15

Fu Manchu

BORIS KARLOFF IN THE MASK OF FU MANCHU, 1932 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese.

—Sax Rohmer

“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.”¹

Such is the insidious image of Dr. Fu Manchu, created in the early part of the twentieth century by the British writer Sax Rohmer. Compared to the genial, soft-spoken Charlie Chan, who uses his Oriental wisdom to fend off menaces to mainstream, white culture, Fu Manchu epitomizes the East’s threat to the West. Made in the heyday of the Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu is no small-time cardsharp like Ah Sin or whiny weakling like John Chinaman. Instead, he is a daunting enemy who can be defeated only by the very best deputy of the West: Special Commissioner Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard. Like Steve McGarrett’s far more contemporary archrival, Wo Fat, Fu Manchu is an agent of the Chinese government who moves about, wraithlike, within the opium dens, subterranean passages, and loathsome dungeons of the modern metropolis. As readers learn, his feline claws can penetrate the rosy bosom of the pristine English countryside or that cradle of Western democracy, the White House. A scientific wizard with incredible expertise in chemistry, medicine, engineering, botany, and zoology; an omniscient hypnotist who can control one’s mind for hours or days on end; and a skilled linguist who speaks English impeccably but with an odd choice of words—Fu Manchu is, in sum, a superman with a satanic heart.

How did this improbable Chinaman come about?

If one thinks it curious that Charlie Chan’s initial incarnation may have been in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library, think again: Fu Manchu, according to Sax Rohmer, was born on a Ouija board.

Like his creation, Rohmer was a lifetime devotee of occultism. Born Arthur Henry Ward on February 15, 1883, in Birmingham, England, Rohmer grew up in South London with an alcoholic Irish mother and a hardworking stonemason father. In his early years, he suffered from that strange affliction called somnambulism (a malady that may partly account for his penchant for creating nightmarish atmospherics in his writing). While sleepwalking, Rohmer once pounced on his father and nearly choked him to death. Another time, he tried to pull his wife, Elizabeth, out of bed because he dreamed that she was about to be run over by a car.

Rejecting all mainstream religions, including the Roman Catholicism of his Irish heritage, Rohmer joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society whose members included William Butler Yeats, among other luminaries. He was also admitted, along with Rudyard Kipling, to the Rosicrucian Society, an influential international sect founded with the belief that a fund of secret wisdom could be handed down through the ages and transmitted only to the initiated. He had kept his memberships secret even from his wife, who shared his belief in supernatural powers but would only learn of his affiliations with these societies after his death.

Before achieving fame with Fu Manchu, Rohmer made a meager living as a freelance writer, selling stories to magazines and journals. Like Biggers, Rohmer also had a brief stint as a reporter for a newspaper, the Commercial Intelligence; and, like the father of Charlie Chan, the creator of Fu Manchu was also fired for his propensity to embroider facts. These are no trivial similarities. The ability to conjure up a character from another culture and to make a career out of such cultural ventriloquism requires a particularly healthy imagination.

Uncertain about his future, Rohmer cajoled Elizabeth into helping him experiment with a Ouija board. Having established “contact” with the mysterious being, which answered “yes” or “no” to a few preliminary questions, Rohmer went to the heart of the matter with a straight question: “How can I best make a living?” To the astonishment of the couple, the pointer, according to Rohmer’s protégé and biographer, Cay Van Ash, “moved rapidly over the chart and, not once, but repeatedly, spelled out: C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N.” The incredulous couple “looked at each other and shook their heads. They had not the faintest idea what it meant.”²

The strange missive from “the Unknown” was soon deciphered when Rohmer received a magazine assignment to write a feature story on a “Mr. King” in London’s notorious Limehouse District. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the mere mention of the term Limehouse would conjure up images readymade for Victorian horror novels: “A vista of dark streets, shadowy yellow-faced forms, the brief flash of a knife blade, a scream in the night, a bloated corpse fished up from the murky waters of the Thames.” Such snapshots might appear to be merely clichéd will-o’-the-wisps concocted by second-rate writers with Oriental fantasies, but, as Van Ash wrote, “Before the First World War, it was a fact that the warren of narrow streets and alleyways in the neighborhood of West India Dock Road, Penny-fields, and Limehouse Causeway formed a no-man’s-land which honest citizens hesitated to penetrate after dark. It was a fact that the Metropolitan Police honored the area with double patrols.”³

