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The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia
A hundred years ago, a character who was to enter the bloodstream of 20th-century popular culture made his first appearance in the world of literature. In his day he became as well known as Count Dracula or Sherlock Holmes: he was the evil genius called Dr. Fu Manchu, described at the beginning of the first story in which he appeared as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”
Why did the idea that the Chinese were a threat to Western civilization develop at precisely the time when China was in chaos, divided against itself, the victim of successive famines and utterly incapable of being a “peril” to anyone even if it had wanted to be? Even the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu novels, Sax Rohmer, acknowledged that China, “as a nation possess that elusive thing, poise.”
And what do the Chinese themselves make of all this? Is it any wonder that they remember what we have carelessly forgotten–the opium wars; the “unfair treaties” that ceded Hong Kong and the New Territories; and the stereotyping of Chinese people in allegedly factual studies?
Here cultural historian Christopher Frayling takes us to the heart of popular culture in the music hall, pulp literature, and the mass-market press, and shows how film amplifies our assumptions.
Why did the idea that the Chinese were a threat to Western civilization develop at precisely the time when China was in chaos, divided against itself, the victim of successive famines and utterly incapable of being a “peril” to anyone even if it had wanted to be? Even the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu novels, Sax Rohmer, acknowledged that China, “as a nation possess that elusive thing, poise.”
And what do the Chinese themselves make of all this? Is it any wonder that they remember what we have carelessly forgotten–the opium wars; the “unfair treaties” that ceded Hong Kong and the New Territories; and the stereotyping of Chinese people in allegedly factual studies?
Here cultural historian Christopher Frayling takes us to the heart of popular culture in the music hall, pulp literature, and the mass-market press, and shows how film amplifies our assumptions.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryChina
360 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 13, 2015
Less an overview of Sinophobia in pop culture so much as a look at the history of Fu Manchu. This wasn't as interesting to me as I'd hoped, so I mostly skimmed. Well-written, though, and full of quotes and sources, so if Fu Manchu is what floats your boat, I totally recommend it.
June 21, 2023
As I finished this book, The Specials' "Do Nothing" came up on my play list, its refrain of "Nothing ever change" feeling remarkably apposite to the theme of this book: The racist attitudes of late Victorian and Edwardian Western popular culture were fostered by political and economic interests to justify colonialism and exploitation, and this sadly still pertains.
It's an enlightening blend of history, biography and filmography; informative, detailed but never dry. The end did seem a little rushed though, which is a slight let down as Frayling is an otherwise assured guide. Still a strong 4⭐
As a counter to The Specials' resigned cynicism, I'm playing The Stranglers' bombastically defiant, "Something Better Change" 🎶✊🎶
It's an enlightening blend of history, biography and filmography; informative, detailed but never dry. The end did seem a little rushed though, which is a slight let down as Frayling is an otherwise assured guide. Still a strong 4⭐
As a counter to The Specials' resigned cynicism, I'm playing The Stranglers' bombastically defiant, "Something Better Change" 🎶✊🎶
March 30, 2020
In the first four chapters, Frayling presents the backstory of the creation of the character of Fu Manchu, looking at British, and occasionally American, attitudes toward China from the Macartney diplomatic expedition in the late 18th century through the early 20th century and the publication of The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu.
After a short introduction on the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, and with many, often wide, digressions, the chapters cover the career of Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry "Sarsfield" Ward), opium and opium “dens” as seen through literature and the press, images of the Chinese as presented in Victorian music hall songs and monologues, and political and popular attitudes about China and the Chinese, especially as an immigrant presence in England and Wales.
The book constantly returns to the Limehouse district, London's onetime "Chinatown", an area that seems to have loomed large in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination, though in Frayling's description it consisted only of a few blocks where a small number of Chinese actually lived - scarcely a patch on the Chinatown areas of New York and San Francisco.
All this leads up to the fifth chapter, which is largely given over to an elaborate close reading of this paragraph from the first of the Fu Manchu stories, a description much repeated with, at most, slight variation throughout the series:
The final chapter looks at Fu Manchu in film adaptations – where he has always played by white actors in “yellowface”* - parodies, and high culture. Though we get references to the character by Andre Breton and Thomas Pynchon – as well as S. J. Perelman and Alan Moore – Frayling apparently missed this from Anthony Powell’s memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling:
After a short introduction on the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, and with many, often wide, digressions, the chapters cover the career of Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry "Sarsfield" Ward), opium and opium “dens” as seen through literature and the press, images of the Chinese as presented in Victorian music hall songs and monologues, and political and popular attitudes about China and the Chinese, especially as an immigrant presence in England and Wales.
