It is a fine summer’s day in 1946, a two-penny bus-ride from the centre of Oxford. A woman leaves her house to join the bus queue, to catch the shops before the lunch-hour closing. She is hoping to buy a pound of biscuits with the last few points in her ration book. Back home, her husband has rolled up his shirtsleeves, ready to do some gardening. As he pushes an old wheelbarrow along the garden path, he beams happily. At his side is his beloved daughter, the soft curls of her perm gently brushing against the garden hoe that she...

When I first met Deni and asked him about his family background, he began by describing China’s imperial examination system, thus highlighting its significance in the Hsiungs’ world:

In theory, a beggar, if he could pass, could become prime minister . . . there were stories in Peking Opera, from rags to riches, that was the only way for intellectuals to climb up . . . The aim was to be an official. If you become an official you have everything, you have social rank, power and money.

In rising to worldwide fame, Shih-I fulfilled the tales of a talented...

After tea one day in January 1933 with Professor Allardyce Nicoll and his wife, the writer Josephine Calina, Shih-I left with the latter’s words ringing in his ears: ‘Mr Hsiung, why waste your time doing Shakespeare? You can’t compete with so many English students, however good your English is. China has so many English plays translated, but we don’t have any Chinese plays in English. Why not do something Chinese?’² It was an offhand suggestion that was completely to change Shih-I Hsiung’s life.

After a long ocean voyage, Shih-I had arrived in London in the late summer of 1932 to...

On 27 November 1934,Lady Precious Streampremiered at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, just off The Strand, to a distinguished audience including the Chinese ambassador Quo Taichi, Sir James Stewart Lockhart and Sir Reginald Johnston.¹ Grace Lau, who attended one performance as a child, recalled:

People were clapping like mad; everyone thought it was wonderful. Uncle Hsiung was so proud, he was beaming from ear to ear . . . There was a mixed audience, Chinese and English, and they all loved it; they all thought it was wonderful!

Hsiung felt exalted.Lady Precious Streamran for three...

During the 1930s, British Sinophobia began to diminish. Not only had China been an ally during the First World War, but, with the rise of anti-fascism in Britain, when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, sympathies for the Chinese grew. According to the historian Robert Bickers, however, the greatest positive impact on British minds came from Chinese art and from Chinese students and intellectuals in Britain.¹ The Chinese government seized upon culture to humanize the Chinese in Western eyes; the 1935 Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy, though initiated by Sir Percival David and other collectors in the Oriental...

WhileLady Precious Streamreached a wide public internationally, part of its appeal in Britain lay precisely in the ‘odd and new’—theDaily Expressdescribed it as the ‘oddest play in London’. What was ‘odd and new’ about it was that its author was Chinese. China and Chinese people had long played a key role in Western culture, from Marco Polo’s thirteenth-centuryTravels, Jesuit missionary tracts, Enlightenment philosophy and the works of writers from Daniel Defoe to Franz Kafka, to the penny dreadfuls of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, sinicized Aladdin pantomimes and even popular songs, such as George Formby’s...

In seeking fame, Hsiung may have crafted his identity to ensure commercial appeal but, on becoming a celebrity, he nonetheless maintained a desire to dispel Eurocentric conceptions of the Chinese. He had writtenLady Precious Streamin the first few months of his arrival, with little idea of the success he could achieve. Now he also realized the power of racialized representations of the Chinese to affect everyday relations:

Whenever I refused a cigarette . . . my host invariably apologised for not being able to supply me with a ‘pipe of peace’ [opium] . . . wherever my wife...

In Dymia’s book,Flowering Exile, Mr Lo states, ‘now that the family is here, we begin to look like an English household’, before turning to his wife and saying, ‘Lien, we’ll all help you. You’ll get used to it soon.’¹ Dymia thus gives voice to the centrality of her role in enabling the Hsiungs to gain acceptance in British society through performances of class, family and home.

In the early twentieth century, Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, two streets in London’s East End housing Chinese shops and restaurants that catered to an ethnically mixed, working-class clientele, had a notorious reputation. If...

When in 1949, Vivien Greene, recently separated from Graham Greene, moved into Grove House at Iffley Turn, the Hsiungs relocated to a smaller house in Heyford Hill, between Littlemore and Sandford in Oxfordshire. Though with only one acre of land instead of two, their new home was a hundred-year-old stone house with beautiful fir trees and land that stretched all the way down to the River Thames. To Dymia, though, it was ‘a real come down’.¹

By this time, the position of China in the world had shifted—the Sinophilia of the 1930s during which Hsiung had risen to fame...

So endsFlowering Exile, Dymia again positioning her protagonist as a woman divided by her love and duties as a wife and mother, and looking forward to an eventual return to China. After the book’s sober reception, the Hsiungs, now rarely receiving any mention in the press, retreated into the literary shadows.

In 1950, Shih-I moved to Cambridge to teach modern Chinese and classical Chinese drama ‘to very small and select groups only’ at the university.² Having abandoned his studies on the success ofLady Precious Stream, he still had no foreign degree and the position he held was only...

The phenomenal rise of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung to global visibility provides a glimpse into an extraordinary history that has been obscured until today. However, their story is not yet over.

In March 2011, a crowd gathered at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing. The Hsiungs’ eldest daughter Delan had passed away earlier in December 2009 at the age of eighty-five, but her burial was postponed. When, just over a year later, a place was secured for her at Babaoshan, it was decided that Hsiung’s ashes would also be laid to rest there. Paradoxically then, on that early spring day, mourners...

This book has focused on the challenges the Hsiungs faced, as a relatively elite couple from China, in becoming accepted as modern, cosmopolitan subjects in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. While Shih-I’s success far transcended Dymia’s, both became part of an elite of highly celebrated figures and contributed to a global traffic in culture. The Hsiungs thus transcend dominant representations of the Chinese in Britain as invisible and insular and as having little impact on wider society, culture and politics. Their stories, however, are also significant in illuminating the histories of the challenges facing Chinese artists and writers in...