The “Mr. King” whom Rohmer was supposed to track down was allegedly “a considerable property owner, a known drug trafficker and, according to rumor, the guiding hand in half of the underworld activities of Limehouse.”⁴ But no one seemed ever to have met him. Looking for the elusive King, Rohmer would disappear in Limehouse for days and mingle with the most unlikely cocktail of humanity. Without question, Rohmer, inspired by the Victorian occult, was a man on a mission, as suggested by his peculiar pseudonym: “Sax,” suggesting “Saxon,” means “blade” in the Anglo-Saxon language; “Rohmer” is a homophone of “Roamer.” Sax Rohmer, then, was an errant Saxon knight on a quixotic quest.

Rohmer’s connection to Limehouse was Fong Wah, a storeowner who purveyed strange delicacies dear to the Chinese palate: bamboo shoots, shark fins, water chestnuts, lily roots, seaweed, bird nests, and preserved eggs. A tall and elderly man with a finely lined face that looked like a map of Asia, Fong Wah was rumored to have been the executioner of Hankow in his early days. Not averse to distaff pleasures, he even took on a fourth wife young enough to be his granddaughter.⁵ Rohmer’s friendship with the executioner-turned-merchant did not, however, bring him any closer to the elusive Mr. King; the mere mention of the name was enough to make Fong Wah go mum or change the subject.

As the deadline for the commissioned piece pressed ever closer, Rohmer became as desperate as an ant in a hot wok. His penchant for creative embroidery took over and saved him from certain failure. Based on a few facts that he had gathered about the tongs and other secret organizations in Limehouse, Rohmer began to fantasize a scenario:

Supposing, I asked myself, a number of those sinister organizations—perhaps, even, all of them—were in turn responsible to the direction of some super-society? Such a society would hold the power to upset Governments, perhaps change the very course of civilization…. I began to wonder what the president of my imaginary super-society would be like, what manner of man could dominate that would-be shadowy empire. He would have Caesaresque qualities. He must be a man of great scientific culture, a genius.⁶

But Rohmer’s imagination stopped there, as he could not visualize the appearance of such an Oriental “King.” He knew that “conditions for launching a Chinese villain on the market were ideal.”⁷ Memories of the two violent and sanguinary Opium Wars that had wracked China were still fresh among the British public. The more recent Boxer Rebellion, during which many Anglo-Europeans in China were singled out and killed by the rebels, had set off fear of a “Yellow Peril,” a phrase coined by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. And sensational reports on Limehouse’s crimes and grime had always riveted the public’s attention. All Rohmer needed to do was put a face on the sinister figure he now imagined.

One day, Fong Wah finally rewarded Rohmer for his patience by tipping him off about the possible appearance of “a very strange man who sometimes visits Limehouse.” Rohmer got the cue and waited in the shadow of a dingy little alley at the specified hour. After a long wait, a shiny limousine pulled up before a mean-looking house, and a uniformed chauffeur jumped out and opened the car door for his passengers. “A tall, dignified Chinese, wearing a fur-collared overcoat and a fur cap, alighted and walked in,” Rohmer recalled years later. “He was followed by an Arab girl wrapped in a grey fur cloak. I had a glimpse of her features. She was like something from an Edmund Dulac illustration of The Thousand and One Nights.” When the house door was opened and the light flooded out, Rohmer caught a glimpse of the face of the man in the fur cap. In that instant, Rohmer’s imaginary monster, Dr. Fu Manchu, sprang to life.⁸

