4Notes Chapter 1 1. The two oldest and most popular of the Chinese puzzle games in the West are the tangram and the sliding-block puzzle. 2. Marian Bower and Leon Lion, The Chinese Puzzle: An Original Play in Four Acts, acting ed. (New York: Samuel French, 1919); Times (Lon- don), July 12, 1918, 9. The play received critical acclaim and was adapted for the screen the following year. Times (London), October 13, 1919, 10. 3. Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture, and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 35–36; Hugh Brogan, The Life of Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 293. 4. Review of The Chinese Puzzle, by Arthur Ransome, and Explaining China, by John Earl Baker, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 7, no. 1 (January 1928): 57. 5. Times (London), September 10, 1877, 4. 6. The Seaman: The Official Organ of the International Seafarers and the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union 4 (May 1908). 7. A point emphasized in John Seed’s recent article, “Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–1940,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 68–69. See also Colin Holmes, “The Chi- nese Connection,” in Outsiders and Outcasts: Essay in Honour of William J. Fishman, ed. Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes (London: Duck- worth, 1993), 85. 8. Thomas C. Holt draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre in his argument that race was “mutually constituted . in the global and the everyday.” Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of His- tory,” American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (February 1995): 10. 9. For China serving as a role model for the British Empire in the nine- teenth century, see Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville, VA: Uni- versity Press of Virginia, 1995), 52. Philippa Levine describes the bar- riers that the British erected around themselves in the imperial context in The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Long- man, 2007), 126–27. Colin Mackeras discusses the general evolution of Western opinion on China in Western Images of China (Hong Kong: 194 notes Oxford University Press, 1989) and in his edited anthology, Sinophobes and Sinophiles: Western Views of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10. The figure of “John Chinaman” is generally attributed to the American satirist and political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who began depicting the image in the 1860s. But the term and image had both appeared previ- ously in the British press, most prominently in the pages of the Times (1840) and, later, in Punch (1857). “John Bull” had its origins in British satirist John Arbuthnot’s depictions of Whig magnates in 1712. By the mid-nineteenth century, the rotund male figure bedecked in a Union Jack had come to represent the British everyman, just as “John China- man,” with his “coolie” jacket and queue, was establishing himself as the most common image of Chinese men in the U.S. and British press. 11. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Chinese workers were also essential to the agricultural labor force in European imperial territo- ries in the nineteenth century. 12. Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha International, 1990), 90. 13. “Coolie” has its immediate origins in the Hindi word qūlī, meaning “laborer.” The original source is most likely the Tamil word kuli, which means “wages.” Northrup, Indentured Labor, 60. The Chinese word kŭlí, which is a transcription of the Hindi, means “bitterly hard (use of) strength.” 14. Seed, “Limehouse Blues,” 79. 15. Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700– 1947 (London: Pluto, 1986), 38–39. 16. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (OBP), http://www.oldbaileyonline .org, September 1800 trial of William Rayner and Charles Moren, t18000917–29. 17. In 1851, the official tally of China-born residents in London stood at 110. Ng Chee Choo, The Chinese in London, published MA thesis, Uni- versity of London (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 5. 18. Ibid., 6. By 1891, the number of officially recorded China-born resident aliens had risen to 302. 19. Mid-century accounts discuss a second, smaller Chinese community in the East End neighborhood of Bluegate Fields (St. George’s-in-the- East), but references to it had ceased by the turn of the century. 20. Poverty, unsanitary conditions, and violence between Chinese seamen and among Lascar seamen in the East End had attracted official atten- tion on several occasions in the early nineteenth century. Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 172–73. For a broader view of anti-immigrant sentiment in the prewar period, see Colin Holmes, notes 195 John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 65–85. 21. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4 (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861–62; New York: Dover, 1968) 232–33. Citations are to the Dover edition. 22. Count E. Armfelt, “Oriental London,” in Living London, ed. George R. Sims (London: Cassell, 1901–3), 84; George A. Wade, “The Cockney John Chinaman,” London Illustrated Magazine, July 1900, 302. 23. Walter Besant, East London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1901), 205–6. Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 86–87. 24. Joseph Charles Parkinson, “Lazarus, Lotus Eating,” in Places and People, Being Studies from Life (London: Tinsley Bros., 1869), 36–37, reprinted from All the Year Round 15 (May 12, 1866). 25. Mayhew, London Labour, 232–33. 26. George A. Wade insisted, in his 1900 account, that “in this Chinese por- tion of the East End, there are no women from China.” Wade, “John Chimaman,” 302. Census statistics contradict this assessment, however, indicating that there were two dozen present in London in 1901 and nearly a hundred there by 1921. Choo, Chinese in London, 11. 27. Mayhew, London Labour, 232–33; Parkinson, Places and People, 28; Joseph Salter, The East in the West; or Work Amongst the Asiatics and Africans in London (London: S. W. Partridge, 1895), 35. 28. Armfelt, “Oriental London,” 86. 29. Parkinson, Places and People, 21. 30. Wade, “John Chinaman,” 307. 31. Ross G. Forman, “Peking Plots: Fictionalizing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1998): 19–48; Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 191–97. 32. The postcolonial critique rightly insists that any examination of race must take into account both the power dynamics inherent in European racial discourse and the ways that racial “others” responded to and contested these dynamics. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Inter- pretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 271–313; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Ranahit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). In the British context, Laura Tabili has emphasized black workers’ contestation of racial subordination in interwar Britain. Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2–5. 196 notes 33. Terence Gomez and Gregor Benton, Chinese in Britain: Economy, Trans- nationalism, and Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 34. Important early works include Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians (Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1978); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982). 35. This concept of race and its linkages with the social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics of empire in the nineteenth century animates much of the recent scholarship on these subjects. In the British context, see Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1986); Tabili, British Justice; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nine- teenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Zine Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 36. For work on the subject after World War II, see Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Kathleen Paul, White- washing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 37. Prominent examples of this scholarship include Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower, 1987); Tabili, British Justice and “Women ‘of a Very Low Type’: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Imperial Britain,” in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonya O. Rose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1996); Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ed., Black Victorians/Black Victoriana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Antoi- nette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encoun- ter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1998); Shompa Lahiri, Indians In Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity 1880–1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes; Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), chap.