Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-40

Abstract

Few parts of London attracted as much attention as did Limehouse between the Great War and the 1930s. Limehouse, and its ghostly double ‘Chinatown’, figured as a dangerous and exotic place in novels, films, magazines, even in popular songs. Images of this small riverside district squeezed among the London Docks were shaped by two authors in particular: Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke. ‘Chinatown’ was a key theme in Rohmer’s early fiction. Three of these appalling novels are centred on the character Fu Manchu, an evil Chinese genius plotting world domination – often from some kind of secret headquarters around Limehouse. 1 Several other Rohmer novels published between 1915 and 1920 dealt with drug smuggling and the dangerous oriental presence in the London docks. 2 A 1916 collection of his short stories was titled Tales of Chinatown. Others jumped on the Fu Manchu bandwagon. Edgar Wallace’s novel The Yellow Snake published in 1926 had its Fu Manchu character Fing Su and an underground Chinese network in London. In Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, published in the following year, Hercule Poirot confronted another diabolical Chinese genius seeking world domination and at one point his assistant, Hastings, was imprisoned in a Limehouse opium den. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties the threat of Fu Manchu and his numerous oriental clones was recycled in comic books, magazine stories, radio shows and several film adaptations and imitations. 3 A very different kind of Limehouse Chinatown was manufactured by Thomas Burke, in a number of short stories, collections of verse and newspaper articles during the same years. 4 Here there were no evil oriental geniuses, international conspiracies or clumsy pastiches of Sherlock Holmes. Burke’s Chinatown stories – fiction and journalism – owed much to Jack London. Their tough boozy narrators revealed the sordid and dangerous spaces of the East End to a nervous suburban readership. They were stories about the interaction between working-class English men and women and their Chinese neighbours. They happened in little corner cafes, in the backrooms of terraced houses, in corner shops and public-houses, and they involved petty crime, sex and much violence. Burke’s writings on Chinatown did not have quite the international currency of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, but they were best-sellers. And they too found a ready market in the United States and were