It is a late September evening in 1928 and a young Chinese man sits huddled over the metered gas fire in a draughty room in one of Bloomsbury’s cheaper hotels not far from Russell Square. Uppermost in his mind is that he is down to his last shilling with which to feed the ‘vampire’ as he thinks of it. He shivers in the thin khaki suit he purchased exactly four years ago in one of Shanghai’s palatial Western-style emporiums. It is time to wear the knitted cardigan which substitutes for what he has discovered to be the inadequacy of a...

Lao She’s youth was marked by violence, poverty and exclusion. His earliest memories were the stories told to him by his mother about how his father had died and how he himself, although just a year-old baby, had narrowly escaped being killed by the soldiers of the Eight Nation Allied Army as they rampaged through Peking following the relief of the Boxer assault on the European legations. The ‘foreign devils’ came to our house, she told him, and ‘they bayoneted our old yellow dog before they ransacked the place. Before the blood of our dog was yet dry, more soldiers...

The events that would shape Lao She’s emergence as one of China’s most important new novelists begin in London, some 15 years before he arrives there, ‘on or around 1910’, the date to which Virginia Woolf would famously attribute the birth of modernism. This chapter will outline a trajectory of the ways in which the cultural landscape of the capital, until this point ‘extraordinarily provincial and chauvinistic’, was broadened by modernist interaction with China, taking Ezra Pound as the lynchpin of a global aesthetic exchange that, in its turn, would determine Hu Shi’s prescriptions for Chinese writing after May Fourth.²...

One of the consequences of China’s post-Boxer modernization and developing nationalism was that increasing numbers of students, educationalists, and young professionals travelled overseas to study, teach, and absorb Western ideas. The historian Frank Dikötter reminds us of the often forgotten cosmopolitan nature of China’s early Republican era when, despite political turbulence,

opportunities for education were more diverse than ever before, as government organisations, private societies and religious associations, funded by local elites, merchants guilds or foreign benefactors, contributed to the spread of new ideas. Religious expression was also allowed to thrive in a climate of relative tolerance, while culture bloomed...

The period of China’s utmost vulnerability, from the Boxer uprising of 1900 until the rise of the Nationalist Party in the mid-1920s, coincided with the mass-marketing of Chinese stereotypes and the ‘discovery’ of London’s Chinatown. The history of British involvement in the opium trade was now subsumed in the struggle against ‘Chinese vice’. The ways in which London’s Chinese community came to represent national threat found its consummate expression in Sax Rohmer’s tales of Dr Fu Manchu, ‘the yellow peril incarnate in one man’ threatening global havoc from his headquarters hidden deep in darkest Limehouse. Rohmer’s fiction fed upon that...

Behavioural trends in post-war London, as Douglas Goldring, former Vorticist associate and man-about-town recalled, encompassed ‘co-educationists, Morris-dancers, vegetarians, teetotallers, professors of Economics, drug-takers, boozers, Socialists, gossip columnists, playwrights, Communists, Roman Catholic converts, painters and poets … all having an uninhibited fling’.¹ Lao She begins Er Ma with a snapshot of this very panoply of British concerns. It is a noisy spring Sunday at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Socialists waving red flags and Conservative Party members waving Union Jacks blame each other for the world’s ills. The Salvation Army bang tambourines whilst next to them proclaims ‘a Catholic preacher, and...

On a sunny Spring day in May 1966 Lao She was interviewed in his traditional courtyard house in Beijing by the British Marxist and pro-communist journalists, husband and wife, Roma and Stuart Gelder. ‘Tell me’, he asked the Gelders,

about Piccadilly and Leicester Square and Hyde Park and St James’s and the Green Park. Are they still the same? Peking is beautiful, but I shall always think of London in spring as one of the most attractive cities in the world. And the people—I received great kindness in England. It’s a pity we don’t get on better. They don’t...