The book constantly returns to the Limehouse district, London's onetime "Chinatown", an area that seems to have loomed large in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination, though in Frayling's description it consisted only of a few blocks where a small number of Chinese actually lived - scarcely a patch on the Chinatown areas of New York and San Francisco.
All this leads up to the fifth chapter, which is largely given over to an elaborate close reading of this paragraph from the first of the Fu Manchu stories, a description much repeated with, at most, slight variation throughout the series:
Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government-- which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.The close of the fifth chapter looks at the character who speaks that description, Wayland Smith; Frayling takes pains to make him seem more than a pale echo of Sherlock Holmes.
The final chapter looks at Fu Manchu in film adaptations – where he has always played by white actors in “yellowface”* - parodies, and high culture. Though we get references to the character by Andre Breton and Thomas Pynchon – as well as S. J. Perelman and Alan Moore – Frayling apparently missed this from Anthony Powell’s memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling:
Elizabeth Bowen rarely wore spectacles and perhaps did not see very clearly without them, the possible explanation of her next remark. ‘Some people complain of cockroaches in the basements of these Regent Park houses,’ she said. ‘Your parents do, but they say their cook doesn’t mind a bit. She just stamps on them. I never seem to see any here.’ In one of the Dr Fu Manchu stories (I quote from memory) the sinister Chinese doctor, by the use of hypnotism, causes the wallpaper of a room to appear to be writhing with huge beetles. That was just how Elizabeth Bowen’s kitchen floor looked at that moment.*Frayling traces the use of “yellow” as a designation of natives of the East Asia to racial theories of the early 19th century, but does not get to the bottom of why this particular hue was chosen – earlier descriptions use ‘white’ or occasionally ‘grey’.
July 5, 2024
In Edward Said's Orientalism, he described The Orient as 'since antiquity, a place of romantic, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’ for the feverish European imagination. This was critical for the west, to have an other onto which to project fears, fantasies and distortions.
In this book, we see public school anti-Chinese racism in the 1950s, imitating pidgin English, 'Confucius he says...', Chinese burns, whispers, Biggles flying in the Orient, Rupert Bear's drawings of the mysterious Chinese conjurer. Flash Gordon and the inscrutable Ming the Merciless. Then later, Sean Connery and Dr No. I met a Flash Gordon enthusiast in a Marylebone pub recently, so this is alive and well!
Said utilised 19th century high-European literature and histories of figures, such as Bonaparte in Egypt, with a focus on the Middle East. His book has become associated with China, but did not explore this in detail.
Which takes us to Frayling, Dr Fu Manchu and this book! :) Here, we have a sort of history from below. Taking the idea that popular literature and visual culture tell us about attitudes towards Chineseness. But also a longer history. The Opium Wars cumulating in the British burning of the Old Summer Palace; the auction houses and private collections of our upper-classes flooded with curios, chinoiserie, a fascination and craze for the orient, with ashes in its mouth.
He begins by discussing having lunch with Said who supported the importance of the visual: ‘when you see an American Indian with feathers and paint across his face he looks terrifying, and it doesn’t matter whether you have read about him in Fenimore Cooper or not… it fixes the image in your mind forever’. (Okay also obviously jealous that was his lunch companion).
He links this into the Hong Kong handover and the arrival of Chinese troops, 'latter-day heirs to Genghis Khan's cavalry, at the gates - faceless, incomprehensible, overwhelming, like Chairman Mao's 'human sea': pent-up energy which went back a very long way.’ The BBC presenter described 'robotic faces' and 'fixed smiles.' I was watching election coverage last night and the BBC presenters hushed descriptions of the ‘Muslim’ demographics of seats voting for pro-Palestine candidates showed these prejudices were not left behind in 1997.
I really liked the way he tied in the imagery around the dragon. ‘In Chinese folk-lore, the dragon is a wise, peaceable and helpful creature, a symbol of good luck, but he has become on book jackets threatening, fire-breathing and warlike, to be challenged - by the likes of St George.’ This imagery is tied up with current western fantasies of war with China. Little British boats and American aircraft carriers to provide the MacArthur like cumulation of squandered and ebbing power. *they* are the ones who pollute, who are wrecking the climate; there's a fascinating lack of western introspection.
