The Forbidden City. The common English usage ‘the Forbidden City’ is a translation of the Chinese name Zijin Cheng, literally ‘Purple Forbidden City’. By law all mortar used in building had to be dyed purple. Zi, meaning purple, refers to the North Star which in ancient China was called the Ziwei Star, and in traditional Chinese astrology was the heavenly abode of the Celestial Emperor.
The City was a mirror image of the celestial realm of the Jade Emperor or Heavenly Ancestor and his court, said to rule over the universe. Through the use of numerology, divination and geomancy the city’s architecture aimed at harmonising the forces of Heaven, Man and Earth to guarantee dynastic stability and the prosperity of the realm.
Mandarin. This is an exceptionally tricky language for Europeans, especially because it and many closely-related Chinese languages have contour tone systems (that is, not just relative pitch between syllables, but also pitch contours - like a little melody within the syllable). Only given Sherlock Holmes’s extraordinary ability to learn new languages is it conceivable he learnt a good deal with an initial 6 weeks’ formal instruction at the London School of Practical Chinese and continued instruction aboard the ship to India, plus the weeks tracking down Watson to that railway stop.
The Mutoscope was an early motion picture device, patented in 1894. Like Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, it did not project on a screen and provided viewing to only one person at a time. The popular ‘What The Butler Saw’ was a short sequence portraying a woman partially undressing in her bedroom, as if some voyeuristic servant was watching through a keyhole.
The Japanese Threat. General Yuán and the Empress Dowager were right to fear their predatory neighbour Japan. 30 years later, in 1937, Japan invaded China. Widely known as the Pacific War, infamous for its cruelties, the Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century. Between 10 and 25 million Chinese civilians and over 4 million Chinese and Japanese military personnel died from war-related violence and famine.
Jingoism. Patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy - e.g. Britain expressing a pugnacious attitude toward the Russian ‘bear’ in the 1870s. The term originated in Britain’s music-halls as a verse:
Savoy opera. A style of comic operetta which developed in England in the late 19th century. W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (‘The Mikado’ etc) were the original and most successful practitioners. The name derives from London’s Savoy Theatre which impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte built to house the Gilbert and Sullivan pieces.
Maxim Gun. A terrifyingly effective recoil-operated machine gun invented by Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim in 1883. ‘The weapon most associated with the British imperial conquest.’
The ‘sing-song’ trade. Often the word for prostitution though in China used for young women serving the customers at table during theatre performances.
Dr. Watson’s Army pension. His ‘wound pension’ from being invalided out of the army after the Battle of Maiwand was 11/6d (Eleven shillings and sixpence) per month. In modern terms the income value of that sum would be about GBP£350 or US$400, probably a subsistence amount at best.
The Ch’ing hairstyle. The men wore a long pigtail and the front of the scalp was shaven. The style was originally enforced in 1645 on all citizens of the Empire as a test of loyalty to the conquering Dynasty by the Manchu Regent Dorgo. Tens of thousands of people who did resist were massacred. This started the hairstyle seen in motion pictures on the Ch’ing Empire. This style was humiliating to the conquered Han but helped the new Ch’ing Dynasty to identify resisters. It was advised, ‘To keep the hair, you lose the head; to keep your head, you cut the hair’.
The Mandate of Heaven. Great natural disasters in the last 50 years of the Ch’ing dynasty contributed to weakening its authority. The pattern was interpreted as a sign the Dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. One of the world’s biggest natural disasters in history occurred in 1887 when the Yellow River flooded. It is thought that between 1 to 2 million people died. The River flooded again in 1898. The Yangtze River flooded in 1911, and about 100,000 died. In 1879 a magnitude 8 Gansu Earthquake killed about 22,000 people. The Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879 killed about 10% of the population (equal to about 10 million people) of several northern provinces. Despite Peking being sited in Chihli, the Capital Province, the little aid provided by the Ch’ing government made the people even more discontented with the Dynasty.
The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre). In 1895, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon and threatening to invade Europe, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II invented the phrase Yellow Peril in an effort to interest the other European empires in the perils they faced in their invasions of China.
Full-blown paranoia was whipped up by the London Daily Express newspaper. Articles screamed in large headlines: ‘Yellow Peril in London’, ‘Vast Syndicate of Vice with its Criminal Master’, and ‘A Chinese syndicate, backed by millions of money and powerful, if mysterious, influences, is at work in the East End of London.’
Dr. Fu-Manchu. With the fear of the Yellow Peril, a new fictional supervillain appeared. By 1911 a novelist using the pseudonym Sax Rohmer cashed in with ‘The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu’. Fu-Manchu disdains guns or explosives, preferring dacoits, thuggees, and members of other secret societies as his agents armed with knives, or using “pythons and cobras ... fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli ... my black spiders” and other peculiar animals or natural chemical weapons.
Old China Hands. At some point historians may return to a question that has never been fully examined - the riddle of why China never became another British India, one more jigsaw piece in Britain’s already-immense Empire. The answer may lie in the already gigantic extent of Empire in 1900 and because the great Trading Houses of Jardine, Matheson & Company and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and the Old China Hands never convinced British Governments or the people of Britain that the national importance of suzerainty over China was a crucial aim, not just for straight-forward commercial advantage and avarice.
If British Prime Ministers of the period - the Marquess of Salisbury and Arthur Balfour - had determined a take-over of China, there rises one of the great ‘Ifs’ of history - would the Communist Revolution ever have taken place?
‘The Great Game’: the phrase describing the strategic rivalry and conflict between London and St. Petersburg for supremacy in Central Asia. The term is usually attributed to Captain Arthur Conolly (1807–1842), an intelligence officer of the British East India Company’s 6th Bengal Light Cavalry. It was introduced to a wider public by Rudyard Kipling in ‘Kim’ which first appeared in serial form in 1900.
The Russian Empire’s expansion into Central Asia threatened to over-run the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire - India. Surprising to recall now, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was a common assumption in Europe that the next great war - the ‘inevitable war’ - was going to be the final showdown between Britain and Russia. Relations between the two powers continued to be strained until they allied against the Central Powers in World War I.