Fu Manchu in the East End
“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 of science past and present, 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.”
When the reporter and novelist Sax Rohmer wrote those words 80 years ago he was obviously not advancing the cause of racial tolerance too far.
Fear and mistrust
But in his portrayal of the evil criminal mastermind, he tapped into a strong vein of fear and mistrust of the Chinese community in the East End.
And in the novels and Hollywood films that followed, Rohmer not only made the mysterious Dr Fu-Manchu a worldwide name, he gave fame to Limehouse – the shadowy quarter from which the bad doctor sprung.
Rohmer first visited the East End in 1911, doing groundwork for a piece for the Daily Sketch. His brief was to discover the mysterious “Mr King”, a criminal boss who supposedly had tentacles in all the organised crime of the area but who had never been seen.
Rohmer never found Mr King, but claimed that tucked away in the labyrinthine streets of old Limehouse, he had met Fu-Manchu. That “meeting” was to make his name and his fortune.
Myth, intrigue, and a strong fictional tradition was closely linked in the public’s mind with Limehouse. The area had been a centre of barge and ship building for 500 years.
And over those centuries, one of the East End’s oldest villages built up a large “Lascar” population. That was a catch-all term for the Asian seamen who, having worked a passage to London, were often paid off as soon as they hit port. Many worked their way back but many stayed.
Limehouse Chinatown really got established around the 1860s and soon worked its way into popular fiction. Sherlock Holmes pursued his quarry here, and found rich young men slumming it in Limehouse opium dens.
Oscar Wilde’s dissolute Dorian Gray did the same and Hollywood producer DW Griffith travelled the area, researching his film Broken Blossoms.
The Victorian newspapers played it to the hilt, with reports of the yellow peril, of inscrutable orientals running their opium dens.
Young white women were, of course, always at risk of being drugged and spirited away into the white slave trade!
Certainly, by the turn of the century, opium could be bought over the counter and was openly smoked, not just by locals but by the wealthy coming down from the West End to taste the mysteries of oriental Limehouse.
During the First World War around 4,000 Chinese people were living in the East End but the numbers were soon to dwindle as fear of the visitors translated into an ugly backlash.
Anti-Chinese riots broke out in 1919, as locals swallowed the yellow peril scare stories in the papers.
Deportation
The Government came down hard on the Chinese – hard labour followed by deportation was a typical sentence for possession of the now outlawed opium. Many were deported for far less, such as gambling on the game of puck-apu.
In 1934, more brutal action was taken. The Council widened Limehouse Causeway, sweeping away the maze of houses and shops that gave the area its mystery. The Blitz did more damage – many Chinese names are on casualty lists from the bombing raids in 1940.
And the building of the Limehouse Link finally destroyed the atmosphere and topography of the old hamlet. The fog-bound labyrinth of Limehouse was swept away – and with it the ghosts of Chinatown.