A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony

by Julia Boyd

With its wild, dissolute, extravagant group of fossil hunters and philosophers, diplomats, dropouts, writers and explorers, missionaries, artists  and refugees, Peking's foreign community in the early 20th century was as exotic as the city itself. Always a magnet for larger than life individuals, Peking attracted characters as diverse as Wallis Simpson, Pearl Buck, J.D. Rockfeller, Jr., Bertrand Russell, Pierre Loti, Rabrindranath Tagore, Sven Hedin, Peter Fleming, and Cecil Lewis. The last great capital to remain untouched by the modern world, Peking both entranced and horrified its foreign residents – the majority of whom lived cocooned inside the legation quarter, their own walled enclave, living an extraordinary high-octane party lifestyle, suffused with martinis, jazz piano, and cigarettes, at the height of the Jazz Age. Ignoring the poverty outside their gates, they danced, played, and squabbled among themselves, oblivious to the great political events unfolding around them and the storm clouds looming on the horizon that were to shape modern China. Others, more sensitive to Peking's cultural riches, discovered their paradise too late when it already stood on the brink of destruction.
Although few in number, Peking's expatriates were uniquely placed to chart the political upheavals – from Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to the Communist victory of 1949 – that shaped modern China. Through extensive use of unpublished diaries and letters, Julia Boyd reveals the foreigner's perceptions and reactions – their take on everyday life and the unforgettable events that occurred around them. This is a dazzling portrait of an eclectic foreign community and of China itself – a magnificent confection, never before told, by one of literary London's great storytellers.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Julia Boyd is the author of A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The Life of the First Woman Physician and Hannah Riddell: An Englishwoman in Japan. An experienced researcher, she has scoured archives all over the world to find original material for her books. As the wife of a former diplomat, she lived in Germany from 1977 to 1981. A former trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, she now lives in London.

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking it would be social history, but it proved to be hybrid social/political history and as a result had cursory treatments of both in such a short book. Interesting enough, but skimmed the surface.

[Jon Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

well researched, good insights, really useful

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well worth reading if you're interested in the subject and the era. Paul French's books on the interwar expatriate presence in China are far better, but this one is not too bad. It covers a longer era, beginning with the background to the Boxer Rebellion and continuing through the post World War II era until the Communist victory in 1949. Boyd is at her best in discussing the Boxer Rebellion and events up to and through World War I. She does have a tendency to lean on a single source, such as Gertrude Bell, at certain times, but the narrative history she describes is valuable nonetheless, if for no other reason that nobody else has bothered to give such an overview.

If there is a problem with the book it's that Boyd over-quotes. And the further you read, the more frequent and lengthy the quotes become. A four page quote is simply too much. An author needs to paraphrase and fit quoted material more directly into their thesis/argument. These lengthy quotes go astray more than a few times. Secondly, I don't know how you can write a book on expatriates in China, particularly Peking, during the first half of the twentieth century and only make two passing references to Pearl Buck. The first reference is a quote (of course) from Mao sympathizer Edgar Snow denigrating Buck's work. I, too, criticize Buck (see my GR reviews on her books), but any study that purports to cover the impact of Western expatriates in twentieth century China and barely mentions her has a severe flaw. Buck's books, and the films that followed, did more to create the image of China in the West than any other single source of China writing.