“The Foreigner in Far Cathay”: Exploring the Foreign Community in China’s Treaty Ports in W. Somerset Maugham’s On a Chinese Screen

Abstract

With the onset of China's imperialist era, a number of treaty ports were opened to foreign commerce and residence. Soon enough, these ports became the centers of imperialist policies, with the development of a community that prioritized its own privileges and status quo over the smooth functioning of Sino-foreign relations despite China's semi-colonial status of China vis a vis the imperialist powers. During his travels in 1919-20, W Somerset Maugham witnessed this community firsthand, an experience that has been chronicled in a series of vignettes in On A Chinese Screen (1922). The current paper aims to put forth a discourse that transcends the bounds of merely analyzing a travel narrative, which Maugham’s work undoubtedly is, with a view to locating the narrative within the broader socio-political and economic context of the changing conditions of 20th century China, specifically with respect to the imperialist incursions by the Western powers. By doing this, this paper aims to further an interdisciplinary approach that exceeds not just the scope of the author’s own visions and experiences but also the prerequisites of the genre so as to forward an approach that provides the readers with a sense of the community as recorded in Maugham’s work.