanne keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth gail marshall, University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin carolyn dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy sophie gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre deborah vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance john glavin, Georgetown University, Washington DC 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by nicola diane thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry matthew campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War paula m. krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God michael wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House hilary m. schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science ronald r. thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology jan-melissa schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World elaine freedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture lucy hartley, University of Southampton

30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study thad logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 dennis denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 pamela thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature nicola bown, Birkbeck, University of London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire nancy henry, The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture cynthia scheinberg, Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body anna krugovoy silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust ann gaylin, Yale University 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 anna johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 matt cook, Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland gordon bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical hilary fraser, Birkbeck, University of London judith johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by nicola bown, Birkbeck College, London carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University and pamela thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination gautam chakravarty, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People ian haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature

geoffrey cantor, University of Leeds gowan dawson, University of Leicester graeme gooday, University of Leeds richard noakes, University of Cambridge sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot janis mclarren caldwell, Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by christine alexander, University of New South Wales and juliet mcmaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction gail turley houston, University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller ivan kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture jonathan smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture patrick r. o’malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain simon dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal helena michie, Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture nadia valman, University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature julia wright, Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination sally ledger, Birkbeck, University of London 57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability gowan dawson, University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle marion thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in NineteenthCentury Writing david amigoni, Keele University

60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction daniel a. novak, Louisiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 tim watson, University of Miami 62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History michael sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman cheryl wilson, Indiana University 64. Shakespeare and Victorian Women gail marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood valerie sanders, University of Hull 66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America cannon schmitt, University of Toronto 67. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction amanpal garcha, Ohio State University 68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination stefanie markovits, Yale University 69. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction jill l. matus, University of Toronto 70. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s nicholas daly, University College Dublin 71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science srdjan smajic´ , Furman University 72. Satire in an Age of Realism aaron matz, Scripps College, California 73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing adela pinch, University of Michigan 74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination katherine byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine 75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World tanya agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York

76. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 judith w. page, University of Florida and elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi 77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society sue zemka, University of Colorado 78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century anne stiles, Washington State University 79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain janice carlisle, Yale University 80. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative jan-melissa schramm, University of Cambridge 81. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform edward copeland, Pomona College, California 82. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece iain ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School 83. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Science, Style and Nonsense daniel brown, University of Southampton 84. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel anne dewitt, Princeton Writing Program 85. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined ross g. forman, University of Warwick