On Sax Rohmer: this quote from his book about sums it up:
'And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the hood of the taxi-cab, trickling down the front windows... Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows; sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's outcasts; this was the shadowland, which last night had swallowed up Nayland Smith.
The mantle of dusk had closed about the squalid activity of the East End streets as we neared our destination. Aliens of every shade of colour were in the glare of the lamps upon the main road about us now, emerging from burrow-like alleys. In the short space of the drive we had passed from the light world of the West into the dubious underworld of the East.'
What the flip.
In this book, we see public school anti-Chinese racism in the 1950s, imitating pidgin English, 'Confucius he says...', Chinese burns, whispers, Biggles flying in the Orient, Rupert Bear's drawings of the mysterious Chinese conjurer. Flash Gordon and the inscrutable Ming the Merciless. Then later, Sean Connery and Dr No. I met a Flash Gordon enthusiast in a Marylebone pub recently, so this is alive and well!
Said utilised 19th century high-European literature and histories of figures, such as Bonaparte in Egypt, with a focus on the Middle East. His book has become associated with China, but did not explore this in detail.
Which takes us to Frayling, Dr Fu Manchu and this book! :) Here, we have a sort of history from below. Taking the idea that popular literature and visual culture tell us about attitudes towards Chineseness. But also a longer history. The Opium Wars cumulating in the British burning of the Old Summer Palace; the auction houses and private collections of our upper-classes flooded with curios, chinoiserie, a fascination and craze for the orient, with ashes in its mouth.
He begins by discussing having lunch with Said who supported the importance of the visual: ‘when you see an American Indian with feathers and paint across his face he looks terrifying, and it doesn’t matter whether you have read about him in Fenimore Cooper or not… it fixes the image in your mind forever’. (Okay also obviously jealous that was his lunch companion).
He links this into the Hong Kong handover and the arrival of Chinese troops, 'latter-day heirs to Genghis Khan's cavalry, at the gates - faceless, incomprehensible, overwhelming, like Chairman Mao's 'human sea': pent-up energy which went back a very long way.’ The BBC presenter described 'robotic faces' and 'fixed smiles.' I was watching election coverage last night and the BBC presenters hushed descriptions of the ‘Muslim’ demographics of seats voting for pro-Palestine candidates showed these prejudices were not left behind in 1997.
I really liked the way he tied in the imagery around the dragon. ‘In Chinese folk-lore, the dragon is a wise, peaceable and helpful creature, a symbol of good luck, but he has become on book jackets threatening, fire-breathing and warlike, to be challenged - by the likes of St George.’ This imagery is tied up with current western fantasies of war with China. Little British boats and American aircraft carriers to provide the MacArthur like cumulation of squandered and ebbing power. *they* are the ones who pollute, who are wrecking the climate; there's a fascinating lack of western introspection.
On Sax Rohmer: this quote from his book about sums it up:
'And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the hood of the taxi-cab, trickling down the front windows... Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows; sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's outcasts; this was the shadowland, which last night had swallowed up Nayland Smith.
The mantle of dusk had closed about the squalid activity of the East End streets as we neared our destination. Aliens of every shade of colour were in the glare of the lamps upon the main road about us now, emerging from burrow-like alleys. In the short space of the drive we had passed from the light world of the West into the dubious underworld of the East.'
What the flip.
August 22, 2020
An entertaining, wide-ranging history of Fu Manchu, his creator Sax Rohmer, and the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment, particularly as it blossomed in the U.K. in the wake of both popular Oriental styles and the Opium Wars. Frayling shows both anti-Chinese stereotypes and Sax Rohmer's career as having some grounding in the Edwardian music halls, which I did not expect to learn! More about Fu Manchu in popular culture than in literature, but I think there were already books covering that. A bit of a specialized sideline, but also relevant to fears about Asian cultures, particularly China, that still exist today, so while the info about Rohmer's life might not interest everyone, it's still a good read and a window into a resilient corner of pop culture.
June 10, 2015
Chinatown! Opium dens! Pigtails! If you enjoy Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels, you'll enjoy this exploration of his ideas and Sinophobia in early 20th century London.
May 11, 2020
What was the perception of China in the West in the 19th/early 20th century? And how did popular culture inform those views?
