The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
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When the desperate western powers call an emergency conference in Philadelphia in 1975, Li Tang Fwung (“the power behind the Dragon Throne”) warns them that China cannot be stopped. The same demographic pressure that makes expansion inevitable, makes intervention hopeless. “Our strength is in our population, which will soon be a billion” (87). This then is London’s Yellow Peril: “There was no way to dam up the over-spilling monstrous flood of life. War was futile. China laughed at a blockade of her coasts. She welcomed invasion. In her capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that could be hurled at her. And in the meantime her flood of yellow life poured out and on over Asia. China laughed and read in their magazines the learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars” (87).
But if London does attribute malignant intention to the Yellow Peril, he is, like Shiel, appalled by it, and the solution to threat is identical to the solution Shiel dramatized. There is no heroic John Hardy in “The Unparalleled Invasion.” Just as Li Tang Fwung is a colorless figure who simply describes the logic of Chinese triumphalism, not a Yen How who creates and directs the triumph, so Jacobus Laningdale, the man who rescues the West, is a colorless figure—“an obscure scientist, a professor employed in the laboratories of the Health Office of New York City” (89). He is a functionary who develops a device and a plan; London gives him no character at all. John Hardy, with his tortured personal experience of Yen How and of China, acted as a heroic, yet troubled, individual when he sent 150 infected Chinese across the Channel to annihilate the millions. Jacobus Laningdale develops tubes of glass that can be dropped on Chinese population centers from a distant airship. John Hardy was content with a single deadly plague; Jacobus Laningdale fills his tubes with smallpox, scarlet fever, cholera, and bubonic plague. Hundreds of millions die of the diseases (including 60,000 Germans and Austrian patrolling the borders to prevent the Chinese from fleeing the devastation), and millions more die in the consequent famine. China is rendered “a howling wilderness,” and “all survivors were put to death wherever found” (99). Five years after the elimination of the Chinese, “the world moved in”—“not in zones, … but heterogeneously, according to the democratic American plan” (100), and the once–Yellow territory is re-peopled.
By eliminating the private melodrama (the “one lillee kissee”) that shapes The Yellow Danger, London’s narrative mitigates its racist implications. By giving the Yellow race the face of Yen How, with his singular intelligence, his singular will, and his singular obsession in gaining an acknowledgement of erotic response from an English girl, Shiel makes the Yellow race a felt human reality. The reader is invited to despise the Chinese, who all seem avidly to share in Yen How’s hateful impulses of greed, xenophobia, and cruelty. And, of course, by embodying the ingenuity and pluck of the White race in a young Englishman (naturally the most ingenious and pluckiest of Whites), Shiel’s reader can identify with someone who, having suffered horrific tortures, can justify despising (and destroying) Yen How and his kind. One cannot hate the Chinese of London’s short fable. Malthus, not Li Tang Fwung, is the true villain of “The Unparalleled Invasion.” The Chinese do not exist as moral actors. The worst that can be said of them is that they are unapologetically fertile. Their only sin is fertility. And Western Science, not Jacobus Laningdale, is the true hero. The Yellow power to procreate is powerful, and threatens to achieve Yellow hegemony, but the White power to destroy is more powerful, and preserves White superiority.
London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion” is thus, like Harte’s “Plain Talk from Truthful James,” ambivalent in its depiction of Yellow-White relations. Harte renders the White victory ironic: Ah Sin and Truthful James are both cheaters; the difference is that crafty Ah Sin is the better cheater, and self-righteous Truthful James possesses more brute strength. The White victory in “The Unparalleled Invasion” is a human catastrophe. London evokes no antipathy for the faceless Chinese, and certainly no sympathy for the faceless scientist who seals pathogens in glass tubes dropped on civilian populations from high altitudes. London was a racist,39 and if his story does not valorize genocide, neither does it condemn it. When Yellow confronts White, it will lose, and should lose; the White race has been destined for victory. But London gives his readers no cause to celebrate the manner in which their advanced culture has annihilated the fecund Chinese.
SAX ROHMER
The greatest of the Yellow Peril novels were, of course, the Fu-Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer (Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883–1959). The initial novel published in England as a serial in The Story-Teller and then in book form as The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu in June 1913, and in America as a serial in Collier’s Weekly and then in book form as The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu in June 1913.40 By 1972, the novel had appeared in more than forty different editions in the two countries. Between in 1916 and 1959, Rohmer published twelve additional Fu Manchu novels (plus three Fu Manchu short stories). And beginning with a British silent film serial in 1923, Fu Manchu emerged as one of cinema’s most memorable villains. Paramount Pictures produced three films featuring Warner Oland as the master criminal (1929–1931),41 and then MGM produced the best known embodiment of oriental evil when Boris Karloff starred in The Mask of Fu Manchu in 1932. (Christopher Lee later played the role in five films, 1965–1969.)
Although Rohmer wrote in a dime-novel, ejaculatory mode—his novels do not spare the exclamation points42—The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu is less apocalyptic than The Yellow Danger or “The Unparalleled Invasion.” Fu-Manchu has the same goal as Yen How—“to place Europe and America beneath the scepter of Cathay” (105), but the interventions of Nayland Smith always interrupt the villain’s plots before he has the opportunity to employ his knowledge of esoteric pharmacopeia to extinguish more than a few Westerners who might oppose his malignant schemes. Where Shiel composed in episodes of grand geopolitical movements, with, for example, well-informed and detailed accounts of naval strategy and tactics; Rohmer composed episodes of pursuit, capture, escape, and rescue, with an emphasis upon the eerie and the fantastic—exotic drugs and exotic creatures (such as poisonous centipedes), trapdoors and preternatural accomplices (such as extraordinarily agile dacoits).
Shiel set Yen How concretely in a specific historical moment. Harold Billings observes, “Shiel cleverly wove incidents from the previous week’s headlines into each successive installment … the serial can almost be used to trace contemporary events for several weeks of real time during February 1898” (56). On the second page of the novel, he makes reference to the German “seizure of Kiao-Chau” (2). Kaio-Chau (or Kiautschou or Jiaozhou) was a “Concession” seized by Germany in spring 1898, the period when The Yellow Danger was appearing in serial form. This actual episode in the European competition for influence in the Far East is integrated into the narrative as Yen How exploits this appetite of the European powers for trade and territorial Concessions from the moribund Qing dynasty to divide those powers against one another as the necessary preliminary to their destruction by his Asian hordes. Jack London, on the other hand, chose to escape history entirely, projecting his vision of the Chinese expansion seventy years into the future. The inordinate size of the Chinese population was a long established and undoubted fact; London may have drawn upon contemporary American anxieties about the size of Chinese emigration into California and the American west, but these remained at best subliminal in his story.
Sax Rohmer was not interested in a factual foundation, but neither was he interested in overt fantasy. The Fu Manchu novels are written in the same paranoid Yellow Peril style as The Yellow Danger and “The Unparalleled Invasion,” but the threat does not grow out of China’s recent history, nor out of China’s projected demographics. Fu Manchu, despite his probable origins in “a certain very old Kiangsu family” (175), is not essentially Chinese. As Rohmer himself confessed, “I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese” (Van Ash 72). The novel contains a few references to China—to the Boxer Rebellion, to the Manchu
dynasty and its overthrow by “New China.” But Rohmer did not feel obliged to study Chinese culture, classical or contemporary, in order to imagine Fu-Manchu. He has his narrator, Dr. Petrie, explicitly sever Fu-Manchu from the specifically Chinese conflicts of the early 20th century. Petrie reports that the Doctor is an adherent neither of the old Qing (Manchu) dynasty nor of the Republicans who overthrew it in 1911. He is not a zealot of the Young China movement: “In my own hearing Fu-Manchu had disclaimed, with scorn, association with the whole of that movement” (155). Rather, he is essentially the enemy of Western values, who happens to be Chinese. None of his active accomplices in The Insidious Fu-Manchu is Chinese. They are all “dacoits” and “thuggees” from south Asia (Burma and India). His slave-girl, Kâramanèh, who falls in love with Dr. Petrie, the narrator, is an Arab from Egypt. This diversity of the Orientals who serve under the Chinese Doctor only expands as the series develops: “Fu-Manchu’s pan–Asian ‘murder-gang’ includes Negro and mulatto henchmen, Burmese thugs, Chinese martial artists, Malaysian dacoits (thieves), Indian lascars (seamen), phansigars (stranglers), hashishin (assassins), and houris (Muslim virgins)” (Seshagiri 175–76). The aim of Fu-Manchu is “to place … the whole of Europe and America beneath an Eastern rule” (122, italics added). “The whole of Europe and America”: Rohmer, unlike Shiel, includes America under the rubric “the West,” just as he includes Burma, India, and Arabia under “the East.” It is the easy thing to do (and so makes Shiel’s deliberate alienation of America from Britain the more noteworthy); it may also have been the more profitable thing to do: Rohmer realized from the beginning that the American market was worth pleasing. Fu-Manchu’s East is not China; it is the Anti-West. And the color of the Anti-West, from Cairo to Tokyo, is yellow.
Nayland Smith ends Chapter 2 of The Insidious Fu-Manchu with an often-quoted introduction to the Doctor:
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, 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 [13].
The phrase, “yellow peril,” recurs several times in the novel: “The phantom Yellow Peril … to-day materializes under the very eyes of the Western world.”(47), “alive to the Yellow Peril” (65), “a cogent Yellow Peril” (157), “the genius of the Yellow Peril” (168). Dr. Petrie recalls “those days of our struggle with the titanic genius whose victory meant the victory of the yellow races over the white” (102), and Nayland Smith speaks of the Doctor’s cause “the triumph of his cause—the triumph of the yellow races” (139). “Yellow” is, simply, the alternative to “White”; the colors of non–White Africa, Latin America, and Austrailia are beneath consideration. It is in the East, not the South, that the “West” locates its threatening mirror-image.
But if the “yellow races” include Dacoits, Thuggees, and Egyptians, they are, in fact, led by a specifically Chinese genius.43 And a Chinese genius has at least two distinctions. He is the quintessence of cruelty: Dr. Petrie assures the reader, “No white man, I honestly believe, appreciates the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese” (61). If Petrie echoes M.P. Shiel’s indictment, Nayland Smith echoes Truthful James on Chinese cunning (“That for ways that are dark / And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar”): “We are dealing with a Chinaman, with the incarnate essence of Eastern subtlety, with the most stupendous genius that the modern Orient has produced” (28). Cruelty and cunning again serve as the hallmarks of the Chinese character.
Unlike both Shiel and London, however, Rohmer is also willing to attribute to his Chinese villain an important quality that they had reserved to the Japanese. Their China was so fundamentally un–Western as to be incapable of adopting Western scientific technology and industrialization. The two civilizations could not in any respect speak the same language. But the Japanese were, on the one hand, able to comprehend the principles and practices of Western science and technology, and on the other, able to translate these into terms that could work in China. However over-simplified and racist, this notion of the Japanese as the necessary mediators between East and West had an obvious historical basis: Meiji Japan (1969–1912) had demonstrated the impressive ability of an Oriental society to “modernize” along Western lines.
Rohmer, detached as he was from history, could elide the Japanese entirely from his “East.” Fu-Manchu himself would pursue a Western education (“He was a scientist trained at a great university—an explorer of nature’s secrets, who had gone farther into the unknown, I suppose, than any living man,” 87); it would be his mastery of chemistry and botany and entomology that would enable him to carry out his mission of removing “all obstacles—human obstacles—from the path of that secret movement which was progressing in the Far East” (87). And he is, of course, as well, the master of arts unknown to Western science. The year after publishing The Insidious Fu-Manchu, Rohmer published a serious non-fiction book entitled The Romance of Sorcery, with chapters on Nostradamus, John Dee, Cagliostro, and Madame Blavatsky. Rohmer was, in fact, much better versed in the Western traditions of the occult (often rooted in Western studies of ancient Eastern cultures such as Egyptian and Chaldean) than he was in any traditions of the East.44 Fu-Manchu is a Magus more than he is a Chinese.
But it matters that he is Chinese. After admitting that he knew nothing of China, Rohmer asserted, “I know something about Chinatown. But that is a different matter” (Van Ash 72). By “Chinatown,” Rohmer meant the Limehouse district of London. There were 1120 Chinese resident in the UK in 1911; of these, 247 lived in London, and of these 101 lived in Limehouse (Seed). The numbers had more than doubled by 1921 (2419 in the UK, 711 in London, 227 in Limehouse), but knowing “Chinatown” clearly did not mean knowing much about Chinese culture. Rohmer asserted that his Chinatown knowledge derived largely from a journalistic assignment to report on one of the hundred-plus Chinese then living in Limehouse, “a Chinese master criminal” named “Mr. King.” Mr. King ran a syndicate involved in gambling, opium, and cocaine. Though he never penetrated Mr. King’s operations, Rohmer did claim to have briefly seen Mr. King, and to have based Fu-Manchu upon him (Van Ash 73). The China that lay behind Fu-Manchu is not, therefore, the geopolitical reality of the new Republic of China; rather it is the Chinese diaspora, and more specifically the very small Chinese population of East London, and even more specifically, the criminal element of that population that operated the opium dens made notorious by Dickens (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Conan Doyle (“The Adventure of the Man with the Twisted Lip”), and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray). As a result, “Chinatown”—real Chinatown and literary Chinatown—not China, would be the origin of the icon of Chinese malignity and the Yellow Peril for more than a century after his debut. When, in his last Fu Manchu novel, Emperor Fu Manchu (1959), Rohmer does set a novel in China, it is a fantastic China, where, in a remote location of Mao Zedong’s Sichuan, Fu Manchu develops a team of zombies (“Cold Men”). In order to restore “the garden of China to its old glory” (10.17), he commits himself to defeating the “Communist fools” (16.121) currently in power. His immediate target is the destruction of a germ warfare research center which the Russians, evidently not able to find a sufficiently remote site in their own territory, have constructed in Sichuan. Sichuan (“Szechwan”) signifies here merely a territory so remote that Fu Manchu, Nayland Smith, an American agent, a Russian agent, a German scientist, a Chinese maiden, and a platoon of zombies can “plausibly” converge and interact.
And where Shiel was experimenting with a new genre—Future History—in his Yellow Peril novel, Rohmer was adapting the conventions of a very popular existing genre, the detective story, and specifically, the conventi
ons of detective story as established by Conan Doyle. The narration by decent, somewhat imperceptive, and easily awed Dr. Petrie is obviously based on Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson. But if Petrie is somewhat less individualized as a character than Watson, Nayland Smith is far less individualized than Sherlock Holmes. This is partly a tribute to the extraordinary character that Conan Doyle developed for Holmes, and partly a certain artlessness on Rohmer’s part. Nayland Smith is handsome, with a jaw whose clenching never fails to impress Petrie; he has an air of authority; he keeps his word. He is not Sherlock Holmes. Nor is he meant to be. He is the Yang to Fu-Manchu’s Yin, and it is the oriental Yin that Rohmer highlights in the novels, which, after all, are named after the villain, not the hero.