Fu Manchu thus was born in the fall of 1911, less than three years before an assassin’s bullet would plunge Europe into war. The first in the series of Fu Manchu stories was called “The Zayat Kiss,” referring to the evil doctor’s use of a scorpion as his devious method of killing. Playing on Oriental fantasy, Rohmer concocted a legend about travelers who stopped by zayats—resthouses along caravan routes in Burmese jungles—and then were found dead. Nothing indicated the cause of death but a little mark suspected to be a scorpion sting—hence, “the zayat kiss.” A fictional re-creation of the worst colonial nightmare, the Asian jungle now struck back at the center of the empire, and the evil doctor, representative of the Asiatic race, brought the kiss of death into the tranquil bedrooms of British homes. First a letter dipped in a rare perfume was mailed to the potential victim. Then, on the night the letter arrived, one of Fu Manchu’s trained dacoits (bandits) would bring a scorpion into the room where the victim was sleeping. The lingering traces of perfume on the victim’s hand would attract the scorpion, leading to a fatal strike.⁹

First serialized in The Story-Teller in October 1912 and then published in June 1913 as a book under the title of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the ten episodes of this evil-Chinaman saga seized the English imagination. The xenophobic fear instigated by the fictional character represented the anxiety and paranoia of a jittery nation on the eve of a global war. Fu Manchu was not just a single Chinaman who, like Ah Sin, has “tricks that are vain” and “ways that are dark.” He was an instigator and leader of what Rohmer described as a “Yellow Movement” his murderous agents included an assortment of dark-skinned Orientals and such other exotics as Thuggs, dacoits, Arabs, Africans, and Greeks. “In the Fu-Manchu stories,” a scholar once wrote, “Rohmer has produced Europe’s worst nightmare, a global insurgency intent upon turning the tables of world domination.”¹⁰

First serialized in the American magazine Collier’s Weekly, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu was released in the United States as a book in September 1913 under that most verbose of titles, Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu: Being a Somewhat Detailed Account of the Amazing Adventures of Nayland Smith in His Trailing of the Sinister Chinaman. The novel appeared less than two years before the film release of The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s best-selling 1905 novel. Set during the Civil War and directed by D. W. Griffith, the 190-minute silent movie is noted not only for its innovative technical and narrative achievements but also for its controversial treatment of white supremacy and its sympathetic account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks, played by white actors in blackface, are portrayed as barbaric rapists threatening the virtues of white women and the sanctity of the civilized white world.

The introduction of an equally threatening Chinese villain only reinforced racist fears. Not surprisingly, the Fu Manchu book became as popular in the United States as in Britain. The book was reprinted at least twenty times. By the 1970s, more than forty hardcover and paperback editions of the first Fu Manchu novel had appeared in the two countries.

Success ignited Rohmer’s literary passions. The outbreak of the Great War provided a greater impetus, as xenophobia spread like a virus. In rapid order, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (also known as The Devil Doctor) appeared in 1916 and The Hand of Fu-Manchu (also known as The Si-Fan Mysteries) in 1917. Needing to up the ante, Rohmer created these sequels in which Fu Manchu’s team of running dogs perpetrates new murders with even more exotic and devious methods. In one episode, Fu Manchu kills a character “carrying a cane with a knob in the shape of a snake’s head.” The satanic mastermind replaces the cane with “a hollow tube holding a live adder, its head in the place of the knob.” In another vignette, he trains a murderer who is an Abyssinian half-man, half-baboon with human intelligence and animalistic strength and agility. On other occasions, Fu Manchu frightens victims to death by broadcasting an eerie echo, while at other times he kills with a peculiar poison, “the flower of silence,” against which the only antidote is the Buddhist chant, “Sakya Muni.”¹¹

These fantastic tales were catnip for early masters of the silent-movie era. Not surprisingly, the evil doctor would appear in yellow-face. The first Fu Manchu movie, The Mysteries of Dr. Fu Manchu, was made in Britain in 1923, starring Harry Agar Lyons, who reprised his role the following year in The Further Mysteries of Fu Manchu. The first Fu Manchu talking film was made in Hollywood by Paramount Pictures in 1929. The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu starred Warner Oland. Having previously played a patriarchal Jew in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927), Oland padded his credentials so well with his superb yellowface that he would soon be picked to star in Charlie Chan films. For a year or two, Oland shuttlecocked between the two Oriental roles—a menacing villain with an evil design on the West and a smiling detective applying Chinese wisdom to Western criminology. Hardly flummoxed by the need to inhabit two divergent characters, Oland starred in The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu in 1930 and then “carried on” his yellowface stunt in Charlie Chan Carries On the next year. He worked at Fox in the Chan film The Black Camel later in 1931 and then went back to Paramount for the Fu Manchu sequel, Daughter of the Dragon.

The most famous incarnation of Fu Manchu was the 1932 MGM film The Mask of Fu Manchu, featuring Boris Karloff. The story involves Fu Manchu’s attempt to recover the legendary sword and armor of Genghis Khan, whose conquest of the West in the Middle Ages was an inspiration for the evil doctor. Karloff, fresh from his breakout role in the 1931 Frankenstein movie, played Fu Manchu as an Asian Frankensteinian monster so skillfully that he propelled both the character and the film into cult status. With its campy humor, Grand-Guignol sets, and torture sequences, The Mask featured Myrna Loy as Fu Manchu’s daughter, Fah Lo See, with whom he appears to have an incestuous relationship.

In later decades, Asian American critics would note the references to incest and other sexual transgressions ascribed to Fu Manchu and often commented on the demeaning depictions of Asian men. “Unlike the white stereotype of the evil black stud, Indian rapist, Mexican macho,” Frank Chin writes, “the evil of the evil Dr. Fu Manchu was not sexual but homosexual…. Dr. Fu, a man wearing a long dress, batting his eyelashes, surrounded by muscular black servants in loin-cloths, and with his bad habit of caressingly touching white men on the leg, wrist, and face with his long fingernails, is not so much a threat as he is a frivolous offense to white manhood.”¹²

Sadly, fictional representation, no matter how false or tortured, has a strange way of making a claim on reality. By 1932, Fu Manchu had become a household name, and many even believed in his physical existence, in the same way that the British Post Office was for years saddled with letters addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street. At the peak of Fu Manchu’s notoriety, a threatening letter once was sent to an employee of the U.S. State Department and signed “President of the Si-Fan.” The FBI conducted an investigation but could find no information about this secret organization.¹³ As recently as 2008, during the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the fourteen-time gold-medalist swimmer, Michael Phelps, was reported to have shaved off his “Fu Manchu beard” prior to the games to ensure top speed in the water. Yet the same menacing beard had returned a few months later, when a British tabloid showed him smoking a bong. Perhaps it was this satanic growth of facial hair that caused the hapless Phelps to try weed? What is more certain is that the Chinaman image of Fu Manchu, like that of Charlie Chan, is firmly ingrained in popular cultural memory.

In his lifetime, Rohmer, the Saxon knight on a mission, wrote thirteen Fu Manchu books, making him one of the most widely read and highly paid writers of popular fiction in the world. As an author who made a career out of fictionalizing the “inscrutable” and “insidious” East, Rohmer died in 1959 in an ironic way: While traveling in the United States, Rohmer caught what the alarmed news media called the “Asiatic flu.” The illness would begin as a feverish cold and pass quickly, “leaving the victim in an odd state of weakness during which the slightest overstrain produced complete and fatal collapse. Nothing quite like it had appeared before; no one seemed to know anything about it.”¹⁴ Coming out of Asia, this incurable, mysterious flu claimed the lives of many victims, including Rohmer, the man who specialized in making the Orient demonic.

“I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese,” Rohmer once famously said. “I know something about Chinatown. But that is a different matter. Nowadays, I like to think that a Chinese and a Chinaman are not the same thing.”¹⁵ Despite the author’s disclaimer, Fu Manchu the Chinaman, inspired by that most reliable of prognostications, the Ouija board, has lived on as a Chinese archetype in popular culture. And Rohmer insisted that the conflation of image and reality, stereotype and type, was not the work of him or his fellow travelers: “When I began writing, ‘Chinaman’ was no more than the accepted term for a native of China. The fact that it has taken on a derogative meaning is due mostly to the behavior of those Chinamen who lived in such places as Limehouse.”¹⁶ Such a double demonization—portraying London’s Chinese citizens as bad and blaming the negative image on their bad behavior—was typical of the Chinatown literature of the twentieth century’s early decades. It would, however, provide a fitting contrast for Charlie Chan. As we will see, the honorable detective from Honolulu would have to compete with the evil doctor in a struggle for center stage, to determine which Chinaman would become foremost in the West’s popular imagination.