This book primarily uses the life, work and preoccupations of 'Fu Manchu' author Sax Rohmer as a focus for such a study. In a somewhat high-minded preface, the author explains that he is attempting to complement Edward Said's Orientalism: continuing the analysis of perceptions of the East, but here specifically in the framework of *popular* culture.
The core theme is "the yellow peril": the 19th century paranoia that China presented an existential threat to the very foundations of Western civilization. What real-world form this threat would take was never really clear; instead, it was largely a phantom conjured up by romance writers like Rohmer.
I see the yellow peril as a kind of ur-fear - a basic fear of 'otherness', perhaps stoked by the West's unconscious guilt about its terrible actions during the imperial era and a feeling that some kind of retribution was surely inevitable. It was a key component of the British imperial zeitgeist and echoes down to the present day, as the author highlights when discussing the 1997 handover of Hong Kong in the first chapter.
The book has lots of great detail about Victorian/Edwardian era Britain: opium dens; music hall; anarchists on the streets of London (seen off by a young Winston Churchill wielding a shotgun - really!). It was the period of high romance for Britain, the apogee of its dark, twisted imperial adventure. And Rohmer read the popular imagination perfectly: feeding it precisely what it wanted with his overwrought tales of insidious oriental evil infiltrating the morally righteous West.
I found the first half of the book by far the stronger. An excellent slice of social history that conveys the popular vision of the East as perceived from the dark streets and reading parlours of 19th century Britain. Key other Victorian luminaries feature - Wilde, De Quincey, Conan Doyle - and we follow Rohmer's very Victorian trajectory from civil servant (working alongside P.G. Wodehouse) to music hall songwriter, to writer of pulp mysteries.
The second half was less satisfying: crammed with much tedious detail about the Fu Manchu books themselves, and the later film and TV treatments. I felt the author didn't really know where to take his analysis in this later, post-war, post-Empire period and the book kind of peters out without any concluding analysis. It would have been interesting to link back to discuss present-day fears over China and how much these echo the original 'yellow peril' anxieties.
Overall, a very well written and researched book. Read it for the compelling first half that gives a fascinating window on a problematic but darkly romantic period.
This book primarily uses the life, work and preoccupations of 'Fu Manchu' author Sax Rohmer as a focus for such a study. In a somewhat high-minded preface, the author explains that he is attempting to complement Edward Said's Orientalism: continuing the analysis of perceptions of the East, but here specifically in the framework of *popular* culture.
The core theme is "the yellow peril": the 19th century paranoia that China presented an existential threat to the very foundations of Western civilization. What real-world form this threat would take was never really clear; instead, it was largely a phantom conjured up by romance writers like Rohmer.
I see the yellow peril as a kind of ur-fear - a basic fear of 'otherness', perhaps stoked by the West's unconscious guilt about its terrible actions during the imperial era and a feeling that some kind of retribution was surely inevitable. It was a key component of the British imperial zeitgeist and echoes down to the present day, as the author highlights when discussing the 1997 handover of Hong Kong in the first chapter.
The book has lots of great detail about Victorian/Edwardian era Britain: opium dens; music hall; anarchists on the streets of London (seen off by a young Winston Churchill wielding a shotgun - really!). It was the period of high romance for Britain, the apogee of its dark, twisted imperial adventure. And Rohmer read the popular imagination perfectly: feeding it precisely what it wanted with his overwrought tales of insidious oriental evil infiltrating the morally righteous West.
I found the first half of the book by far the stronger. An excellent slice of social history that conveys the popular vision of the East as perceived from the dark streets and reading parlours of 19th century Britain. Key other Victorian luminaries feature - Wilde, De Quincey, Conan Doyle - and we follow Rohmer's very Victorian trajectory from civil servant (working alongside P.G. Wodehouse) to music hall songwriter, to writer of pulp mysteries.
The second half was less satisfying: crammed with much tedious detail about the Fu Manchu books themselves, and the later film and TV treatments. I felt the author didn't really know where to take his analysis in this later, post-war, post-Empire period and the book kind of peters out without any concluding analysis. It would have been interesting to link back to discuss present-day fears over China and how much these echo the original 'yellow peril' anxieties.
Overall, a very well written and researched book. Read it for the compelling first half that gives a fascinating window on a problematic but darkly romantic period.
September 24, 2022
4 stars for some of the content, 3 stars for presentation of same - to me it seemed regrettably unfocused.
January 17, 2025
A solid, well researched dissection on how popular culture influenced the way in which the west views China
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April 24, 2015809.93358 F847 2014
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews