Few people today remember how pervasive the Yellow Peril was in popular culture, and a good thing, too. The term seems to have originated in the late 19th century when Chinese workers were brought to the United States as cheap labor to work on the railroads and in the gold fields of the American West. That many of these workers not only looked strange to America workers, but wore unfamiliar clothes, spoke unintelligible languages, ate foods that bore no resemblance to traditional American meat-and-potatoes, and often worshipped what appeared to be idols was bad enough, but that they worked for a pittance of what a white man might expect was seen as a direct threat to the American way of life.
That all too many of these menacing "heathens" were virtually enslaved by the (white) men who brought them to America was either not known or discounted by the working class men who saw the Chinese as despised competitors with "devilish" ways. Soon there were laws restricting Chinese immigration, anti-Chinese riots in the Pacific Northwest that rivaled the horrors of the Tulsa and Rosewood tragedies, and attempts to prevent ethnically Chinese children born in the United States from claiming American citizenship. Matters only got worse in the early 20th century, when rising prejudice and the popularity of eugenics resulted in a series of increasingly restrictive immigration laws that targeted all Asians, not just the Chinese, making it all but impossible for Asian immigrants to become naturalized citizens and stripping American women who married Asians of their citizenship. There were a few exceptions - what became known as the "Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907" exempted the Japanese from many of the anti-Asian laws - but it's no coincidence that the phrase "Chinaman's chance" was coined around this time.
If this wasn't bad enough, the idea that despite laws restricting their immigration and popular hatred that forced them into what were effectively ghettoes, the evil Oriental hordes would somehow combine to overcome the gallant, doomed West thanks to conspiracy and military conquest became a staple of popular culture.
This seems to have started early in the 1900s, soon after the Russians learned courtesy of the Battle of Tsushima that the "Japanese monkeys" were more than a match for the Imperial Navy. Suddenly there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stories about ruthless Chinese and/or Japanese armies invading and destroying the West. Jack London was probably the best author to take up this theme, in a 1914 story that has a vengeful Western alliance stopping Chinese expansion with a ruthless campaign of biological warfare, but he was far from the only one; Philip Francis Nowlan's seminal pulp novel Armageddon 2419 AD, which introduced Buck Rogers, has the original sleeping superhero wake to find that America has been colonized by evil Chinese invaders, while HP Lovecraft's works depict "slant-eyed immigrants [practicing] nameless rites in honor of heathen gods by the light of the moon." Robert Heinlein, one of the first SF writers to feature a non-white hero (Johnny Rico of Starship Troopers), wrote Sixth Column, the tale of a "PanAsian" empire that was so rife with stereotypes that Heinlein later apologized.
And there were more, many, many, many more, from movie serial villain Ming the Merciless to comic villain the Yellow Claw. So powerful and pervasive was the stereotype that as late as the 1960's superhero Iron Man fought evil Asian sorcerer the Mandarin and his evil minions in the Ten Rings, Batman battled the evil Asian Ras' al Ghul, the 1970's version of Hawaii 5-0 pursued the evil Wo Fat, and Doctor Who was menaced by Weng Chiang and his Peking Homunculus
And then there was Sax Rohmer's massively popular, massively influential, massively bigoted series about the gallant Briton Nayland Smith and his ongoing battle against the irredeemably evil, utterly inscrutably walking stereotype named Fu Manchu.
Rohmer, born Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward in 1883 in Birmingham, was not quite the aristocratic writer one might expect from reading his fiction; the scion of a working class Irish-Catholic family, he originally trained as a civil servant before chucking it all to work writing comic songs and sketches for that quintessentially working class English form of entertainment, the music hall. Eventually he chucked that as well and started writing horror fiction for middlebrow magazines like Pearson's. He soon was rubbing elbows with the likes of more established horror and "weird fiction" authors like Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Algernoon Blackwood. Also like Machen and Blackwood (though not Conan Doyle), Rohmer claimed to be a member of one of the numerous quarreling factions of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an enormously influential magical organization that included the likes of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley in its ranks. That Rohmer might, just might have appropriated a family friend's actual occult connections is only speculation.
Rohmer enjoyed enough success as a horror writer that he was making his living entirely from novel and short story sales by 1911. It was then that, possibly inspired by an earlier Yellow Peril novel by M.P. Shiel, that Rohmer created the character that made him rich, famous, and renowned.
That character was, of course, the evilest of evil Oriental villains: the one, the only, Dr. Fu Manchu.
Despite not being the first, Fu Manchu was unquestionably the most important and influential Yellow Peril villain. Intelligent, ruthless, utterly amoral, and evil to the core, this descendant of the Mongol Emperors of China was determined to achieve nothing less than the complete conquest of the West in revenge for the degradation of Chinese civilization by European conquerors. His chief antagonists, the gallant British hero Dennis Nayland Smith and his sidekick Dr. Petrie, thwarted the insidious and inscrutable Fu Manchu in a series of fast-paced, exciting, bigoted, immensely popular, and increasingly ridiculous adventures between 1913 and, God help us all, 1957. There was even a posthumous collection of Fu Manchu short stories published in 1973, not to mention authorized sequels as late as 2012.
Yes. A Fu Manchu novel was published last year.
Really.
For all his success, Fu Manchu was far from Rohmer's favorite character. The first three books in the series were so popular that Rohmer, like Conan Doyle before him, felt smothered by his own success. And though he stopped writing Fu Manchu books after three bestselling novels, and wrote about other heroes such as Moris Klaw, "Red" Kerry, Gaston Max, and Paul Harley, plus plenty of short stories and novels about such delights as reanimated Egyptian mummies, the public clamored for Fu Manchu and only Fu Machu.
Rohmer finally gave up thanks to the combined efforts of Paramount Pictures (which wanted to film a series starring, I kid you not, Swedish actor Warner Oland), Collier's(which wanted to publish a serial), and a newspaper syndicate (which was gearing up to produce a daily comic strip), and by the late 1920s was once again churning out Fu Manchu books. He wasn't especially happy about it (which showed in a volume which tried to shift the evilness and villainy onto Fu Manchu's daughter and her fight against one Drake Roscoe), but finally gave up and brought back both Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith in 1930's Fu Manchu's Daughter.
If this weren't enough, Rohmer decided to recycle Drake Roscoe, the intended replacement for Nayland Smith. This he did in one of the few Yellow Peril series to feature a female villain, the evil Sumuru, which lasted for five books and was made into a film series in the late 1960s starring former Bond Girl Shirley Eaton. And of course he kept writing short stories, many of them about cursed Oriental objects, writings, and people, very, very few of which bore even the slightest resemblance to actual Asians (not that this made any impact on sales)….
Needless to say, the Chinese government was less than pleased by Fu Manchu, his daughter, or his adventures; his depiction of Limehouse, the main Chinese community in London, as a hotbed of crime, conspiracy, opium, and white slavery, was particularly outrageous given that the Asian community Limehouse was actually one of the most law-abiding ethnic enclaves in London. Chinese communities in the United States were equally upset. They already faced huge legal obstacles to fair treatment, and having Fu Manchu on the silver screen, in the Sunday funnies, and flying briskly off the shelves at the Heck Piazza Yarnes & Mobile didn't help one little bit. That Fu Manchu was only one of many evil Oriental villains in the pulps and the comics and the serials was no excuse; many of these characters were clearly inspired by him, and the popularity of a highbrow novel like The Good Earth, which was sympathetic to the plight of Chinese peasants, counted for little against the rising tide of racial stereotyping.
Rohmer shrugged off the criticism and continued to write books that mixed high adventure, exotic lands, paper-thin characters, and a whole heap o' misunderstood, misportrayed, and outrageously stereotyped Asian and Middle Eastern characters, customs, and religions. He did soften some of the worst of the Yellow Peril motifs in his books by the time of his death, but less than ten years later revisionism, the Civil Rights movement, and the repeal of discriminatory immigration laws would have rendered his particular type of pulp mayhem obsolete, if not yet completely unpublishable.
His most famous character lived on, with no less than Peter Sellers attempting a high camp version of Fu Manchu AND Nayland Smith in his last film. And though Fu Manchu himself has resisted all efforts to revive him on-screen, there are echoes of him in everything from the Kurt Russell vehicle Big Trouble in Little China to Eddie Murphy's The Golden Child to the explosion of fanboy wrath against the recent Iron Man movie that transformed the Mandarin from a literary white man's fantasy of an evil Asian villain into a literal white man's fantasy of an evil Asian villain. That a stereotype like the Mandarin, who was very much a relic in the early 1960s and has gradually faded from view as society has evolved, was literally unfilmable today doesn't seem to have occurred to the most vociferous critics.
As for Sax Rohmer himself…
After a few years in New York just after World War II, he moved back to London in the 1950s. There he continued to write until his death, which came about not from old age, cancer, smoking, drinking, or any other traditional writerly vice, but from…
…wait for it…
…are you sitting down?…
Asian flu.
Yes. Really.
I swear, I couldn't make this up if I tried.
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And so...do any of you have a Fu Manchu novel lurking sinisterly in your attic? A pastiche? An homage like The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril? The Christopher Lee movie series? The Peter Sellers comedy? Don't be shy...it's Saturday night, so let the fun commence....
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