Books beget books and this engrossing, wide-ranging study of the deeply prejudicial mythology surrounding matters Chinese arose from a conversation between Christopher Frayling, polymathic emeritus professor of cultural history at the Royal College of Art and former rector of the RCA, and Edward Said, the Palestinian-American critic and historian. In 1995, during the course of a BBC radio discussion on the “cinema of empire”, Frayling raised two questions about Orientalism, Said’s seminal study that challenged the patronising attitude of western observers to Asian art. First, why did Said neglect the influence of popular culture in shaping prejudices and reinforcing stereotypes? Second, why had he said so little directly about China? With characteristic grace, Said accepted both charges and suggested Frayling undertake a job for which he had been informally preparing. His passion had begun in his public school library in the 1950s, relishing pulp novels about the ingeniously cruel, oriental super-criminal Fu Manchu, and had continued in 1970 when he met the widow of Fu’s creator, Sax Rohmer, while planning a student send-up of Rohmer’s work at Cambridge.
Having filled his young head with these exotic images, he admits early on that “at one level, this book is a kind of exorcism”. Fortunately, Frayling can criticise and contextualise the world from which Fu Manchu emerged without either letting go of that youthful excitement that attracted him in the first place or denying the literary equivalent of Noël Coward’s famous tribute in Private Lives to the potency of cheap music. Coward wrote that line, incidentally, in 1930 while convalescing from influenza in Shanghai, one of Fu Manchu’s stamping grounds, the same year the first sound movie featuring Fu opened at Grauman’s Chinese theatre in Los Angeles.
In the 18th century, the British view of China was generally admiring and benign. But as Frayling demonstrates, the change over the next hundred years was steady and dramatic. The British imperialists conducted a series of wars to impose the opium trade on China and suppressed the Boxer rebellion that was the natural response to this brutal commerce. Paradoxically, the oppressive foreigners managed to cast the oppressed victims as a threatening, expansionist foe. Meanwhile, starting with Coleridge and De Quincy, European writers created a cult around opium and the frighteningly exotic oriental dreams it unleashed, a movement that reached its literary peak in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Droodand Wilde’s Dorian Gray. By the end of the century, Chinatown and its notorious opium dens had become the locus of dangerous romance, alluring evil and spine-tingling threat in Europe and North America, with London’s Limehouse a top attraction for the intrepid tourist.
The general drift was encouraged by bestselling books in which missionaries and old China hands shared their ignorance with western readers and apocalyptic novels of a sort still echoed in reputable books on the prospects for future role of China on the global scene. The new century opened with the first reference, in the Daily News of 21 July 1900, to “the yellow peril in its most serious form”. Now something of a joke perhaps, the phrase stuck.
It is at this point that the very incarnation of this threat in the form of Dr Fu Manchu begins to develop in the confused, fertile, florid and prolific mind of his creator, a working-class autodidact of Irish parentage called Arthur Sarsfield Ward, who was to adopt the pseudonym Sax Rohmer. The resonant name came from the Saxon and roughly translates as “blade roamer” and might well have inspired the unfilmed William Burroughs screenplay Blade Runner from which the Ridley Scott sci-fi picture took its name.
While working early in the 20th century at the London branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank(where PG Wodehouse was a fellow clerk), he began freelance writing for the popular press before composing songs and sketches for the music hall, most notably for the comedians George Robey and Little Tich. As a journalist, he became a bogus authority on Limehouse and the Chinese community and he claimed to have seen a strikingly tall and sinister Chinaman there one night, the way his contemporary Baroness Orczy had a vision of the Scarlet Pimpernel one day at an underground station. He had great respect for the Chinese, particularly their poise, though he never visited China. So Frayling argues that Fu Manchu was a product of the times, filtered through the music hall – a place charged with jingoism and xenophobic humour, employing Asian magicians and other entertainers and staging pantomimes and musicals featuring oriental villains. Moreover, the central characters of Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, the first of which appeared in 1913, the last in the 1950s, found their models in the work of Conan Doyle: the suburban narrator Dr Petrie, the Scotland Yard detective Nayland Smith and Dr Fu himself paralleling Watson, Holmes and Moriarty.
The Fu Manchu books achieved immediate success, and the garish covers of the paperbacks and the movie posters (reproduced in The Yellow Peril in all their pulp glory) were a major contribution to the popular image of the exotic Orient. They sold in vast numbers, reaching readers ranging from the teenage SJ Perelman, who in middle age recalled them with wry humour, and President Calvin Coolidge, whose enthusiasm anticipated John Kennedy’s supposed admiration for Ian Fleming, whose Dr No was clearly inspired by Rohmer’s creation. Fu was the monstrous super-villain, a suave, intelligent, handsome megalomaniac, his web cast around the world. But an important part of his success was that while his organisation operated everywhere from Hong Kong to Limehouse, no one was sure for whom he actually worked. Was it the old Manchu dynasty or the Young China Movement, his own evil ends or a resurgent world-threatening Asia?
Impersonated by a charismatic Boris Karloff in the MGM B-feature The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), a camp classic widely regarded as the best movie in the series, his aim was to destroy the white race using the sword and mask of Genghis Khan. The Chinese consul in Los Angeles protested and the film has since existed uneasily in the realm of guilty pleasure. In the 1930s, however, the Chinese government was less concerned with Fu than with overseeing the positive images of Chinese projected in prestige Hollywood versions of novels by the Nobel prize-winner Pearl S Buck.
The Mask comes across as funny, dated, curiously innocent – a ripping yarn. In the immediate postwar years in Britain there was for several years a serious version of Fu broadcast nightly by BBC radio for an audience of millions of impressionable young listeners – Li-Chang, the Chinese villain in Dick Barton – Special Agent. In the 1950s, however, the story of Fu ended up as camp, self-mocking, post-imperial nostalgia in the BBC radio comedy The Goon Show, written and performed by that Irish child of the empire Spike Milligan and his co-star Peter Sellers. Appropriately, in The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980), the abysmal comic pastiche that brought an end to the devil Doctor’s screen career, Sellers played both Fu Manchu and his western nemesis, Nayland Smith, and died before the film opened.
The Yellow Peril is published by Thames & Hudson (£24.95). Click here to buy it for £18.71
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